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By Root 364 0

and that over time we could reach an accord. Night after night, they returned. The accord seemed to be: You plant, we eat. The jackrabbits were hungry too, but I discovered that they shun the nightshade family—which conveniently includes tomatoes and eggplants—and that I could dissuade them from my flowers with chicken wire (although a flowerbed that looks like Fort Knox is a doubtful ornament). Not so picky, the pigs. With mouths of steel and cast-iron stomachs, they relished the nightshades, and in their eagerness I swear they even ate chicken wire. Over the weeks I tried the most pungent flowers I could think of: geraniums, marigolds. They ate everything. Rare is the epicurean pig who has feasted at such a varied table as the one I provided.

I tried to drive them off. Banged on the windows, shrieked, and after a goodly amount of accomplishing nothing whatsoever through those means, cautiously opened the door a crack, stuck my head out, and hollered.

“Shoo, pigs!” said I.

“Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin,” thought they, apparently, in what passes for thought within those bony skulls. They ignored me profoundly, inciting me to extremes. I stooped to throwing rocks, and once by the wildest of chances, so help me God, I hit one, broadside. With a rock the size of a softball, and a respectable thud. The victim paused for half an instant midgobble and sniffed the air as if to ask, Was that a change in the weather? Then returned to the hollyhocks at hand. On the He-Man Scale of Strength, my direct hit scored “Weenie.” I seethed between the four walls of my house like Rochester’s mad wife in the attic.

In a fit of spite I went to a nursery that specializes in exotics, and brought home an Adenium obesum. This is the beautiful plant whose singularly lethal sap is used by African hunters to poison their darts.

Javelinas understand spite: they uprooted my Adenium obesum, gored it, and left it for dead.

Over the months our house slowly grew, with javelinas watching. We framed up an extra room, which we would eventually connect to the old house by tearing out a window, once it was sealed to the outside. We laid out sheet-metal ductwork, which would go into the ceiling, for heating the new addition. In the middle of the night we woke to the sound of the devil’s own celebration: hellacious hoofs on tin drums. The pigs had found their way into the new room and were trampling the ductwork, sending their tinny war cry to the stars above.

Ownership is an entirely human construct. At some point people got along without it. Many theorists have addressed the question of how private property came about, and some have gone so far as to suggest this artificial notion has led us into a mess of trouble. They aren’t talking about personal property, like a toothbrush or a digging stick to call one’s own, which has probably always been a human tradition. Even a bird, after all, has its nest, and chimpanzees in a part of central Africa where there’s a scarcity of nut-smashing tools are known to get possessive about their favorite rocks. But to own land, plants, other animals, more stuff than we need—that is the peculiar product of a modern imagination.

In the beginning, humans were communal and social creatures; this is agreed upon by all scientists who’ve given our species retroactive study. The habit and necessity of cooperation is what led us, like other social species, toward the development of an elaborate communication system. Other social primates that live in large groups, like Japanese macaques and baboons, communicate with a much richer repertoire of sounds than the solitary primates like orangutans. Many social mammals use not only verbal but olfactory signals—a language of the nose. An example of complex communication among birds, familiar to any rural child, is that of the socially cooperative chickens, who use different calls (in the wild, as well as the barnyard) to refer to important events in their lives: krk krk krk (food over here); kark kark KARK (really good food over here); RRRR-rrrr (hawk overhead). Parrots, another