The Good Good Pig (20 page)

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.”

L
IZ DOES NOT COMPLAIN.
T
HE 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.

T
OGETHER 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
compas
sion
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.

S
PRING IS A FARRIER'S BUSIEST SEASON, BUT STILL
, G
EORGE 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 conscious 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.

And now, with spring soon to flower, I was grateful.

Soon there would be tulips, and then lilacs, and then strawberries. Feeling loved and lucky, I stood on the tender lip of spring, open to the healing summer.

C
HAPTER 13

The Days Before the Lilacs

T
HAT
F
RIDAY WAS A BEAUTIFUL
M
AY DAY—THE TREES AT LAST
lush with leaves, the grass as emerald as a rice field. Our crab apple and quince were a mass of hot pink and salmon petals, heavy with bumblebees. In a day or two, the apple trees in the field would come into bloom, and soon thereafter, the lilacs I love would flower, arching over our doorway, filling the whole world with their scent.

On a day like this, of course, Chris would want to be outside. So shortly before noon, although we were out of slops, I tried to lure him to the Pig Plateau with grain.

Although he stepped over the threshold with relative ease, he wasn't particularly interested in the grain. He had taken only perhaps thirty paces out of his pen when he made his decision: he had now arrived at the spot where he wanted to root with his nose, expose the cool, damp, fragrant earth, and lie down in the sun. There was nothing I could do.

You try to be mad at a pig at a time like that. I needed to go inside and get to work. And the blackflies were swarming—which didn't bother Christopher but really bothered me. “Terrible!” I said. “You're being a terrible animal! A dreadful beast!” But, of course, I said this as I bent over to stroke his ear, and then leaned in to pat his belly—and next I found myself kneeling in the freshly dug earth, rubbing the length of his stomach. He grunted in a cadence that said ha-ha-ha, as if he was laughing at the joke he had played on me once again.

I couldn't blame him, of course. Why should he walk the additional yards down to the Pig Plateau when things looked so inviting here? For him, as always, the immediate fulfillment of pleasure was utterly, unquestionably paramount. His priorities were always clear.

So he laid his huge body down in the dirt. And once again, swatting at blackflies, I was powerless before the great, swelling tide of Christopher's desires.

Ah, but there
was
one thing we could do: we could appeal to Chris's Higher Power.

I dispatched Howard to go get fresh slops.

Fiddleheads came through, providing three buckets, one of which featured doughnuts floating in a sea of pancake batter. As Howard retreated from the flies, I fished out one of the doughnuts and dropped it inches from Christopher's head.

The pig stretched his huge head forward and tried to lengthen his lips to bring the doughnut to his mouth. He couldn't. Getting the doughnut would require standing. And with the sun so warm, the earth moist and cool…well, after all, he wasn't starving.

But then a hen came to my rescue. Spotting the doughnut, she raced over, eyed it with surgical precision, and began to peck at it, enlarging the hole. Another hen saw the prize and joined in. In minutes, everyone in the barnyard would see the bonanza and come running. This was too much for Christopher. He rocked his bulk up sideways, pulled his feet beneath him, uttered a grunt of disapproval, and stood to eat the remains of the doughnut. I was able to entice him down to the Plateau with the remains of the slops. I poured out half, and, with his entourage of pecking chickens, he gorged until he was ready to lie down again in the sun.

Unfortunately, he was still enjoying the sun at 6:15 and was utterly uninterested in coming inside. This was a problem. That evening we were planning to meet Liz's daughter, Stephie, for dinner at 6:30. It was Howard's and my first outing together for any length of time since Tess had become so frail, and Stephanie's first without her family since she'd come from Texas to help with her brother's rehab and the new baby.

We all very much wanted to get together. Because of Tess's condition, we didn't want to leave her, but the single step to our front door made our house inaccessible to Stephie's wheelchair. So we had decided to meet at the Hancock Inn, just a mile away from our house. One of us could drive back and check on Tess during dinner. We really didn't want to drive off and leave our pig out, either—but it was clear, after my many unsuccessful efforts to rouse him, that this was what we would have to do.

We had a lovely supper. After we finished our entrees, Howard went off to check on Tess and Chris while Stephie and I sipped tea. Howard returned looking concerned.

“What's wrong?” I was scared.

“Our dog is OK,” Howard reported. “But Chris is lying in a strange position.” He was lying as he often did, on the downward slope of the Plateau—but with his legs facing
up
slope.

“Is he upset about this?” I asked.

“No—but there is no way he can get up from that position,” Howard answered.

I looked at Stephie for help. She is in line with her mother and Gretchen for the award for Most Supremely Competent Person on Earth. And in this case she was particularly qualified. As a disability rights activist, she might have some advice on how to help an arthritic pig rise to his feet.

In fact, she did. “You need a Hoyer lift. It's not made for pigs,” she stated, almost apologetically. “It's for people who can't get out of bed. But it might work for Chris. There are some really big people out there now.” She paused.

“Do you have one?” I asked.

“I bet you could order one on the Internet,” she said. “It won't do you any good tonight, though.”

(Note to self: order Hoyer lift. Do not mention to salesperson it's for a fat, arthritic pig.)

Stephie wanted to come with us and help get Chris up. But considering the steep, dirt slope and the coming darkness, we all pictured what might happen and decided against it. Stephie promised to alert the family when she got back from dinner. If we needed them, she said, just call. Everyone—Ramsay, recovering from his brain injury, Heather, less than two weeks after giving birth, Liz, mostly healed from her surgery, and Steve—all of them would be standing by to help our pig.

Howard and I raced home, hoping that Christopher might have somehow changed position on his own. He hadn't.

“Christopher, how are you, sweetie?” I asked him.

He grunted softly. He was not in the least upset.

“Chris, come on, fat man. Get up,” said Howard.

Christopher wouldn't move.

No slops would rouse him. We pulled at his harness to urge him up, but he seemed to realize he couldn't rise from this position. Yet he was strangely serene. He seemed confident that Howard and I would come up with a solution. He was content to lie there and wait until we did.

Howard and I discussed our options.

“Should we roll him?”

“He's not going to like that.”

“What if we tried to move his hindquarters so they were facing downhill? Then he would have his powerful back legs in position to rise.”

“I think he's too heavy. I'm also afraid of pulling his legs and hurting him.”

“If we roll him, he might keep rolling.”

“And right downhill is a giant pricker bush.”

“A seven-hundred-pound pig stuck in a pricker bush—at night.”

“This isn't good.”

“This is terrible.”

“You are a terrible beast!” I scolded the recumbent pig. “But we're going to help you. We love you so much.”

We couldn't get his hindquarters in position, so we decided to roll him. This required that the pig be completely upside down for a second, with his legs sticking straight up in the air—a position we were sure would not make him happy. He might thrash. He might scream. He might bite. But there was no other option. I took his front legs and Howard took the back.

“One…two…three!”

He rolled over and hit with one air-expelling grunt. Then he kept sliding—long enough for us to wonder when he'd stop. But once he did, he got up calmly, as if nothing unusual had happened at all. After frowsting in the grass for a bit, and then stopping to scratch his head on the back wall of the writing studio, he followed Howard and me and the slops bucket, meandering slowly, and with dignity, back to his pen.

T
HE SUNNY WEATHER DIDN'T HOLD FOR THE WEEKEND
. C
HRIS
stayed in his pen Saturday, as it was clouded over and a little windy. On Sunday, the day I was to receive an honorary doctorate of letters from Keene State College, it was raining. I processed to the outdoor stage damply, along with the college president, trustees, and the rest of the platform party who would address the graduates and their families.

The sun began to peek out during the actual ceremony. Howard had to stay with Tess, so Liz, Selinda, Gretchen, and Gretchen's new husband, Peter—a horse trainer turned mortician that she had met at an equine event—were my guests.

“I wish my parents were alive,” I began my address, “but today I am surrounded by a significant portion of the people I love most in the world—as are you. So it seems an appropriate moment to talk about blessings.”

Indeed, in reading the citation conferring my honorary degree, the robed college trustee had recounted into the microphone some of the unique blessings that I had enjoyed in the past fourteen years of my odd career: “On assignment, you have been chased by an angry gorilla, hunted by a tiger, bitten by a vampire bat, and undressed by an orangutan…”

And in my speech, I recounted yet more blessings. I told about my first trip to India, when I was working on
Spell of the Tiger.
My translator, speedboat, scientist, and guide had all fallen through, and I was stuck for a month in a mangrove swamp full of man-eating tigers; my language-tape Bengali was my only means of communication. That was when I had hired Girindra—and acquired a Bengali brother I'd never known I had. I recalled my very first book,
Walking with the Great Apes,
written about my heroines, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. On my final expedition to Africa to research it—a trip that had been repeatedly rescheduled to fit Jane's busy schedule—Jane, my childhood icon, had broken my heart. I had arrived at Tanzania's Gombe Stream Reserve to find that she had stood me up, leaving me alone with one African research assistant, no food, and the chimps. Instead of chasing Jane, I tracked the chimps myself.

Blessings, all. In each case, I hadn't found what I had hoped for or expected. Instead, I'd discovered something far more exciting or profound—an unexpected insight, a surprise gift. “And that's a pretty good working definition of a blessing,” I said. “So go out into the world where your heart calls you. The blessings will come, I promise you that.”

I had never made a promise so public. This was the largest audience I had ever addressed: six thousand people. But I was certain this was the deepest truth I knew. “I wish for you the insight to recognize the blessings as such,” I said, “and sometimes this is hard. But you'll know it's a blessing if you are enriched and transformed by the experience. So be ready. There are great souls and teachers everywhere. It is your job to recognize them.”

A
S
L
IZ DROVE ME HOME
, I
FELT AWASH IN JOY
. R
ADIANT WITH THE
love and pride of my dearest friends, I carried home a bouquet of tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils from Selinda's garden, in a vase she had thrown herself at her pottery class. I came home to a house full of flowers. Howard had stepped out briefly to visit artist friends who were great gardeners and come back with armloads of gigantic parrot tulips, the kind with splayed, fringed petals, like flamboyant kisses. I hugged Howard and petted Tess and went out to the barn to see Christopher.

He was cheerful, standing, and eager to come out. Even though it was 5:00, when I opened the gate to go in to pet him, he thrust his big head out and stepped eagerly over the threshold. We walked together to the Plateau. He enjoyed half a bucket of slops—featuring noodles, croissants, strawberries, and some sort of creamy sauce—and he stayed outside until the light began to fade. He was already on his feet when I came to let him in, and he walked back to his pen hardly limping at all. I was thrilled to see him looking so robust. And when he came in, I poured more delicious slops into his bowl, and he was grateful for them, grunting with happiness as he picked out the strawberries first.

More slops were on the way. That night, as I was washing dishes, I heard something fossicking in the slops buckets on the back porch. I opened the door hoping to see a raccoon. Instead, it was Mollie and Bob, who had stopped over on their way back to their other home in Cambridge. They were not raiding the slops buckets but adding to them, decanting a cornucopia of stale baked goods that Ned and Jack had been saving for Chris for the past month or so in their freezer. I noted this was a particularly fine selection, including loaves of French bread, frozen waffles, and chocolate cupcakes with green icing.

After dark, once I closed the chickens in, I slid the barn door shut to Chris's pen as always. “Goodnight, my good, good pig. I love you.” And he grunted his goodnight grunt.

I
FOUND HIM IN THE MORNING LYING IN HIS USUAL COMFORTABLE
position, on his side, trotters outstretched. His eyes were shut, his face peaceful. But I knew right away something was terribly wrong. His stomach was hideously bloated. Probably quite some time earlier, certainly before midnight, Christopher had died in his sleep.

I threw myself upon his great, prone body, as I had done with so many other sorrows before. “No, no, no!” I cried. “How can this be? I love you!”

It seemed impossible. “Wait,” Howard said. Looking upon Chris's body, Howard thought surely he would draw another breath. But none came.

We knew that, on a warm day like this one, we could not let his body rest in his stall for long. We would have to bury him right away.

Howard called Bud Adams, whose backhoe attends the funerals of nearly all the large animals in town. He was in the driveway twenty minutes later. Meanwhile, I called Gretchen, Liz, and Selinda. Each one said the same thing, immediately and without question.