The Good Good Pig

by Sy Montgomery

  George stopped in his tracks. He set down the bucket. He opened the gate to a maternity stall, picked out two pink piglets, and handed one to Kate and one to Jane. Then he ran off and reappeared with a half gallon of maple syrup for Howard and me. Finally he put the piglets back in the stall—and then took up the bucket and continued his high-speed chase after the loose draft horse.

  THE VISIT TO GEORGE AND MARY’S SIGNALED THE END OF ONE OF New Hampshire’s fiercer winters. At our house, as Christopher slept snug in his bed of hay, and hens roosted warm in their nest boxes, our upstairs windows frosted over, so we could see only out of a one-inch porthole. Tess, Howard, and I huddled close together in our bed. Some nights the wind howled so loudly our walls seemed to sigh. But it was much worse next door. At night, Kate and Jane could see their breaths in their uninsulated upstairs bedrooms. One night, snow piled on Jane’s bed from a broken skylight. To try to warm up before bed, the girls would take hot showers and then burrow under the covers. The damp bath towels would be frozen stiff by morning.

  For the girls, the winter had been difficult in other ways, too. Fourth grade was Kate’s first in public school—like me, she’d gone to a private school, and she found the transition to a public one difficult. It was hard to fit in. Her schoolwork was frustrating, especially because Kate had dyslexia. And the whole family had problems with the girls’ father.

  But they had a way to cope. I didn’t know it at the time, but the younger Lillas would do exactly what I did when I needed to cry: go to Christopher’s pen. At these times, he did not demand food. He grunted softly as we confided our private troubles and scratched his ears. In his huge presence, our sorrows somehow felt smaller.

  The old house, as it turned out, was just as cold as everyone had feared it would be. But because of Chris, the move was not nearly as lonely.

  The hens were the first to realize the change that had occurred. At some point that winter, Howard and I noticed they had begun hopping over the low stone wall that separated ours from the yard next door. As far as the Ladies were concerned, they, Christopher, Tess, Howard, Lilla, I, and the two girls had become one unit.

  “OK!” I WOULD SAY WHEN EVERYONE WAS READY. AT THIS POINT in the Running of the Pig, Christopher would be bellowing in anticipation, rocking the gate violently with his nose.

  I’d slide back the bolt, swing open the door, and shout, “Go!”

  Christopher surged out of his pen, bucking and snorting. Any chickens in the way burst like grouse from cover and flew off in all directions. I ran ahead like a madwoman, struggling with the main slops bucket to get to the Plateau before Chris. The girls brought up the rear, as fast as their legs would carry them.

  Christopher was young and powerful—a speeding pig bullet. I think he felt his strength and youth all the more in the limelight of our admiration. He enjoyed putting on a show. Watching a three-hundred-pound beast charge at top speed “was just a little bit scary,” Jane admitted later—“and that made it exhilarating.” It was all part of a game. Even as we ran, we could see that Chris looked each one of us in the eye, as if to make sure we were playing our parts.

  Three pairs of pounding boots, sixty-four scaly chicken toes, and four thundering hooves all raced toward the finish line at the Pig Plateau and its rewards. There was a prize for everyone. Chris would receive his beloved slops. While he was communing with his Higher Power, Tess would rise from her “stay” for play with the Frisbee. The hens, too, got treats. They darted in to seize morsels from the edges of Christopher’s slops pile, then raced back out of range, their beaks trailing carrot peelings and spaghetti.

  And then, if the day was sunny and the weather fine, came the best part of the whole operation. After Christopher had eaten his fill, as Tess’s tongue hung out from catching and retrieving the Frisbee, after the hens had stolen enough scraps to turn their attention to the bugs in the taller grass of the field, came the main event of our summer days.

  It was an activity that Kate and Jane perfected, one that eventually became a summer institution that drew children to the Pig Plateau in Hancock for a dozen years. We called it Pig Spa.

  NONE OF US CAN REMEMBER THE SPECIFIC MOMENT THE GIRLS made the leap of imagination that transformed plain old tummy-rubbing into Pig Spa. But we are fairly sure the inspiration was Christopher’s tail.

  Like all the parts of our pig, his tail was extraordinary. It never achieved the tight curl of picture-book pigs, but Christopher Hogwood’s back end nonetheless ended with a great flourish: the coarse white hair on his tail grew nearly a foot beyond the fleshy tip, and it cascaded to the ground in a thick, appealing ringlet.

  At least it had been appealing the previous fall. Winter is hard on a pig’s tail. There are many days in winter when a pigpen simply can’t be cleaned. You can’t push a wheelbarrow to the compost pile through deep snow (though there were days we loaded piles of manure on a sled we had found at the dump). But some days, everything you’d want to move is frozen solid anyway. When it does begin to warm up, the opportunities for a long tail to trail into softening slopsicles and melting manure are myriad. By spring, Christopher Hogwood’s magnificent tail was a mess: matted, tangled, and embedded with detritus.

  To two little girls, the ruined ringlet begged for a beauty treatment.

  Most animals would prefer that people leave their tails alone. Tess was one of them. She hated having her tail brushed and sat on it whenever she saw me carrying her red brush. From my earliest pony rides with my father, I had learned not to mess with a horse’s back end, either, for fear of getting kicked. Even touching the tail of a snake (who you can argue is mostly one long tail) will usually cause the animal to turn around and face you with suspicion and then slither off.

  How would our three-hundred-pound pig react to two little girls combing the tangles from his tail?

  Christopher loved it.

  Out of the Doll House came the perfect detangling devices: a lilac-colored brush with plastic bristles tipped with little white balls (they were intended to protect the scalp from scratches) and a dark blue comb with widely spaced teeth. Christopher particularly enjoyed it when the grooming extended to the hefty cheeks of his butt. He would often move a hind leg forward in order to show you exactly the spot that needed attention.

  Occasionally, the comb would pull. Christopher would flick his tail in annoyance. If you persisted, and he didn’t like it, he would pull his huge head off the ground and growl. But discomfort would be forgotten if you rubbed his belly or touched his ear and reassured him. “Good, good pig…Good, good, good.” He closed his eyes and his whole body would heave with grunts of contentment.

  Tail combing was just the beginning. The girls decreed that the tail would also, of course, need to be braided. And once it got warm enough, Christopher would need a bath. We quickly learned that temperature was crucial to the success of this endeavor. Although the garden hose would have made our job easy, that wouldn’t do: the water came from our well and was too cold. Chris leaped up shrieking as if we were trying to butcher him. No, instead we had to carry heavy buckets of warm, soapy water from the kitchen, and then buckets of warm water for the rinse. We had to do this while he was lying down, so the aesthetic effect of the bath was somewhat diminished: one side of him would be squeaky clean, the other side lying in soapy mud. And of course if we managed to get him to stand up and convince him to lie down again the other way so we could wash his flip side, the side we’d just cleaned got all muddy.

  Soon our simple comb and brush would be augmented with other beauty products. At the Blue Seal feed store, I bought a jar of The Hoofmaker, a fragrant, creamy concoction of cocoa butter mixed with something else and guaranteeing shiny, healthy hooves for show horses. We rubbed this into Christopher’s hooves till they gleamed. We bought three kinds of scrub brushes with bristles of varied stiffnesses to accommodate the varying sensitivities of Christopher’s skin. (His back and rear could take vigorous brushing, but as you got closer to his head he demanded, wit
h a growl, softer bristles.)

  Pig skin is so like a person’s that skin from hogs is sometimes used as a temporary graft for human victims of massive burns. (The pig skin stays on for days or weeks, as the person’s own skin heals, before the graft is ultimately rejected.) So no wonder Christopher’s was vulnerable to the same problems as ours: sunburn, dermatitis, eczema. Happily, pig skin responds well to human skin care products. You just have to buy huge amounts. At one point, later in Christopher’s life, Howard ordered a gallon of cod liver oil (Where do you find a gallon of cod liver oil? At Codliveroil.com) to keep his skin supple. He drank some of it—he liked it—but we found it worked best rubbed directly on his skin. And many years later, when Christopher was so old that he exhibited what we called porcine pattern baldness, our vet prescribed summer baths with a special foaming antiseptic soap. We would follow this treatment with a rubdown with Vitamin E skin cream with aloe.

  To some, this beauty regimen might sound over the top for a pig. But the truth is, while the brushing, bathing, tail braiding, and nipple stroking delighted Christopher Hogwood, even more it restored the humans who touched him.

  WORD SPREAD. KATE AND JANE BEGAN TO BRING THEIR FRIENDS TO Pig Spa. I invited professors at the grad school where I sometimes taught to bring their kids. Deacons from church came with grandchildren. The Amidons brought their grandchildren from Iowa—a place with no shortage of pigs. But they had never seen a pig like this. All the little visitors were thrilled.

  But besides Kate and Jane, the kid who loved him most was Kelly Felgar.

  Kelly’s mom, Amy, heard about Chris at the post office, a place where you can usually count on interesting and varied conversation with your neighbors. “The topic of cantaloupe rinds came up,” Amy told me, “and then Pat Soucy mentioned saving slops for Chris. Kelly would love to meet Christopher! She adores pigs!”

  I knew the Felgars from church, but I had never suspected their radiant, blue-eyed twelve-year-old was a pig-lover. All I knew about Kelly was that she had cancer.

  The Felgars had moved to town from Athens, Georgia, when Kelly’s dad became CEO of our local hospital. Back then Kelly was eight, and when she first saw the tiny elementary school on Main Street she said, “That’s not a school—that’s a house!” But any qualms she’d had about moving to a small, rural community were quelled on their first visit to the Friendly Farm, a modest area attraction whose motto was “See ’em, feed ’em, pet ’em.” There she fell in love with a mother pig lying on her side, nursing a row of pink piglets. She adored babies, and she loved that they were nursing (her mom, Amy, was a leader at La Leche League). And the scene reminded Kelly of the summer she and her older brother, Adam, used to play with a two-foot-long black-and-white pig named Miss Piggy who lived on her grandmother’s farm.

  Shortly after that, Kelly began amassing her pig collection: A pig-pile figurine carved from ivory-colored material. A pig puzzle carved from wood. Pigs of metal and plastic. Sleeping pigs and suckling pigs. A pig ballerina dancing on tiptoe (but then, pigs are always on tiptoe) clad in a pink tutu. She slept with a plushy brown pig with a squishy nose that squeaked.

  Collecting pigs was just one of Kelly’s hobbies; she also sang in the choir at church, won ribbons in figure skating competitions, and loved to dance. But after her diagnosis, and the brain surgery and radiation that followed, some days she didn’t feel well enough to do these other things. Tending the pigs in her room was a reliable source of joy. One summer, Howard and I saw her collection when she lent it to the town library, where it commanded the glass case in the foyer reserved for rotating displays of citizens’ treasures. We saw it again the next year, when it was displayed at Kelly’s funeral.

  But on the sunny spring afternoon that she and her mom first came to our door, Kelly felt she was the luckiest kid in the world. She was such an optimist that she often told her mom she was so lucky she had cancer and not cystic fibrosis or diabetes or Crohn’s disease—she had met kids with these diseases and felt sorry for them, whereas what she had, she said, “really isn’t so bad.” But on this day she felt especially blessed—for she was about to meet a famous pig.

  I had already put Chris out on his tether by the time Kelly and Amy knocked at the door. With Tess and her Frisbee in tow, we approached the Plateau. Kelly couldn’t believe her eyes.

  “He’s the biggest pig I’ve ever seen!”

  “Want to pet him?” But I didn’t really have to ask.

  Over the next two years, Kelly and her mom were sporadic but enthusiastic visitors. Her parents had a photo of Chris enlarged to an eleven-by-fourteen-inch poster, which Kelly taped to her bedroom door. She told people it was “my friend Christopher, who lives up the road.”

  Kelly enjoyed telling her friends about her time with him. She would tell them how he would roll over so she could scratch his belly. “No!” they would say, disbelieving. “Yeah!” she would counter. She told them how he would leap to his hind legs when she visited him in the barn, and he would stand taller than she was, and hold open his mouth so she could plop in banana peels and apples and pastries. She told them about the feel of his bristles, and the special, gentle greeting grunt he gave her when she visited. They were always impressed.

  But unlike Kate and Jane, Kelly never wanted to bring her friends to meet him. Her mom told me: “That was just for her and Christopher.” The moments she spent with him were outside her everyday human friendships, and somehow seemed outside ordinary time. Kelly wore a knitted cap because her hair had fallen out; her cancer had spread to her spine and sometimes hurt terribly. But the cancer was far away when she came to visit Christopher Hogwood on the Pig Plateau. There was only a joyful, beaming young girl and the happiness of a great big pig.

  “SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK?” I SAID TO KATE AND JANE ONE SUMMER afternoon at Pig Spa. I often consulted them on what I was writing and they usually gave excellent advice. “Vampire bats or sharks?”

  As usual, I was working on several stories at a time. One, for Animals magazine, had arisen from a recent jaunt with Liz to Costa Rica, on which I’d enjoyed the distinction of being bitten by a vampire bat while I was removing the captured animal from a net. That story would report new findings that these altruistic little creatures share blood meals with hungry roost mates. The shark piece was for International Wildlife, the story of Jaws in reverse: human hunger for shark-fin soup was driving many sharks toward extinction. Which should I work on first?

  “Vampires,” they said in unison.

  “Unh,” said Christopher, as if to register an opinion. He moved a hind leg forward, asking us to scrub his butt.

  It was one of those perfect, golden days on the cusp of September, when the late summer light spills over the land like cricket song, and the fields are bright with goldenrod. The hens bustled around us, hunting bugs and exclaiming softly; Tess guarded us from her position at the edge of the tall grass.

  We poured another cupful of warm rinse water over Chris. “I might be a biologist when I grow up,” Jane said.

  “Really?”

  “Or maybe an artist,” she said. “Or maybe I would want to travel and write.” She paused. “Like you.”

  “When I grow up,” Kate announced, “I’m going to start an animal sanctuary.” She had clearly given the idea quite a bit of thought. “All the unwanted animals can come and stay with me. It would be like here, like us with Chris and Tess and everybody, but we would have elephants, too. And wolves. And horses. And kids could come take care of them, kids who were runaways or homeless or having problems—”

  “Unh-h-h-h-h-h-h!” said Christopher. The water was getting a tad too cool.

  I could not help but think of Kelly then, forever fourteen. How grateful I was to have known her, and to keep her always in my memory. And how grateful I was for these girls with me now. I was grateful for their future, for the many bright dreams from which they would one day choose.

  Like them, I, too, loved to imagine: my mind wandered the continents and p
aged through the unwritten books of tomorrow.

  But that day, I was in no rush.

  CHAPTER 7

  Nature Red in Claw and Tusk

  HOWARD WAS UPSTAIRS WITH HARRY ATWOOD, SOARING OVER Lake Erie in a flying boat in 1913. I was downstairs, gliding beneath the Pacific with hammerhead sharks over undersea mountains, sensing the earth’s magnetic field as their guide.

  But our written worlds vanished in an instant—casualties of another animal interruption. This time, it was the distress squawk of a chicken.

  Not every squawk demanded our attention. Maybe somebody stole someone else’s worm; a squabble erupted over nesting box space; a hen took offense at an undeserved peck. But sometimes squawks signaled another pig breakout. In an effort to steal the hens’ grain, the coop was often the first stop on Christopher’s outings—the story of which we read clearly in his hoofprints in mud or snow.

  Had Christopher escaped again? Only a couple of weeks earlier, Lilla and the girls had been getting ready for school when they saw him loose in their backyard, cheerfully flipping dinner-plate-sized divots of lawn into the air with his nose. Jane tried to lure him back to his pen with her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but after he ate that, plus her apple, he took off down Route 137. His ultimate capture even involved our town road agent, so within days, the whole town had known our pig had been loose again.

  We didn’t want a replay of this soon.

  Howard ran to look out the upstairs bathroom window, hoping not to see a black-and-white spotted pig crossing the street. Instead, he saw a hen racing uncharacteristically across the road.

  Howard wondered: why did the chicken cross the road?

  And then he saw, chasing the hen, something long and orange. Fox! The next moment, it had our hen in its jaws.