Post #340349 by Cammo on Wed, Oct 24, 2007 3:10 PM

Monsters
Part 2

My parents had known Jim Ducey for years, he worked at my dad’s plant and his nickname was Crazy Horse. He owned a good chunk of land down below my parents, right beside East Lake, not right on the lake but on a stream that ran behind the fields there. His hobby was bow hunting, so he had pretty much swept his fields of rabbits, woodchucks and the occasional unlucky migrating Canadian Goose. The article about starting your own Wild Boar Hunting Farm was everything he could have wished for, made real easy to pay for in a lump credit card sum.

The only thing the nice man from the boar farm in Toronto had specified, when Jim picked up his 12 little piggies, was to build a ten foot chain link fence around the whole property.

“They like to range wide,” he advised Jim. Jim nodded his head, like he understood what the man meant.

Then Jim had taken the little ones home. They were very small, lying in the back of his truck inside a thick cardboard box, on a soft bed of straw. He drove slow so as to not wake them.

A few months later my brother came for the big weekend. He wanted to see the wild pigs right away, so we all jumped in the car Saturday morning to visit Jim. He and his wife were busy feeding them at the side of the house. They were really cute, and my brother’s face sort of fell when he saw them. I don’t know what he had expected, but I guess he realized it would be a long time before he could get the bow hunting shots he’d need to sell the story with. These pigs were tiny!

Jim told us all about his plans, though.

“Hunting by the hour, say, one hundred bucks. Lessons on bow hunting, another hundred. We can put visitors up here at the farm, maybe later we’ll build some small cottages. Three hundred a night, hunting and meals included. Fully cooked, smoked wild ham leg goes for one-sixty and up. I can sell it to restaurants, wholesale throughout the States.”

He was obsessed, he knew all the numbers.

“But I’m not going to just smoke the legs,” he said, staring at these cute little pigs, just about drooling, “I’ll smoke everything. Rib meat. Shoulder. And fishermen can pay me to smoke their catch, you can pull some pretty nice ones out of East Lake.” He unrolled a blueprint of a really nice looking brick building with no windows and big wide eaves. “This is it. The best smokehouse you can build. Alder fire, temperature moderated automatically. They use these in Sweden.”

I looked over at the little pigs. How anybody would have the heart to kill these sweet little pink moppets in cold blood was way beyond me. But I ate bacon all the time, who was I to judge? The pigs seemed to do nothing but eat, sleep, and scratch at the dirt. What kind of sport would it be to kill them with an arrow?

“How long before they grow up?” I asked. Jim looked at me, and his whole face went blank for a second. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.

Then he remembered something. “They mature in a year or so.” But it was a grudging answer, and he changed the subject quickly after. Had my brother caught that?

We all looked at the little hogs, milling around, bumping into each other in the chicken wire enclosure Jim had built for them. It looked more like a children’s petting zoo than a hunting preserve. I could see my brother getting desperate to beat up some sort of story, but all we ended up doing was looking at Jim’s collection of bow hunting gear, having a quick coffee, and saying goodbye and good luck to him.

We laughed about Jim’s big plans all weekend. He became the butt of most of our jokes, I even drew some cartoons on the phone pad of Jim trying to smoke a pig that was eight inches long. Then Monday came and we forgot all about it.

Until we began to hear strange sounds coming from the Ducey’s land late at night, about a year later. It usually happened after midnight, screams and cries, sounds that seemed to come from the very pit of hell itself.