I think about poor old Samuel Bisset dying in defence of his pig. I wonder about jealousies and grudges. Would anyone want to do harm to our pigs? Would anyone care enough, harbour enough spite? It seems a ridiculous idea. We’re still strangers here – we’re still English interlopers, it’s true – but everyone we’ve spoken to about Big Pig and Little Pig has been kind; amused and curious but kind. Like Bisset, we’ve broken no rules. Besides, who would go to the trouble of breaking down the electric fence, charging into the enclos-ure and chasing the pigs from their shelter when you could just stand at the entrance and shoot them with a shotgun? Was it all for fun? For a laugh? It doesn’t make sense.
Perhaps this was some kind of ‘nature’ thing; perhaps we should blame wild boar. The door was closed when Mo and I arrived, so they couldn’t have sneaked in from the track, but perhaps they somehow found a way over or around the orchard walls to attack their pampered cousins. They could have been drawn by scent and then found themselves trapped, trampled the fence … But this is ridiculous, too, isn’t it? What are the chances of cavorting herds of boar plunging out of the woods, rampaging through the enclosure and then vanishing without trace?
Dogs, then? Foxes? Cattle? Not long after we arrived in France I was walking down the lane to the village at night. It wasn’t late – perhaps eight or nine o’clock – but it was softly, impenetrably dark: no street lights or house lights, no moon, a tangle of stars. I hadn’t brought a torch. I tried to pick out the paler surface of the road against the thicker blacks of the hedges and fields, but this turned out to be more difficult than you might think, and familiar ground was proving treacherous. I was disorientated, already jumpy, wary, the absolute dark new to me. As I made my way up the slope to the point where the lane turned along a line of pine trees, I began to hear an odd sound, an intermittent, hollow clunk, a kind of bodiless sound, clear and sharp but not quite physical. I’d heard nothing like it before, I was sure. It came at me from ahead and then from behind, from one side and then from the other. It seemed close, but I couldn’t judge because it echoed, too, as though ringing on stone.
I was terrified. I turned tail. It took me perhaps fifteen minutes to get home and then I retraced my route by car, still trembling. The headlights, of course, showed everything in its familiar form: Solange’s farm next door, the hay barn, the tracks off on either side, the tall oak, the pines … the donkeys. Donkeys! Five or six donkeys broken loose from somewhere, grazing quite happily in the dark, nudging each other across the lane, languid, unconcerned. Clip-clop. Hooves on tarmac. The ordinary recomposed. A lesson in the power of night.
Probably something humdrum happened at the enclosure. Even in the wild, adult pigs have few natural predators: there are no bears here at Mas de Maury, or leopards; to my knowledge there are no alligators in the lake. And with the added protection afforded domesticated animals, attacks on free-range farm pigs are extremely rare. Certainly something spooked them and brought down the fence, probably in the shuffling, unsettled hour or so around dawn, not long before Mo and I arrived, but we’ll never know if it was an intentional assault by man or beast, or just confusion of some kind: a family of deer, perhaps, unexpectedly finding itself confronted, alarmed and skittery. We’re just grateful that Big Pig and Little Pig are both unscathed. No tragic ending here, unlike Bisset’s sorry tale. And we take comfort that the new piece of land at La Graudie is better protected: the pigs will be out of view of conniving humans, further from a track and sheltered by the sloping woods; the houses and barns, geese and dogs will put off animal marauders; the huge enclos-ure will allow room for evasion and escape.
There’s no doubt now: it’s time to move.
It’s midweek, mid-morning, a time of stillness. A bright day with birds circling high, the hay growing thickly and scenting the dew, the light already hardening towards summer. The verges are speckled with campion, poppies, mallow, bindweed, daisies, scabious, thyme, feverfew, saxifrage, stitchwort – and all the jewelled bugs, beetles and hoppers that skitter among them. It feels like a cheerful day for moving pigs and we set off to the orchard in high spirits, each with a bucket full of acorns. Only Mo, left at home, is glum.
We leave the buckets outside the little white door and go into the enclosure. Big Pig is truffling at the far end under the plum saplings, his nose deep in soil. Little Pig is lying on the straw in the sun, lazy, but he’s the first to see us and he squirms to his feet with a grunt and rushes over for food. Big Pig raises his head, shakes the earth from his skin and trots over to join us. I scratch him on the neck, behind the ear. It’s difficult to know whether he feels my touch through the thick dark skin, but there must be some pleasure in it because Little Pig nudges, demanding attention, too.
Ed turns off the battery that runs the electric fence. We remove the three posts nearest the door and drop the wire, pulling it out to create a wide passage. The pigs watch. We step back towards the door and encourage them through the gap. ‘Come on, then! Come on.’ Two mornings ago they were here, charging at me, a heap of pig beyond the enclosure, but now they stand resolutely still, exactly at the line where the fence had been, exactly where they usually do. We fetch the buckets and rattle the acorns. They know the sound; they want the treat. But they daren’t cross the line they’ve learned. They’re frightened of a shock, of pain. So they gaze at the bucket and grumble and shove sideways against each other; they make a tiny movement forward, nothing more than a flinch.
I run my hand in front of their noses. See? No wire. I step back and forth to prove that things have changed. The pigs eye me suspiciously. Ed rattles the acorns and moves away with the bucket towards the door. ‘Come on. Last chance!’
They’re desperate now. They want the acorns more than anything. They want to burst forward and follow Ed. And they suspect that it might be all right. They’ve begun to understand that the rules are being rewritten and they hold themselves tight and unusually still, suspended between learned fear and new desire. ‘It’s OK. You’ll be OK. Come on.’ But they can’t bring themselves to risk it. They discovered the sting of the fence as tiny weaners, and ever since they’ve respected its authority. Quite sensibly, they don’t want to get hurt. Even for a big bucket of acorns. And it occurs to me that much of their misery after the ‘break-in’ at the enclosure might simply have been because they’d been forced across the line that night, driven over, compelled to defy safe habits.
So it’s an impasse, a stalemate. We can’t drag or push them out; they’re simply too heavy and determined. They’ll have to do this for themselves. But what if they won’t? What if they refuse to step over the now non-existent boundary? We’d envisaged all sorts of problems walking the pigs along the lane but not this; we’d never considered that we wouldn’t even get started. I step behind Little Pig and try to edge him forward, prodding his round bottom gently with my knees, talking to him. But the sense of a limit is too ingrained. Even this slight encouragement to cross it causes anguish: Little Pig protests and backs heavily into me, shying away; Big Pig, too, pulls noisily, anxiously aside. They’re edgy for a moment, the acorns forgotten.
We fetch both buckets and put them on the ground a few feet from the door. I kneel by one of the buckets and rummage inside it, presumably throwing up a delightful aroma of oak mast. We take a handful or two of acorns and scatter them in a trail from the enclos-ure. The pigs can now see the potential feast, as well as hear and smell it. On the whole, pigs use their noses and ears much more than their eyes, but anything’s worth a try. We sit with our backs to the wall, the stone crumbling over our overalls, and we wait. The pigs fret and fidget, tormented by the thought of acorns out of reach.
Finally, warily, it’s Big Pig that makes the move. Little Pig may be greedy, but Big Pig is brave. More thoughtful, too, if that’s possible. He fixes his attention on the buckets, steadies himself, and takes a single, slow step over the imaginary line. He seems still to expect to be zapped; when nothing happens, he collects himself and gingerly takes an
other step. ‘Well done. Good pig.’ We get up slowly, so as not to cause alarm, and move across to rattle the buckets. He’s extremely cautious, but he’s approaching the acorns. Little Pig, apparently terrified and furious in equal measure, stands stiffly behind the non-fence and glares.
We can’t separate the pigs. We can’t leave one untended while we take the other. We have to move them together. Two pigs, two people: a proper drove. But Big Pig is growing in confidence. He’s worked his way along the trail of acorns and it’s obvious that he’s enjoying himself. His tail swishes happily from side to side, his snout is lively, twitching; he’s trotting towards the buckets. We pick them up and step away and, just as planned, he follows. If we don’t keep moving so that we’re just ahead of him, he’ll press his head low into the bucket, then his strong neck, eventually his trotter, and he’ll force us to stop or spill the entire hoard of acorns, or both. But Little Pig is still hesitating. He wants to come, he’s desperate to come, but he can’t yet bring himself to take the plunge. It’s like watching someone tackle their first bungee jump: will they? won’t they?
And we wheedle and encourage, and I wrap my arm gently around Little Pig’s neck and tug very slightly, and Big Pig is flaunting his feasting and his freedom, and in the end, inevitably, Little Pig comes, too. In a bustle of unease, he crosses the line, still afraid of a shock but much more afraid, finally, of losing out or being left behind.
So: we have two pigs, at last. We can begin. At a merry amble and with the constant brisk jiggle of acorns, we set off together through the little white door and into a new world.
The care of the family pig has never been a particularly gendered activity. Women kept poultry. Men tended cattle. Goats and sheep: that was women’s work, mostly, or children’s. Mules, horses, miscellaneous meat stock: men took charge of that. But the pig was different. Keeping the pig was a shared task. Men often foraged handfuls of greens to supplement kitchen scraps: ‘During the Spring and Summer months,9 every labourer, who has industry, frugality, and conveniency sufficient, to keep a pig, is seen carrying home in the evening, as he returns from his labour, a bundle of Hog Weed,’ noted the agricultural writer William Marshall in 1798. A boy in nineteenth-century Northamptonshire noted that his chores included sorting ‘all the small potatoes and any diseased,10 with some swedes […] washed and boiled in the copper’ for pig food. ‘When it was cooked, put in a tub and mash it.’ Because the pig was kept alongside – or even inside – the house, women and girls, too, were inevitably involved in raising the animal on a day-to-day basis, and when pigs were let loose to forage in orchards or woodlands, it was usually the housewife who took her knitting or sewing along and sat with them. In Lark Rise to Candleford, a rural memoir of late nineteenth-century life, Flora Thompson remembers that the pig became ‘an important member of the family’ and everyone,11 from the oldest to the youngest, took an interest in its well-being:
its health and condition were regularly reported in letters to children away from home, together with news of their brothers and sisters. Men callers on Sunday afternoons came, not to see the family, but the pig, and would lounge with its owner against the pigsty door for an hour, scratching piggy’s back.
Similarly, the French belle époque of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revelled in the idea of the family pig: series of popular photographic postcards proudly displayed mother,12 father and children all posing with their animal; some of the captions showed the women declaring a preference for piglets over their men, while others had the man of the household with an armful of pigs in his embrace. Comfortable, affectionate family life without a pig was unthinkable. Apparently, even into the early twentieth century, newly-weds were as excited about the prospect of owning their own pig as having a private space for those first few nights together: ‘To have a sty in the garden,13 or, as often, abutting the cottage, was held to be as essential to the happiness of a newly married couple as a living room or bedroom,’ suggested Walter Rose, a rural carpenter.
Walking the pigs with Ed is an act of shared domesticity. I’m at the front of the procession with a bucket in each hand, going on slowly. I have one pig to each side of me, slightly behind me, ambling. Ed is a pace or two further back, wielding the drover’s staff. We’ve made it on to the Mas de Maury track that leads up to the stone cross marking the junction. To our right is a high hedge of hawthorn and blackthorn and brambles, twittering with small birds. To the left, with the sun slanting across it, is a row of very old and large oaks which mark the perimeter of a field. The field is sprouting something green; a flock of starlings shimmies across. There’s no sign of anyone else. We don’t talk much – we’re concentrating on the pigs – but still it feels special, this moment together, intimate, slightly festive. It’s perhaps the strangest thing we’ve done since we’ve been married, and perhaps the most beautiful.
From time to time, one or other of the pigs will pause to snuffle at something. Little Pig: nose in the hedge. Big Pig: deep in the debris at the foot of an oak. There are acorns, of course, buried and delicious. There are new leaves, insects, general bits of tasty this and that. But on the whole they’re as interested in the journey as in what they can scavenge, and one rattle of the bucket has their attention. They look up, they remember: ah, yes, that’s right, we’re on the move. They sense more discoveries, or hope for them. And they’re off again, the pace quickening.
As we make our way to the end of the track I turn and look back, just once, and I see a scene I’m not quite in and which doesn’t seem quite real: a bucolic, ancient frieze of two fine, rounded black pigs sauntering through the light and shade of spring; the drover a few paces behind, unconcerned; the frame of trees and hedges indeterminate, unchanging. For the briefest, most exhilarating of seconds, I slip through time.
We reach the cross. It’s a plain blunt cross on a corner of drystone wall that abuts the hedge: three large pieces of pale weathered stone stacked unevenly, one upon the other. The walnut tree, above and behind, is not yet in full leaf. It dangles reddish catkins into the shadows. Here, the dirt and gravel of the track give way to the metalled lane; from here, for a distance of about twenty yards, we’ll be on the road.
It’s only a country lane, no more than the width of a small car, but the pigs have never experienced a hard surface underfoot. Ed comes alongside and takes a bucket. We pause and the pigs have a handful of acorns each as reward for such good behaviour so far. There’s no sign of any traffic: you can usually hear a car coming from at least half a mile away, and just now it’s quiet. We’ve chosen a good time, after the children have been taken to school and before people start coming home for lunch, but it’s still a relief to find the road deserted. I’m not sure how the pigs would react to a vehicle coming alongside them; I’m not sure I want anyone to see us clip-clopping comically along the highway; I’m not sure the appearance of a 4x4 wouldn’t shatter the spell.
We manage the road. The pigs are unimpressed by the discovery of tarmac. But they love the narrow, grassy path that comes next. It’s damp here and shady, soaked with smells, littered with the fruit and nuts of past summers. Big Pig trots past me with confidence on the trail of some particular scent. Little Pig buries his head in a tangle of undergrowth. We come to a standstill. The rattle of the acorn bucket has no effect. There are better things here, just now, than last year’s dried-out acorns. And we’ve been walking already for fifteen minutes or more: the pigs seem to want a rest.
I expected the pig walk to be anxious and stressful, a chore, and instead it’s turned out to be a thing of great pleasure and romance. I’d like the experience to last. I’d like to remain here on this path with the pigs and Ed, cradled in green shadows, admitted to this non-place, seduced by this non-time. But we have to get to the new enclosure. We have to get the pigs settled and secure. I hurry to catch up with Big Pig; grab hold of a fistful of hairy black hide, enough to slow him. I jink the bucket above his head. He remembers the sound of acorns, thinks about it; lo
oks at me. It’s some kind of negotiation. He knows I can’t bully him. He knows he could run away, if he wanted, crash through the hedges, turn on me and bite and kick. He knows the bucket’s a ploy: a good one, a tasty one, but only a ploy.
Big Pig’s deciding something enormous. If he chooses to walk on now and follow my direction then it’s because he trusts me; it’s simply because he likes me enough to come with me. The alternative is life as a pig, purely – a life without humans – setting off into this wide land and fending for himself, abandoning what he’s known for the lure of space and liberty, fields and woodlands without bound-aries. He’s deciding how much he wants to be part of this ‘family’. And how much he wants to break free and run wild.
Can a domesticated animal ever decide such a thing? Is there ever a choice? Big Pig looks at me again; I nudge him with my knee. I step past him, begin to walk, rattle the bucket. Big Pig follows, of course he does, and Little Pig trots on quickly, grunting loudly at the thought of being left behind. And very quickly we’re at the end of the path, crossing the road to La Graudie, finding our way on the verge beside the hedge to the open gateway that leads to the scruffy field that leads to the meadow and woods of the new enclosure. In no time at all, we’ve taken the pigs through the gap under the ash tree and emptied the acorns on to the ground to delay them while we loop the wire of the fence across behind us; we’ve connected the battery and thrown the switch for the electric current. The little green light flashes: the pigs are in.
The walk is over. But in the time it’s taken to make our way with a rattle and a snuffle from one enclosure to another, my relationship with the pigs has changed. I knew they had different characters: in the orchard pen at the Mas de Maury, I could see that they had grown to be unique animals. Big Pig was a bit calmer, I thought; Little Pig more friendly. But this didn’t mean much. It was a curiosity. It was setting out on to the tracks and lanes which tested the pigs, gave them the opportunity to be themselves, provoked them, teased them, and confirmed them completely, absolutely, as two distinct animals. Yes, Big Pig is the level-headed one, but he’s bold, too, and loyal. Little Pig’s curiosity makes him flighty; his exuberance and joy in life mean he’s quicker to act and react, more easily distracted. He seems to care about us less. And now this realization involves me, too, because as I’ve come to know both of the pigs, I’ve come to treat them differently. I trust Big Pig; I like him. I appreciate his solidity. I find I think of him as wise. Whereas my relationship with Little Pig is more fidgety, slightly wary: I’m fond of his openness but suspicious of his antics. I think of him as selfish, perhaps even spiteful. I keep a closer eye on him, allow him fewer freedoms.
Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France Page 10