by Brian Brett
When I mentioned that our last ram had gone infertile, Mike Byron showed up the next day with a honking big ram in the back of his truck. This behaviour was unusual for Mike, who often operates months behind schedule, being of the class of farmers who always have far more tasks than any normal person could handle. I was suspicious immediately, but we sorted out ewes, lambs, dogs, and pastures and unloaded the ram, who pranced off the truck like a superhero, took one look at the ewes, and made himself at home. This is good, I thought, forgetting my initial suspicions.
The ram was a real gentleman and went about his business mating with the ewes. He also figured out feeding time soon enough. A week later he took his first run at me. I thwacked him with the bucket and that backed him off. I didn’t quite turn my back as I walked away, and that was smart. He charged again. I rotated quickly, kicking him in the chest, and deflected the charge. This wasn’t looking good. Within a week I didn’t have to turn my back before he attacked. A 250-pound charging ram is no fun. I slapped his face, but he charged again, and I slapped him again. I abhor hitting animals, yet he had no qualms about hitting humans. This was not fair. Worse, he regarded every slap as an incentive. He chased me around our small stand of birches. That day ended in a standoff, and I thought I’d calmed him down. He didn’t make another charge. But one week later, after Sharon fed the sheep, she declared she wasn’t doing that again. No story, no explanations. The decision was final. I didn’t dare ask what had happened.
As can often occur on a farm, that incident incited opposing forces. The encounter with Sharon was the final straw for Sam, the border collie, who had enough good breeding to recognize a ram gone rogue. The next afternoon, as the ram pawed the earth and I stood ready, like a goaltender, bucket in hand, waiting for the charge, Sam leaped at his hind end and yanked off a mouthful of wool. This is totally illegal behaviour for a sheepdog, but considering the circumstances, I raised no objection, and watched events unfold. The ram whipped around. Sam was long gone. Lying in the grass, her jaws tufted with wool, she gave him the “evil eye” of a master collie. Though no competition-trained herd dog, Sam had inherited this “eye” and knew how to use it. She rushed him again and veered off at the last moment.
After less than twenty minutes of this intimidation dance the ram was cowed. I never said anything to Sam. She knew. She never hurt him, outside of yanking that first tuft of wool. By the time I closed the gate the vicious ram was trembling behind the ewes, and Sam proudly sashayed down the road at my side, spitting out bits of wool.
Living with sheep is a kind of collapsed life lesson. You learn and feel so much within a few years. They are born and they leap with joy, kicking up their heels—a sight that brings you rushing to the fence to watch. They grow fat and stupid. They get their heads stuck in the hay bin. They fold up in the corner of the shed with a great sadness, and then they die, and you are left with the dust of complex, confusing memories.
Sheep usually prefer living with sheep, although we did have a bottle-fed lamb who was convinced she was a dog and who sometimes joined the dogs on the deck, hoping to be let inside. Pigs, in contrast, love to intermingle with people. They can be more domestic than goats or chickens or horses. During the Korean pot-bellied pig craze I met a few house-trained television-watching pet pigs. The potbellied pig is notoriously personable, but so are most pigs. We stuck to more regular breeds. Our first lot arrived one morning in the back of my closed van. I drove them behind the barn and lifted them down inside their page-wire enclosure. It was well fortified—the wire dug into the earth. I mixed them up a batch of feed, and they set to it as if they were born here.
Pigs are often used to clear new land. It’s easy to see why. Give a pig enough time and it will dig out and overturn a four-foot tree stump. I watched them do that in our pen over a period of several weeks.
We named our threesome Bacon, Eggs, and Toast—not distinguishing who was who. Never name an animal you are going to eat. This gang scarfed their feed trough clean and set about destroying every living thing in their enclosure and a few nonliving objects as well. I watched them for almost an hour. They seemed so happy. Satisfied that they were comfortable, I returned to my chores.
A few hours later I decided to check them. They were gone. They’d burrowed under the buried page wire. I panicked and immediately phoned old Howard Byron, Mike’s brother and the animal control officer. Howard was out, so I left a message. I spent all afternoon searching for those pigs. Long gone. Howard didn’t phone back, which was unusual for him. And Mike wasn’t home either. We didn’t have a herd dog then, so they’d be tough to corral without help. My imagination went wild with visions of the pigs destroying some neighbour’s expensive, exotic flower garden. I finally reached Mike on the phone. He didn’t seem worried in the least.
“You fed them this morning before they broke out?”
“Yes, sure.”
“Just leave the gate open. They’ll be back by dinnertime.”
I spent the afternoon turning the pen into a barbed-wire, buried-post concentration camp, which was no easy task, as it was a large yard. Exhausted, I returned to the house and was having a mug of tea by the pond when I heard a great barking on the road and Tara, the Labrador, returned to the house as if she were being chased by the devil. Side by side, three happy piglets trotted cavalierly past the barn and down the back road to their pen.
What most impressed me was their unerring sense of direction. Although they had been brought into the farm in a closed, windowless van, they’d escaped through the forest behind the farm. I’d tracked them with Tara for close to a mile in the opposite direction before she lost their scent. Yet they knew exactly where the road, our driveway, and their pen were. They barely noticed me as they trotted down to their trough, where they stopped and looked up expectantly. It was dinnertime.
Pigs are perhaps the only domestic livestock that haven’t lost their natural intelligence despite our breeding strategies over the centuries. They are such clever creatures— they use toys and tools—with an unerring sense of what’s going on around them, if they haven’t been raised in the psychotic-sadistic environment of today’s factories. A university professor with a sense of humour once taught pigs how to use their snouts to manipulate joysticks to play a simple video game. Generally good-natured, they also have a fearlessness that cracks only under the worst circumstances. A pig with its back to the wall will put up a hell of a fight, and the pig’s only real predator in North America is the bear, though a cougar might take a run at a young one. On Vancouver Island, the black bears were once notorious for night raids on pigpens.
One of the most chilling moments I’ve had with farm animals was when I had to help a friend castrate the young males. They barely weigh fifty pounds, but it usually takes three men to hold them down and tie off the testicle cords. The unearthly squealing while the piglet undergoes this indignity is enough to chill your bones and make a man swear off raising pigs forever, yet you can’t have two ungelded boars together in a small flock without catastrophic consequences.
SLAUGHTERING PIGS IS ALSO a gruesome experience. On a small farm, we don’t usually confine them in scary chutes and use the hammer gun; instead we lure them to a green patch of pasture, shoot them between the eyes, and cut their throats. Their mates can be extremely callous about this. I have seen one lick the blood out of the bleeding throat of its brother, just before I shot it as well. The horse, who adores pigs, mourned the loss more than that piglet mourned its own brethren. Jackson ran around the pasture and then stood beside their fence and called for them. When they were alive he used to hang his head over that fence, and they would stare nose to nose at each other for hours, having some secret interchange.
As soon as possible after they are killed you have to winch them up and dip them into a vat of 150-degree water, lift them out, and, with special scrapers, scrape the hair off their hides so you can keep your crackling. As grisly as it can be, one can only prefer the traditional raising of swine t
o the modern factory farms. Over the last fifty years our culture has progressively distanced itself from animals (except for pampered household pets). The animal kingdom is now a kind of Disneyland, in which the shit, the blood, and the brute madness are reduced to cuteness and sentimentality. In Vancouver the residents react in horror at the thought of culling the invasive and aggressive Canada goose population contaminating the lagoons and driving rare ducks away. I’ve actually sat with a woman weeping over the fate of those pretty birds while slicing up her pork chops that came delivered in plastic out of pig factories as large as cities. Cruelty is apparently acceptable if it’s invisible to the general population. Which is why it’s becoming increasingly difficult to smuggle photographs and videos out of these factories. They do their best to prevent people from witnessing how the pigs are treated.
In the biggest factories sows spend almost their entire adult lives clamped in a four-foot-by-two-foot pen. Which is why the meat is so tasteless and fat, despite being injected with polyphosphate to give it “flavour.” It’s also injected with water to enhance weight. People who have been in swine factories say the hideous screams of the pigs can be devastating emotionally.
The possibilities of bacterial contamination grow exponentially when you’re dealing with a slaughterhouse that kills six thousand pigs in a day. These slaughterhouses and their feeder factories have to be treated as biosecure platforms. Even the once-rich offal of skin, bones, guts, and feathers buried, composted, and then dug up years later to enhance soil is now considered toxic waste, and the remains of pigs or sheep or chickens are sealed into steel cans and shipped thousands of miles to incinerators. This new processing is regarded as healthful and environmentally correct. What was once a small-scale and locally composted product that returned nutrients to the land has been converted into a immense, wasteful health hazard that diminishes the ecosysem on a scale that a normal person could hardly imagine . . . and doesn’t.
When I was slaughtering I used as much of the animal as possible. I’m fond of pickled pig’s feet, and I’ve also saved their tripe, and their intestines for chitterlings (delicious pan-fried) or sausage making; but with pigs, because they are susceptible to parasites that can infect humans, you have to wash everything meticulously and practise good hygiene, and also compost the offal for at least two years if you are going to use it in the garden. After singeing the hide, I will use a razor to trim off the hard-to-get hairs. Then we gut the animal. Once, in a hot midsummer slaughter at the height of wasp season, we were gradually covered with wasps as we worked, moving carefully to avoid being stung. We had to get out of there fast. Because I was feeling rushed, I set the heart down on the butcher table behind me, forgetting to cover it. In the dozen minutes it took us to ready the carcass for the cooler, the wasps ate a hole through the heart. Mistakes are not always forgiven when you work in the natural world.
IN ENGA PROVINCE IN Papua New Guinea, there is an entire culture based on swine keeping and exchange—a culture as complex as the cattle cultures in Africa. It’s said the men have more affectionate relationships with their pigs than with their wives. Pigs have a freebooting and generally unherdlike nature, which is why they coexist well only with stable, stationary cultures, running free in villages or in large enclosures, and this is why transporting a small-farm pig can be thrilling.
Trying to drag a three-hundred-pound young pig backwards by its hind legs is no easy trick—pigs deliver a powerful kick and have sharp hooves—but transporting a full-grown, heavyweight boar for stud duties can be a life-changing experience. Mike Byron has a knack for turning simple tasks into thrilling encounters. This is mostly because he thinks outside the box, and innovative ideas can backfire. For moving his much-prized boar he used the old-fashioned method of “gates”—four-by-eight-foot, lightweight, movable fences that can be manipulated to guide livestock. Moving swine this way should be an easy four-man job.
Unfortunately, this time, there were only two of us, using our gates to direct the red boar to the truck ramp. The boar understood the routine but wasn’t interested today. Before I knew it I was on my back, under the gate, the boar staring down at me.
“Geezus,” Mike moaned. “Don’t let him get away!”
“Don’t let him get away?” I gasped beneath the eight-hundred-pound boar. “He’s killing me!” Luckily, he had a kind disposition and wandered off my crushed ribs, searching for a few flowers to uproot. It took us hours to get him into the truck, and somehow this was all regarded as my fault.
FARMING IS COMPLICATED ENOUGH when dealing with the major livestock, but rural people are prone to innovation, and farmers have more dreams than common sense, which is why so many exotic livestock have come and gone through the centuries of domestication on small farms. Only a few notorious herbivores were resistant, like the zebra and the moose, but dozens of others also eventually proved more hassle than they were worth.
“Breeders,” an old farmer contemptuously snorts at exotic livestock, whose only real market is in supplying expensive breeding pairs to other farmers. These are livestock pyramid schemes. When I was a child there was the chinchilla rage. Everyone was going to raise chinchillas in their basements and make millions. As with chain letters the only ones who make money in these affairs are those who start the fad. In the years since we purchased Trauma Farm, I’ve seen Korean pot-bellied pigs, llamas, alpacas, ostriches, yaks, and emus. The original purchase price can range up to $50,000. I know farmers who paid $15,000 for a llama and sold it for $300. They considered themselves lucky to be able to sell it. Ostrich meat is great, and a single egg can feed a family, but the public wasn’t ready to buy ostrich meat and the eggshells ended up as ornaments on shelves. I love ostrich meat and I keep an ostrich femur on a shelf behind my desk, but I’d never raise those birds. They have a kick that can drive a farmer through a barn wall. Collecting an egg might get your back broken. Despite all this I can’t help but admire the intrepid farmers willing to take on the weird and the wild. One day, another “breeder” might yet become a success, as has happened in the past.
Aside from the peafowl—who have given us more than enough grief—and some exotic chickens, we’ve stuck to the standard livestock, knowing we couldn’t learn all their ways in twenty lifetimes. Every animal that has set hoof or paw or claw on Trauma Farm has been a teacher.
10
FRUIT OF THE WOOD
HOWARD, MIKE’S BROTHER, lounged in the old chair beneath the Byrons’ carport while I hauled on the handle, squeezing the juice out of the apple mash. “Pull harder!” He laughed like a mad galley-master on a slave ship as I threw a last heave into the press, sweating in the cool October air. This was a decade ago and Howard was in his mid-seventies, wiry and full of laughter, wearing his favourite, frazzled fedora. His ancient giant of a border collie, Big Mac, slept at his feet.
One of the Byron clan that settled the island in the Depression years, he not only worked his own farm but leased several others, running his Jacob sheep—the four-horned bicoloured black-and-white breed whose bizarre face was often used as the face of the devil in Christian iconography— on their fields. He also tended orchards. The Brown orchard was the biggest, about 150 acres with at least two hundred apple trees.
The domestic apple arrived on Salt Spring around 1860, and our orchards peaked at the turn of that century as land was cleared and fruit planted for the gold rush of ’98. A crate of winter apples in a cabin was a miner’s source of vitamin C back then. Today Salt Spring is rich with ecologists who have been rebuilding these legacy orchards and planting more heritage fruit. The island is rapidly becoming one of the larger fruit tree resources in North America. There are over 350 varieties of apple on the island.
Snow apples. Spartan, Spy, Winter Banana, Gravenstein, Wolf River, Belle de Boskoop, Ben Davis . . . The Ben Davis is a legendary hard, winter apple that suddenly sweetens and softens in January. During the Depression boys used them for baseballs until Christmas arrived. Like many winter apples, the
Ben Davis travelled well in barrels, but all these apples are increasingly endangered as they are replaced by the sweeter, showier apples designed to match globalization’s evolving transportation and cold storage systems. Few farmers like Howard remain. You only had to show him an apple and he could tell you its name, its storage characteristics, and whether it was best for juice, baking, drying, storage, or eating straight up, and he could probably name the girl he gave one to when he was a teenager, after polishing it up on his blue jeans.
We’d picked close to five hundred feed bags full of apples earlier in the week and were only half finished our pressing, sugar-stoned on the juice. Howard could dip his glass into our barrel, taste the juice, and know what variety to mix in. “More Grimes, more Grimes,” he’d say, waving his glass about. Then he wanted Wolf River because the flavour was too strong and we needed to thin it with a juicier apple. He was an apple gourmand, and it was a thrill watching him blend our juice while I grunted at the press. “Bring ten more bags of the kings and a couple of Cox’s orange pippin. We need to sweeten this batch up.” His commands made me recall Thoreau’s ageless “Wild Apples” essay: “Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye.”
We squeezed many hundreds of gallons of juice, more than enough to drink and sell for the winter. So we decided to brew ten gallons of hard cider with the remainder. In one of those unfortunate “inspired” moments I also used the leftover mash to make apple wine. It was the most awful wine I’ve ever fermented—bittered by the seeds and stems that weren’t winnowed out of the mash. Since I’m stubborn, I banged together an improvised still I could perk on the wood stove, and somehow distilled the lousy wine into a great Calvados. It was an apple brandy to die for, literally. I refined fifteen gallons down to six beer bottles of brew that was better than some of the $100 bottles of French Calvados I’ve tangled with, but the proof level was through the roof, and even watered down it could nearly make you go blind. My liver still quivers at the memory of it. The Calvados was so scarily successful I decided to end my moonshining career after the one batch, and the still went to the dump.