Run Through The Jungle

    Thought it was a nightmare

    But it’s all so true

    They told me, “Don’t go walking slow

    ’Cause the Devil’s on the loose”

I had taken two spansules of synthetic amphetamine salts two hours earlier, or thereabouts … about 40 milligrams each, as near as I could figure; and I was really starting to feel them when Fred asked me if it was time to open another bottle of Popov vodka, the kind that came in 1.75 liter plastic containers, for $8.99. Cheapest drunk out there, good old Popov. I have a lot of Russian in me, on my mother’s side, but I always fucking hated vodka, even the expensive kind. So I figured if I was going to have to drink the shit, anyway, it might as well be ‘Comrade Popov’, as we called it. Didn’t taste any better/worse than Stoly to me, and I’d save a little money.

To Fred’s query, I answered in the affirmative. “Fuck, yes,” I said. “Open that motherfucker up! I need another shot of the Comrade right now, goddammit! And what the fuck happened to the sangrita, jagov!?”

Fred and I had been riding along, drinking and laughing and telling stories and yelling at each other, for about an hour. At a snail’s pace, it seemed like. We were slogging through the mud and slop and occasional relatively dry ground, deep in a large palmetto swamp somewhere southeast of Georgetown, SC. We were in a vintage Land Rover some engineer friend of Fred’s had loaned us. The kind of rig Englishmen used to tool around the African bush in; the kind you could entirely dismantle (and reassemble, supposedly) with a slotted screwdriver.

That guy was nice enough to loan his vehicle to us, although I don’t know if he would have done it, had he known exactly what we had in mind.

I looked over at Fred, in the driver’s seat, just in time to see him take another long pull off of the vodka. He was as much Russian as I was – we were first cousins on my mother’s side – and I don’t know what his excuse was for tolerating this rotgut version of the national drink of the motherland, fermented and brewed from leftover crap in a trailer house in Missouri somewhere. But he took a big hit off of it, then reached back into the game bag of his camouflage jacket and pulled out the bottle of sangrita.

“You son of a bitch!” I cried. “You’ve been hiding the fucking sangrita! Hand it over, and the ‘Comrade’.”

Fred had eccentricities. One of them was hanging around with me, since we were little kids. Another was chasing his cheap-ass vodka with a tomato-based concoction originally formulated for chasing pricey tequila. But Fred’s lifelong credo had always been something like, “What the fuck?!” And in this case, I had to agree. The sangrita just after the Comrade Popov made the latter seem, well, not quite so bad.

Fred lived in Georgetown, a nice little city close to the ocean. He was a civil engineer at a large firm there. I was spending a week vacation with him.

Right after college I had been recruited by a company that ran these large catalogue showroom retail stores. This was the early 1980s, and that type of thing was really popular then. Anyway, I guess they were going by some of my work experience, and not so much my Political Science degree, when they hired me, as part of their regional warehouse office, based in Birmingham, AL.

But, you know what? They were right. I was a natural at that job. About half of the time, I fucked around with not much to do at the regional office – testing out new products, working on ways to modify our warehousing setup to make it more efficient. Shit like that.

But I was also part of a “crisis team” that would be flown in when a warehouse operation at one of the retail outlets had failed. The company I worked for had been a large regional retailer in the South, mostly, but they had recently acquired another retailer that was more spread out around the country. They were in the process of converting a lot of the just acquired stores over to their system, which caused problems. In addition, their prototype outlet had a wrap-around ‘warehouse’ (a large stock room, really), and they hired managers locally at just above minimum wage, and helpers at minimum wage. So fairly often the whole staff would just say, “Fuck it,” and the whole setup would go to hell, and it might be a week before the regional office caught on. At that point a crisis team of young-ish regional warehousing types from all over the country would be flown in to take over operations, clean up the mess, and hire and install newer and supposedly better staff. I was on one of the crisis teams.

Most of the team members, men and women, were in their early 20s, like me. We had to fly all over the country, at a moment’s notice. Go in, work twelve hour days at whatever location required us, then go out and drink and raise hell and try to hook up with the local talent, or (less often) someone else on the team. Then get up early the next morning, tired and hung over, and do it all again.

An average operation lasted a week or so; then we’d all return to whatever office we’d come from, and try to recuperate before the next call came. This particular time I’d been flown out to a giant-sized clusterfuck in a north Georgia store, and after my team had completed its task, I asked for and got a week’s vacation I had coming. So I rented a car in Athens, and drove up to see Fred in South Carolina.

By chance, Fred was off that week, as well. It was mid-April. When I got there Fred told me we were going “hog-hunting.” I’d never done it, but it sounded fun, so I told him I as all in.

I found out it wasn’t hunting in the sense of shooting something and killing it, though. Fred’s firm had a big company barbecue every year just after Memorial Day, and the tradition was that Fred and some of his engineer buddies would go out into the marshes outside of Georgetown, in two-man teams, and track down and capture feral hogs; which were then brought to a couple of locals out there, who had heavy steel corrals set up on their properties. The captured hogs were put in the corrals, then spent about a month being fattened up on corn. Apparently the combination of lean feral pork and a month of domestic feeding made for really good barbecue.

    Thought I heard a rumbling

    Calling out my name

    Two hundred million guns are loaded

    Satan cries, “Take aim!”

We splashed through two or three or ten more deep-ass mud holes, and over several more hummocks of dead marsh vegetation, causing the vodka to slosh around violently inside its plastic receptacle, and inside of me, as well. Finally, we came to a stop, and Fred killed the engine.

We were in a clearing that looked pretty much like the last ten or twelve clearings we’d been through. But Fred pointed out to me something I hadn’t seen at first. In the heavy undergrowth across the way, if one looked hard enough, one could see a kind of tunnel bored through it. Made by a feral hog, my cousin insisted.

The idea of our quarry being nearby, and the sudden relative quiet that came when we shut off the Land Rover, just made all the other things going on in that swamp more noticeable to me.

The weather was hot and sticky, and the place smelled of rotting vegetation and decay. And the mosquitoes were having their way with us. But fuck it, we were on a mission. Fuck the heat, fuck the decay, and fuck the fucking mosquitoes. Fuck the humidity, too.

Fuck it all. Down a few spansules of crank, slam down some cheap vodka, climb in an all-terrain vehicle (true meaning of the term), and make a run through the jungle.

And don’t look back.

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My cousin and I were crawling on hands and knees, commando-style, through the underbrush and mud, down the same trail a hog had made some time before. We were a sight to see, I’ll bet. Fred had us decked out in camouflage fatigues and Gore-Tex, which kept us somewhat dry and protected from the elements, and somewhat protected us from the mosquitoes; but it was hot as hell in that get up. I was sweating tons, and some of the craftier mosquitoes were still finding their way through, anyway.

Fred was ahead of me, “on point” as it were. He had black cork on his face and forehead, and a large Ka-Bar bayonet in his teeth. Fred had been a Marine once. I tended to forget that. I thought the big knife clenched between his incisors was a bit much, but he said you never knew what might happen walking (or crawling) the point, and he wanted to be ready. It seemed to me he was reverting back to his active duty days a bit, out in this swamp.

I was about the most un-military person you could find, but I’d spent a fair amount of time out in the woods, too, in the past, pursuing my own agenda; so I wasn’t a total stranger to privation in the wild, or to stalking a quarry for dinner, either. I had a Bear Mfg. lockback knife in a leather sheath on my belt. It was a 5 ½” knife – 5 ½” folded, that is; with a 5” blade. I’d spent the previous evening sitting in Fred’s camp, sharpening my knife with one of those Lansky kits, the kind with stones of different gradations of coarseness. If one took one’s time and gradually sharpened with stones from coarser to less coarse, one could get a knife pretty fucking sharp. I ventured mine was about as sharp as a blade of that heft and thickness could get. I felt, if it got down to it, that hog might get the best of me, in the end; but he’d damn sure remember me for awhile.

Our basic plan was to run the hog down into his lair, and then jump and, well, hog-tie him, and drag him back out of there. It seemed like a crazy-ass plan, to me. The feral pigs in that area were often 200-300 lbs., with hooves and tusks. Between us, Fred and I were about 350 lbs., but a big hog would outweigh either one of us individually by two times, at least.

That is why teamwork was so important. We’d been crawling for maybe 1/8 mile (it seemed like longer, but I doubt it was) when we came to an open area under the overgrowth. Fred stuck out his arm to stop me, and then quietly pointed to the other side of the clearing. It was pretty dark, but eventually my eyes adjusted, and I could see a decent-sized sized hog, resting on his side in the leaves. He was all black, and looked lean and mean. Nothing like what one saw in a feedlot. Fred started crawling around to the left. He would take on the front end, the front legs and the head, complete with a couple of smallish but still nasty-looking tusks. I slipped around the other way, to sneak up from behind. I had my knife out and unfolded by then, gripped in my right hand as I crawled around. I felt like I was amped up on max adrenaline, and ready for whatever happened next.

Suddenly, Fred leapt onto the head of the hog, just as it was rising up to see what the fuck was going on. He had the front end of the pig momentarily immobilized, but I knew that wouldn’t last. As quickly as I could, I jumped across the back of the hog, landing across his hips, with his hind legs in front of me. I grabbed the knee/elbow of one leg with my left hand, and I quickly and – I thought – pretty deftly sliced into the back of the hind leg with the knife in my right hand, about halfway between the hoof and knee, just like Fred had showed me how to.

It was basically the same concept as clipping a bird’s wings. When I was a kid, my brother and I found a wounded mallard hen once, out in the marsh. We brought it home and – long story, but we ended up with a bunch of wild mallards as pets. To keep them from flying away we would take just a couple of feathers out of the wing on one side of each mature bird. It made them feel unbalanced in the air, and after awhile they would quit trying to fly at all. What Fred had instructed me to do was knick the tendon on the back of one of the pig’s hind legs. He didn’t want me to slice it all the way through – that would injure the hog grievously, and render him lame. The trick was to just nick the tendon – or the hamstring, I suppose – enough so the pig wouldn’t try to run for awhile, at least long enough for us to get him out of there and to a pen somewhere.

I knicked that pig with surgical precision, using my Bear Mfg. lockback knife as my scalpel. Then I quickly wrapped the cut leg in cloth, and tied the back legs together with nylon rope, then duct-taped them together on top of that, for good measure. Fred had meanwhile done the same up front, and just like that, we had caught us a wild feral hog. We rolled it onto a tarp, and then Fred grabbed one front corner and I grabbed the other, and we dragged that big boy on out of there, all the way back to the clearing where the Land Rover was.

The tarp and the slick ground in the swamp eliminated a lot of drag and resistance, but still, it was close to 300 lbs. of dead weight we were dragging out of there. That burden, coupled with the heavy gear we were wearing and the heat and the humidity, really began to get to me. But we kept after it, and finally I saw the clearing ahead. When we got to it, we dragged the hog around to the back of the Land Rover, and then, on ‘three’, we heaved him up into the back. All that was left to do was bring him to a friend of Fred’s trailer, about ¾ miles away, where we would deposit our porcine friend into a corral. He could recuperate and fatten up there, before being dispatched to his final destination. In other words, mission accomplished.

Before we got into the Land Rover to go, I sat on a hummock for a few minutes, to catch my breath. Fred seemed relatively at ease and nonchalant, but I was still on fire with adrenaline, and at the same time beginning to feel fatigued. I’d been pouring sweat, and my heart had been pumping. I felt like I’d just finished an intense thirty minute cardio workout, which, in fact, I basically had. I was fucking worn out, but I felt good, too. You know? Along with all the sweat, and all the lactic acid flooding into my muscle fibers, a lot of endorphins had been released into me, too. I felt … good. Fucking great, actually.

I looked across at my cousin, who was sitting on the tailgate of the Land Rover, looking off into the distance of the swamp somewhere, contemplating who knew what? And at the same time he was idly stroking the hindquarters of the feral hog lying mostly quietly in the back of the Land Rover. When I looked up, Fred had been looking off into the distance; but then he sensed me looking at him, and he looked over at me with the oddest look. Maybe I had surprised him out there. I don’t know. May he didn’t expect me to do as well as I did; or, more importantly, once we had decided to do this thing, maybe he was a little surprised that I went at it with such gusto, and with no fear. Maybe he was surprised, after he’d jumped on the hog’s head, to look up and see his wayward cousin, the one who drank and drugged to excess and was by most accounts totally irresponsible … maybe he was surprised to see him, right there and right on time, on top of that fucking pig and cutting him where he needed to be cut, with no hesitation. Just taking care of fucking business, as dependable as he could be.

If he was surprised at that, he shouldn’t have been. Fred and I played racquetball together in college, and in our junior year we completed a mighty upset of the defending champions, who were much better players than us, and much more serious about racquetball and just about everything else than we were, and we won the intramural doubles championship, against all the odds. We were a terrific combination, actually. We trusted each other implicitly, for one thing. Fred was the tactical player, making precision shots and returns; while I was the one who dove headfirst into the walls, trying to make saves … and who bent several rackets, and had nearly a dozen pairs of goggles broken by return shots because I’d got too close to the fucking wall, just doing my thing. I think my style of play amused Fred, but he respected it, too. It helped us win; and anyway, it was the only way I could ever play.

Fred should have known that would translate over to hog hunting, and just about anything else I tried, especially with him. We didn’t see each other as much as we had as kids and in college, so maybe he just forgot.

It was nice to bask in the tacit approval of my lifelong friend and cousin, who I respected so much. But that really wasn’t why I felt so good that afternoon, sitting out in the middle of a palmetto swamp in the middle of fucking nowhere South Carolina.

It was late afternoon, and the shadows had begun to lengthen across the clearing we were sitting in. The sun and the shadows cast by some nearby tallow trees were dappled across my face. I had looked up then, and just about all I could see was blue sky. I was physically spent, but in a good way. Unlike about 99% of the people I knew, who lived and worked and loved and died and never once had any real idea what it was like to be at the mercy of the elements or truly out in nature, if even just a little bit … unlike them, I knew. I’d had the opportunity … to be out there, in the open. To sweat and labor and risk injury, in order to do something worthwhile and, well, great. How many of my co-workers knew what it felt like to have a wild animal under them? An animal who meant no good, who could and would do harm, if given half the chance? How many knew what it felt like to subdue this wild thing, with one’s own hands, and feel the fight go right out of it, right under one?

And then afterward, how many would know the tremendous amount of sympathy and even empathy one would have for the quarry one had just hunted down and subdued? I remember reading of the respect and even reverence the Native American buffalo hunters held for the noble animal they hunted. I don’t think I really understood that when I read about it, back in school somewhere.

But I understood it that day in the South Carolina swamp; at least a little bit. Fred had been idly stroking the hog lying in the back of our truck, comforting it, almost. Now I pulled myself up, and went over and sat next to my cousin, and did the same. That hog was getting some mixed signals that day, for sure.

He would be fattened up and then killed and butchered, soon enough. But I felt like I had some sympathy with him, by the end of our day together. I felt like I shared something with him, if only just a little bit.

We all have our day coming, we can be sure of that. Just like that hog, and everything else walking around alive on this planet. But we don’t think about that. I am sure the hog wasn’t thinking about it, even in the predicament he found himself in at that point. We don’t spend much time thinking about our end, because we are not made to. What I think I realized that day, if I didn’t know it already, and what that hog and all his brethren knew down to their bones, is that we are here for one thing – to feel alive.

Alive! The rest of it is just mundane details.

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