A Bear Ate My Pigs

In my current state of adulthood, I feel fortunate in having had the unique childhood experiences that I had.  Back then, of course, I knew no other existence, and presumed that my life was normal. 

Right around the voraciously formative age of 4, my family (mom, dad, big sister and myself at that time) moved from our comfortable small-town Ohio home into the wilderness of Northern Vermont.  Allow me to define this wilderness: A vast and thickly forested portion of the state, just brushing fingertips with Canada, in a relatively unpopulated area known as the Northeast Kingdom.  Holland, Vermont was where my parents chose for us to call home.  I'm not sure I'd call it a town... perhaps a village?  Empty miles of unnamed dirt roads stretched between homes, and a tiny schoolhouse held all of the maybe 50 total children from kindergarten through 8th grade.  2 entire grade levels shared each classroom (and each teacher), and a cook prepared homemade food for all daily.  One of my fondest memories from Holland Elementary School was ice-skating at recess.  We would rush to the box of skates in the hallway, finding a pair that fit, and clamber across the snow-covered playground on bladed feet to the skating rink.  I believe in today's society this practice would be known as a "lawsuit waiting to happen."

So here we are in the wilderness.  Did we buy a house and get quickly settled in?  No.  No we didn't.  We bought land.  Upon this land, my adventurous parents pitched a camping tent, and in that camping tent my family of four lived for several months as Dear Old Mom & Dad built a house.  Note, they did not have a house built.  They built a house themselves, from basement to rooftop, with hammers, nails, and the help of a few neighbors.  My sister and I would use scraps of the lumber to build high-chairs for our dolls, in which we would "feed" them any sort of edible or inedible berries we could find nearby.  Choke cherries were a favorite, and to this day I can conjure up that acidic bitter-tart taste in my mind.

We had no electricity in the tent.  No running water.  For drinking water, we would carry empty gallon jugs about 1/2 mile down the road to fill from a neighbor's outdoor spigot.  Bathing happened in Seymour Lake, with Ivory soap of course (it floats!).  A makeshift toilet was constructed far behind the tent with a toilet seat on a board with a hole in it situated over a hole in the ground.   There was a time or two when a curious bear would approach the tent at night, and my parents would somehow manage to convince us children that there was absolutely no reason to be scared, while they themselves must have been bordering on heart attacks.

Just before the cold months of Winter arrived, the house was finished (enough to live in, anyway).  Winter storms would easily deposit as much as 6 feet of snow over the property, leaving only a suggestion of where the car might be in the driveway, or how tall the trees might truly be with only the top portion poking up through the whitened world.  My sister and I mastered the art of building perfect snow forts, and we also became expert tree-climbers.  Our "back yard" contained a brook (great for catching trout with Dad), a beaver dam, a field that was always thick with dandelions in the Summer, rows of apple trees (perfect for Mom's pies), and tall Maples tapped with galvanized buckets for the syrup our neighbors made.  Vegetables were grown in the garden, and canned for the cold months.  Friends and neighbors who grew various varieties of produce would naturally share, and help each other with harvesting and canning.  Meat was either raised at home, hunted in the woods, or butchered on a local farm.  Milk came from cows, butter was churned, eggs were retrieved every morning from the chicken coupe (which replaced the tent after the house was built).  We eventually built a pig pen and kept 2 pigs, as well.

The chickens and pigs were a real pain for a kid like me.  Every morning before school, I had to go to the chicken coupe and retrieve the nasty, poop-covered food and water dispensers, bring them into the house, clean them, and replenish them with fresh water and chicken feed, all the while being brutally pecked at by the vicious little hens.  When it was time for a chicken slaughter, several families would gather at one property, set up croquet in the yard, chop the heads off (they really do run around with no head until they die), and then the children had the unpleasant task of plucking out all the feathers while the birds hung from a post, dripping blood from their necks.

For the pigs, we kept a slop bucket beneath the kitchen sink.  All plate scraps from every meal were scraped into the bucket, and each morning, the plate scraps were combined with a grain mixture and water, creating... slop.  This heavy bucket of slop had to be carried out to the pig pen, hoisted over the fence, and dumped into the pigs' feeding trough.  Unfortunately, pigs are not the brightest creatures, and would never cease to position their heads over the trough in anticipation, thus forcing us to dump the slop directly onto their heads with every feeding.  These were only some of my morning chores, which also extended to such tasks as carrying in loads of freshly-chopped firewood for the wood-stove that heated our house.

It was a very bizarre event for me to arrive home on the school bus one day to find a professional-looking stranger at our home talking with my parents.  After their discussions were finalized, it was revealed to me that a large bear had defeated the fence of our pig pen, and had eaten both pigs.  The stranger was an insurance man, gathering information and measuring the size of the bear tracks to verify that the accused bear was indeed large enough to have consumed 2 pigs.  It was.  We were reimbursed for the value of the 2 pigs, and replaced them in short order.  We also followed the advice to install an electric wire around the pig pen fence to prevent such an occurrence in the future.  Eventually, we were able to eat the 2 replacement pigs ourselves, thanks to having "a bear ate my pigs" insurance coverage.

The end.