Strange Doin's in the Pine Hills

by Ardath Mayhar

  There was a scuffled trail through the yellow-brown layer of leaves. He stooped to examine the tracks, noting the marks of many cleft hooves. Wild pigs were already at the mast, and if his family was to get its share they’d better hurry.

  A bellow in the distance brought him upright again, and he swung his polished stick as he strode off through the thick woods toward the sound. Old Hassie was having her calf, and as usual she had hidden herself well and truly and then had trouble delivering it. You’d think she’d catch on, sooner or later. But then, a cow’s mind worked different from a man’s, and that was a fact.

  The morning was brilliant with sun blazing in a polished cobalt sky. The treetops leaned above him, rustling in the light breeze that held the coolness of East Texas fall weather, and the path stretched ahead like the Yellow-Brick Road. Rob began to whistle. On such a day it was a joy just being alive.

  This was a very old part of the wood, where the woodcutters of his father’s youth had never gone. His grandfather particularly loved the towering hickories and gums and oaks and ashes that formed it. He had visited here every spring, bringing whatever grandchild he could round up to smile gently at the jacks-in-the-pulpit that grew in the damp spot where the creek bank was low. Those were good memories, and Rob was glad that this forty-acre patch of the farm had escaped the ravages that messed up the woods all over the rest of the county.

  There were deer in the thickets around him, though he never saw them, just their tracks that overlapped his when he returned the way he came. There were coyotes that ranged down the creek, and from time to time a cougar-track marked the mud in the flat or obliterated a cowpat in a pasture. Rob liked to think of those creatures still surviving because of his uncut land and his hard line with hunters.

  Then there were the piney-woods rooters, the wild pigs that were natural to this area. They were bigger than they used to be, because of domestic hogs that escaped and went free with their wild kindred. There were numbers of them in the cutover woods of neighboring farms and more along the river where old forest still remained.

  It looked as if he was getting his share too, for the sharp tracks had chewed up the cow trail he was following. If they started getting into Merrily’s garden, he’d have to do something, though he hated to shoot anything since Vietnam.

  Another bellow hurried him again, and in ten minutes he had located the thicket in which Hassie stood, head down, sides straining, eyes staring at him reproachfully. Sighing, Rob patted her and scratched behind her horns. Then he went behind and saw the problem. One leg of the calf had bent at an awkward angle, preventing the body from emerging. He put on his rubber gloves, reached in and corrected the position, and the little heifer almost shot out into his arms, propelled by her mother’s muscles.

  Once relieved of her problem, Hassie turned and ate the afterbirth with absent-minded thoroughness, and began licking the calf from head to tail. That was that, thought Rob, picking up his stick and turning back into the wood.

  As he had expected, deer tracks were pricked into the yellowish dust on top of his sneaker tracks. The little devils were curious as cats, but they were too shy to let you know they were there.

  A bit farther along he noted that more pig tracks were there as well. And then he heard them, the muffled grunts, the patter of hooves, the crushing sound of many animals moving through drifts of leaves. They were heading his way, and since ’Nam, he couldn’t run worth a damn.

  Rob never carried a gun, for he didn’t like shooting things. Even a snake, he often said, would leave you be if you stood still and gave him the chance. Oh, a water moccasin would sometimes be really nasty, but they were pretty slow and it wasn’t that hard to get out of their way. Pigs were something else. He had a cousin who had lost two toes on her left foot to his grandfather’s big sow after the visiting children climbed onto the hog-pen, bare feet thrust into cracks between the logs forming its fence. He could still hear Lily’s incredulous shriek and see the sow chomping down on little-girl toes. That had made him extremely cautious in his dealings with porkers of all kinds.

  Wild hogs made domesticated ones look like pussycats. Meeting a bunch of them in the woods with no weapon but a stick was not a good thing to do. If they were hungry, they’d eat a man or a dog or a calf as a mid-morning snack. He wished suddenly that he’d let Snap come with him. The big redbone hound had yowled pitifully when he left him tied, but when all was said and done, a cow with a new calf had nothing but suspicion for any dog, and Snap would have made his work harder.

  Hogs were wary of dogs, however, and the hound could probably have gone baying up the path and scared this bunch into the next county. As it was, Rob knew it was best not to contest the way with them. Even the piglets could bite a plug out of a leg or a foot protected by nothing stronger than a sneaker, and a big boar could rip you, thigh to belly-button, with one swipe of his tusks.

  He moved aside into a huckleberry thicket and looked about. This was no place to be trapped. He needed a tree to climb, for the trampling was getting very close, now, and the gruff comments between members of the troop sounded as if they were right at his elbow.

  The crooked oak off to his left would be just right, though it was set a bit apart from the clump of ash and elm around it. There was a good spot to set his toe, and once up to the first branch he was in good shape. The leg that he’d had all but shot away in ’Nam wasn’t any good for shinning up a tree trunk anymore.

  He moved quickly through the bushes and into the space around the oak. Its top was still green, for live oaks lost their leaves only when new spring ones pushed them off the twigs.

  He hugged the fat trunk, got his good toe into a notch, and sprang upward, grabbing a branch and swinging into the first crotch. There was a lot of room in the treetop, with many limbs conveniently spaced. He went as far up as was comfortable and then sat on a flat branch, hugging the trunk and watching the woods below his perch.

  Fifteen wild pigs marched down the path, the boar at the head of the group, followed by three sows and eleven youngsters of various ages from yearlings to last summer’s litter. That bunch could crunch up everything including his bones, leaving nothing to show he’d been here but his polished hickory stick.

  He sat so quietly that a jaybird lit on the twig above his head and began preening. But a crow, passing overhead, saw the intruder in the tree and began yelling at the top of his voice, the warning sounding to every corner of the forest.

  The boar down on the path paused, letting the rest of the family clump about him. The tusked head went up as the animal sniffed the air, peering short-sightedly about. Then the crow called again, and the boar turned off the track and came snuffling through the thicket to halt at the foot of the oak.

  He looked up, and Rob, looking down, saw complete confidence in the hog’s bearing. Nothing had ever escaped this beast’s appetite, he realized with a sudden chill down the middles of his bones.

  The younger pigs rooted about the oak, finding old acorns or grubs or rootlets. The sows flopped in the shade, grunting contentedly at this unexpected rest. The boar sat back on his haunches, his upper body propped up on his forelegs, and surveyed his prey with all the coolness of a hunter planning how to approach a covey of quail. It looked as if the family had settled in for as long as it took to do the job.

  Why had he chosen a tree so far from the others? With that monster at his heels, Rob knew he could have gone up a straight wall, bad leg or no bad leg. He might have been able to follow a big branch to the next tree, and the one after that. As it was, he was stuck up here with no place to go but straight up. And nobody would know that something was wrong until milking time, when he didn’t return from hunting Hassie.

  In the fall, he was free once he’d put out the morning hay for the dairy cows. Merrily and he had an agreement—either could take some time off to ramble through the woods, if it didn’t cause them to neglect anything important. She wouldn’t think anything if he took all day, which it began to seem that
he might.

  The limb on which he sat got harder and harder, and he shifted along to put up his feet. His butt was numb, his skin scrubbed by the rough bark, and the sun was slowly moving down the west when Rob began to think the animals below might well win this game.

  They were comfortably on solid ground, with water close enough so they could visit the creek in shifts. They certainly showed no sign of giving up the siege and going wherever they had been headed when that damn crow warned them he was hiding in the oak.

  On the other hand, his leg was giving him Billy Heck, and his bottom was all but destroyed by sitting on the rough rounds of branches. His neck was sunburned under the back of his cap, and he felt as if every bug in East Texas had taken up residence in his clothes.

  This was not a fun day in the woods!

  Shadows stretched long across the small clearing around the base of the oak. The sun moved down behind the line of trees that marked the distant course of the bigger stream into which his creek ran, and the sky to the east began to darken. Milking time, and he wasn’t there.

  Merrily would have things ready, the kids would be rounding up the milk cows, and they would all know that something had gone wrong, but they couldn’t do a thing about it until they were through with the job at hand. The cows came first, no matter what.

  He groaned and leaned his head against the trunk of the oak, hearing the chatter of breeze through the narrow leaves. He was getting cold. The wind was rising, bringing with it a brisk chill. He shivered, feeling the old wound in his leg twinge deeply. If he lived through the night, he’d be fit for the nursing home by morning, he thought.

  Merrily had forty acres to search, and doing it at night would be a long job, unless he heard her coming and yelled, which it was beginning to be doubtful that he could do. He was falling asleep even as he thought about it. If he did that, he fell out of the tree, and that meant the immediate end of everything.

  He could hear, almost subliminally, the distant throb of the compressor that powered the milking machine. The cows would be strolling up the chute into the barn, taking their places in the stalls, there in the warmth and light. The family could milk blindfolded, even Karen, his youngest, whose job was keeping the feed bins filled and the udders washed.

  They’d survive, if he wound up being eaten by wild hogs. But he’d really have liked to see his three grow up, to be a grandparent with Merrily, to grow old on this piece of ground that his family had been granted back in the Spanish days. There came an irritable sound below, but now it was too dark to see anything but shadows where the hogs still waited for him to fall into their jaws. He wrapped both arms about the tree, closed his eyes, and tried to doze without relaxing too much. From time to time he woke with a jerk and listened.

  Then there came a deep bark. Snap, back on the top of the hill west of the barn. Rob pursed his lips and tried to whistle, but his mouth was too dry. No sound came out but a feeble puff.

  “Snap!” he tried to yell, but his throat was raw to cracking, and his effort was pretty pitiful.

  Infuriated and now wide awake, he reached up and broke off a hand of twigs that had been tickling him all day. He flung it down among the black shadows, and a flurry of grunts rose to his ears.

  “Snap!”

  After a while there came a rush of paws through fallen leaves, the baying of a hound on the scent. Another shadowy shape dashed into the clearing. “Watch it, boy!” he called, this time making a bit more noise.

  They’d eat his dog, if he didn’t watch out. He reached for another leafy branch and twisted it off, to drop among those below. That distracted the swine a bit, but he couldn’t tell what was happening. There was breathy growling and grunting and snuffling and a lot of unidentifiable sounds that only made Rob uneasy.

  Then he saw a pair of lights moving beyond the trees. They bounced as the tractor crossed tree roots and holes, but they came on steadily, and now he could hear a voice.

  “Rob! Ro-ob!” Merrily was coming.

  Snap broke off his engagement with the boar and went yelling through the bushes. Rob saw him dash into the tractor lights, run in three circles, and head back for the clearing. After a brief pause, the tractor turned and followed, crushing thickets under its heavy, water-filled tires.

  Then the scene below was brilliantly illuminated in the twin beams from the tractor. The boar stood, neck bristled, tusks gleaming, eyes sparking red in the glow. The young pigs scuttered into the undergrowth and disappeared; the sows, after surveying the situation, followed them.

  The boar was the dangerous one, certain to kill calves or even children, given the chance. As badly as he hated to say it, Rob called down over the roar of the engine, “Shoot him, Hon! He’s a bad one.”

  The 30.06 spoke, the shot echoing through the trees and away into the distance. The boar sank back onto his haunches; then he keeled over slowly and lay flat on his side, blood drooling into the dust of the rooted-up area. The rapid patter of retreating hooves marked the flight of his family into the forest.

  Rob flexed his legs, finding that the bad left one still moved, though with considerable difficulty. Now a hand-light shone upward, lighting his way as he stepped down from branch to branch, holding for dear life in case the leg gave way entirely.

  The tractor pulled up close to the tree, so he could step directly down onto a wheel. He fell into Merrily’s arms, and she helped him settle into the hard seat, where he put his arms on the steering wheel and laid his head on them, dizzy with relief, hunger, and thirst.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Okay. But that’s too much meat to let lie there for the coyotes. We can grind him up into sausage for the winter, if we can get him home. You think?”

  The backwash of light made her pale face glow, and her smile was full of relief. “I shot him. I can load him on the trailer. It’s back there in the trail, where I dumped it before taking off after Snap. Hold on here. Can you drive?”

  “No.” He was shaking now, with chill as much as exhaustion. “I think I’d better get down. With him.”

  It took a bit of doing but soon he sat in the dust beside the boar, holding the hand light to guide Merrily back with the trailer. He turned the beam onto the animal beside him, seeing the dark blood in the dust, the glazed eyes, the stark curves of the steely tusks. This animal had actually intended to eat him, and probably would have if Snap hadn’t followed his trail.

  Instead, he would feed Rob’s family with pork sausage for much of the winter. Life was funny, whether you were a hog or a man. He wondered if others as dangerous as this one would come into his woods. The word was that wild pigs were growing in numbers from year to year.

  Merrily had left the rifle beside him, and he took it into his lap. One thing was for certain: he’d never go into the woods again without protection. Principles were one thing; survival was another.

  The tractor heaved into the clearing and Merrily backed the trailer almost to Rob’s feet. Grabbing the iron brace that held the backboard, he hauled himself upright and laid the rifle carefully on the worn boards.

  “Here piggee, piggee, piggee!” he whispered, as the two of them struggled to heave four hundred pounds of dead boar into their trailer. It wasn’t easy, but it got done at last, and as they jounced away through the trees Rob looked back once at the dark space between the trees.

  He’d entered it one sort of man. He was leaving it another. Some of the innocence he thought he’d rediscovered after ’Nam had turned out to be foolish, and he gladly left it behind as they moved through the night toward their home. Behind them there came the long wail of a coyote, smelling blood, smelling death, coming to see if there was anything left for him, as their dangerous human presence moved away into the darkness.

  OLD WOMAN

  The big woods are full of strange old ladies with odd habits. Revenge being a fine old backwoods tradition, this one made a hobby of it.

  It was hot. Evening was creeping through the river-bottom country, and t
ree-shadow filled the clearing around her house, but the steamy heat hadn’t lifted a bit. Old Woman sat in the swing beneath her chinaberry tree, fanning vigorously with the cardboard fan that the Levi Garrett Snuff salesman had given her forty years before. Every time it went limp, over the long years, she stiffened it with starch and a hot iron, but it had been decades since she had seen the picture that decorated it.

  A moth was dipping into the four o’clocks, unfurling his long proboscis to reach into the deep blossoms. A crow was punctuating the breathless quiet, when, out of no place, there came a hint of a cool breeze. The mockingbird in the elm struck up his evening song.

  Old Woman sighed with satisfaction. She hadn’t felt like exerting herself in the heat of the day, but now she did. And this was, she felt in her bones, THE NIGHT.

  Old Rupe, lying among the four o’clocks, raised his hind leg and thoughtfully scratched at a flea. Then he turned his nose toward the lane leading into the forest and perked up one ear. She understood him as clearly as if he had spoken.

  “Somebody coming along the path, eh?” she asked. “Good. Maybe it’s the one I want to see, you think?”

  The dog turned his faded brown eyes toward her and sighed as he laid his furry chin on his front paws. Not this time, his entire attitude told her.

  “Oh, shoot!” she grunted. “Another of those giggly kids, I guess, wanting a fortune told. Dammit. I wonder why I ever started that foolishness. Such a bother, and on a hot evening too.”

  She rocked herself back and forth in the swing by the pressure of one toe against the ground. The breeze was now cool enough for comfort, and she put the fan carefully into her antique reticule, which lay beside her on the weathered wooden seat. From its depths, she took a bundle of crochet thread and a needle and began hooking rapidly into and out of the linen strand. A spidery doily, incongruously dainty, grew between her arthritic fingers.

  Rupe, eyes closed, monitored the approach of the visitor by minute twitches of his ears. She knew to the minute when to put away her work and look up to greet the newcomer.