The Good Good Pig

by Sy Montgomery

  There would be much darkness in the months ahead. Often—too often—despite medicine and prayer, despite faith and strength, the ones we love are torn from us, sometimes viciously, for reasons no one can fathom. But sometimes God, or luck, or the universe itself allows you a rare opportunity. That is the gift that the darkness brought: the knowledge that sometimes you really can love someone back to life.

  PIG VISITORS THAT SUMMER GOT QUITE A DIFFERENT SHOW FROM years previous: as we left the house, out would stumble a fifteen-year-old deaf and mostly blind border collie, holding her head at a forty-five-degree tilt. Sometimes I’d carry Tess part-way to the barnyard, where we’d be greeted by a flock of hens composed partly of menopausal birds so aged that some of them had grown spurs on their feet like a rooster. Then, armed with the most tempting of slops, we would coax the arthritic Chris to limp from his pen. Sometimes he just couldn’t be bothered to step over the threshold, knowing that usually he could just stay in the nice, cool barn—which Howard had recently upgraded by installing a rotating fan—while a crowd of admirers gratefully placed pastries in his open mouth.

  But Christopher still knew how to rally for the right audience. When the Chronicle sent a TV team back to our barn to film a short retrospective on our pig that May, Chris played expertly to the camera. Christopher looked the lens in the eye, grunted forthrightly, then stepped out of his pen smartly as the camera rolled. “Oh, this is great!” the host cried as Chris ate blueberry muffins from my hand. “He’s the only one on the block who’s not on Atkins,” I said—and Christopher grunted in agreement, as if on cue. The moment they had enough footage of the pig eating, Christopher lay down on request. The cameraman shot several minutes of Christopher lying luxuriously in the sun, flicking away blackflies with his lavishly furred ears and flexing his moist nose disk exactly like an expert fashion model on the runway. Well, maybe not exactly— but as close as it gets around here.

  When children came for Pig Spa, Christopher would almost always rise to the occasion. One afternoon the Miller-Rodats came with Jack and Ned and a friend, Isabel. Christopher displayed his entire repertoire: He trotted to the Plateau. He devoured slops greedily. He dug an enormous hole with his snout that the kids pronounced “like, so awesome!” We rubbed his belly and he lay down and allowed us to wash him with sponges and massage him with aloe-scented skin cream.

  After a luxurious hour or so, it was time for Chris to go back in his pen. Howard was again off premises, and I would soon have to clean up and leave for a slide lecture I was giving at a local library.

  But Christopher wouldn’t get up.

  Why should he? He was perfectly happy where he was. He was lying in the sunshine being petted by adoring children. If he got up, he knew full well that he’d be leaving the sun for his pen, and the children and I would go away. Why should he leave all this behind? Nothing doing. He was no fool.

  Fortunately I had considered this possibility and brought a box of a dozen chocolate doughnuts to help lure him back to the pen. What I had not factored in was that during Pig Spa, the children would eat some of them.

  We lured Chris to his feet with a first doughnut. A second doughnut got him moving forward. He stood there chewing it with a thoughtful look on his face. We knew he was considering turning back to the Plateau—or possibly strolling out to the pasture. We gave him another doughnut in an attempt to dissuade such thinking. Christopher walked forward several paces and then opened his cavernous mouth. He wanted another doughnut. We popped one in. A few more paces. His mouth opened again, his lips shaking with anticipation.

  But now, disaster—we were out of doughnuts! Christopher dug another “awesome” hole with his nose, and halfway between the Plateau and his pen, he lay down. It was the worst possible scenario: now he was completely loose without even a tether to hold him, and I, still dressed for Pig Spa, had thirty-five minutes to get to a formal slide presentation at a library that was a half-hour’s drive away.

  We dispatched Mollie to the Cash Market to buy more doughnuts.

  I made it to the library about ten minutes late. I was forgiven when I explained that I had been waylaid by a recalcitrant pig. The audience, many of them children, knew about Chris already, because the librarian—the wife of our optometrist—was on our Christmas mailing list and had been vamping for time recounting Chris’s adventures.

  THE TROUBLE IN THE NEXT YEAR BEGAN WITH A BUCKET OF SLOPS.

  We always checked Chris’s slops bucket, for a number of excellent reasons. The first was to satisfy our curiosity, as there was local culinary history in those slops buckets. Oops, somebody burned the brownies again. And who overestimated the pancake batter? Well, that soup didn’t go over. We could also look into the slops bucket and foretell the future. Were there lots of melon rinds? Remains of hors d’oeuvre rollups? That was evidence of a catered event—often one we might well attend ourselves. Our pig’s cuisine would give us a peek at the party menu.

  We also scanned the slops with safety in mind. Although Fiddleheads’ employees were generally very careful, occasionally someone would forget and toss a napkin, a plastic bag, or a toothpick into the bucket for Hogwood’s slops. Also, we wanted to make sure nothing had spoiled.

  And finally, there was simply the matter of balance. Sometimes we would get a bucket of mostly one thing. Pigs are not known for their innate sense of moderation, so if we got an entire bucket of mainly, say, hash brown potatoes, we would try to administer it in smaller doses. You never want to give anyone too much of a good thing.

  But sometimes the slops seemed to have a mind of their own. Especially when the buckets were heavy with slippery items, the slops would plop out in one big bolus, and Christopher would have a bonanza. And that is what happened one bitterly cold January morning, when I tipped the bucket toward Chris’s bowl and out slid about five gallons of tomato sauce.

  Chris slurped happily. His appetite was excellent, and no wonder: this was one of those brutally cold days when a trace of moisture on your hands will cause your skin to freeze to a metal doorknob, and the hairs in your nose will freeze as stiff as a porcupine’s quills. Even with all that lard and his fluffy bed of fresh hay, Chris needed extra calories to stay warm. Maybe all that tomato sauce was a good thing: I recalled having read recently about the medicinal wonders of tomatoes—the cancer-fighting carotenes, the lycopene for eye health—and I didn’t worry.

  Until a few hours later, when I returned to find Chris lying on his side and moaning.

  He had suffered tummy aches before. (More of them than I had realized: Howard had spent more than a few nights up beside the pig while I had been in Southeast Asia, as Chris recovered from indigestion.) In fact, Chris had suffered a bout of digestive trouble just before Christmas, but after a meal of warm bran mash, which I sweetened with molasses and fed him with a spoon, he was fine again.

  So this was what I tried that evening. He ate a few spoonfuls, and drank some warm water I poured into his mouth from a yogurt cup.

  But in the morning, he was worse. He didn’t stand to eat. He lay on his side. His grunts were weak. Even more upsetting, he would take a breath, hold it, and then let it go in a shivering moan. Worse yet, he felt cold to my touch. I had never seen anyone who looked this sick who survived. I was terrified and called Chuck at home.

  Chuck said it was the tomato sauce. “Tomatoes are no good for pigs!” he told me. In all my fourteen years of swine-herding, I had never known.

  “What’s wrong with tomatoes?” I asked.

  “Too acidic,” he replied.

  The solution? Try to get him to swallow some activated charcoal—I actually had a huge bottle of this, left over from a digestive ailment I had acquired in Southeast Asia—and get some antacids into him. How many? “As many as you can get him to eat.”

  This was easier said than done. I was faced with an unusual problem: Christopher did not want to open his mouth.

  As Howard reminded me of the variable quality of our small local hospital’s emerg
ency room, I forced my freezing, naked fingers past the thicket of Chris’s tusks and teeth.

  First I placed the antacid into the cavern of his mouth, tiny pills that I thought he would surely swallow. A few went in, but then what? I don’t know that he ever knew they were there. Did he swallow them? It didn’t look like it to me.

  “Come on, sweetie,” I begged. “Please eat this for me.”

  “Unh.” Nothing doing.

  “Please!”

  “Unnnnnnnn!” He was getting irritated.

  Next I tried Tums. Because these were larger and sweet like candy, I hoped they might prove more promising. He spat them out. I tossed in activated charcoal capsules—but because they are black, I couldn’t tell whether they simply fell out the other side of his mouth or not. I poured in a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. The pink liquid oozed out his lips.

  There was nothing to do but stay with him. In the eleven-below-zero weather, I put one arm around him and lay down beside him in the hay. Howard came out and brought us a blanket.

  IT SEEMED CHRISTOPHER FELT BETTER THE NEXT DAY, BUT HE still wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t open his mouth for warm mash, not even sweetened with molasses. I couldn’t tempt him with the choicest slops. I made him soup. He wouldn’t touch it. When he spat out a pastry, I burst into tears. The tears froze to my face.

  But he would drink warm water. When I poured it into his mouth, he opened wide for more. Later that day he stood up for a shaky moment as I poured water into his dish. Chuck came out and decided Chris needed injections of a really powerful antacid. To my horror, he gave me a needle three inches long, mounted on a syringe so big the entire assembly looked like the Empire State Building—so huge I almost couldn’t look at it. But that’s what we needed to get past all that lard and inject ten cubic centimeters—about two teaspoons—of antacid into Christopher’s backside, twice a day.

  Howard wouldn’t even watch.

  I carefully chose my plan of attack. I would administer these shots when Chris was lying down, I decided, with his back end facing the gate—my exit, in case I had to make a speedy one. I would pet and scratch his back end for a time before giving the injection. And right before the jab, I would smack the site smartly with my knuckle twice—a trick I remembered a humane nurse using on me during one of many series of shots I had needed for my travels, and which I had thought considerably dulled the pain of the injection.

  But nothing I could do could have prevented Christopher from disliking my jabbing a three-inch needle deep into his flesh. He had every right to bite me. He never did. True, he said some horrible things to me—his emphatic grumbles and occasional roars could have been the sound track to a monster movie—but I knew he didn’t mean it. When the shot was over I would crawl under the blanket and lie down beside him in the hay, and he would push his back up against me and give love grunts as I rubbed his belly.

  Days went by, and still he wouldn’t eat more than a spoonful or two of mash. He didn’t want bagels. He didn’t want bread. He neglected his pastries. Squirrels who retrieved the uneaten treats from his dish tried, unsuccessfully, to pull them through holes in the barn’s stone foundation, to hide them in tunnels. As a result, I would find bagels and muffins lodged in the holes in the wall at odd angles, like some weird installation from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  Chris’s breathing sounded wet, so Chuck came by and gave him a shot of antibiotics. We switched drugs: a mix of two powerful antibiotics, plus Banamine, a strong painkiller. Finally Christopher turned the corner: no sooner had I given him his shot than he stood up, wheeled around, and growl-grunted, “Nynhunnnnnr!”—enough already!

  I phoned Liz with the daily pig update to give her the good news. After my torrent of veterinary details, I asked, finally, “And how are you?”

  Came the reply: “I have cancer.”

  LIZ DOES NOT COMPLAIN. THE MASTECTOMY, SHE INSISTED, would be nothing more than “a haircut.” She insisted that her daughter, Stephie, not bother to come from Texas. Her son, Ramsay, was mountain-guiding in France, and his wife, Heather, was pregnant with their first child—of course Liz insisted they stay there. Liz sent her husband, Steve, back to Prague, where he had been researching a book on nationalism, to continue his work. So I didn’t ask her if I could go with her for the operation; I announced it.

  We were still awaiting Liz’s surgery date when I called to say hello on February 6. The next day would be my forty-sixth birthday. With Chris on the mend and Tess stable, I was going to join a host of friends and colleagues at the annual meeting of the International Bear Association in San Diego. The hotel had a sea lion living on the premises.

  “Hi, Liz—how are you?”

  She hesitated, and my blood froze.

  Ramsay had been in an accident.

  While mountain-guiding on a ski slope at the Swiss-French border, he had fallen and hit his head earlier that morning. He was in a coma. The brain damage was severe, the doctors said. He might die. He might never come out of the coma. He might live to be a human vegetable. Or he might be dead even now. Liz’s only source of information was his wife, Heather, alone in a foreign country with her comatose husband, seven months pregnant with their first child, and struggling to understand the doctors’ French.

  I announced, “I’m coming over.”

  The next day, together, we flew to Geneva.

  TOGETHER WE FACED THE LONG, STRANGE, ELASTIC HOSPITAL hours, the sleepless hotel nights, the frantic phone calls home at weird hours. Day after day, together we offered our eager, loving presence to Ramsay and to Heather. The word compassion means “with suffering.” To have compassion is to willingly join in suffering—to show those you love that you will not let them suffer alone. And this is the most you can do: offer your presence.

  One beautiful day, Ramsay opened an eye. It was as unexpected, as miraculous, as blessed as witnessing the opening eye of the Hindu Creator, Vishnu, who slumbers on the coils of the endless serpent, Ananta, on the sea of eternity. And then, days later, he opened the other eye. None of the surgeons, none of the doctors, none of the nurses or therapists or aides dared voice even the possibility of what was happening, but I had seen it before: Ramsay, like Tess and Chris, was coming back to us.

  I flew home first, and Liz followed a few days later. Steve stayed with Heather and Ramsay. Stephie flew to New Hampshire from Texas so we both could be by Liz’s side for the mastectomy. The surgery, though gruesome, was a success. The cancer was gone.

  We began to make plans for Ramsay and Heather to come home to New Hampshire. Ramsay would start rehab, to get his strength back; Heather would bear their child. Spring was just around the corner.

  SPRING IS A FARRIER’S BUSIEST SEASON, BUT STILL, GEORGE MADE time to come and trim Christopher’s hooves.

  Mary hadn’t even told him I’d phoned until days after my call. She wasn’t thrilled about her husband messing with the feet of a seven-hundred-pound pig. Chris had never had his hooves trimmed before. Even horses who regularly require a farrier’s services don’t like it; for one thing, they don’t like standing on three hooves while a person cuts off pieces of the fourth. They usually take out their displeasure on the farrier. And, understandably, perhaps Mary didn’t really want George to postpone good, paying work to risk his life servicing a “customer” from whom he’d never accept a cent.

  But Chris really needed him. In Christopher’s younger days, his hooves had been trimmed naturally by his frequent walks. But in the past year, because of his arthritis, they had grown long and awkward. The longer they grew, the more uncomfortable his feet became—and the less likely he was to walk at all.

  So I was surprised and delighted when George appeared at the door a couple of days later. “I just found out about your call from Mary,” George apologized, “and I came as soon as I could!”

  We went out to the pen, and Christopher grunted a greeting. He did not stand up. This made things easier for George, and he appreciated it as much as if Chris had done him a consciou
s favor—and perhaps he had. Surely it was easier on Chris not to have to balance on three legs while having his trim. While I stroked his belly, Christopher didn’t wiggle or thrash. He let George go about his work quietly and efficiently.

  George had only visited a couple of times before, and each time he saw Chris he would praise his size, his condition, his attitude. I was always happy to hear this, and reminded him that he and Mary had made this all possible. “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” George used to say. He had given us both all those years ago, with the gift of a sickly runt at a time when I thought I would lose everything.

  And now, as he trimmed the big old pig’s overgrown hooves, George had something new to say about Christopher.

  “This pig,” he said sincerely, “has been so successful!”

  I was deeply moved by his choice of words. In the vocabulary of a yuppie, success can be a nasty word, the sort of thing that makes you jealous when you read your alumni magazine. But when a hippie farmer calls someone successful, it is stripped of the clutch and shove of money, power, and ego, and achieves a more important meaning. And when the word success is applied to a pig, we get to its most fundamental meaning: success is achieved by escaping the freezer. Christopher Hogwood had outlived everyone in his class by thirteen and a half years.

  Even on a human playing field, Christopher Hogwood’s life would have been considered a success by many measures. Many people would consider their lives a success to attain just a fraction of Christopher’s fame. But I knew that George meant something else.

  Christopher’s success was fourteen years of comfort and joy, given and received. Christopher was a gift who kept on giving. For me, his greatest gift was simply his presence, the pure delight of his company. But he had given me so much more: He had introduced me to my neighbors. He had helped me overcome my shyness with people. He had showed me how to play with children. He had even brought me a garden. And his success didn’t end with us. This huge, adored pig, who had given so many people delight, was proof that no matter what nature or history hands you, with love, anything is possible.