An Absolute Hog

We crash through low brush and spruce, Val in the lead. Snow sinks into my boots, pine needles sticking to the wool of our uniform. The lake looms in front of us. I can’t see the pig, but I hear the grunts and squeals.

“Hold up,” Val says.

The pig stands in front of us not twenty feet away, looking back. He’s so small. I wonder how he still looks so perfectly pink after a week in the woods. I think we’re making eye contact, like Syl has some sort of deeper infinite wisdom to convey to me and only me, but then I blink and he just looks cross-eyed.

Val slowly cocks the gun, wrestling the butt into his scrawny shoulder.

“Captain, wait.”

The pig hasn’t lost eye contact.

“Boy, if I’d waited all my life I’d probably look just like you.” Val places his finger on the trigger.

“You can’t wait for it to start. The hesitation’s what’ll kill you.”

The blast shocks all three of us, and then, squealing.

I open my eyes. The pig’s on the run again, faster this time, a trail of bloodied snot following it. The quiet forest erupts with each shriek, birds calling and beating the air.

“Did you seriously miss it? What the fuck, Val.” I’m in a cold sweat.

“I got that fucker right in the face.” Val considers it. “Well, we’d better follow him.”

“It’s heading straight for the lake. We’re too heavy.”

“We’ll cut him off around the other side. Back to the truck!”

 

When Dad went up to the slope for work, Nick had been my responsibility. He tagged along wherever I went, even the river. The regulars knew we were Jim’s boys, so Mom would let us hitch a ride out there with our poles in tow before sunrise.

I had better luck, being bigger with more coordination. When I finally wrestled a salmon to the rocky bank it was Nick’s job to pound the hell out of the skull. I brought in fish after fish with nothing but tangles on his own line, but he’d just set his teeth grinding, cast again, and let the river take his bobber downstream.

Town appears on the other side of the lake. We drive to the edge, looking for the trail of blood. Not 60 yards away, but the road stops.

“Okay, boy.” Val hands me the gun.

“What?”

“It’s up to you. I’m gonna drive the truck around, back in from the main road.”

“What?”

“Follow him! Herd him towards East End.”

“Wh-why do I have to?”

Val just points to his leg, as if that’s enough explanation for everything.

“Captain, I can’t…”

Dad used to pay us $5 a squirrel but Nick was the only one who could shoot to kill. He’d pretend not to notice me hiding underneath the porch when Nick would pull the trigger on the B.B., and I’d cringe as the squirrel inevitably twitched in reflex. We had matching jackets, Nick and I, dark blue, it’d be easy to get us mixed up. I knew Dad didn’t though.

“Ter, listen, you don’t have to shoot him, just scare him north.”

“But, but he’s half-dead already…Why give me the gun if I don’t have to…”

“Just in case.”

The truck pulls away, a trail of diesel following, and I’m standing with the gun awkwardly between my wet palms.

It’s trying to be a beautiful day. Cold. I see myself above my body. It’s not hard to follow the pig’s bloodied trail, now, the brush lower, less trees. Through the woods, through the branches. Feet soaking. The shrieking gets louder and closer.

I used to think it was the worst possible thing, death. But there are worse things, like walking around half-alive. Death, at least, means the chase is over. Death means it’s all over.

 

Jessie came with us that last trip to Anchorage. She just told Val she was coming and that was that. Mom and Dad flew up with Nick in the hospital’s helicopter but we drove. We stopped twice—once for Twizzlers and Diet Coke and then to throw rocks into the glacier sluff-off by Cooper Landing. She rarely did things she was bad at but she let me show her how to cradle the rock in that extra thumb skin. The rocks disappeared into the silty water, lost, and we’d move on to pick up more.

We had to stay at the hospital all weekend. People were dying all over the place and my limbs got stiff and angry.

While we waited for Nick to wake up, she grabbed my hand and pulled me to an old abandoned wing. We ducked under caution tape.

“Look what I found,” she said.

For hours we raced those two broken wheelchairs up and down the darkened musty halls. Sweating, I lost.

 

The pig’s thirty feet in front of me, and I feel my breath leave in puffs. It must be fucking cold, but I can’t feel my limbs anymore. All I see is Syl, looking at me, not a hundred yards from the Alaska Bible Institute Daycare. A small building, preschool. A fence around the yard, but a section’s pulled down—big enough for a pig.

There’s a short bus pulling up to the building, and the kids run out for recess.

All buses must smell the same, like hot plastic and sticky kid breath. That swoosh of air as the bus that morning had pulled up its stop sign, crooked. I remember yelling to Nick, telling him to get his ass on the right side of the road. It’d been an icy morning, still dark. A car coming from the opposite direction couldn’t stop, couldn’t see that dark matching jacket. I’d been standing ten feet away, watching his face contort and feeling mine match– a silent horror mirror.

Screams of laughter, chanted songs. A ball bounces. Syl breathes. I match him, breath for breath. Blood cakes the pig’s nostrils, and I can see where Val left the bullet. Syl wobbles, then heads straight to the recess yard.

“No!” I whisper from the trees, “Syl! Hey, here piggy piggy!” But he doesn’t hear me, or I’m not her.

I have to. I have to raise the rifle and my hands are shaking, and then I’m looking down the barrel, and then a shot. It echoes through the now-silent yard. The pig falls.

Hysterical cries echoed through that dark morning static. Hot tears stuck to me all over, that icy mask, my gloves were wet. Sirens came from far away, far away and then close. Too loud on that dark muffled road. Bright lights, red, blue, made my heart pound in those wet fingertips.

Blood’s always redder than anything when it spreads across pristine packed snow.

Nick was nine, nine, nine, when the light came late morning and we could see the red.

I can only hear that swooshing in my ears now, like the planes on the tarmac or the bus’s stop sign that couldn’t make things stop.

I wait for those same sirens. Teachers corral the kids back into the school, the prayers echoing and whispering too familiar. My knees won’t work anymore and all I can see is bright red light. Then I hear the truck. Val’s whoop.

Someone pulled me off the ground but I wouldn’t let go of the down jacket sleeve similar matching mine just smaller. Then hoarse yells, my throat. The arms around my chest held too tight.

 

It’d been raining when Nick caught his first salmon.

“Reel when he gives you slack!” I must’ve yelled. “Don’t fight him when he wants to run!” Nick’s face scrunched into itself and he grunted with every reel. “Need help?”

“Fuck no,” he breathed, strings of water dripping down his red baseball cap. “Just get the net ready.”

When she was safe on the bank everyone cheered. Some tourists had pulled up, late to the tide in their RV. It stopped raining. My chest just about burst with pride as they snapped pictures. Forty pounder.

She’d been wider and meatier than Nick’s scrawny little body, an absolute hog gleaming in the morning light with all sorts of colors.

Piper Daugharty, born and raised in Homer, Alaska, spends summers tackling halibut and winters in long, ice-encrusted meditation. She just graduated from Southern Oregon University and now enjoys reading whatever the heck she wants. She continues to pursue her one, true, ever-elusive aspiration: to become a mermaid.

Featured artwork: Two shots and more, by Merlin Flower