One of the best moments of my childhood was a month I spent on a farm when I was eleven. We were about fifteen kids, ranging from ‘My family keeps chickens’ to ‘Wait, potatoes grow underground?!?’ and we helped with gardening and the animals and slept on straw and went out at night to learn about constellations.
It was like Hogwarts, but with goats.
One of my favourite animals there was Louise, a gigantic she-pig who lived with her daughter Hortense just behind the stables. She was like a Renaissance queen - sprawled out against the fence, enjoying the shade, and looking up at us with a distinct human expression (fed-upness bordering on open dislike). Hortense would eat kitchen waste, grunting in appreciation as soon as she saw one of us arrive with the bucket, but Louise always required nobler offerings, such as a whole apple she’d take directly from our hands.
Anyway, by the time we arrived there Louise was heavily pregnant - probably exhausted and demented with the need of creating a welcoming environment for her delivery and future babies - and she’d often bicker with Hortense (one thing I learned there is that when pigs bicker, that means they bite down and draw blood). The farmer was actually considering moving Hortense before the situation could escalate any further, and was working on a new pen as the hottest day of July dawned and Louise finally lost her God-given shit.
I don’t know how it started because I was sitting quietly in the dining hall trying to sketch a spider I’d trapped under a glass when I suddenly heard, in quick succession the unmistakeable sounds of impending doom: Hortense screaming bloody murder, some kid shouting, the catastrophic CRACK of something very sturdy breaking down, more pig noises, more human noises, and just as I was getting up, the glass door to my left shattered as a 700 lb sow crashed through it, ran right through the chairs in front of her (two splintered into matchsticks) and snouted her way out of the other door.
It was like a minor earthquake.
(The pitcher of tea that had been on my table had fallen down, and so had the glasses - including my spider glass. Two framed photos of the surrounding mountains had slid down the wall, sending glass everywhere.)
As I stood there like an idiot, pencil in hand, the farmer came running through the door. “Stay back,” he roared, stopping to pick up a broom. I raised my hand to point him in the right direction - as if the door hanging off one hinge wasn’t a big enough clue - and he ran out again.
Ultimately, he decided Louise was too angry to be reasoned with. He left her alone, fuming under an old apple tree at the very edge of the farm, and focused on moving poor, traumatized Hortense to a safer place. Since the new shed wasn’t finished, the chickens drew the short straw. Hortense moved in with them, and she immediately scared them half to death by digging a car-sized hole in their coop. She then sat inside it, oblivious to the distressed, offended clucking echoing all around her, and spent the rest of the day crying about her mother hurting her (and I mean, real human tears) and warily accepting bits of fruits and veggies from us as we tried to cheer her up.
As for Louise, she didn’t seem to give a fuck about any of that. After several hours, she simply strutted back to the now-empty pigsty, majestically ignoring the signs of the devastation, sat down and waited for dinner.
I was there for another three weeks - mother and daughter never talked again. Louise was much happier, and Hortense, after a few more days of mourning, made friends with the chickens. When I left, the scars of Louise’s bites were still angry and red on her delicate, Georgian features.
