The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [178]
I e-mailed Angelo and asked him to let me know the next time he planned to go hunting. He wrote back saying he would give me forty-eight hours notice, to get ready.
4. MY PIG
Word came about a month later, on a May Friday, that we were to meet at a gas station in Sonoma the following Monday morning, 6:00 A.M. sharp. This time it would be just the two of us.
We drove the last few miles together in Angelo’s SUV, following a deserted road north of Healdsburg that curved extravagantly through deeply creased hills in the process of turning from winter green to summery gold. To me that morning all the hills looked like the backs and shoulders of great beasts, the thick grasses covering them like pelts.
Coming around the final bend before we reached Richard’s gate I spotted on my side a large group of pigs, big ones and babies together, right there on the hillside that sloped down to meet the road. Angelo pulled over onto the shoulder; the pigs were on Richard’s land, he said. I remembered from hunter ed that you weren’t allowed to shoot from a public roadway. So we decided we’d try to spook the pigs, force them up over the crest of the hill and down the other side, which would bring them into Richard’s forest. We honked, we hollered, we got out of the truck and waved our arms like lunatics, and eventually the pigs started to move up the hill.
“This gives me a very good feeling,” Angelo said as we climbed back into the truck. And then he offered the prediction/prayer: “You are going to shoot your pig today. A big pig.” I had my doubts, yet seeing those pigs did seem like a promising sign: They were up and about, feeding and on the move.
We spent the first part of the morning doing the circuit of Angelo’s customary spots, patrolling first the ridge in the ATV and then moving down into the lower forest on foot. The entire day I kept a round in my chamber. It was hotter than last time, so Angelo felt the pigs would be keeping to the shadier parts of the property. We staked out a wallow deep in the woods, and then a trampled clearing of ferns on the near side of the hill that abuts the road, but saw no signs of the group we’d tried to herd this way.
A little after nine in the morning we were walking together down a logging road cut into a steep hillside when we were stopped in our tracks by a grunt so loud and deep and guttural that it seemed to be coming from the bowels of the earth. A very big pig was very close by. But where? What direction to look? The sound had no address; this was the grunt of the ground itself, omnipresent, more audible to my torso than my ears. We crouched down low, making ourselves as inconspicuous as possible, and listened as hard as I’ve ever listened for anything before, listened the way you listen when you hear a strange sound in the night.
I needn’t have strained so, because the next sound we heard was nearly as loud as the first: the sharp clean crack of a branch coming from above us to our right, where the thickly oaked hillside climbed steeply to a crest. A stream ran down the hillside and crossed the path in front of us about thirty yards ahead. With my eyes I followed the silvery line of the stream up through the woods to the crest, and that’s when I saw it: a rounded black form, a negative of sunrise, coming over the top of the hill. Then another black sun, and another, a total of five or six, I couldn’t be sure, popping over the crest in a line like a string of huge black pearls.
I touched Angelo on the shoulder and pointed toward the pigs. What should I do? This time my gun was cocked, of course, and now, for the first time, I took off the safety. Should I shoot? No, you wait, Angelo said. See—they’re coming down the hill now. I followed the pigs with the barrel of my gun, trying to get one of them in my sight. My finger rested lightly on the trigger, and it took all the self-restraint I could summon not to squeeze, but I didn’t have