Their eight little tails were twisted into eight curls so tight that I felt sure another twist would have lifted their hind feet off the ground. An unguarded step roused them, and then what excitement there was. Eight little voices were at once raised in protest at my slowness. Carefully spilling a little of the skim-milk "mash" into one end of the trough, I stepped back hastily and distributed the remainder evenly along the rest of it. The taste I had given them, however, was enough to get them all into action and reveal their characters. Really, one can't help liking little pigs. They are so human. For a moment I imagined myself a Professor Garner, and felt that I understood their language.
"Whee! whee! Willie got more than I did! Whee! Whee!
"Make Susie take her elbows—I mean, feet—out of my part of the trough!"
One little bully who did not like the table manners of his next neighbour jumped at him, and started to chew his ear. It was all a hurried scramble, and then a couple of them discovered that they were at the wrong end of the trough. Without a sound, they started to gobble the feed, while the others were still quarrelling and fighting. Right there I realised that I was not the first to observe the habit of pigs. There is a world of truth in the old saying we so often apply to men: "It is the still pig that gets the swill." Fortunately, the others soon noticed what was going on, and stopped squabbling to get their share. What pushing and gobbling there was then! It reminded me of the stock exchange, with a bull market in progress. They took no more interest in me than children do in their hostess at a birthday party after the ice-cream has been served, the human little rascals.
Some day I hope to have the leisure to write an adequate "Defence of the Pig." Now that Judge Jeffreys and Nero have been whitewashed and given good-conduct cards by the historians, I think that some one should speak a good word for the pigs. They have been very much maligned. And perhaps this is the right time to do it—after the pigs, both live and dressed—have been dragged through the mire of politics. To begin with, the pig is no more gross in his appetite than that much applauded "tame villatick fowl," the hen. As for cleanliness, give him a chance, and see how clean he can be. His dirtiness is due to the people who pen him up so that he can hardly stir. "Seek other cause 'gainst Rhoderick Dhu!" Then, consider how important the work of the pig has been in the making of Canada. He deserves a place in the gallery of the Makers of Canada, because the pioneers would have had a much harder time of it had they not been supported by plentiful supplies of fat pork. If the pig had his rights, he would be our national emblem, instead of the beaver. What has the beaver done for us, anyway? The pig, on the other hand, sustained our fathers in their fight against the wilderness, and yet his name is a name of scorn. Even the poets, in whom fair play is intuitive, have done scant justice to the pig. As a matter of fact, I can recall only one bit of poetry about the pig in Canadian literature, and that is McIntyre's epigram "On a hog exhibited at the Western Fair, which weighed 1000 pounds, and measured five-foot-nine from tip to tip":
"Pig had to do some routine work
To make a thousand pounds of pork;
But our stomach it doth not incline
To eat a hog five-foot-nine;
Let others eat enormous swine."
In clearing the country of snakes, the pig has been a veritable animal St. Patrick. Even the rattlesnake had to go down before him. Because of this, he deserves a place in heraldry second only to St. George the dragon-killer. In history, the pig has received frequent mention from the time of the prodigal son. Even to-day the reigning family of Servia proudly claims its descent from a militant swineherd, and do not both the United States and Canada boast of many pork-packing millionaires, who prove the importance of the pig to modern society? These are only a few of the points that might be developed in a "Defence of the Pig," and as the subject is one of the few on which a book has not yet been written, we may expect to have it written by some one before long.
I never think of pigs without remembering a dark night, many years ago, when they used to run half-wild, instead of being penned and fed scientifically. I was coming home late, and took a short-cut through the dark woods. I was whistling to keep my courage up, for even though I knew that there were no wolves or bears, there was something uncanny about the deep shadows. At last I came to a huge elm tree that had been cut down for a coon in the brave days when the coon-skin was worth more than a tree three feet in diameter and the labour it took to chop it down. It was late in the fall, and there were deep drifts of leaves beside every log. Climbing to the top of the fallen giant, I jumped down into a great drift—and then yelled with terror. The earth seemed to spring up under me and around me, as a drove of half-grown pigs that had taken shelter from the cold in the dry leaves began to scatter, squealing and "whoofing." They were every bit as scared as I was, and as they rushed about blindly they bowled me off my feet. My first thought was of wolves and bears, about which I had heard so much in my boyhood, but I soon realised what the trouble was. And yet, in the few seconds when I didn't know what I had tumbled into, I got a scare that made me wear my hair à la pompadour for weeks afterwards. Since then I have at different times tripped over a sleeping pig at night when walking past a straw stack, but I never got such a scare as I did in the woods. Perhaps that is because these modern pigs haven't so much steam in them as did the grunters we had when the saying "root hog or die" had an actual application. They had to root for their livings, and I have no doubt that there are still neighbourhoods that keep up feuds that were started by the predatory pigs of the early settlers. It was no easy matter to make rail-fences "horse-high and hog-tight," when they had to be built over cradle-holes, and those eager, hungry pigs could be depended on to find a hole if there was one; and if there wasn't, they were not beyond making one. Those pigs didn't pose before cameras and get their pictures in the agricultural papers, but if an acorn fell within half a mile of them, they would hear it, and get to it in time to catch it on the first bounce. We shall never see their like again.
And now to come back to our eight—did you ever see anything more contented-looking? Every one of them looks as snug as the cat after he has eaten the canary, and even a cat couldn't put more contentment into his purring than they do into their grunting. A couple of them are lying sprawled on their stomachs in the sun in an attitude which I would not hesitate to condemn as unnatural if I saw it in a picture. One is chewing a blade of grass, and no doubt meditating on the weather and the prospects of the food supply for the winter. Others are doing their best to do a little rooting in the baked ground, no doubt in the hope of getting a place to wallow in. Vain hope! Just look at the little fellow scratching himself against the end of the trough. He positively looks to be smiling, and the tone of his grunting tells clearly that he agrees with Josh Billings, who said: "The discomfort of itching is more than half made up by the pleasure of scratching." Taken altogether, these little pigs make as interesting and pretty a picture as the farm affords. And looking at them from a practical point of view, is there anything about the place that will better repay feeding and attention, with pork at the present price? But don't let us think of that. It is too tragic to think of these happy little fellows being turned into Wiltshire bacon. Let them enjoy the swill and sunshine and other good things of life while they may. It would not be such a bad thing if some of the rest of us could do the same.