The Good Good Pig

by Sy Montgomery

  With their tusks and great bulk, their omnivorous diet and sometimes frightening voices, it is easy to forget that pigs are ungulates. But hooves don’t lie. Hooves are the heritage of flight: eons of running away sculpted the hardened tiptoes that define the ungulates, from antelopes to horses, from goats to pigs to giraffes. Deep in their genes, pigs remember. Forty million years of porcine evolution says: somebody is trying to eat you. Forty thousand years of barnyard history says: somebody is going to eat you. Who wouldn’t be hysterical?

  Howard and I simply could not afford to be responsible for an hysterical 350-pound pig blunderbussing through Hancock armed with razor-sharp tusks. For the good of the community, we had but one choice: tuskectomy.

  I knew Chris wasn’t going to like it, but I phoned Tom Dowling. Tom was a vet with a practice in a neighboring town. He had earned his master’s degree in pigs. We had first become acquainted the year before, due to a math error. As part of routine hog husbandry, Howard and I wormed Christopher annually. That year, I had gone to buy the medicine at Agway. When you buy it in bulk, the drug is packaged for a lot of little pigs, not one big pig. I calculated the dose wrong. Hours after he had swallowed the medicine, Christopher came down with what looked like a terrible stomachache. I had poisoned him!

  Who in the area treated pigs? George and Mary’s pig vet was too far away. We had a wonderful vet for Tess, but at the time I did not know he treated large animals, too. Based on a horse-owning friend’s recommendation, I summoned Tom. At the sight of the tall, lanky vet entering his pen, Chris struggled to his feet, trying to greet his visitor. Expertly, Tom got a loop of rope over Christopher’s snout, and to my amazement, Chris’s reaction—a known reflex among pigs—was to stand as if frozen in his tracks, screaming but eerily unable to move, enabling Tom to squirt liquid-activated charcoal down Christopher’s throat to neutralize the excess wormer.

  Although Chris didn’t thrash, he still managed to dramatically register his displeasure. A pig’s screams can be quite literally deafening, a health threat deemed serious enough to merit an article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association titled “Incidence of Hearing Loss in Swine Veterinarians.” “Ree! Ree! Ree-e-e-e-e-e!” Christopher shrieked, at the same time shooting thick streams of liquid charcoal out of his nose and mouth. When the eruption was over, Tom was as black as a chimney sweep. But Christopher was all right.

  So it was to Tom I turned again. Because Christopher had met Tom only once, well over a year before, I hoped he wouldn’t remember him. But unfortunately, Christopher seemed to have excellent recall. He never forgot the location of the Amidon lettuce garden, for instance, and it was clear Christopher remembered a number of people and recognized them easily. (I later learned this is typical of pigs: laboratory tests show pigs easily outperform dogs in learning mazes, and pigs can recognize people not only by smell but also by sight alone. Pigs can also discriminate between people at a distance, even when the people are wearing identical clothes.) That Christopher remembered people was obvious in his greeting grunts. His grunts were low and soft for Kate and Jane, deep and manly for Howard; there was one distinctive grunt he used only for our friend Ray Cote. The president of a software company, Ray’s busy schedule permitted only rare visits. But each time he came to his pen, Chris emitted deep, loud, long, fantastically appreciative greetings he offered no other person. Why? Ray and Chris had much in common: they were both smart and strong and funny. But what Chris may have liked best was that Ray weighed about four hundred pounds. Chris may have thought he had finally found one of His People.

  But would our pig remember Tom? The minute Hogwood caught sight of him, he began to shriek hysterically—and didn’t stop until Tom had finished sawing (painlessly, he promised) both of Christopher’s sharp lower tusks to blunt, harmless stubs.

  YOU MIGHT THINK I’D HAVE BEEN AS WORRIED ABOUT THE JAWS OF Sundarbans’s tigers as I was about the tusks of our pig. I was not. Truth be told, my getting eaten was never one of my worries. My worries about the trip were all centered on Hancock, that something bad might happen while I was gone. I never would have admitted it, but the hardest part of any trip I ever took was leaving home.

  I was vulnerable to homesickness—but immune, in my mind, to death. I could not even fathom my husband’s and my mother’s concern for me. I was too lucky to die, but I reckoned that even if I did, getting eaten was a fine way for me to go. Plus, if I got nailed by an experienced tiger, it probably wouldn’t hurt. Tigers stalk and ambush hunters, and almost always attack from the back. A skilled tiger sinks its canines into the spaces between the neck vertebrae of its prey, severing the spinal cord as neatly as a key opens a lock. In Sundarbans, it’s said that people attacked by tigers are often killed so quickly they don’t have time to scream.

  I almost got a chance to find out. On my first expedition, my boat got stuck in the mud in an area where tigers were known to be hiding. My boatman, Girindra Nath Mridha, handed me a machete and my photographer an ax. During the endless minutes that Girindra and his son worked to push the craft free, we stood back to back on the deck of the boat with only these weapons to defend our party against the tiger if it chose to attack.

  Later, we had an even closer call. We chugged down a wide river and then turned up a small channel. Fearful of getting stuck, Girindra turned the boat around—to reveal tiger tracks so fresh that they couldn’t have been more than two minutes old. But the tiger had not simply swum across the little channel; there were no prints on the opposite bank. We backtracked to the larger river and, to our amazement, discovered that the tiger had entered the water from the forest there. The tiger had swum after our boat.

  Through it all, Girindra, a strong, slight man my age who had seen an uncle killed by a tiger, was never angry. He feared the tiger, but he did not hate it. Like his fellow villagers, Girindra would never hurt a tiger except in direct self-defense. No one poached tigers in Sundarbans. To search out a tiger to kill it was unthinkable.

  What, I wondered, did they know about predators that most people have forgotten?

  To research the book, I went back to Sundarbans again and again. At first I stayed at the little tourist lodge across the river from Girindra’s village. But later, with a translator, I stayed with Girindra’s family—his beautiful wife, Namita, his mother, MaBisaka, and his eight children—at the smooth mud and thatch house they had made by hand. They were eager to help with my book. By day, in Girindra’s wooden boat, we would search the banks of the muddy creeks for tiger signs. At night, the neighbors—fishermen, honey gatherers, widows—would gather at his home, smoking clove-scented bidis and chewing betel nut, and by the light of the kerosene lamp they would tell me stories of tigers and crocodiles, gods and ghosts. After they would go, I would lie in the darkness, trying not to think of Christopher’s ears or Howard’s laugh, or the way that Tess would now lie on her back on our bed and expose her white belly to us in complete, trusting bliss. Home seemed as far away as a half-remembered dream, and the thought of it would seize my throat with a sob.

  When I came home, it was Sundarbans that felt like a dream. Which was the dream and which was real? Girindra’s letters reminded me: both were real. We wrote each other regularly—we still do—my letters translated into Bengali and his to me into English by the teacher at the village school. “Amar chotto bon,” his letters usually begin, “my little sister.” Shortly after my second trip to Sundarbans, Girindra, who as a Hindu believes in multiple lifetimes, announced that he thought he and I had been brother and sister in a former life. Girindra’s eight children called me pishima, the beautiful Bengali word for paternal aunt.

  “Take atop my love,” Girindra would write. “I pray you are well by the blessings of Goddess.” I prayed even harder for him and his family; after all, they lived on the outskirts of a reserve inhabited by five hundred man-eating tigers. “Thank you very much to write long treasurous letter. I used to wait for the same as a thirsty bird and inquire to the postal dep
artment….” I did, too. Pat knew well how eagerly I awaited Girindra’s letters. We wrote each other about every two weeks, but it usually took a month for a letter to arrive, sometimes more.

  Each battered airmail letter, covered with as many as fourteen stamps, was blessed proof the family had survived. In grateful reply I composed simple but detailed letters describing life in our village on the other side of the world. I sent photos: our post office and church in five feet of new snow; a picture of my father in his military uniform; Howard and me in parkas and snowshoes. I sent pictures of Kate and Jane and Lilla, Ed and Pat. And, of course, I often sent pictures of our animals. (“Your very large Hogwood pig is wonder to see,” Girindra wrote. “There is no such pig in Sundarbans. How can it be? It is as miracle to us.”)

  But the miracle, to me, was in Girindra’s world, where death in the jaws of a predator was a subject as familiar as the weather. “Rain has fled along with its wetty clumsyness,” he wrote in one letter; in the next paragraph: “A large grown-up crocodile has been a terror to the fishing persons. Five man and woman have been eaten within a month and a half.” Yet in Sundarbans, there would never be a posse of hunters tracking down a croc or a tiger, even a man-eater, the way New Hampshire’s early farmers had persecuted Monadnock’s last, crippled wolf. That was the central mystery in my book, the mystery that kept me returning to Sundarbans.

  I learned the answer from the story of the tiger god. The story is retold in Sundarbans each January in a long poetic song, part of a day of praise and propitiation to Daskin Ray, ruler of Sundarbans. He is at once a tiger and a god. The crocodiles and sharks are his emissaries. Daskin Ray has always owned the riches of Sundarbans—the fishes, the trees, the bees and their honey—and it is only through his generosity that he shares these gifts with the people. But only if the people understand that the forest is his, and give both him and the land due respect. To this day, they say, the deity may still enter the body of a tiger at any moment, and if the god has been angered, he will attack.

  The stories reflect a sophisticated understanding of ecology. The tiger protects the forest: fear of the tiger keeps woods-men from cutting down all the mangroves. The mangroves protect the coastline: their limbs and leaves soften the winds of cyclones. Their roots form nurseries for fish, which feed the people. The people understand that without the tiger, Sundar-bans could not stay whole.

  That a man may be eaten by a tiger does not make life cheap. No; in Sundarbans, life is large, and gods are everywhere for the people to see. So the people see the tiger’s mission in life—its dharma—as sacred. They see the holy goddess who resides in every cow. They remember that the great god Vishnu once came to Earth as a boar. And they see, as well, in the jaws of the tiger, the blameless perfection of the divine.

  IN ONE OF HIS BOOKS, HOWARD WRITES ABOUT A CONCEPT CALLED tikkun: it’s a term coined by a Kabbalist mystic, and proceeds from an ancient Jewish story about the beginning of the world. The story has it that shortly after Creation, some of the Lord’s light, the creative force, was spilled and lost by accident. It is our job, says the mystic, to try, in our actions, to gather up that spilled light—to restore the wholeness of the world.

  But what is wholeness? How do we come to recognize it, and to realize when it is lost?

  I know how wholeness feels. It feels like the soft summer evenings when I would close in Christopher and the chickens for the night. It feels like when Tess would lie on our bed and roll on her back to show us her white belly. It feels like the times I would linger by the barn as soft clucks and gentle grunts would wash over me like moonlight, and fill me with peace.

  Wholeness feels like gratitude. Gratitude that we are safe and happy and together. And for that, I must thank equally the foxes and the weasels, the tigers and the crocodiles. For the peace of the barnyard, I am grateful to the dangers and jaws of the jungle. For the belonging that is home, I can thank, in part, the exile that is travel. Though they seem like opposites, they are more like twins—two halves of a whole.

  CHAPTER 8

  Celebrity

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER HAD DRIVEN UP FROM NEW YORK. HIS CREDENTIALS were impressive: he used to work for Time-Life. Bruce Curtis had covered the war in Vietnam, where he had been wounded three times. He had documented the student protests at home, the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, the famine in Biafra.

  And now, with a car trunk full of camera equipment and costume props, here he was on our doorstep. Again, he was shooting on location.

  His next stop was the Pig Plateau.

  Bruce had heard about Christopher from his girlfriend, who had met Howard years before on a Victorian Society study program in England. Bruce had quit Time-Life and now worked freelance, hustling after any image that would sell: teddy bears wearing different outfits, bucolic landscapes. He thought a big spotted pig would make a great subject for a series of greeting cards.

  The props reflected those he had in mind. For a birthday card, he envisioned the pig wearing a party hat, surrounded by festively wrapped packages with bows, and in the foreground, a birthday cake. For a new-baby card, he had made up signs that said IT’S A BOY! and IT’S A GIRL! and procured various pink and blue items for Christopher to wear to celebrate the appropriate sex. Then there was a wild and crazy party invitation idea, with an assortment of hats and some giant, hot-pink plastic sunglasses, the kind you get at an amusement park. Another theme would be the pig in a bubble bath, with all sorts of soaps and shampoos and a shower cap.

  Howard and I welcomed him to New Hampshire. After all, he was a friend of Howard’s friend. Besides, how could I refuse someone who considered our pig such a worthy portrait subject?

  Howard didn’t say so, but he did not think Chris would cooperate. My husband retreated to his upstairs office to write. Kate and Jane were off on some neighborhood adventure. I was left alone to work as Bruce’s pig wrangler.

  Bruce was initially enthusiastic. We had a beautiful July day. The light was clear and rich. Our barn was “the perfect color.” But when Bruce actually met Christopher, whom I had already put out on his tether, the photographer was taken aback.

  “He’s much bigger than I expected,” he said soberly.

  “He’s much bigger than we expected, too,” I replied.

  Bruce studied the scene with his photographer’s eye. “What’s that nylon webbing around him for?” He was concerned that the makeshift harness, patched as it was with pieces of different-colored nylon from previous generations, would look bad in the photos.

  “That’s the only thing between us and four hundred pounds of loose pig,” I explained.

  “You mean you can’t control him?”

  “Not at all,” I answered honestly. “He’s pretty much the one in control around here.”

  When he’d envisioned his project, Bruce might have hoped that Christopher would turn out to be a porcine version of one of William Wegman’s vogueish weimaraners. But this was not to be.

  Christopher hated the party hats. The flimsy elastic, made to stretch around the chin of a child’s seven-pound head, instantly snapped when we tried to stretch it around Christopher’s hundred-pound head and the commodious jowls that hung from it. We tried to perch the hats between his ears, but they tickled. If Kate had been on hand—her wardrobe genius now perfected in the fashion crucible of junior high—maybe she could have gotten him to wear them, but without her it was hopeless. Christopher shook each hat off in turn, and when it fell to the ground, he would pick it up in his mouth and deliver the death shake. We had a party pack of twelve shiny, pointy hats. Within five minutes, he had destroyed eleven of them.

  We obviously needed to get a hat on him before we set out the birthday cake, which would last perhaps two seconds, if that, before Chris ate it. But perhaps we should try piling the gifts first, then the hat, and finally the cake, I suggested. Christopher knocked the boxes over instantly with his nose. He had pioneered the knocking-things-over game with our carefully stacked woodpile, but this was e
ven more fun, because the next step, as he saw it, was obviously to rip off the gift wrap. He pinned each box with a hoof and then tore off the wrapping with his lips, giving this a shake, too, before shredding it.

  Finally we decided to nix the gifts and just focus on the hat and the cake. Once the cake was served, we would have just one chance for the shot. Bruce set his camera on its tripod just out of nose-print range. I set a few bagels on the ground to occupy Chris while I got the final hat and the cake. I plunked the hat on the pig, set down the cake, and darted away from the camera. The hat fell off. Christopher plowed his nose through the blue HAPPY on the white icing, and then, in one bite, consumed one-quarter of the sheet cake.

  Christopher was enjoying his modeling career immensely. The only parts he didn’t like were wearing clothes and getting photographed.

  For the new-baby card, Christopher shook off every piece of pink and blue ornament Bruce had to offer. He would not put his front legs through the sleeves of a sweater—and besides, it was the wrong size anyway. He pushed over, pulled up, shook and bit the IT’S A BOY! and IT’S A GIRL! signs until they were pulp.

  The only thing Hogwood consented to wear was a red kerchief around his neck, which Bruce put on to cover the unsightly harness. That, and—oddly—the giant sunglasses. He liked them. They perched comfortably on his wide snout, and the colored lenses ended up positioned, uncannily, directly in front of his eyes. He walked around with the glasses on his face for about a minute. Bruce got several shots before they slid off Chris’s head.

  Finally—the props broken, the cake eaten, the wardrobe destroyed—Bruce and I made the final effort, the bubble bath scene. The harness would have to come off, Bruce said; Chris had to be naked for the bath. We frothed up some bubbles in a bucket of warm water and I unbuckled the harness.

  But Christopher Hogwood had had enough. He took off at a trot to a neighbor’s house, where he could smell their wild grapes ripening.