Post #341309 by Cammo on Tue, Oct 30, 2007 9:32 PM

No guesses????

Here goes -

Monsters
Part 6

Jim Ducey never got a clear shot at that pig. It had jumped before he was even near it, the shots we found out were just to scare it away even farther.

So it was back to square one.

The next day mark got on the phone. I think he was really ticked off about the Mr. Fancy Big City Reporter comment, and our miserable, somewhat cowardly performance of the night before.

I wasn’t ashamed at all, just glad that I was still alive and eating bacon in the morning. After that night, I’d never take vegetarians and their babble about ‘poor defenseless animals’ seriously again. Animals are cold, brutal, quick killers. All of them. Cows will stomp you to death if they’re in a bad mood. Cats are all carnivores. So are dogs. Adult seals will try to eat you in the water, no kidding. Stay away from those seals.

So Mark used his name and position on the magazine to call all the pig farmers he could find, he called the office and got a list, he called organizations like 4H and he stayed on that phone all day.

At first they thought he was crazy, or just funny. Then he learned to use their own terms to describe what was going on. Instead of ‘wild hogs’, he’s say ‘rogue male pigs’, or ‘lone males’ that ‘escaped the pen’, whatever it took to get a straight answer. He asked lots of questions, and mostly told people that a single pig had got loose, it was dangerous, and what could they do to kill or capture it? Farmers said one thing or another, some made sense, a lot of it was just rambling.

And the more he listened, the more he realized there was some funny stuff going on in the world of pig farming. There were a lot of rules being bent and broken, nobody really watches what a pig farmer does so they get away with strange things. A lot of them didn’t want to say anything about their operations.

He had to go all the way up to the top, and he finally got it straight from the head of the Canadian Council of Pig Farmers himself. This guy talked my brother’s ear off. He knew all about every aspect if the business, he knew what to do about wild pigs roaming around.

“It’s easy, but it’s not 100% legal,” he said. “We don’t usually recommend the practice. Don’t quote me on this. I’ll just deny it if you do. And I’m not saying you should even try it, it’s just that there are some people that do it all the time and it seems to work for them. Good way of controlling the pigs, some say. It even softens the meat, some say. Not me, but some say so. Never done it myself, you see.”

“Yeah, what is it?” my brother asked.

“Get them drunk.”

“What?”

“Let their feed ferment. How do you think they came up with corn liquor in the first place? It came from the South, the same place that grows the best pigs. Pig slop is mostly corn. Southern moonshiners would just let the slop ferment, and boil off the alcohol for themselves. They were doing it anyway to keep the pigs docile.”

“You’re kidding. I never would have though of that.”

“Yeah, alcohol isn’t considered an illegal drug, so technically you can use it on pigs, but it’s… we, that is, frown officially on the practice. For you, though, with this one rogue, you could try getting him stinking drunk,” and he described a few ways of doing just that.

Mark thanked him and hung up, smiling. Then, finally, he made the call to Jim.

Jim didn’t want to hear from Mark, but he listened. Then he seemed to listen some more. When Mark eventually got off the line with him, they had a plan.

So I’ll condense what happened over the next few days and tell you what went down.

Jim started by just feeding them all again. He’d put slop buckets out in the morning to get them used to eating near the old enclosure, and at that time of the day. It worked; first one, then the rest began dining at the Ducey’s each day for breakfast. Even Mr. Big showed up, pushing everybody else away. Jim could have shot one right then, but the rest never would have come back again to the spot. So he waited.

Mark even got to take pictures now, they were up close, in good light, and we could finally see exactly how big they had grown. They were huge, really big. Big as a couch. Five feet to the top of the ears, all muscle, moving quickly all the time, like no pigs you’ve ever seen. And they had been breeding; little piglets were everywhere, staying close to the sows. It was disgusting.

Mark got his pictures, lots with Jim smiling in front of his fence too, took them back to the magazine and fabricated a completely untrue story about the Perfect Wild Hog farm where everything was rosy and the happy pigs all behaved like model citizens at all times. It was a hit story, lots of letters poured in and Jim actually became a hero celebrity in the underground world of Canadian Hog Handlers.

Back at the farm, Jim had been trying to ferment the mash and it wasn’t working. He read up on moonshining, asked a lot of questions himself, but the stuff just wouldn’t turn. It smelled bad, too.

He had learned a lot about alcohol, though, because The County was at one time, during Prohibition, the Number One producer of moonshine in North America. It was run across Lake Ontario to drop points in New York State back then, billions of dollars were made. So local farmers knew a thing or two about fermentation.

And Jim decided to start from scratch with a new brew, this time made from apples. Apples turn to hard cider real quick, but Jim had learned to add pure alcohol as well, to trigger the process. He started feeding the hogs apples too, to prepare them, and they ate the stuff with relish.

So far so good.

Jim mashed enormous amounts of apples in a big cistern behind the house, using an outboard boat motor. Then he went searching for the cheapest alcohol he could find, and dumped it all in, along with yeast, sugar, and some kitchen trash. Then he built a small fire against one wall of the cistern, put boards across it and waited.

Here’s the final recipe, if you’d like to make some:

Mix in a cement cistern -
1200 lbs. apples, mashed
20 gallons grain alcohol
60 lbs. white sugar
1 small jar of yeast
10 gallons corn mash, for taste
Stove grease, egg shells, for taste
Keep warm, 1 week.

Jim let it sit, then finally shoveled the stuff into the feed buckets.

The moment of truth had arrived.

It was served at the normal time. The hogs came and dove right into it. They LOVED the brew. Jim said that they were born alcoholics. They finished it all up, the largest fattest hogs getting the most, perfect for his plan. Mr. Big drank quite a lot, as Jim expected him to. Good.

Then the alcohol hit their system and they all went NUTS. They screeched, lay down and rolled back and forth, stumbled around, and generally had a Whoop-de-doo, Shee-bang Wild Hog Par-tay. They threw up, rolled around in it some more, screamed again, jumped, swaggered about, butted heads with each other, stepped on the young ones, just plain made pigs of themselves.

And plop – plop – plop they fell down, one by one, and just laid there. It was the time of day when they went to sleep anyway, see.

Jim got his rifle, moved back a bit so he wouldn’t wake them, and in the clear morning light drilled that Big One right between the eyes. The others didn’t even notice. Then he just unlocked the gate and dragged him out with the truck. He shot some others to pay expenses, too, but Mr. Big was his trophy hog.

Every time he needed some new meat, it was easy. He’s just have a pig party. Afterwards, he could take his pick. He did it all from a lawn chair. The hogs never noticed that one or two had disappeared in the morning after the occasional binges, they were busy dealing with the hangovers.

And that’s how it’s done in The County.