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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