Gentleman Farmer Part 2

I didn't listen to the bargaining process that went on between my dad and Mr. Dickey but I didn't really have to. My dad never bought hardly anything without first haggling over price. I can remember being embarrassed many years later when he picked up a hammer and asked the cashier in a hardware store what he would take for it. With my dad, there was an asking price and a settling price and they were never the same thing. After a few minutes I heard them agree to price with a handshake and dad told me it was time to go.

As we got in the station wagon and bounced back down the dirt road leading to Mr. Dickey's house, I asked him how we were going to get our hogs home. We didn't have a truck as yet and the old yellow station wagon served as an all purpose vehicle. We had hauled everything from fencing to feed and lumber as both seats in the rear would fold down flat. Dad told me would simply build a cage and slide it in the back of the station wagon as if it was a perfectly obvious plan. I told him I didn't think Mr. Dickey's hogs would fit in the back of the station wagon and he just laughed and told me we were buying "feeder" pigs that would be between 50 and 60 pounds when we picked them up.

This seemed reasonable to me but I couldn't see up putting anything near the size of the hogs I had seen at Mr. Dickey's in our station wagon; cage or no cage. When we got home that day we gathered up some plywood scraps and two by four pieces along with some of the dog wire we had used to build a pen for our rabbit dogs. From these materials we constructed a cage that slid neatly into the back of the station wagon, complete with hinged door on the end that we would face towards the tailgate type backdoor on the station wagon. When we slid it into the back of the car with all the seats down it fit perfectly. We could just close the back tailgate with the cage wedged tightly against the back of the front seat.

The next Saturday we made sure the electric fence was working. Then we loaded our newly created cage in the back of the station wagon and took off for Mr. Dickey's place. I was pretty excited about the whole prospect and couldn't wait to get there as dad had told me that I could pick one of them out for my own. This was an unexpected but exciting possibility that had whetted my appetite for hog farming to a very sharp pitch. As we finally wound up the dirt road to Mr. Dickey's my excitement was pretty much at a fever pitch.

As we pulled up in his driveway Mr. Dickey appeared from behind the barn at the back of his house and waved us toward a gate in the fence behind his house. He stood at the gate as we pulled up and seemed a little puzzled. "You have a truck coming behind you?" he asked when we rolled to a stop and got out.

"No.. we built a cage for the back of the car that will hold them until we get home," dad answered as if it was the most normal thing in the world for people to pick up hogs in their family car. Mr. Dickey walked over to the car and peered inside. He didn't say anything for a moment or two as if he was considering something carefully.

"Well..... that should hold them," he said, nodding his head. "But..... I wouldn't mind delivering them in my truck if that would work better," he suggested. I think he figured out we didn't have a truck and was trying not to be rude but at the same time he seemed anxious that we shouldn't put hogs in the back of our car for transportation.

"No need for that," my dad explained, "this will hold them until we get home and it's really not very far."

"Uhh..... Ok.... " Mr. Dickey mumbled, "if you're sure?" he said asking one last time if we might not prefer letting him deliver the hogs.

"I'm sure," dad said. My dad could surely tell as good as I could that Mr. Dickey didn't seem to think this was a good idea but he didn't let on. I was so anxious to pick out a hog and I didn't think too much about it; but I remember thinking later that Mr. Dickey had done everything he could to talk us out of our plan without being rude.

Mr. Dickey opened the gate and directed us through the muddy ruts the passed for a road to the barn. As we pulled up behind the barn I could see a lean to roof on the back with a low hog wire fence surrounding it. Inside this pen were 12-15 small hogs. One of the odd things about hogs is how proportional they grow from the time they are born to maturity. A piglet looks like a perfect miniature of a full grown hog when they are born. Some six inches tall to the tip of their back they are born perfectly proportioned and extremely agile. Within an hour or so after their birth they are running around are more or less full speed, which is surprisingly fast. They don't really go through an infant or clumsy childhood, they just get proportionally bigger and stronger as they grow.

As we stood there looking at the pigs dad told me to pick out which one I wanted. Mr. Dickey added that they were all gilts so it didn't matter which ones we chose. A gilt is a female pig that hasn't had a litter yet; after which they become a sow. Dad had already explained some of the terminology to me so I wasn't surprised by the term. As I looked the pigs over carefully I noticed one of them eyeing us as well. She was taller than the rest with her back arching 8 or 10 inches higher than the rest and she appeared to be longer as well in the length of her body. I pointed at her and told dad that was the one I wanted.

Mr. Dickey seemed to approve my choice as he said, "I like the high back ones as well," and gave me a smile. "Go get her," he said. He took a large scoop of corn and handed it to me. He told me to put it in the wooden trough and then grab her by the hind legs when she started eating. If you grab a pig by the hing legs and pick them up high enough you can walk them where you want them to go on their front legs. Of course I didn't know this at the time but I trusted Mr. Dickey to tell me what to do and my dad just nodded and waved me into the pen.

The pen was several inches deep in the muck that hogs love. It was a combination of mud and manure and had been thoroughly turned and rooted over for quite a while. This muck or "wallow" as we called it was the color of chocolate and was very slippery and slick underfoot. I stepped over the fence holding the large scoop and was instantly startled by the rush of pigs against my legs as they knew what was in the scoop. I managed to make it the few feet to the trough without getting knocked over but I was instantly aware of how strong the pigs were as they were effortlessly knocking my legs in every direction as they passed around and through them.

As I dumped the corn in the trough they instantly all were shoving and pushing each other as the begin munching on it. Your could hear the hard corn cracking open under their molars with each bite. I threw the scoop back to Mr. Dickey and maneuvered carefully behind the pig I had picked. I needn't have bothered with being careful as she didn't seem to notice or mind, even when I grabbed her hind legs just below the main joint. Her legs were coated in "wallow" which made it hard to get a good grip and I was suprised how slick and cold it felt. As I slowly started lifting her legs she didn't react until I got them a couple of feet off the ground. When she did react, it was quite a reaction. She started kicking them to and fro with a great deal of strength and speed so that I felt like I was hanging onto a paint can shaker like they have in hardware stores. It was so violent and so fast that I couldn't focus my eyes, she was literally tossing me around like a rag doll and I couldn't hang on. As I let go of her legs, she calmly went back to eating as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, I was covered in the oozing wallow that has slung violently off of her legs and instantly smelled just like Mr. Dickey's whole place.

Dad and Mr. Dickey seemed to think this as a very good show as they were laughing outrageously. "Why did you let her go?" my dad asked in his best mocking voice. After they settled down, Mr. Dickey explained that she wouldn't kick if it tilted her over far enough to make her lose her balance a little. He explained that she would cooperate by walking whichever way it tilted her after I got her away from the trough. Since she was still eating I grabbed her legs again, but this time I tilted them all the way up and yanked her away from the trough. As I turned her towards where dad and he were waiting she calmly walked over to them on her front legs. When we got close, dad and Mr. Dickey grabbed her hind legs and swung her up on to the tailgate of the car. She immediately went into the cage and dad closed the door behind her.

After dad picked two more of them and we followed this same procedure of loading them into the car, he paid Mr. Dickey $120 and we were soon on our way back home. Unfortunately, I was fairly well covered in "wallow" that smelled like hog manure and began drying on my skin and clothes. The tailgate of the car was also pretty much coated in it as well. Somehow, dad had managed to get very little on him as he had worn gloves and managed to avoid the worst of it. Two of the pigs had not liked being handled at all and had squealed in a pitch high enough to carry for quite a distance. I was later to learn that a young hogs squeal is one of the louder noises that the human ear is likely to hear. It is simply ear splitting in pitch, the moreso when they are very young.

As we rode in the car I discovered something else about hogs. Under stress or excitement they had a tendency to "scour". Scour is a polite term for animal diarrhea. Hogs are prone to it anyway, but the more excited they get the more exaggerated it gets. Evidently, our new hogs were very excited by the time we went a few miles down the road as the bottom of our makeshift cage was now covered in the proof of their stress. It suddenly dawned on me why Mr. Dickey was so concerned about our method of transporting hogs as their scour was now running out of the edges of the makeshift cage and slowly sloshing down into the openings around the folded down seats on either side when we made a turn.

I knew I could shower all this muck that was presently coating me off. I wasn't so sure about the car seats or the carpeted floor under them. I could see my dad eyeing things in the mirror so I knew he was probably having the same thoughts but there wasn't much we could do about it until after we got them unloaded. It was only about a 20 minute drive back to the house and they seemed to settle down more the longer it went. When we finally pulled in our driveway and began the slow bouncing path through our side pasture to the hog lot dad went over the plan for unloading them.

He and I would lift them over the electric fence and I would run back to the barn and turn it on whenever we had them all in. In retrospect we should have blocked them in the farrowing house area where we had web wire for a few days but I didn't think of that until later. As we eased back against the edge of the fence I got out and lowered the tailgate on the station wagon, so that we could have it directly over the fence. Once we got in position we opened the cage door and grabbed the first pig we could reach. We hauled her out and lowered her into the pen. As soon as she hit the ground she ran to the far end of the lot before turning to watch the rest of the proceedings. When we lowered the second one to the ground she lit out in the same direction at full speed. My pig didn't seem in any hurry to get out of the cage and it took us a few minutes to coax her back where we could reach her. Once we grabbed her and set her in the pen she took off in the same direction.

As I ran toward the barn to turn the fence on I looked up to see all three of them shoot right through the unarmed fence at a trot and head for the woods down below our house. Dad was already running that direction so I took off after him as well. By the time we reached the creek on that end of the pen they were out of sight. We chased down through the woods for a while occasionally seeing their track but since it was fall there was a carpet of leaves on the ground and we soon lost their track too. Sounds on dead leaves carry quite a distance in the woods and we couldn't hear any rustling or running at all. They were simply gone.