The Good Good Pig

by Sy Montgomery

  A HOME OF OUR OWN, MEANINGFUL WORK, A GOOD MARRIAGE, friends we loved, a popular pig. What else could we want? Only one thing: a dog.

  Actually we had tried to adopt a dog the summer that Chris was a piglet. On an errand to the A&P, Howard had seen an oak tag poster with photos advertising a two-year-old female border collie needing a good home. We’d watched these wonderful herding dogs working sheep on trips to New Zealand and Great Britain and were enthralled with them. Howard saw that the phone number bore a nearby exchange, and called the minute he got home. But, to our disappointment, the lady who answered—Evelyn Naglie, who apparently ran a private humane shelter—was reluctant to let the dog go.

  She explained that Tess, as the dog was named, had been brought in the previous winter by a family who found the border collie too rambunctious. Shortly after she arrived at Evelyn’s, Tess had been in a terrible accident. Chasing a ball that a child had carelessly tossed into the street, she was hit by a snowplow, crushing her pelvis. She’d had two operations and had to live in a crate for much of the past year. Her right leg would never be the same.

  Despite the promising poster, Tess really hadn’t recovered enough to leave, Evelyn said. Howard asked her to keep our number and to call us when Tess was ready for adoption. But we never heard from her again.

  A year later, on an August afternoon, our tenant Mary Pat told us she had some good news. She knew we were anxious to adopt a dog, especially since our beloved cat, Mika, had died of cancer in November. It turned out that the place where Mary Pat and John boarded their fluffy white Samoyed puppy, Chloe, also placed homeless animals. A border collie had just come in for adoption.

  Howard called the number. A familiar voice answered. It was Evelyn. The border collie was a female, she said, three years old.

  It was Tess.

  We were meant to be together. We drove over to get Tess that afternoon.

  BORDER COLLIES ARE DOGS WHO SHOULD COME WITH A WARNING label.

  Tess’s first family, we later learned, had made the mistake of adopting a border collie puppy and then leaving her alone in the house, frustrated, frightened, and bored. They would return to discover the puppy had destroyed everything in the house.

  No wonder. Border collies are too smart and too intense to be left alone all day with nothing to do. If they have nothing to do, they will think of something—and probably not what you had in mind.

  Border collies are bred not for looks but for brains. Border collies don’t look like Lassie. They don’t even always look like other border collies. They are usually black with a white blaze down the nose, a white ruff, and white at the tip of the tail. The ears can be floppy or pointed, the coat shaggy or short. The border collie was developed to herd sheep, often far from the shepherd, on the mountains and moors of the British Isles—a task requiring extraordinary agility, endurance, and intelligence. What distinguishes border collies is their outlook on life. They need meaningful work or they go crazy. Whether that work is herding sheep or chasing Frisbees, border collies are compulsive perfectionists, and do everything with incredible intensity and dedication.

  Some call them maniacal.

  The drive to herd is so powerful that, lacking sheep, border collies will herd squirrels, children, buses, even insects. They are exceptionally independent, emotional, and willful. In competitions, if the shepherd makes a mistake that costs them the ribbon, the dog might hold it against him for days. And border collies are so brilliant that they can figure out just about anything. They instantly understand how to open cabinets, doors, and refrigerators. One border collie (Devon from Jon Katz’s delightful A Dog Year) routinely broke out of his picket fence by systematically testing for one loose slat—and then always pushed it closed after the escape. He was also known to unwrap Katz’s ham and cheese sandwich and carefully remove and eat only the ham, leaving the rest of the sandwich pristine.

  I wondered—briefly—if adding another potentially diabolical genius to the household was really a good idea.

  After all, just that week, our pig had been in police custody again.

  I’d been in the “big city” of Keene (well, it was a city, anyway), a forty-minute drive away, teaching a short writing course at Antioch New England Graduate School. I’d let Chris out on his tether, and asked Howard to periodically check on him. The first check, he didn’t see the pig, but saw his rope, leading downhill into a mud wallow among some trees, was taut. Second check, the rope was in the exact same position. Howard followed the rope. There was no pig at the end.

  Howard ran down Route 137 shaking a coffee can full of grain. Mike Cass came up the street to meet him.

  “Looking for something?” Mike asked.

  “Yeah,” replied Howard, “About two hundred fifty pounds of back bacon.”

  But Ed already had Chris in custody and was leading him back to our barn with apples.

  The next night the pig was on TV. He’d made a cameo appearance on New Hampshire Public Television, in a segment filmed at our house by a local producer, Liz Klein. The show was ostensibly about my book, Walking with the Great Apes, which had been published that spring. The show had interviews with me and clips of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. But what everyone remembered was the shot of Christopher eagerly trotting behind me down to his Pig Plateau, trailed by the chickens.

  “Saw your pig on TV,” Mike said to Howard when they next met at the Cash Market.

  “Yes,” Howard replied, “one day he’s a convicted felon, the next day he’s on TV.”

  “Isn’t America great?” Mike said.

  WE WORRIED. WOULD TESS RUN AWAY? WOULD SHE BARK INCESSANTLY? Would she chase the chickens? And most upsetting of all, would she try to herd the pig? (This wouldn’t go over with Chris, we were sure.)

  But she did none of these things. She ignored the other animals. She was entirely and obsessively focused on us.

  Things went astonishingly well at first. The moment we got her to her new home, we first spent some time playing with her favorite tennis ball in the yard. Howard would toss, and Tess ran after it like the wind. Unless you watched her very carefully, you would never suspect the weakness in her right rear leg. She leaped into the air—all four legs off the ground—seized the ball in her jaws, and then whipped back to us, spitting the toy into our outstretched hands. Although Howard had by far the better arm, Tess brought it back to me every other time. She was keeping track. We played until her tongue was hanging out.

  It then occurred to us that Tess should probably empty her bladder before coming into the house. I led her into the tall grass of the field. “Tess, pee,” I suggested, not particularly hopeful that anything would happen—but to my amazement, she squatted and took care of the matter instantly. “Good dog!” It was not so much praise, but a statement of fact.

  “Tess, come,” we said as we invited her to the house. She followed us intently. And from there she commenced surveying our every move with her intense brown eyes, applying her considerable intellect to figuring out what Howard and I wanted her to do.

  She would sit beside one of us for thirty minutes, keeping me or Howard in the laserlike focus of her stare as if it were some sort of tractor beam. Then she might switch to the other person. By the time an hour passed, we could feel the buildup of tension. We went outside to toss the tennis ball or Frisbee again. She was a Gold Glover, Howard said. She caught and retrieved anything you tossed with the same intensity, grace, and skill. But although Tess enjoyed catching the toys, we felt that to her, this wasn’t play. It was work—work she loved—and she took it quite as seriously as we did ours. Perhaps she felt if she impressed us enough with her catching, we would let her stay.

  Although her energy was frenetic, in other ways Tess was heartbreakingly reserved. She merely tolerated our petting her. She did not kiss us, sit at our feet, beg for food at the table, or solicit affection as other dogs do. She was too elegant and refined for that. But she did not want to be alone. Not even outside.

&
nbsp; After we heard her whole story from Evelyn, we understood why. Tess’s first family couldn’t cope with her energy, Evelyn said. Any family foolish enough to adopt a border collie puppy and then leave her at home alone all day couldn’t have possibly understood how to lovingly house-train an animal—even one as smart as a border collie. When Tess predictably destroyed the house, the family punished her. And then she was abandoned. At least the family had the good sense to place her with Evelyn. But next came her terrible accident, followed by two operations and a prolonged, painful recovery.

  When finally Tess had recovered enough to adopt her out, Evelyn had lost our phone number and forgotten all about us. A retired couple had phoned later, and Tess went to live with them. They had loved her, and she had loved them. At last she had a home. But this lasted only one brief year. The couple lost their house in the recession. They had to move to a cheap, dog-free apartment. Reluctantly, they brought Tess back to Evelyn. And then finally, thanks to Mary Pat, Tess had come home with us.

  She was understandably wary of her new family. When we patted the couch to invite her to sit with us, she stared at us in disbelief. When she finally hopped up, she seemed torn between fear of disobeying our command and fear she might be scolded for doing something that clearly had not been allowed before. When we invited her to sleep in our bed, she was incredulous. Tense, she would stand on the futon hesitantly, then leap down at the first opportunity, as if she expected us to shoo her away. She would eat her food only if we praised her lavishly afterward—“You ate your food! Oh, good dog! What a dog! Tess is so good!”—and then gave her a biscuit for dessert.

  That whole first week we had her, she didn’t once bark. Then the Fed Ex man came. (Howard was a proponent of the theory that dogs bark at delivery people believing that otherwise these shifty characters would take something away from your house. But because dogs bark, they leave something instead—a sequence of events that proves to dogs that their barking is indeed effective.) When Tess issued a series of arfs, we praised her as if this were the most inspired and original thing any dog had ever done.

  She didn’t chew things, either. And for her loo, she used the tall grass in the back field—not the lawn and never the house—but she didn’t even dare pee unless we asked her. It was as if she felt that we, her third family, were her last chance, and she didn’t want to blow it. But it also seemed as if she was always formulating a contingency plan in case we didn’t work out. She seemed to be guarding her emotions, protecting her heart from being broken once again.

  In bringing Tess home, we realized, we had taken on a monumental, lifetime commitment: we had to earn the love of this fiercely intelligent, beautiful, and mysterious creature. It was up to us to redeem the cruelty and sorrow of her past.

  BETWEEN CHRIS AND TESS AND THE LADIES, HOWARD AND I WERE now not only outnumbered but outsmarted—not to mention outweighed. What did we think we were doing?

  Some people consider their animals their substitute children. Certain psychologists explain away the loving relationships between people and animals in terms of thwarted parenthood. These psychologists have identified a group of physical traits, such as the flat face and big eyes of pug dogs, that they call “baby releasers,” and claim the sight of these activate a torrent of misplaced maternal feelings toward animals. This suggests that any friendship between a human and an animal is really just some kind of wiring mistake, a person’s thwarted yearning for a human infant—a simpleminded view that, in my opinion, insults mothers, diminishes animals, and underestimates the complexity of love.

  Our animals were not our babies. True, Howard and I had raised Chris as a piglet—but there was no mistaking him for a baby anything now. By his first birthday, Christopher Hogwood was big enough to eat us. (That was another reason we didn’t give him meat—we didn’t want to give him ideas.) Our chickens were no longer babies, either (as their eighty eggs a week proved); they were adults, as we were. And no one could have mistaken Tess for anything other than an adult. She was a fully formed, mature creature with a mysterious past of her own.

  No, our animals were no babies. Besides, if we had wanted babies, we knew full well how to get them. But we chose not to.

  Not wanting children is something many people don’t understand. “Don’t you feel your womb calling to you?” a woman acquaintance my age asked me. I replied that my organs seldom had much to say, and that I hoped things would stay that way. In fact, I was more adamant about staying child-free than Howard was. In our mid-twenties, he had broached the subject of children—once. My sensitive, wifely reply was something like: “Forget it.” I had nixed the idea of having children when I was myself a child, having learned in the 1960s that human overpopulation was literally crowding other species off the planet. Why create another mouth to gnaw at the overburdened earth? I was about seven years old at the time and have never for a moment regretted the decision.

  I never went crazy for babies the way a lot of other girls did. Babies would have been far more appealing to me if they had fur, like most normal mammals. Other mammals whose young are this naked wisely tuck their babies into holes, or if they happen to be marsupials such as possums or kangaroos, keep them hidden in a pouch, until they are cute and furry enough for public viewing. I didn’t hate babies, of course. But having made my decision, I never nurtured a desire to produce one. So when I found myself happily married, fulfilled in my work, and surrounded with friends of many species, children were simply not part of the picture.

  Until the day two blond-haired girls came pouring over the stone wall next door, drawn irresistibly to a black and white spotted pig.

  STANDING IN A COLD, EMPTY HOUSE, THE FORLORN LITTLE GIRLS and their mother wanted only one thing: to go home. But they couldn’t. That was the very problem that brought them to the vacant house next door.

  They were still reeling from the divorce. It had taken four years and three lawyers to end Lilla Cabot’s marriage to the girls’ father. The worst of it was that now, Kate, ten, and Jane, seven, were being forced to give up the home where they had lived all their lives.

  Kate and Jane had loved the little shingle-style cottage in the middle of Hancock’s deepest woods. It was near the nature center, surrounded by hundreds of acres of protected land. There, the sisters had learned the songs of chickadees and the drummings of woodpeckers, where to find salamanders, how to catch frogs. The cottage had been in the family since Lilla’s great-great-grandfather built it. But now the house had to be sold.

  At the time, New Hampshire, as well as the rest of the nation, was in the grip of a recession. Though money was tight, the local real estate market was hot. The day the divorce came through, the house sold within three hours of going on the market.

  Now, Lilla and her daughters had to find a place to live—fast. The old house next door to us was the only one available for rent in town that would let them move in by January. The kids hated it instantly. Kate and Jane had never even been in an empty house before. It felt creepy. It was October, and already it was obvious the place had no insulation. “It was so uninviting,” Kate remembers. “One of those dark, old, run-down little houses that’s colder inside than out.”

  But they had no choice. In January, two other girls would be moving in to their house. Kate and Jane thought sadly of the other girls’ dolls and dollhouses spread over the beloved old rooms where Kate and Jane had played with their stuffed animals—the big black and white orca whale and the howling Arctic wolf and the black panther. The sisters felt betrayed, and these cold, empty rooms were the very embodiment of how they felt inside.

  With their mom, they walked outside, miserable. They wandered into their backyard.

  Then Kate saw something big and black and white next door.

  “Can we look? Can we look?” the girls asked their mother. Kate, who like her younger sister was enthralled by horses, had noticed the barn next door and thought maybe there was a pony. They took off, Kate first, Jane following.

  Just
as she leaped over the stone wall that separated the two properties, Kate saw Christopher’s face.

  “Wow!” she said to her sister. “This is even cooler than a horse! It’s a pig!”

  From the Pig Plateau, Christopher, Tess, and I looked up to see two beautiful little blond girls running toward us. Chris flexed his nose disk to catch their scent and uttered a grunt. “Come over and meet Christopher Hogwood!” I said. “And this is Tess…”

  I didn’t ask who they were, and I didn’t introduce myself. We got right down to business.

  “Sure, you can pet him! Here, feel behind his ears!”

  “It’s so soft back there!”

  “He’s got so much hair!”

  “I thought pigs were pink….”

  “Now, watch this,” I said, sure to impress our audience: “You rub his tummy, right over his nipples, like this—look at all the excellent nipples he has! That’s right…stand back, he’s going to go over….”

  Christopher got that dreamy look in his eyes, dropped to his knees, and then rolled on his side, landing with a thud.

  “Oh!” the girls gasped in unison.

  “Unh!” answered Christopher. “Unn-n-n-n-h-h-h-h…”

  “He wants us to keep rubbing,” I said. But Chris had already made this obvious, grunting in ecstasy in time to the rhythm of their little hands. “Wow—he really likes you both!”

  Lilla, a thirty-six-year-old version of her golden-haired, blue-eyed daughters, crossed over the low stone wall to survey the scene: her girls, surrounded by eight curious hens and tended by a suspicious border collie, were completely absorbed in the task of petting and massaging a blissful, supine, black-and-white 250-pound hog.