Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France

by Jacqueline Yallop

  And it’s right next to the Mas de Maury. From one corner of their early walled pen, you could see the roofs of Mas del Sol, hear the chickens and the dogs. I begin to wonder: was it an escape with a purpose? Have they been curious all this time about what went on in this cluster of houses? It seems more than a coincidence that this is the first time we’ve ever left the pigs, and also the first time they’ve bothered to break out of their enclosure – it’s possible that they were scared by la chasse, I suppose, and were reacting out of instinct, but it also occurs to me that they might have been trying to make a return: since we’d abandoned them to go on holiday, perhaps they were unsettled, lonely even, trying to find their way home, to the safe place they remembered, the first place – to us.

  Of course, there’s no way of knowing what might make two black pigs wander off; it’s quite possible that Jean-Claude was slow filling their water and in the hot weather they mounted an expedition to find refreshment for themselves. But it’s a relief to track them down so quickly, and it’s useful to know that they can obviously walk free of their enclosure and its flimsy wire quite easily if they want, or need, to – it’s just that most of the time, they don’t bother. Most of the time, they have everything they need; they’re happy.

  We grab our buckets and sticks and rush off to Mas del Sol. Big Pig and Little Pig are strolling along the lane, waddling round a bend that hugs the sagging wall of a stone barn, their black haunches sashaying, their tails twirling and whirling, their grunts going back and forth between them in quiet conversation. They seem to be enjoying their outing. There are the damsons, wild and plentiful, blackberries still, elderberries, walnuts. There’s water, too, and perhaps even the possibility of a whole new wallow: the man who called us, Raymond, had woken from his siesta to find the pigs kicking over the tub of water he’d left in his yard for the poultry. When he’d gone out to find out what was going on, the pigs were sloshing in the puddle, the ducks squawking alongside. They’d seemed pleased to see him, he said. New places, new people, new friends.

  They’re pleased to see us, too. They hear or smell us as we approach and immediately thrust their heads up, listening intently. Little Pig turns first; he trots towards us, and Big Pig comes, too, catching up quickly, so that they arrive together, a scramble of pig. They don’t seem to feel ‘captured’ in any way; there’s no defeat in the reunion. Instead they seem keen to return to their enclosure and to rummaging in their own woods. They nudge us forward; want to follow. Raymond and his two grandsons encircle us, creating a kind of cordon, and we try to organize the pigs and the buckets into an orderly livestock procession of sorts, but in the end we all go back to the enclosure together in an untidy scuffle: me and Ed and Mo, Raymond and the boys, Big Pig and Little Pig, sauntering in the late afternoon sun.

  It’s chestnut season. The end of autumn. While we live firmly in oak country, just a couple of miles up the road the soil changes, and the dips and valleys in the land are filled with chestnut woods. Some of the villages, bounded on every side by chestnut trees, take their name from the fruit – Castanet. For a few weeks, the woods are carpeted with huge, shiny nuts, so densely scattered that you’re walking on layers of prickly green casings and crunching the nuts underfoot. The chestnuts are beautiful things with their grained mahogany shells; they cry out to be stroked; just the look and feel of them promises something special. And the pigs love them – more than perhaps anything they’ve eaten so far, more than acorns or melons or sweet pumpkins – so we collect bucket- and bagfuls, spraying them down the hill as we did with the pears, watching pigs and nuts bouncing together down the soft slopes.

  Rich and mineraly and nutritious, chestnuts are perfect for ‘finishing’ the pigs and giving the final meat a good flavour. They have been used for centuries to plump up the best pigs – it’s the chestnut woods around Parma in northern Italy, for example, which give the renowned prosciutto its quality and taste. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Royal Agricultural Society of England was urging its members to seek out chestnut groves because ‘hogs fattened with chestnuts have fine-flavoured flesh’.11 But people love chestnuts, too. Just as they give the pigs a boost of protein, so trad-itionally chestnuts have provided villagers with a ‘fattening’ before the lean times of winter. Starchy and high in vitamins, chestnuts provided an important staple in many parts of Europe, ground into flour, preserved, roasted, as sweet delicacies. But the three weeks or so of collecting were hard labour, breaking the prickly shells by hand, sorting, peeling, drying and grinding: it’s been estimated that a family would need to put in 110 working days between its members over the short season to gather enough chestnuts to live on,12 usually amounting to 100 days of work from the women and children and 10 days from the men.

  Not surprisingly, the gathering of such a harvest was cause for celebration, and in the chestnut areas local to us this late-season abundance is still fêted with enthusiasm. With Big Pig and Little Pig snuffling contentedly through the woods in search of the nuts we’ve scattered, Ed and I take a short drive into the valleys south of our house, to the annual fête de la châtaigne. It’s a Sunday morning of church bells and Keatsian mellowness, but as we approach the village there’s a surprising amount of traffic and bustle – small white vans, groups on foot, a line of men armed with metal poles, a municipal police car – and we park at a distance, walking into the central square on foot. It’s a wide marketplace of trampled earth, symmetrical and pleasing, with medieval arcades on all sides and low stone-and-wood houses clustered above, a well raised in the middle. But the attraction today is not history or architecture; it’s the chestnuts. Ranged across the square are half a dozen or more big wire tumblers, like barrels of sturdy mesh, each one propped over a huge wood bonfire, each one being turned by hand by a red-faced man, a chestnuteer (most wearing the colours of the local rugby club). Inside the tumblers are thousands of chestnuts, rattling and spinning; behind are sacks overflowing with more gathered chestnuts; clustered around are crowds of people to watch. Many, many people standing on a Sunday morning watching chestnuts roast.

  The smell, of course, is delicious, a heady concoction of woodsmoke and charred chestnut, enough in itself to keep us all transfixed by the tumblers. It’s a smell that promises good things, satisfaction, satiation, and it’s easy to see how such a festival has survived so long; in the grip of such a smell it’s possible to understand how important chestnuts were to a community facing a long freezing winter with meagre stores. With the weather turning heart-sinkingly cold and the days shortening, here were great piles of fire to recall the warmth of summer and armfuls of rich, soft nuts to help you put down a layer of insulating fat. Pigs and people preparing for winter.

  Ed and I stroll from fire to fire. They’re all more or less identical except for the man wielding the crank and the slight change in tone of the chestnuts rattling against the wire. There’s an accordion playing jolly tunes, Beyoncé piping out equally cheerfully from one of the first-floor windows. Under the arcades, there’s a makeshift bar, cobbled together from wooden trestle tables and a plastic awning; we wait in line for glasses of sweet wine. Then the bells toll the midday angelus, traditionally a call to prayer, but for now, today, a dinner gong: the first of the tumblers has been stopped and pulled back from the fire, the little ‘window’ in the wire opened. With a flick of the crank, the chestnuteer lines up the gap with a bucket and the blackened, crispy chestnuts pour out. There’s a murmur of appreciation from the crowd, an inevitable movement forward towards the bucket, an expectation. We’ve been gathering chestnuts for weeks for Big Pig and Little Pig, putting handfuls aside for ourselves, bagging up boiled nuts for the freezer, slipping a couple on to the fire at the end of meals, but this is a crackling, smoky surfeit of chestnuts, a rite of gluttony, and we jostle with the crowds, as excited as everyone else, as eager for our share. Later in the afternoon, there’s a meal in the salle des fêtes, five courses of chestnut dishes with dancing, but for us this is enough: we dip our
hands into our carton of nuts, and with burning fingers begin to peel.

  It’s not yet perfect pig-killing weather – the daytime sunshine raises the temperature so that it’s warm enough to sit outside for lunch, with a jumper on – but it’s heading that way. White egrets arrive at the lake at the same time as our wood delivery arrives in the front yard. We spend two full days stacking the logs along the walls of the old barn, piling them neatly: good, dry oak logs. Fires are lit all over the neighbourhood, all burning the same causse oak; the air shimmers with the unmistakable musk of winter. Mornings are suddenly frosty; the garden ponds freeze lightly, trapping water lily leaves; some of the hens begin to moult, scattering feathers everywhere, becoming shy and grumpy and scraggy.

  We want to kill the pigs close to the house – we’ll need access to water and heat, tools, YouTube. We decide to fence off the vegetable patch at the end of the back garden and move the pigs there briefly, just for a week or so as we make the final preparations for the slaughter, long enough for them to clear and turn the land for us so that we won’t have to dig it ourselves for the following year. There’ll be plenty of buried seeds there left over from the summer, shoots, gnarly beetroot, thick overgrown clumps of chard and lettuce. Once again we begin to poke plastic stakes into the ground, unravel spools of wire. In the meantime, we also reduce the size of the enclosure in the woods, narrowing it at the sides, snipping off a few yards at the bottom, making it more difficult for the pigs to evade us at the far reaches. Big Pig and Little Pig potter alongside us snuffling, occasionally nudging. Their hair is growing dense again with the colder weather, filling up the ridge along their backs, thickening over their haunches and matting on their stomachs. We’re getting towards the end of the ‘finishing’ period now, when the pigs’ muscle should take on its final marbling and the last layers of fat are being laid. What they eat now will seep into the flavour of the meat: all those pears and acorns from the autumn will round out and deepen the taste; we’re still feeding them extra chestnuts, rich, sweet, pungent. As we work our way round the enclosure, Big Pig wanders away, sniffing, finally plunging his nose into the soft loam at the base of an oak tree. He digs, throwing the soil from one side to another. Little Pig, inevitably, barges in to see what the attraction might be. They dig together diligently for some time, determined, energetic; we move away from them, post by post, winding the wire back on to its spool.

  It’s only later that we wonder about truffles. The oak woods of the causse are truffle country: the ugly, brown-black lumps, like dried dung, are on sale through the winter in the local markets, nestled in lined baskets, a prize. It’s usually female pigs that are used to hunt for truffles – dogs are popular for this, too – but all pigs seem to love the lingering, earthy, mushroomy flavour. When we go back the next day, we’re no longer absolutely sure which tree Big Pig stopped at but we take a guess and crouch among the depressions where the roots tangle close to the trunk. We’ve never come close to finding a truffle before; we have no idea what we’re looking for, but we search anyway, rather half-heartedly, throwing aside the leaves and scraping through the soil. Bits of twig; stones; more leaves. There’s nothing out of the ordinary. We soon give up the quest. But we wonder, nonetheless, if the pigs have been feasting. Pigs finished on truffles: that would be fine meat.

  As we work, stumbling through the woods and rifling for truffles, we talk, inevitably, about our plans. This is our last chance to change our minds. If we’re going to kill the pigs ourselves, at home, then we have to be sure; we have to know we’re doing the right thing. It’s obviously not something we can back out of halfway through. And we’re nearly sure. Nearly. But just now, almost at the end, there are doubts, niggles of uncertainty. Even Ed, after so many months of confidence, begins to hesitate. Have we made a mistake? We run through everything for the final time and we reconsider the alternative: should we think again about sending Big Pig and Little Pig to the abattoir? Are we absolutely certain we want to kill them at all?

  Confronting the realities of what goes on in an abattoir, even a good abattoir, is not easy. We don’t want to think about terrified animals, poked and prodded, herded, gassed, hung, bled; the noise of the machines clattering; the cold, wet, bloody environment; the concrete, the metal. This is not the intimate, almost sacrificial death of a pig at home. This is efficiency, industrialization, distance. When abattoirs started to take over from home killings at the beginning of the twentieth century people didn’t quite know what to make of this new system: the French belle-époque postcards that had once shown photos of happy families posing with their pigs in their arms now focused on the huge bleak slaughterhouses. They featured walls, gates, guards suggestive of prisons; one card, from 1905,13 entitled ‘Lyon-vaise. The bleeding of pigs’ shows a high-ceilinged concrete barn with tiny windows and harsh electric light, rows of pig carcasses on either side dripping blood, and the workers standing to attention in the middle of the room, doing nothing. Everything is seen at a distance; the workers are tiny, no more significant than the hoists and vats; the view is orderly, inhuman.

  One of our neighbours has a cousin who works at the local abattoir, and by chance he’s at the house when we call by. We don’t ask him specifically about our pigs, but we show interest in his work. He’s a fat, unreflective man who doesn’t like to talk. He doesn’t tell us, he perhaps can’t tell us, about what he does every day but he says bluntly that he hates his job, the cold mostly, and the discomfort, the smells and noise and dirt. It’s a factory job like most other factory jobs: boring, monotonous, repetitive. We struggle to hold a conversation. He shrugs a great deal.

  There’s nothing essentially wrong with a small, well-run abattoir like the one we have in our town. It’s an efficient, clean way of turning live animals into meat for sale. Most pigs have to go to an abattoir. There’s no alternative. But for us there is an alternative, a choice. We want the pigs to have a good death; we want to honour them in this. We want to avoid fear or confusion, unnecessary delay. It makes sense, then, to go ahead with our original plans and kill them at home. So why are we hesitating?

  The days are short now, the sun hardly rising above the tall trees in front of the house. In the enclosure, leaves fall fast to cover the last of the acorns; sharp morning frost silvers the meadow and the pigs hunker low in the straw. We set a date for the slaughter. Assuming the weather’s cold enough, we’ll do it in a few weeks’ time: mid-December. We’ve got visitors coming for Christmas and don’t want to confront them with the sight of dead pigs. But if we stick to the timetable, that would give us enough time to kill the pigs, do all the butchering, pack away the meat and clear up. Cover our traces. As if nothing has happened.

  We no longer bother to ‘weigh’ the pigs with our trusty piece of string. There doesn’t seem much point. They’re fully fattened, hefty; we can see by looking at them that there’s going to be plenty of carcass weight. Their graphs have each reached an impressive summit at around 170kg – Little Pig’s red line an Alpine ridge below Big Pig’s – and the only important measure now is one of freezer space. They’re probably still putting on slow growth, little by little, but winter feeding will have slowed this down and it doesn’t seem to matter like it once did. It’s hard to contemplate them continuing to grow and preparing to die, at the same time; if they’re maturing still, developing, then there’s life in them, potential, unfinished business. It might make death seem untimely.

  We begin to amass the equipment we need. We’ve got our hands on a captive bolt which operates on compressed air to stun an animal before slaughter. It looks disturbingly like a gun, some kind of police handgun from American cop films. It’s black, weighty, glossy; a serious weapon. But when you pull the trigger it thrusts a metal bar from the barrel instead of shooting bullets. The bar whops the animal in the forehead and instantly fells it. From the same man, a local farmer, we’ve also managed to borrow two lengths of heavy chain, each with a pulley. Bring them back clean, he says; if there’s any rust on the
m they’re as good as useless. Finally, Jean-Claude solves the problem of how to hang the carcasses. He takes us round the back of his barn. Leaning against the wall are racks of scaffolding. There are six or eight pieces, which would form a block tall enough to loop the chain about eight feet above the ground and winch up the pigs. The scaffolding is old and rickety but seems sound enough. We load it precariously into the back of the car to carry it the short journey home, the open boot spewing rusty metal poles like a mouth full of Twiglets. Over the following days we fit together a basic tower alongside the woodshed, out of sight of the road, hidden. We try out the chains. A scaffold. Hanging. Death.

  I spend half a day constructing a shelter on the vegetable patch. I rake over the old stalks, pull out the last tendrils of the pumpkin plants and level out an area for the straw. I don’t take a great deal of care with it; I don’t bother taking apart the current shelter for mater-ials, making do instead with what I find around the house, some plastic sheeting, planks. Even propped against the stone wall it has a precarious air, but it doesn’t have to last. The pigs won’t be there long.

  I collect an old upright freezer from a couple up the road. They have a new model, and offered us this cast-off for free. It takes a lot of puffing and heaving to get it into the back of the car and even more to unload it at the other end. It’s immediately clear why they wanted to get rid of it: it rattles and groans when I plug it in, its motor going full tilt into the night, devouring electricity like Pac-Man on speed.

  Good, then. Ready. We move the pigs for the last time. It’s a fine crisp morning, frost lying in the shadows and the sun slanting low and pale over the ridge at La Graudie. The woods sigh out a thin mist; below, in the valley, light and shade criss-cross the fields around the stream, making them uncertain, unsteady. Jean-Claude has a bonfire, wispy and slight; the dribble of smoke seems melancholy. Everything seems melancholy. There’s a sense of parting, of rupture.