Post #339981 by Cammo on Tue, Oct 23, 2007 12:45 AM

Monsters it is.

Monsters
Part 1

My brother worked for years on small Canadian newspapers, sometimes as a stringer, a photographer, later as editor. It’s easy editing small town papers. At first he thought it was hard, he worked every waking hour of the day searching for stories, attending town meetings, talking to people in bars, interviewing the Mayor, you name it. For a long time he came up with nothing. Because nothing ever happens in a small town. And anything that DOES happen people want hushed up. You could get killed printing real news in a small town.

Then he learned to simply make everything up. That way, everybody’s happy. Nobody wants to read real news, it turns out. Real news is none of anybody’s business. They just want to be thrilled and entertained. And when he started making up all the stories, he had a ball. He had more fun than he’d ever had in his life. It was interesting and exciting. The police department didn’t care, because they never read the paper.

So it was sort of a shock for him to finally ditch the small town news game and finally get a decent honest job. Canada’s highest circulation farm journal was fishing around for a young writer, and they were paying good wages for once. But their one hard and fast rule was; no making up stuff. He actually had to go and dig for stories. He had to get his nose back for smelling out the real stuff. It was fun of a different sort now. Some of his work from this period was rather interesting; a big four-parter about peanut farmers developing the perfect peanut (three peanuts per shell was their goal), tobacco harvesting and it’s similarity to marijuana (nearly identical crops to raise), snake farms, organic cheese producers, if it had an atom of interest my brother Mark was there to cover it. He was well known to farmers across the nation.

And he was always trying to root a story out of Prince Edward County. That’s where my parents live, and if he could extract a lead story out of the County it meant a nice week long vacation of writing, eating my mom’s blueberry pie and swimming in their pool.

So when my parents mentioned the new wild pig farm on the phone he perked up right away.
“What Wild Pig Farm!?” he asked.
“The one our neighbors the Duceys are starting. He’s just retired and read an article in the Toronto Sun about how European Wild Hogs are the new thing.”

The Duceys had been sold on turning almost 40 acres of prime corn growing and adjacent forest land into a large pig enclosure. They had bought a whole swarm of these unique Wild Hog babies, fairly common in Europe but almost unknown here in North America. His plan was to raise them to full size for almost nothing, then charge folks hundreds of dollars to be able to hunt and kill them with high powered futuristic bows, exactly like Rocket Robin Hood. Then he’d charge the hunters another fee to smoke the meat, which was delicious.

If you’ve never had Smoked Wild Pig, you’re missing out. It’s maybe the most delicious meat on Earth. It’s twice as flavorful as regular ham, but lean. And soft as butter if it’s smoked right. The caviar of smoked meat, it sells for enormous prices.

Jim Ducey planned to make tons of money, kill animals for fun, and eat like European Royalty.

“I’m coming this weekend,” my brother said. “I gotta meet this guy.”