keep their vast herds of swine and slaves all aimed in the same direction than they did actually moving forward. A few of the Spaniards’ stray pigs escaped, but the people soon killed and ate every one of them. Then, several generations later, the Scotsmen and Irishmen brought hogs in greater numbers.
The old Celts’ most brilliant idea in the direction of animal husbandry was to let hogs run loose in the woods during spring and summer and then to hunt them down like game in the fall. It saved work on the one end and provided entertainment on the other.
Free range animal husbandry began easy enough. Turn some young pigs out into the mountains to eat mast for the summer and hope you can find them in the fall when you’re hungry and they’re fat. The problem was, you could cut identifying earmarks in every possible pattern—smooth crop, half crop, swallow fork, under bit, under keel—and still, come hog-killing weather in the fall, a few rebels would manage to escape. Hogs smart enough to live through the winter multiplied without the interference of man and once again became violent hairy beasts. Given but a few generations, the survivors and their offspring transformed into an old style of swine, their bodies relapsed to a wild pattern. They got long-headed and grew red back bristles and sprouted long yellow tusks. Their temperaments became dangerously militant and bloody. Come some cold wet November a few years hence, instead of walking into the pen of a fat and muddy pink pig, smooth and inert as a river boulder, and burying an axe between its resistless ears, you had to pursue fleet fierce animals with the ability and the will to gut you open as they fled across the highest ridges. You did it at your own peril, like hunting bear or catamount.
And left to themselves in the wild, the pigs became smart. Bear said some of them even learned to catch fish. He swore he’d seen them plow their snouts in creek bottoms to turn up crawfish. In the spring when the redhorse were running, he said he’d seen boars wade out chest-deep and come dragging two feet of fish back to the bank and eat it whole, head to tail, while it was still flipping.
The upshot was, wild boars made excellent hunting. Men chased them with dogs, and it was a bloody business. Wounds and fatalities fell on all three sides. In the fall of the year, Bear could not get enough of it. He had bred boar hounds for many generations of dogs, and he remembered the best one among them with great love all these years later. The kind of love where pairs of tears form in the outer corners of the eyes but do not fall. The dog was the only one Bear had ever bothered to name—and that only barely, for all he could think to call him was Sir. It was a foreign word Bear had learned back in the Creek War, when he had fought under Jackson, and though the whites seemed to put a great deal of stock in it, Bear had never quite got the hang of using it.
Sir, the dog, was stocky, colored muddy yellow, with bright searching eyes. As to personality, Sir was strict and sage and settled, a good influence on his fellow dogs. And he possessed an unerring sense of direction home, whereas any of the others might take off following an interesting scent trail and never be seen again, not even having enough sense to follow their own smell back to the house.
During one desperate encounter on a long hunt up toward Big Choga, Sir had been gutted by a boar with a head the size and shape and color of a blacksmith’s anvil. A swipe of tusks as long as knife blades laid Sir’s belly open from his ribs nearly down to the testicles. Instead of mercifully shooting the dog, Bear cupped the wet pink-and-blue ropes in his palms, spilled them back inside, and stitched the bleeding belly back together with his kit for patching moccasins, which consisted of whang strips cut thin from a groundhog hide and a fat steel needle blistered with rust. Having done all he could, Bear laid Sir under the shelter
The old Celts’ most brilliant idea in the direction of animal husbandry was to let hogs run loose in the woods during spring and summer and then to hunt them down like game in the fall. It saved work on the one end and provided entertainment on the other.
Free range animal husbandry began easy enough. Turn some young pigs out into the mountains to eat mast for the summer and hope you can find them in the fall when you’re hungry and they’re fat. The problem was, you could cut identifying earmarks in every possible pattern—smooth crop, half crop, swallow fork, under bit, under keel—and still, come hog-killing weather in the fall, a few rebels would manage to escape. Hogs smart enough to live through the winter multiplied without the interference of man and once again became violent hairy beasts. Given but a few generations, the survivors and their offspring transformed into an old style of swine, their bodies relapsed to a wild pattern. They got long-headed and grew red back bristles and sprouted long yellow tusks. Their temperaments became dangerously militant and bloody. Come some cold wet November a few years hence, instead of walking into the pen of a fat and muddy pink pig, smooth and inert as a river boulder, and burying an axe between its resistless ears, you had to pursue fleet fierce animals with the ability and the will to gut you open as they fled across the highest ridges. You did it at your own peril, like hunting bear or catamount.
And left to themselves in the wild, the pigs became smart. Bear said some of them even learned to catch fish. He swore he’d seen them plow their snouts in creek bottoms to turn up crawfish. In the spring when the redhorse were running, he said he’d seen boars wade out chest-deep and come dragging two feet of fish back to the bank and eat it whole, head to tail, while it was still flipping.
The upshot was, wild boars made excellent hunting. Men chased them with dogs, and it was a bloody business. Wounds and fatalities fell on all three sides. In the fall of the year, Bear could not get enough of it. He had bred boar hounds for many generations of dogs, and he remembered the best one among them with great love all these years later. The kind of love where pairs of tears form in the outer corners of the eyes but do not fall. The dog was the only one Bear had ever bothered to name—and that only barely, for all he could think to call him was Sir. It was a foreign word Bear had learned back in the Creek War, when he had fought under Jackson, and though the whites seemed to put a great deal of stock in it, Bear had never quite got the hang of using it.
Sir, the dog, was stocky, colored muddy yellow, with bright searching eyes. As to personality, Sir was strict and sage and settled, a good influence on his fellow dogs. And he possessed an unerring sense of direction home, whereas any of the others might take off following an interesting scent trail and never be seen again, not even having enough sense to follow their own smell back to the house.
During one desperate encounter on a long hunt up toward Big Choga, Sir had been gutted by a boar with a head the size and shape and color of a blacksmith’s anvil. A swipe of tusks as long as knife blades laid Sir’s belly open from his ribs nearly down to the testicles. Instead of mercifully shooting the dog, Bear cupped the wet pink-and-blue ropes in his palms, spilled them back inside, and stitched the bleeding belly back together with his kit for patching moccasins, which consisted of whang strips cut thin from a groundhog hide and a fat steel needle blistered with rust. Having done all he could, Bear laid Sir under the shelter
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