When it became pretty warm, the pigs assembled by the lagoon to drink and wallow in the mud. Before so very long the Muggywah appeared, with Jennie and Esther on board. They moored her out a little way and waded in. Quietly they drove the herd up toward the rocks and bushes, for, though not what could be called wild, the pigs would not permit a close approach. Presently one of them poked his nose through Delbert’s waiting noose, and Delbert fairly held his breath till he stepped on, and then he gave a mighty jerk and began hauling in his rope over the pulley. He had caught the porker just back of one front leg, and the astonishment of that pig and his companions when he was thus lifted bodily into the air was enough, Delbert afterward said, to pay him for all his trouble.
From behind his screen of rocks and bushes he pulled the squealing animal up till he could reach him with a sort of shepherd’s crook he had provided himself with; whereupon he fastened the rope and pulled the pig in out of sight of its companions and dispatched it.
At the first squeal the girls had retreated most hastily to the Muggywah and pushed off, paddling back till they were well out of sight of the herd of pigs, when they moored the craft again, this time to a rock on shore, and, ascending the hill, circled round back till they found Delbert cutting up the game.
DELBERT PULLED THE SQUEALING ANIMAL UP
They did by it as they had done by the deer,—skinned it and carried the meat home tied up in the skin slung over a pole. They had a stick with a fork at one end, so each of the girls could take a fork, and Delbert managed the other end.
After that Delbert had no more taste for potting small game. He spent his time thinking up tricks and traps for deer and pigs. The deer were not such easy marks, but the pigs, being more stupid or less shy, could often be successfully bagged by practically the same tactics as he had used the first time.
Finally Marian suggested to him that it would be in the long run a great saving of time and an all-round better plan if he would build a good little pen somewhere and catch rather small pigs and put them into it, where they could fatten them up on garden stuff, of which they had plenty now,—the inferior bananas, for instance,—and then they could kill them when they chose. Jennie thought of a good place for a pen, close to the watermelon-patch, where there was a scrubby tree or two and a great overhanging rock that the pigs could go under for shade and shelter, and where they would not have to build a fence except on two sides.
The plan was put into operation and worked very well. They built the fence mostly of rocks piled up into a wall, and when it was finished, Delbert stocked it with youngsters that he was sure were quite old enough to leave their mothers. And the catching of them and the conveying of them across to the pen gave him much glee in spite of the hard labor involved.
The pork when killed was cured with salt and smoke. Marian did not have very good success with the last method, yet she managed it after a fashion. First she tried smoking the meat by hanging it over their chimney, but that was too hot, for it cooked it as well as smoking it and fried out all the grease too. But she did better when she built a smokehouse where a tiny fire discharged its smoke through a tunnel in a bank that terminated in a little cubby-hole affair of sticks and rocks where the meat was laid. They called it a smokehouse. It was a sort of doll smokehouse. The meat was always cut in rather small pieces and well salted, for Marian had a horror of spoilt meat.