The Red Hourglass

by Gordon Grice

  The pigs were in stalls made of metal fencing, many of the stalls too small for the animal to turn around. The cement floors beneath them sloped toward drains with metal covers. My guide demonstrated his bravery by putting his foot into the stall of an irritable boar. The high rubber boot that encased the foot was patched with duct tape. The boar snipped; the man deftly yanked his foot back, causing the fence to ring with the impact of the boar’s teeth.

  I watched the man check the young female pigs, or gilts, to see if they were in heat. Choosing a gilt, the man pointed to a region of her anatomy I had always considered private. “We call that the vulva,” he said. Apparently he thought the term had been invented in the pork trade. “You’re supposed to use gloves for this, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass to find any when you’re on the job.” He shoved his thumb up to the first knuckle in the gilt’s vulva. She shifted slightly, but made no protest.

  “Wet,” he said, holding the thumb in front of my face so I could observe the mucus. “That means she’s in heat. The question is, will she stand to be mounted?” I tried to imagine how he would test her on this score. He opened her stall and prodded her into a larger pen. He came up behind her and pressed the heels of his hands down on the middle of her back. She froze.

  “That means she’s ready for romance,” he said. “Otherwise, she’d have run off when I pressed on her.”

  He led the gilt past the stalls of several boars and observed which boars got erections. “Let’s start with Ready Freddie,” he said to an assistant. He explained that he preferred to use experienced boars who could perform consistently. “Some of the young ones mount from the wrong angle or what have you.”

  The assistant released Ready Freddie into the pen. Ready Freddie’s erect penis appeared to be about eighteen inches long. It was about as thick as a man’s finger, and the last third of it spiraled like a corkscrew. It bobbed dangerously close to the ground as he ran toward the gilt. She ran from him for a minute or two before standing firm. He mounted, his cloven hooves daintily folding back on either side of her spine.

  The assistant stepped forward to lend a hand. He grabbed the boar’s penis and shoved its tip into the gilt’s vulva.

  “That’s one of the really big innovations of the confinement breeding industry,” my guide said. “We help them plug in every time. If you were breeding on your family farm, you might just put them in together and hope for results. But the boar only mounts successfully a fraction of the time, and when he manages it, he takes a lot longer than what you’ve seen here. Our little manual assist raises the conception rate. Of course, some small pig farmers help with the plugging in, but we help with the whole fertility cycle. We monitor the gilt’s temperature constantly, so we can get her bred as soon as she hits estrus. It’s scientific, not like the guesswork of nor mal farming.” Then, to the assistant, he hollered, “Let’s do another for him, Toby.”

  Toby went to check the other gilts whose temperatures showed them to be near estrus. I saw him walking in a crouch down the row of their stalls, thumb extended. “I have to keep an eye on Toby,” my guide said. “He’s one of these guys that will rape a gilt.”

  “Rape a gilt?” I said.

  “Force the boar on her, instead of letting her take her own time to stand. That way he can mark down that he’s bred her, but it’s sloppy work. The stress of it keeps her from conceiving.”

  We’ve bred pigs for different cuts of meat. We can make them heavy in the rear for plenty of ham. We make them long for plenty of bacon. I knew of a boar eleven feet long and one thousand pounds, so big he broke the backs of two gilts he tried to mount. At a carnival, among tents housing freak shows and fossils, I came across a sign that read WORLD’S LARGEST HOG— 2200 POUNDS. I paid my dollar to get in and I saw him, a Volkswagen Bug of a brute, his back high as my chin, his basketball testicles jutting at the rear. Such a creature could never live wild: he was an artifact.

  In 1268 a German court tried a pig for killing and eating a human child. The pig, found guilty of murder, was executed.

  That was the first court trial of an animal in medieval Europe; others followed. Like the later crusades against supposed witches, the pig trial depended on belief in demonic possession. The courts believed they were trying sentient beings. The New Testament accounts of the swineherd colored the court’s reaction to an ordinary act of predation.

  That act was probably real. The pig’s taste for human flesh is well documented. Historical documents refer to unprovoked attacks by wild pigs. During the reign of Charles I in England, when the Crown shipped in wild pigs for hunting to replenish a forest that had been hunted out, the pigs “became terrible to the travellers.”

  Every citizen of a rural community knows a “true” tale of a man eaten in a hog pen. Generally, the incident happened “not too far from here”; the man was old; he died of a heart attack or a stroke while feeding the pigs; and “nothing was left of him but the shoes.” The repetitive formula of this story and similar ones marks them as legends—you have to be particularly suspicious of the heart attack diagnosed from the shoes. Nevertheless, a rare man-eating story proves well documented. Small children are the usual victims of domestic swine, but the swine take adults as well. Here is a true tale that sounds like a particularly silly version of the legends:

  In 1938, in the little town of Harper, Kansas, a man raised hogs for his living. People would see him driving to the grocery stores in his old Model T Ford, which was equipped with a bed like that of a pickup truck. The stores gave him their old, unsalable produce, which he would load into the bed of the Model T and cart off for his hogs. Most people knew him only as Hog Slop Charlie.

  A neighbor found a little of him one day. His remains lay scattered in the hog pen. The story most people settled on was that Hog Slop Charlie had died of a stroke in the pen, and his hogs had scavenged him. Of course, no one was there to know; they may have killed him. I have not been able to ascertain what happened to his hogs after he died, or whether anyone ate them.

  A friend who fought in Vietnam didn’t like to talk much about his experiences there, but he told me that some of his worst memories involved pigs. He mentioned this fact as we stood looking into a pen in his barn. Inside the pen were Vietnamese potbellied pigs, a sow and her litter. The piglets were old enough to root around in the hay. One of their brothers lay dead, half-buried in hay at the center of the pen. His swollen slit of an eye swarmed with blue-black flies. His body ended behind the forelegs. His mother had eaten half of him. He was the runt.

  “Pigs eat anything,” my friend said.

  CANID

  The trailer houses were packed close. Some of them hadn’t been leveled; most lacked numbers. The residents got their mail at boxes nailed to a hastily cobbled lumber frame down by the paved road. The weed-ridden strips of yard bore accumulations of junk. Everything about the place seemed to say, “We’re just doing this until we can get a permanent place.”

  A cratered dirt drive ran before the trailers. By day, children played there. At night, the dogs took over. They brawled and barked, keeping the human residents awake. They raided the garbage. A few children had been bitten. The ranchers who owned nearby pastures said the dogs were running their cattle lean, and it was only a matter of time until they brought one down. A minor political squabble developed around the dogs, the ranchers blaming the owners of the trailer park. That battle was remote from my concern as I sat in one of the trailers one evening, playing cards with some friends who lived there.

  A dogfight erupted just under the kitchen window. Dennis picked up his bow and his only remaining arrow and raced to the door.

  I caught up to him standing on the front porch staring at the dogs. Their fight had subsided. There were ten or fifteen milling about. A big black mutt lay in the yard gnawing the children’s toy lawn mower with the side of his jaw. Dennis shouted a threat. The mutt growled back.

  Dennis nocked, drew, and released. The dog ran off screaming. I saw the shaft pr
otruding on both sides of his abdomen.

  “Buffalo hunting,” a friend said when I told him about the incident. He knew two men who hunted trailer park strays as a hobby. They, too, used bow and arrow, since firing a gun in town was illegal. They used the code “buffalo hunting” to conceal their activities from others who wouldn’t understand.

  “They have a point,” my friend said. “When you say ‘dog,’ most people think of a pet. Those packs of strays aren’t pets. They’d take you by the throat if you got too close.”

  My grandmother had told me the same thing years before as we looked out the window of her trailer at two male dogs battling loudly around the hulk of a rusted-out Mustang. It must have been a fight for leadership. Their pack skirled around them, barking and kicking up dust devils. The combatants, a thin, pied mongrel and a scarred, blunt beast that might have been half boxer, yelped and tried to shield their genitals with their tails, each pushing in for a castrating bite.

  A man who was training for Special Forces would tell me what he learned. Once it was about sneaking into a guarded building. The human obstacles, he said, were to be handled as one would expect: seized from behind, the throat slit. The canine guards could not be taken by surprise.

  “Your big dogs go for the throat. I’m talking Doberman, German shepherd, most of the ones used as attack dogs. You put your arm up to protect your throat. You let him bite your arm, but you fall back with his momentum. As you fall, you put your other forearm just behind his head. As your back hits the ground, you’re bringing your knees and feet up to push him up over your head. Basically you’re giving him a monkey flip, and you’re holding your arms rigid. His mouth is hooked onto one arm, the other’s behind his neck, and as he flips his momentum snaps his spine. One dead dog. Not hard to do, but you have to sacrifice your arm. You’re okay if you’re wearing a thick jacket. If not, your arm gets pretty torn up. You could bleed to death.”

  Killing a pet dog is an act in the realm of the holy. It is so uncomfortable that most people assign it to professionals who will do it out of sight and never make them see the carcass. We tell our children about it in guilty euphemisms. We say the dead dog has been “put to sleep,” as though he might wake and release us from the burden of that irrevocable act.

  At the other end of this spectrum of dog-love, some believe a man owes his dying pet a death by its master’s hand. I know a man who was obliged to kill a dog he loved because it had hurt a child. He took the dog into the country—he wouldn’t hear of anyone else doing it. He took a gun and a shovel along, and when he returned he spent a week in a dark and silent mood. His wife says he kept the casing of the bullet.

  Farmers and ranchers have codes for dealing with other people’s dogs. One man whose bitch had been courted by the neighboring males took offense when a certain male turned up wounded and he was mentioned as the shooter. He might very well have shot an intruding dog, he said; but he wouldn’t have unless he were certain of a killing shot. His point was this: A man’s property rights outweigh the life of a dog, but no one has the right to make a dog suffer.

  A neighbor’s border collie once took some of my family’s chickens. I would go outside to find a white leghorn lying in the drive, the feathers of its neck frosted with fine drying droplets of blood, and the hen, moments from death, would raise its head to look at me. “I don’t have any chickens I can learn him off of,” the dog’s owner said. “I won’t fuss if you have to kill him.”

  The city dweller’s desire to distance himself from the killing of his own dog and the farmer’s ethical code for it: both are signs of a deep reverence.

  When we hate the dog, we do so not only because it’s dangerous but also because it has stepped outside the role we want it in, that of loyal friend to humans. The dog’s loyalty is a commonplace, a homily, a fact too obvious for notice. It is also the signpost of an odd quirk of evolution.

  Gray cinder block walls; oil stains on the cement floor, some of them peppered with absorbent gravel; toolboxes; a greasy workbench mounted with a heavy vise. My father’s shop. From a rafter hung a cord that ended in a droplight, which was in my father’s hand. My uncle was there too, and they worked together in the pool of harsh light surrounded by darkness, the black hair of their thick forearms gleaming with sweat. Their tools were a length of elm branch and a pair of pliers.

  The men occasionally gave each other suggestions. The only other sounds were the snarling and whimpering of the dogs. My father would seize a dog and hold it down, levering its mouth open with the branch. My uncle would move in with the light and the pliers. Jutting from the black-and-pink flesh of the dogs’ mouths were the quills of a porcupine—long, flexible needles terminating in splintered fishhooks.

  The miniature bloodhound was first. He struggled and growled against my father’s grip while my uncle sank the pliers into his mouth. It seemed a tableau of dentistry in hell. The other two dogs moved to the edge of the circle of light and stood with their tails alternately between their legs and wagging in appeasement. I thought, why do they stand there waiting for it to happen to them? I knew it was supposed to be for their own good, but how could they know?

  In the morning my mother showed my sister and me a little plastic pumpkin—it was nearly Halloween. In the pumpkin were a dozen brown-and-white quills. When we went outside the dogs were happy to see us, as though everything were the same.

  One thing the dogs did for us was to reveal the other life around us: the nocturnal animals we rarely saw, the burrowing animals only they could hear and smell, the distant things making sounds imperceptible to us. We rarely saw raccoons, until the dogs showed them to us. Raccoons weren’t especially common in our part of the state, where trees were scarce; we only saw them occasionally on a long drive home at night—the sudden fire of fractured amber that must be the eyes, a thick grayish body bounding across the dirt road, fast enough to blur, though the headlights somehow made it seem suspended in the dusty air.

  The dogs would scent them at evening, and a chase would begin—the raccoon somewhere ahead, beyond my sight; the old dwarf bloodhound leading the pursuit, his crumpled lip and throaty growl announcing his intention to kill; the lean, lupine border collie at his hip, faster than the leader but lagging to show respect, barking to keep the slower animals apprised of the quarry’s location; the indefatigable short-legged mongrel with the skunk tail a few steps behind, also barking; my older sister a few yards behind, covering ground with her long-legged strides, sometimes followed by a few cousins or friends; and me, the slowest of the pack. We humans, even at our age, thought the dogs were serving us. I wonder how we held this conclusion as we labored to keep up with them on a hunt the bloodhound had devised.

  Such hunts happened dozens of times in my childhood, and the archetypal example that has crystallized from the mix of details in my memory involves irrigation pipes. These aluminum tubes, stacked like cord-wood, each big enough to hold a human head, always seemed to be lying around somewhere waiting to be installed; I don’t know how the crops ever got irrigated. The quarry—it might be a jackrabbit or a cottontail, a raccoon or a possum or a porcupine—dashed into a pipe. The dogs rushed along the open ends of the pipes—not looking, but smelling—until they had found the one that sheltered the animal. If they couldn’t find it quickly, they would pause in their sniffing. The mutt and the bloodhound had floppy ears; I could see the cartilage of those ears moving slightly. The border collie’s ears would abandon their usual submissive backslant and stand up, rotating to triangulate.

  That did the trick: all three dogs suddenly knew exactly where the prey was. They split up to cover both ends of the pipe. Then they barked into it, their manic cries echoing from the sheet metal buildings nearby. They pushed their snouts into the pipe (the bloodhound always first) and their cries were trapped in the pipe; we could touch the pipe and feel it vibrating with the sound. I imagined the raccoon curled in the middle of the pipe, as distant as possible from both ends, his gut shaking in time to the thr
eats against his life.

  The raccoons were always smart enough to stay in the pipe and wait, even through hours of barking. We poked at them with sticks and hurled rocks into the echoing pipe. Once, early in the morning, I found a sparkle of blood on the lip of an irrigation pipe among the beads of dew. The raccoon we had harassed for ninety futile minutes the night before had finally walked away during the night, after we had all, canine and human, lost interest. He had taken some sort of wound during the harassment, but had sat still for his only chance of surviving.

  The possums also knew they’d better not stop to fight the dogs. They would curl up and cling tight to something inside the pipe. We couldn’t move them an inch even by tilting the pipe. Once it was an albino possum. As he reached the pipe ahead of the bloodhound, he looked back at us with his mad crimson eyes, baring his milky teeth and hissing. He looked like a demon with leprosy. Possums will sometimes back up such threats with action, but this one must not have liked the odds. He disappeared into the pipe.

  Rabbits could sometimes be spooked out of the irrigation pipes; they were faster than possums and raccoons, but, judging from the number the dogs caught, I think their tendency to abandon cover was really a sign of lower intelligence. The rabbits would run in zigzags, a strategy for evading single predators that rarely saved them from the three dogs giving chase as a team. The old bloodhound would put on a burst of speed, prompting the rabbit to spring sideways. The other dogs would be running behind and to the sides; the rabbit would often jump directly into the jaws of one or the other. This dog would seize the rabbit by the neck. Then the bloodhound would rush in snarling, take a mouthful of rabbit, and pull away from his colleague. As a child, I thought the older dog was trying to take the rabbit away from the younger. Years later, when I saw other groups of dogs hunting in the same way, I realized that this pattern is actually a killing tactic.