How to make a Pig Fly

[Mithrandir]

“You shouldn’t try to teach a pig to fly,
It frustrates you,
And it pisses off the pig”.
American Truism


Gridley Kansas.

I had related about the coyotes and something about the town of Gridley Kansas.

I sometimes drove down there during the week when I didn’t have any classes to go to.

It was quite.

Peaceful…

My Uncle was at school teaching and my three cousins were in school too.

Sometimes, my aunt would be there and we would talk. If she was in town someplace, I would get myself something to drink and relax out on the big porch.

Just watching the day roll by.

Warm Summer breezes……but not unbearable here on the porch…

It was….very peaceful…….I had only been home a few months and I was unwinding from military duty…

Or trying to anyway.

Here comes the school bus…….bumping down the gravel road and leaving huge clouds of white dust in its wake….

The bus brakes squeal to a stop and I can see the girls climb down.

The bus pulls away……….and the girls are screaming and running for the house!

WHAT THE HELL??

They run all the way to the porch and when they see me, they stop screaming and hang on to me.

“It was chasing us!!” the three of them was squeaking in unison.

“What was chasing you?” I ask…

They point out across the road to the fence line.

And there was this HUGE boar….must have weighed in at three hundred pounds!!!! Seems that the farmer who owns this land & house, boards his breeding hog just across the road from the house.

“You guys have lived here for a year or two now and you didn’t know that it was there?

“NO, the farmer just brought him here a month ago” says the oldest.

“And every, and every, and every time we get off the bus, he chases us” sobs another.

“But he can only get to the fence and the road is ten feet away from the fence, he cannot get to you!! I reply with just a hint of dismay in my voice. It seems to me that the Hog charges the fence JUST because he likes to hear them scream….

“BUT HE SCARES US”…. They again squeal in unison….”AND HE CHASES US EVERY DAY”.

“All right, all right, go on in the house and get a snack before your parents come home. I promise that I will talk with them about it.

That seems to satisfy them and they all troop into the kitchen to get something to snack on…

“And don’t get more than ONE COOKIE, your mother’ll have my hide if you take more….”

I walk around the porch to the front side that faces the road and where the hog is penned up.

I plop down in the porch swing and continue to gently rock myself……..all the while watching that huge SOB hog. As I contemplate him, I glean information about his pen.

It was a large one by the looks of it, but its size was deceptive. The side where I could see him was right next to an old garage and it seemed to only be about thirty or forty feet wide with the garage adding about another twenty feet to this side that faced the road. But there had to be more room because this guy was, indeed, huge with a capitol H.

Soon, the hog walks off into the shade of the large oak trees that were in one corner of his pen.

Upon him settling down, I walk down off the porch and head for the barn across the main yard. This will take me out of his sight.

I reach the back of the barn and turn toward the road, he cannot see me now from any angle.

I cross the road keeping the garage between me and him.

The garage does have doors in the front, but he would either see or hear me if I came through them because I would have to open them. So I elect to go into the garage through the side door which is partially open.

I quietly enter the old garage and stand to let my eyes adjust to the dimness within. After a minute or so, I can see old junk littering the garage floor, shelves and a small attic deck in the rear.

There is a small, grime covered window on his side….

So I pick my way through the debris.. once at the window, I can see him and the layout of his pen.

He has a large area to roam around in, with one of those ten foot diameter by two foot high water tubs. (for want of a better word).

The pen area is dirt with a few weeds growing around the perimeter. His hoofs are huge so anywhere he walks is dead in no time.

His area is well sheltered because of the trees, but toward the back there is a ten by ten foot area that is exposed to the sun.

I wonder to my self “This thing is so huge, what keeps it from breaking down the fence?”

I let my eyes scan the fence line, no different than I had been doing for the last two years, searching for….

Well… whatever!!….

There it is….. THAT is what keeps him from breaking out….

Two thin wires run the perimeter, entwined with the fence and the stand-offs attached to the sides of the garage, with a lead coming into the garage through a knothole in a plank of siding. Then, it leads right up to and very old looking knife-switch mounted on the wall, right next to the door I had just come into.

OH **** MAN!!… that’s a 440 line!! And runs outside straight up the pole to the transformer!!!!

No wonder the hog makes no attempt to break down the fence. The first time he brushes that wire and his bacon would begin to fry; while he is still wearing it to boot!!

Armed with this new information, I begin my retreat.

Upon exiting the garage, I scan the area behind the garage and I can see that there is a small ditch that runs some twenty or thirty feet behind the garage parallel to the road.

Since I am here, I decide to recon some more.

I head for the ditch and about the time I get to it I can hear him snorting and grunting up a storm…

He has spotted me now and is trying to intimidate me like he did the girls.

But I am walking away, to see where this ditch leads, and I know something that the girls didn’t. They didn’t know that in order for him to “get” them, he would have to risk a 440 butt burn!!

I am not sure that hogs are really that stupid…… but….. I could be wrong….

I end the afernoon taking a glorious walk along that ditch and circling the house. The sun is low in the sky now and I can see that My Aunt & Uncle have come home.

My Aunt sees me coming and holler’s out “Supper’s ready, go wash up”….

“OK Aunt Bev…. Be right there!” and I head to enter the house through the mud room to wash up.

One thing about my Aunt, she had many more of my Grandmothers mannerisms than my mother did.

My mother would have never told ANYONE to wash up before supper whereas my Grandmother and now my Aunt; you didn’t come to supper without washing your hands and face and wiping you shoes on the matt.

Supper was typical country fare. Steak, two different kinds of potatoes (mashed & baked), Salad with all the fixin’s, Peas, Corn, steamed cauliflower, cabbage and the ever present carrots. My Aunt loved carrots and I think she knew twenty different ways to prepare them. This was another way my Aunt was more like my Grandmother…she could cook……..my mother only pretended to know how to cook…. (well… sometimes she did good…)

I couldn’t help but remember a time with my Grandfather, Grandmother & sometimes my Aunt & I would take the long drive up to our farm relatives up in McGregor Iowa, to my Great Aunt Mary’s place. The meals there where the same as tonight… only more of it… you see… great Aunt Mary had fifteen kids to feed!!!

Sometime I will tell you about those trips…..they are another story altogether.

After supper, everyone had a job to do to clean up. But No one would let me do anything….

“You just got back, go sit on the porch and I’ll bring you some home-made ice-cream”.. ”go on!!”

I step out on the porch and the sun is almost gone now…but the daytime glow is still bright. The evening breezes are starting up… it is cooler now.

Soon, everyone is out on the porch…eating home-made vanilla ice-cream…..I can taste it now….

As we all finish eating, the girls take to firefly catching……sometimes rushing back up to the porch to show us one that “Has a funny mark on it” or “See how big this one is” and so forth…..

I believe strongly that God put firefly’s on this earth for the pure enjoyment of adults watching them travel in the darkness as miniature flames

Or for children to catch them and wonder at them in glorious curiosity.

While the children play, I ask about the hog next door and tell then of the incident this afternoon.

“NO… I didn’t know that it was chasing the girls” my Uncle says

“And neither did I” says my Aunt.

“Can it get out?” they question

I explain that I didn’t think so, because of all the power wires..

But we discussed what might be done about it.

My Uncle finally says.. ”I will have a talk with the bus drivers, there are only two of them… maybe I can get them to stop fifty feet farther from the house and the girls can cross the road from there…that might be a solution. If not, I will talk with the owner…but, it’s only Friday night so I will wait until Monday morning….no sense is bothering them on a week-end”….

So now, the conversations turn to simpler things….. the weather….the cicada’s are beginning to be in full-throat this evening….

The cicada’s…….something I had missed….. they certainly make a lot of noise in the dimness of the evening.. but they were much easier noise to listen to than those damnable lizards in VN.

The sun sets and the sky in the distance is aflame with reds, purples, blues. A watercolor sky that I know most of us have seen in our lives…..but it always gives you a sense of awe at the beauty of it….. no matter where you are…..

The color disappears and is replaced by the darkness..

But this darkness is so much more friendly than the dark I had been living in…..

The cicada grow quite now and the night birds are out… you can hear them swoop in for a tasty moth or mosquito….but you cannot see them….

Everyone else has gone to bed now.

And I fall back into a very comfortable porch glider…..the same one that my Grandmother had on our front porch in the city when I was young….well… younger anyway.

I use to spend the hottest of summer nights out on the front porch of my Grandmothers house….the concrete porch had been shielded from the hot daytime sun and was always cool to the touch at night….and the glider would rock ever so gently and I would sleep ever so well.

I am on that glider now in the country….I may no longer be that child on the front porch in the city, but the old friend… rocks me to sleep never-the-less effectively….

Wait………….

[armedandsafe]

Thank you.

Pops

[pickenup]

Wait?
OK.

[inplanotx]

Thanks, Mith. I really enjoy reading your wonderful short stories.

[SouthernMoss]

Can't wait for the next installment.

[Mithrandir]

The weekend goes by uneventful…..and I enjoyed it, playing catch with my cousins and exploring the farmlands and woods….and the Sunday afternoon I go back to the city.

……………………………

The week goes by fast and as Saturday morning comes, I begin the drive back down to Gridley. The drive goes slower then normal because this time I am on my newly purchased motorcycle and I take a longer route; but a much more scenic one.

Oh the motorcycle?… It was a Honda CL450 twin. Well, I couldn’t afford a Harley yet and besides, Harleys in those days weren’t really Harleys, they were AMF bikes with all the major parts produced by some Italian corporation, and they lasted just as long as the Italian Government did too! (for those who don’t know, the Italian government usually changes ever year or so, I think they have had fifty or so since WWII)

So I slowly tool through all the little towns on the way, enjoying the morning air.

Along about 11 or so I pull into Gridley and turn down the long gravel road to the house. As I approach, I can see two of the girls out playing.

My Aunt greets me and offers me lunch and as sit down for lunch I turn the conversation to the hog.

“Did Uncle Pete get the bus drivers to let the girls out farther up the road?” I ask

“No, they say there is some sort of School District rule about just where they can pick up and drop off from, and if our case it has to be right in front of the house”

“Well, then, is the driver letting them cross in front of the bus before she pulls away?”

“No… they won’t do that either “ says my Uncle coming out on the porch to join us.

“Matter of fact” He continued “I think the old girls think it’s funny that the “City girls” are afraid of the hog so I’m not counting on them to help” “I also talked with the owner and he blew me off…. Doesn’t think it very important either and he had the gall to warn us not to go near the hog… as if we could harm that thing.”

“So… no one is going to address the issue are they?” I ask

And the answer is no.

“But… is it still charging the fence and scaring the girls”?

Yes…..

At this point , I allow the conversation to go in another direction….I am here to enjoy the country and the quiet.

The girls want to go see the new calf’s that have just been moved into the pasture behind the house, so off we go exploring.

All the while my devious little mind is searching for a solution to this…dilemma….

Sunday comes and it is time to go back…and I still don’t know what to do about this….I have always been a firm believer that you should never let ANY animal intimidate you…well except maybe some rally big cats I have seen….and I know that I can’t outrun one of the thousand pound bulls out in the other pasture…so I guess that I do have a certain level where a animal can intimidate me.

But not this hog……

One the trip back it begins to rain a bit… not much… but on a bike, it gets cooler. The last fifty miles was also cold!….but exhilarating….none-the-less.

Tuesday morning at class, it came to me….. I didn’t need to think of a solution…. I would ask Granddad…He had worked for Swift & Company almost his entire life…. He knew hogs, cattle and sheep as well as any farmer….

That evening, I asked, and his solution was so very simple……

“Hogs like dogs learn…..they learn to not touch the wire on the fence and so forth….. so… teach the hog not to charge”….. he said

“Well how do I do that?” I ask.

“Make him associate charging the girls with ….say.. a loud noise he doesn’t like or better yet … pain!!. I have an old cattle prod you could use… every time he charges poke him in the snout with it”

“Damn granddad, You have to be a lot braver than I am to stand your ground while a 500+ pound hog charges you!”

We both laugh at that image.

The week goes by and I mull over the words he gave me….

Pain by association…Pain by association…Pain by association…Pain by association…

But HOW???

That SOB could EAT me for crips sake!!!

Until it develops an opposing thumb and learns English… I am not going to get through to it to stop charging the fence and scaring the girls.. Besides…. Evolution is too slow…. I have to find another way…..

The next week is an off week at the school… a summer break I guess…. And I will spend the entire time down in Gridley.

And the morning I get up to get ready to go… it comes to me…. OH MAN I’VE GOT IT!!!!..

Pain by association…and I know how to do that now without getting close.

Here is my plan…. The hog ALWAYS gets up when he hears the bus coming down the road, he waits until the girls are off the bus and the bus has started to pull away…THEN he charges the fence……

His attention is ALWAYS on the bus and the girls…..it is then that I will make him associate pain with charging the fence.

OH man… I think it will work….

The drive down was as pleasant as always, and the weekend went by just a bit too fast for me….

I had told my Aunt & Uncle what I was going to do to solve the issue. My Uncle being a deep-city type of guy didn’t think it would work and warned me not to harm the hog….(wussie!!… well he is!!)

My Aunt was different, she agreed with my method…..

“Well… I just don’t want to know anything more about it” says my Uncle I think he is afraid of what the farmer might say….That is, if he is stupid enough to TELL the farmer in the first place…

Oh well…. I just know that it will work…

The weekend goes by and it is now the Monday afternoon. The heat is high today with large slow moving clouds casting dark shadows on the ground as they pass.

The bus should be here in about thirty minutes, so I pick up my gear and head for the west pasture. I am going to circle around the area so that the hog cannot see me.

The wind is just right for me….it will put me well downwind of his pen.

After walking across the pasture, I don my VN blouse and hood. They are Tiger marked but the grassland & weeds that grow along the ditch I am going to traverse will blend in well… especially since the clouds are streaking patterns and dark spots on the ground.

I cross the road about a quarter mile from the pen area, and that makes the main road another quarter mile away. I can see the bus coming well before the hog does. There is no need to crawl or sneak because I still have the old garage between me and him and since I am down in this ditch he should not be able to see me at all as long as I am quite about it.

As I come close to the garage, I slow and snake my way to scope him out…..There he is…… on his side snoozing in the afternoon heat…The birds in the trees are making a lot of noise so I don’t think he can hear me as long as I stay in quite mode.

I slowly inch my way along in the ditch until I think that I am directly behind his pen. I, again, slowly inch my way up to the top of the ditch and gain info on my alignment. I need to be right behind him with the girls in front of him in a straight line.

He stirs!!!

Did he see me?? Or smell me maybe??

No… the wind is still strong in my face…

Oh… he hears the bus coming and as it turns onto the road to drop off the girls… he stands and trots around his pen a bit….strutting snorting….

The bus is two hundred yards out now and he positions himself right behind his water tub…. He is shuffling from foot to foot like an athlete getting ready for a sprint down the track…all the while kicking up dust…

I’ll be damned!!! He is actually working himself up for this!!!!

I ready myself too….. I steady myself at the top of the ditches berm…..

OK… here it comes!!!

The bus brakes squeal and it stops right where it always does….

I see the girls getting down off the bus and I can see the hog preparing to charge..

He looks like a 500 pound fat cat crouching for the pounce!!… head down forelegs out in front and his butt in the air!!!

And just as the bus pulls away a fast clip the hog starts to charge….

And I let him have it with the old Czech single shot .177 pellet rifle ..

RIGHT IN THE BALL SACK!!!!!!!!

I see the girls running screaming

I see the hog leaping right over the water tub in one jump!!!!

HE’S AIRBORNE!!!

Squealing loudly at having his ballocks stung!!!

And falling with a heavy THUD bump bump… on the other side of his water tub…

I duck back into the ditch and I can hear him snorting a trotting around kicking at the trees and the tub and the garage.

HE IS PISSED!!!!

I don’t bother to take a look, I move back the way I had come..

It took me a while to get back to the house, where again, the girls told me all about the hog again…

I said nothing to them…..

That was Monday.

Tuesday, Wednesday was a repeat…

Thursday he got up as if to charge but didn’t

And Friday he didn’t even get up to try…..

YUP.. Granddad was right…….hogs do learn.

The girls never had to run and scream again…my Aunt & Uncle never knew how I did it and the hog led a much quieter life in his little pen.

But now….

I have seen a pig fly!!!!



Out…

[inplanotx]

I can feel the pain!

[SouthernMoss]

I love it!

[Mithrandir]

Epilogue…………

My Aunt never said anything about the incident to me then, but years later, she told this story to the girls (who are now all grown) and informed me of what was said by the farmer & the Vet.

It went something like this :


Some weeks later the farmer had the local Veterinarian to come out and look at his hog.

Since it was a breeder, he wanted it to have all its shots and such and see if the Vet could figure out why the hog seemed to be afraid of the school bus……

The Vet, of course, poo pooed the idea that the hog was “afraid” of a school bus….

But he did notice that the hog looks as if it had been stung several times by a big wasp on the ballocks…..and maybe that is why it is acting different…..

He just put some sort of salve on the wounds and let it go at that….

When the farmer informed my Aunt of the hogs wounds and to be careful of wasps in the area….

It was all she could do to NOT laugh out loud!!!!

……………………


out...

[inplanotx]

ROTFLMAO!

[pickenup]

THAT was worth waiting for.
THANKS.

[berto64]

Outstanding Mith!!!!!!

Pavlov's Hog!!