Piggy Lou Harris
Well, here at Circle M we’re still bundled up pretty tight under a lovely blanket of snow. In a month we’ll be lambing then kidding then shearing then planting the market gardens, but for now we’re enjoying the relative daily peace provided by a warm fire, a queue of wool projects and a still short day. Farm chores are mostly brief morning and evening and it’s a pleasant necessity to spend a few hours outside among animals every day. Unless, of course, you’re bringing in a rambunctious boar to shack up with your own Piggy Lou Harris, as we did today.
The forecast accurately predicted a balmy day in the 20s, and both we and the neighboring farmers from whom we were borrowing the boar felt we’d have a lovely afternoon for the move. Unfortunately, these farmers, like us, tend to have rather unbridled optimism when it comes to animal moving schemes, and the crate they’d fashioned for the job was a wire-tied cattle-panel contraption strapped onto an old wooden pallet. The plan was to lure the boar, a little heritage Mulefoot ironically named Kong, into the crate with some food, then lift the whole thing into the back of our pick-up with their tractor. The luring went without a hitch (no small thing, as we’ve learned from painful hours of experience trying to get our market hogs onto an unfamiliar trailer). Shannon was halfway out the long drive before he noticed the friendly boar’s head pretty much nuzzling his through the rear window. Kong’s powerful nose had made quick work of the few wires securing the door to the cage and he was now gently rooting around the bed of the truck. So we abandoned the cage concept and tied Kong with a rope to the wood panels we install on the truck for animal moves.
It was only three hours later before Kong was off the truck and in the pen with Piggy Lou. Not that he wasn’t interested in her. In fact, the two of them started literally foaming at the mouth the moment we parked outside her garden. That quite embarrassed the teenagers we enlisted in the long process of coaxing Kong out of his perch. See, we’d planned on lifting him out of the truck in his cage, then merely opening the door into her pen. But with Kong now loose in the truck bed, we had no plan to get him out. As excited as he seemed about Piggy Lou, he had no interest in getting closer than three feet away from the end of the truck. No amount of corn tossed on the ramp down could convince him. In the end, Shan and our two boys took a fence panel behind the poor confused darling and pushed him, stiff- legged and squealing, down the ramp, at the bottom of which I was anxiously guarding various scary open spaces from a by-now frantic Piggy Lou who was tearing around the gate in a most worrisome way. Ah, love. Hopefully they make us twelve robust piglets who will appear in May. And in six or seven months those piglets will make us a lot of fabulous bacon.
