A Circle of Hogs

Posted Sat Jul 20, 2002 in

Winter in the Missouri could be a lot of different things. Sometimes it was cloudy for weeks and the overcast sky would weigh on my spirits. It could be rainy for weeks as well, with a little rain every day, making the world damp and dreary. Or it might rain hard or snow and be very cold. Working livestock in the mud and cold was neither easy nor pleasant. But, the animals still required care.

Sometimes the weather would be mild. I remember several deer seasons sitting out in the woods asleep against an oak tree with just a light jacket. The morning or afternoon sun would shine on me as I sat waiting. Those days were some of the best and it didn’t matter whether any deer were present at all. I could hear the squirrels working the mast in the woods. I once fell asleep against a oak tree, to awake with a large fox squirrel running directly at me. He ran up, jumped, bounced off my shoulder and ran up the tree! It startled me pretty badly! It must have startled him too because he sat on a branch above me, scolding me in his squirrely way.

Winter could be very cold too. When a cold front would blow through, the air would dry out and the sky would clear. During the day, the sky would be so blue it almost hurt to look at it. At night, the radiative cooling would make the temperatures drop very low.

On those nights, I could hear the hogs barking and squealing from my bedroom. I wondered why they made so much noise. So, one night, I slipped my clothes on and stepped out the back door. The early morning was lit by a hard, bright moon shining down through the cold winter sky. I hadn’t turned on any lights in the house so as not to wake any of my family, so my eyes were already adjusted to the dark. I gripped my parka around me as it was very cold, the breath steaming from my face.

I could hear them in the field. I stepped over to the fence to watch the scene play out. I was amazed. The hogs had formed up into a circle to stay warm as they lay on the ground. Every now and again, one of the animals on the outside of the circle would get up, cold and irritated, then walk across the circle toward the center, stepping on the animals beneath it, to lie down in the center where it was warm.

These were hogs and some of them weighed 400 pounds or more. (So, they were not pigs!) Of course, the animals being stepped on were unhappy and they barked and squealed whenever a sensitive place was marked with a hoof.

The process went on in a more or less continuous fashion as the outside animals got cold. I stood there in amazement, watching them, fascinated by what I saw, the cold night air forgotten.