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More Pig Stories
- University of North Texas Press
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198 More Pig Stories Some of my best horse customers lived up in the hills of Northern California where horses were a way of life. We lived there, too.The houses and ranches were spread out and most people had plenty of room for horses used for working cattle and sheep, for pleasure riding, and for shows, fairs, and rodeos. It was horse country.It was also wild pig country.Almost everybody in the county had some kind of wild pig story where the storyteller had been chased through the woods and into the house, where pig and person raced around the house until the person jumped on top of the refrigerator in a final effort to save their skin. About half of these storytellers could show you the scars from the pig attack.The stories and scars all seemed to be authentic. My stories aren’t nearly as exciting.I seldom saw any wild pigs, but I saw signs of them. I raised a lot of rabbits that we either sold to pet shops or ate, and after slaughtering the ones for eating,I would throw the hides,guts,heads,and feet over a fence into the woods. By the following morning there would be no trace of any of this.The pigs came down and ate everything.Once I found a tail that had been overlooked,but everything else, skulls and all, had been eaten. I knew it was pigs and not vultures, because I could see the tracks. These • More Pig Stories • 199 pigs were also a nuisance to the sheep ranchers because the pigs became so bold as to start eating a birthing lamb before it had even fully emerged. After we had lived there about a year, we saw our first “wild” pig. We had come home from a half day of shoeing and a half day of grocery shopping, and after closing the gate I noticed a pig rooting around in the front yard.I also noticed my brave dogs sitting quietly in the truck showing no interest in getting involved, even after my wife at the time had unchained them. My wife had not noticed the pig. When she did notice it she screamed and ran for the house, yelling at me to get in the house and to hell with the dogs. I just watched for awhile.The pig hadn’t even seemed aware of all of us, not even looking up to see what all the screaming was about. He just kept tearing up the lawn and the flower garden looking for something good to eat. I eventually walked past him with the dogs who were looking everywhere but at the pig. “Pig? What pig?” We went in and ate dinner, and eventually went to bed. The pig was still there in the morning , looking quite refreshed after a good meal and a pleasant night’s sleep. I began to doubt how wild he actually was. He was colored like a domestic pig, but that didn’t mean anything because most of the wild pigs had a variety of colors from mating with runaway domestic pigs.He barely took notice of me and the dogs as we loaded up the truck to go off to work. My wife decided to spend the day in the house. When I came home that night, our neighbor, who was one of my horse customers and lived a few miles down the road,had roped this wild pig and was loading him in a pickup [3.235.251.99] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:33 GMT) 200 • Confessions of a Horseshoer • truck. My wife had tired of spending the day trapped in the house and had called the neighbor to come rescue her. He gave us a box of apples in exchange, which I didn’t consider fair at all.I would rather have kept the pig who obviously was just an escapee from a local ranch and hadn’t yet taken up with any of the uncivilized wild ones.That pig didn’t make it through the week, and we didn’t even get a pork chop. The only other wild pig experience I had in this place was when my wife, her brother, and I went boar hunting. My brother-in-law and I each had a 30.06 with scopes, and my wife had a puny .22 rifle, also with scope. About an hour into the hills we spotted a boar...