A Story About a Pig and Patience

We raise a few pigs on our hobby farm in MN. A delightfully fat and furry heritage breed of guinea hogs.

Sadly, our oldest boar died unexpectedly in January. It was in the middle of a long deep freeze of subzero temperatures and seemingly constant blizzard conditions. No, he did not freeze to death. These breeds are specific to this region and he had shelter.

The boar died over night of an unknown and sudden illness. We found him the following morning.

But an odd thing occurred.

His warm body melted the snow beneath him as he lie taking his final respite. After passing, the frigid north winds quickly refroze the ground around him. When we discovered him, he was fully iced in. He resembled an petite wooly mammoth partially unearthed in an archeological dig.

This, in conjunction with record levels of snow, meant that we had no means to remove the pig. We would have to keep him isolated and wait until spring. Which for Minnesota…is May.

I did not love this scenario.

This pig haunted me.

I would sometimes sit quietly and imagine his body ripening in the sun, gelatinous, drawing in other creatures, and just being terrible mere yards from our back door. I could imagine what the smell would be. I thought of us trying to move him yet pulling him apart instead. It was dark.

I felt worried. I felt ashamed. We had failed.

I engineered creative ways we might dislodge this pig.

My best idea was to just burn down the paddock and shelter completely. Send him off to piggie Valhalla in true Viking fashion.

My much more relaxed husband Steve, spent considerably less time worried about the pig situation.