Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker

by Kathleen Hale

  I tried traps, into which the trespassing ants marched single file while I laughed at them like a heartless overlord. But more armies arrived to break apart and hoist onto their backs the carcasses of flies I hadn’t noticed while cleaning house. They seemed impossible to kill.

  Then one night outside my window I heard the trash cans get knocked over—followed by an animal scream, which sounded so impossibly human that I dashed outside with a hammer thinking someone was being murdered, only to see the trees behind my house bend apart and snap back together, swallowing up whatever large and whining beast had eaten up my garbage. The next morning I found a giant pile of shit in the driveway, and when I sent a picture of it to a hunter I knew, he texted back, “Hogs.”

  By happenstance I’d recently watched a program on the Discovery Channel called “Hogs Gone Wild,” a special on feral hogs, which I learned could grow up to eight feet long and four feet at the shoulder (google “Hogzilla” for a better sense of these nightmarish proportions). Between their hairy faces and beady eyes and long meaty bodies, they reminded me of the Rodents of Unusual Size from The Princess Bride. When I read about their tendency to mate and give birth in residential swimming pools, and to murder people’s poor sweet little doggies, I felt alive for the first time in months.

  Ever since my freshman year of college, I had daydreamed about defending myself against wild animal predators. Now I sat by the back door clutching my hammer, yelling at ants and waiting for hogs to come eat my body. It wasn’t how I’d pictured my early twenties: hiding out the recession in my little MFA program, at the proverbial bottom of the food chain. Maybe if I could triumph over these disgusting pigs, the rest of my life would fall into place. So I devoted myself to the task of getting to know my enemy.

  * * *

  Historians think feral hogs were probably first introduced into the American wilderness during the 1600s and 1700s by European explorers and settlers. Some of the immigrant pigs had been born wild, brought over from their native home of England, where they prowled countrysides and were hunted by gentlemen. Others arrived as domesticated pigs, and had immigrated to America to become pork, but were either set free or escaped, and began breeding like crazy.

  Back in 2005, the New Yorker described the wild hog as an “infestation machine” (“Suddenly, feral swine are everywhere”). Female wild hogs go through puberty as young as three or four months old and give birth frequently, with a gestational cycle of only sixteen or seventeen weeks. Twice annually they can produce large litters of up to 14 piglets—which means that the oldest documented female feral hog, who survived to the age of fourteen years old, may have produced up to 392 offspring over the course of her lifetime. Those offspring, in turn, were biologically capable of generating as many as 153,664 piglets. That’s more than one tenth of a million pigs in just one feral family.

  By 2012, when I was in grad school, they had become such a destructive invasive species that municipal governments in places like Arkansas had set up “pork chopper” laws, allowing hunters to shoot down feral hogs from helicopters. In Texas, the Guardian reported a full-blown “aporkalpyse,” in which residents massacred the animals with machine guns and night-vision goggles. In 2013 alone, Texans managed to kill as many as 750,000 pigs. But even that wasn’t enough to keep up with the birth rate, and hunters left behind an estimated 1.8 to 3.4 million feral hogs.

  I should have been writing my novel, or whatever it was I thought I was working on, but I couldn’t stop thinking about hogs, so I spent ant season writing, maybe, eleven stories—but basically the same one over and over. My MFA cohort responded with characteristic vitriol, scrawling three-page-long single-spaced critiques that ended with sound conclusions like, “There’s not even a story in this story, just facts about pigs,” and “Kathleen, I feel like your writing is consistently preoccupied with hog sex and hog violence,” and “Kathleen, maybe you should see a therapist”—scathing truths that exposed my fiction for what it was: a symptom of my hog madness.

  Finally, after months spent fielding criticism and shaking spiders from my sneakers and fearing pigs I’d never actually seen, I dropped out of my MFA program. I’d failed at graduate school and at being a writer, and had given up on all of my life’s dreams. But there was still one concrete and good thing that I could contribute to the world. And that was murdering a feral hog.

  * * *

  I flew into West Palm Beach airport in early June with my friend Sarah McKetta, whom I call McKetta, because otherwise, when I address her in public, every woman’s head turns. McKetta is, incidentally, a vegan. But here we were, off to hunt for meat in Okeechobee, Florida.

  Before we left for the hunt, I called up Stephen Dubinski, a seasoned feral hog hunter, to get a better understanding of America’s hog problem. “The rate of reproduction is unbelievable,” he explained. “More people are getting involved in harvesting them. But it just seems like a losing battle. It’s just crazy and worrisome, especially when they’re near little kids. It’s dangerous. I don’t have any idea of how to deal with it except more killing.”

  I asked him what feral hog overpopulation looks like up close.

  “I haven’t seen any type of wildlife explode the way these hogs have,” he responded. “From one tree stand, one afternoon, I saw over seventy piglets, all sizes. All the ones I’ve shot over the years have been pregnant.” He added, “We lay the fetuses on the grass. Other pigs will come and eat them. Nothing’s there in the morning.”

  When I told him that I’d signed up for a guided hunt in Okeechobee and planned to kill a feral hog as a mitzvah to the world, Dubinski said he didn’t know what a mitzvah was but that he hoped I’d get out unscathed.

  “Aim for the shoulders,” he told me. “Kill as many as possible.”

  * * *

  The streets leading from West Palm Beach airport to Okeechobee are named after citrus fruits, brands of alcohol, dead presidents, and politically incorrect terms for Native Americans. Moss hangs from the trees and power lines alike. Roads are lined with huge, toothy plants that look like monsters. En route to our hotel we braked for a group of hunchbacked feral hogs, screaming as they scuttled like humongous rats across the highway’s sweltering pavement. I waited for the pigs to disappear before driving over the speed bump of excrement they left behind.

  After dropping off our bags we crossed the parking lot to eat at Applebee’s.

  “Is there anything fun to do around here?” I asked our waitress as she seated us.

  “I’ve been here since 2003,” she said pleasantly. “There’s nothing.”

  “We’re going hunting tomorrow,” I said.

  She nodded. “People around here are always hunting something.”

  On the ride over to the hunting grounds the next morning, we blasted the air-conditioning but couldn’t stop sweating. Entering the dirt road leading to the eight hundred acres surrounding Ron’s Guide Service felt like entering Jurassic Park. There were multiple gates and warning signs with terrifying beasts on them. Dust blew in our eyes as we ducked out of the car. It was time.

  “You my ten o’clock?” a man in jeans called to us. He was standing under a metal lean-to, surrounded by meat hooks, wiping off his hands. I wouldn’t call him a handsome man. His skin looked like beef jerky, but he seemed healthy. I felt safe around him, like he would save me if a hog got its horns into my stomach, even though later he would have me sign a liability waiver that made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that I could die and that was my business.

  “Is Big Mama here?” I asked.

  I had spoken to Big Mama on the phone a few days prior about appropriate hunting gear. “Wear anything except booty shorts. It’s Florida, so the bugs get in,” she said. She kept calling me “honey child” and asking me to speak up because she was deaf from “all the crossbows.” I didn’t yet understand the crossbow reference. But I liked Big Mama.

  “Big Mama’s not here,” the guy said, shaking his head. The look on his face suggested that Big
Mama might be dead. “But I’m Joe.”

  Joe led us to a locker full of guns and asked which ones we wanted. McKetta explained that she wouldn’t be hunting, just watching, because she was a vegan. “What’s ‘vegan’?” asked Joe. McKetta spent a while explaining the dietary restrictions she subscribed to, then told us that if we needed her she’d be taking pictures of the alligator heads scattered on the ground. Before she walked away, Joe had her sign another waiver. I was starting to feel nervous.

  “How many waivers are there?”

  “Enough so it’s not my fault.”

  I stared at the guns.

  “Joe, can I talk to you about some feelings I’m having?” I proceeded to explain to a now very confused Joe that in addition to concerns for my own safety, hog-wise, I worried that if I took off into the Floridian jungle with a gun, I might accidentally shoot myself in the face or kill McKetta. I explained that I wasn’t exactly what you might call “graceful,” or “athletic,” or “coordinated,” and had fallen over just that morning while putting on my denim overalls—and that falling over while putting on pants was actually something I did pretty often.

  Joe handed me a handgun, and I handed it back. So he suggested a crossbow, and I was like, “Are there any laws in Florida?” and Joe was like, “Not really, that’s why pedophiles go to live in the panhandle after they’re finished up with prison,” and I was like, “Whoa.”

  Joe became exasperated. “Are you going to kill or not?”

  I sighed. “I do want to kill, Joe, really I do.”

  “Well, then pick a weapon!”

  I racked my brain for other armaments, ones that would not have a chance of fatal ballistic error, but could think only of cartoonish weaponry, like swords and war hammers.

  “Would a knife be too crazy?” I whispered.

  Stephen Dubinski had gotten weird on the phone when I asked him about knife slaughters. He told me that knife kills were too up close and personal, even for him—said by the man who killed pregnant animals and used their unborn babies to bait other animals he wanted to kill.

  “It just feels slightly safer to me, in terms of collateral damage,” I said to Joe. “Given that there’s no trigger to accidentally pull.”

  Joe disappeared into the small bathroom/kitchen attached to the lean-to and returned with a rusty knife that still had mayonnaise on the blade. Then he yelled, “Vegan!” and McKetta returned, and Joe dragged two hunting dogs out of their kennels and put them in separate cages on the back of the truck we’d be driving. One of the dogs hooked its hind legs around the outside of the cage, not wanting to get stuffed inside.

  “Can I pet them?” I asked.

  “Pet Sadie,” Joe said, indicating the dog who did not seem to have truck-related PTSD. “Spoon’s demented.”

  I petted Sadie and then followed McKetta into the truck. “How long have you been doing this?” I yelled to Joe over the engine. There were no seat belts, and the terrain was so rocky that I had to squat a little over my chair and clutch the bottom of the seat with my nonstabbing hand so as not to get tossed overboard.

  “My entire life,” he said. “Twenty-five years.”

  “So that sign back at the meat-hook place,” I said to Joe. “The one on the wall with various animals and amounts of money—?”

  “The price list?”

  “Yeah. What was the thing about ‘Dogs: $2000’? Is that if people want to buy the dogs?”

  Joe laughed.

  “Wait,” I said. “Can people pay to kill the dogs?”

  “Why?” he asked, sounding interested. “Do you want to?”

  I felt like passing out. It was hot, the truck was lurching over holes, and despite having deliberately chosen a weapon that would be safe, I was now worried about stabbing myself with the knife clutched in my free hand, soon to be my killing hand.

  “There’s one,” Joe said. “Do you see?”

  McKetta and I shook our heads.

  He stopped the truck, climbed down, and unlatched Sadie’s cage. She leaped out, bounding through the tall grass like a happy dog from a dog-food commercial—only skinnier and probably abused.

  “Do humans get hurt on these trips a lot, or just dogs?” I asked Joe when he got back in the driver’s seat. We began trailing Sadie in the truck.

  “That’s why we had you sign the waiver.”

  “But it’s not bad or anything, right?”

  “Sometimes it’s real bad.”

  “You’re going to shoot it before I stab it, right?”

  “Nah, I’ll just hold its legs.”

  “But what about its tusks?”

  “You need to be careful. That’s why you signed the waiver.”

  McKetta looked back and forth between us. “Why does he keep bringing up the waiver?” She turned to Joe. “What did I sign?”

  “Simmer, Vegan,” Joe said. “The guys who get hurt are the crazy ones. They jump off the truck onto the hog’s back, then they get gored. Stomach outside the body.”

  “But they live?” I said.

  I watched Sadie disappear into the trees, chasing something we couldn’t see or hear.

  “Yeah. But they’re not the same.” Joe shook his head. “War turns men into animals.”

  “What?” McKetta said.

  Just then Sadie barked. She’d found something worth mentioning in the thick, dank foliage.

  Joe slammed to a stop, and hustled out of the truck to unlatch Spoon, who burst from his cage, frothing at the mouth. I clutched my knife and followed, McKetta at my tail. Joe ran ahead and was immediately swallowed up by the jungle. We could hear him barking along with the dogs and screaming, “Cowabunga!”

  We looked at each other before following in his footsteps. “Joe?” we called in unison. As we pushed through the tropical leaves, I spotted wiry hair dashing through the grass—and then something huge charged us.

  “Hog!” I yelled, throwing an elbow over a low branch and swinging my leg up like a monkey, trying not to cut myself in the process. By the time McKetta looked up and saw the feral pig coming, and before Joe even yelled, “Watch out!” I was fully inside the tree. Mortal fear had briefly transformed me into a gymnast.

  Below me, McKetta screamed and hurled herself into a ditch. The hog flew by, and I jumped down to chase it. Only in its wake did I realize it had no tusks. The hog was a sow. A procreation machine.

  “Come on!” Joe shouted, so I followed his voice, pushing aside high brush. I found him gripping the huge and hairy pig by her hind legs. Spoon had her by the face. The hog was screaming—not the high-pitched squeal that I would have expected, but a desperate, drawn-out grunt. She must have weighed two hundred pounds.

  “Do it!” Joe said.

  I threw a leg over her and lined up the tip of my knife with her armpit. Spoon was struggling to keep her head still, and even though I could see the sow’s fangs glistening in the melee, I could tell she was in pain. For a second I didn’t think I could do it. None of my fiction writing had prepared me for this pivotal moment of reckoning (or for anything, really, but that’s a different story). I considered that God had made this hog and me in His image and that she didn’t deserve this unnatural death.

  But then I stabbed the shit out of her.

  I hit the heart on the third try. Then I stabbed her three more times. Later, when we took the heart out of her body, I saw that I had nailed it. Twice.

  McKetta whooped, wiping sweat off her face. “That thing was a monster.”

  “I’m a monster,” I said.

  “Fuck off,” Joe yelled. It took us a second to realize he wasn’t talking to us but to Spoon, who wouldn’t let go of the sow’s face.

  “Spoon, get!” Joe swatted at him with a stick, but Spoon, as promised, was demented and wouldn’t let go.

  “I said get!” Joe said, kicking Spoon in the head with his steel-toed boot. Spoon yelped, and McKetta and I held our breath as Joe kicked him again and again.

  In retrospect, I think Joe hoped tha
t I would buy the sow’s head, have it stuffed and mounted and pay extra, or whatever. He needed Spoon to let go—to stop destroying what he could potentially sell.

  Just when I thought Spoon might die, he growled and backed away from the corpse.

  “You want the meat?” Joe asked me.

  I shook my head. I told him I was sure she tasted great, but I didn’t have room for a whole hog in my hotel mini fridge. So McKetta found a nearby church that took all sorts of animal meat donations—even raccoons and armadillos. “Hog wild,” the person on the phone said, laughing. “Praise the Lord.”

  Back at the meat hooks, the next group of would-be hunters waited for their turn with Joe. They were from a nearby Baptist church. When they learned I’d stabbed the sow that Joe was gutting, they nearly lost it, hooting and hollering. “Let me take your picture,” the preacher said. I realized that the only females in our vicinity were McKetta, me, the dead sow, and Sadie, who was now passed out from heat exhaustion in her cage.

  “Is there anything here I can pet?” I asked. There was blood on my hands and I needed to hug something, like a therapy dog or potentially a life coach.

  “Here’s a puppy,” the preacher said, handing me their hunting dog in training. She was small and soft and licked my face.

  “You want the hog head?” Joe asked, hosing blood down a drain. “I got Spoon off it in time. There’s hardly a nick on either ear. We can do it up for you nice.”

  “Let me get you the head as a present,” McKetta offered. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, that was scary. I thought it would bother me but it didn’t.”