Excerpt of The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery
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On their shaggy, overgrown 165 acres, they cut their own firewood, hayed the
fields, and raised not only pigs but draft horses, rabbits, ducks, chickens,
goats, sheep, and children. But the pigs, I suspect, were George’s favorites.
And they were mine, too.
We visited them every spring. We didn’t get to see George and Mary often—our
schedules and lives were so different—but the baby pigs ensured we never lost
touch. The last time we’d visited was the previous March, at the close of
sugaring season, when George was out boiling sap from their sugar maples. March
in New Hampshire is the dawn of mud season, and the place looked particularly
disheveled. Rusting farm machinery sat stalled, in various states of repair and
disrepair, among the mud and wire fencing and melting snow. Colorful, fraying
laundry was strung across the front porch like Tibetan prayer flags. Inside the
house, an old cottage in desperate need of paint, the floors were coming up and
the ceilings were coming down. Late that morning, in a kitchen steamy from the
kettle boiling on the woodstove, we found a seemingly uncountable number of
small children in flannel pajamas—their three kids plus a number of cousins and
visiting friends—sprawled across plates of unfinished pancakes or crawling
stickily across the floor. The sink was piled with dirty dishes. As Mary reached
for a mug from the pile, she mentioned everyone was just getting over the flu.
Would we like a cup of tea?
No thanks, Howard and I answered hastily—but we would like to see the pigs
again.
The barn was not Norman Rockwell. It was more like Norman Rockwell meets Edward
Hopper. The siding was ancient, the sills rotting, the interior cavernous and
furry with cobwebs. We loved it. We would peer over the tall stall doors, our
eyes adjusting to the gloom, and find the stalls with piglets in residence. Once
we had located a family, we would climb in and play with them.
On some farms, this would be a dangerous proposition. Sows can weigh over five
hundred pounds and can snap if they feel their piglets are threatened. The
massive jaws can effortlessly crush a peach pit—or a kneecap. The razor-sharp
canines strop each other. And for good reason: In the wild, pigs need to be
strong and brave. In his hunting days in Brazil, President Theodore Roosevelt
once saw a jaguar dismembered by South American native pigs. Although pigs are
generally good-natured, more people are killed each year by pigs than by sharks.
(Which should be no surprise—how often do you get to see a shark?) Pigs raised
on crowded factory farms, tortured into insanity, have been known to eat
anything that falls into the pigpen, including the occasional child whose
parents are foolish enough to let their kid wander into such a place
unsupervised. Feral pigs (of which there are more than four million running
around in the United States alone) can kill adult humans if they are threatened.
That pigs occasionally eat people has always struck me as only fair, considering
the far vaster number of pigs eaten by humans.
But George’s sows were all sweethearts. When we entered a stall, the sow, lying
on her side to facilitate nursing, would usually raise her giant, 150-pound
head, cast us a benign glance from one intelligent, lash-fringed eye, flex her
wondrous and wet nose disk to capture our scent, and utter a grunt of greeting.
The piglets were adorable miniatures of their behemoth parents—some pink, some
black, some red, some spotted, and some with handsome racing stripes, like baby
wild boars, looking like very large chipmunks. At first the piglets seemed
unsure whether they should try to eat us or run away. They would rush at us in a
herd, squealing, then race back on tiny, high-heeled hooves to their giant,
supine mother for another tug on her milky teats. And then they would charge
forth again, growing bold enough to chew on shoes or untie laces. Many of the
folks who bought a pig from George would later make a point of telling him what
a great pig it was. Even though the babies were almost all destined for the
freezer, the folks who bought them seldom mentioned what these pigs tasted like
as hams or chops or sausage. No, the people would always comment that George’s
were particularly nice pigs.
Excerpted from The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery Copyright © 2006 by Sy Montgomery. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
