Back in February I waxed hopeful about the purchase of a permanent pig, and within the month Aunt Agatha, a pedigree Berkshire, was making the paddock her own, in snorting and nuzzling distance of nine neighbouring weaners.
She arrives having spent two days honeymooning with the boar and we are told to check whether she comes back into heat after three weeks. I mark the days in the diary and peer at her rear end on and off for forty-eight hours, but can’t see anything suggestive of an unsatisfactory coupling.
Aunt Ag (we are bosom buddies now) swells and plumps like a juicy peach. Pendulous of stomach and udder, she nonetheless scurries about in search of missed tidbits, and in hot weather makes her own wallow by thrusting her head into the trough and splashing out great waves into a sow-shaped muddy dent.
A week before her due date, we take the tractor into her field and scatter sow nuts into the entrance of the stock box. She snuffles them up, then walks round and round the tractor to check if any of that is edible. I chuck another handful into the far corner of the box, and watch, holding my breath, trying so very hard to appear nonchalant. I scratch her back to calm myself as much as her, and then greed overcomes caution. The door bolted, she’s lifted into the air and trundled to the barn.
For a week I attend Aunt Agatha in the barn, mucking out the soiled straw and communing with her, sharing grunts and oinks like a pair of biddies at bingo. There’s a chair next to the pen for me to sit and watch and chat. She sleeps great swathes of the day, her belly huge, rippling and distended, but even asleep she snorts to me as I come to see her. When I rub her back she moves ecstatically under my hand, swinging her hips, her natural curry plant smell rising.
115 days is the sow gestation period; three months, three weeks and three days. Never, in all my previous reading, have I come across the rather useful bit of information that Berkshires extend this to anything from 116 to 120 days. But when day 118 dawns and Ag is still avidly holding on to her offspring, I start to do my own rooting around. Armed with this revelation I tell her that she has two more days maximum, that my nerves can hardly cope with much more waiting, when she starts to build her nest with mouthfuls of straw.
Friends join us for supper, and every hour we nip out to check progress. Yes, she is having contractions. Yes, she’s let down her milk. Yes, she has two piglets. Now four. The sixth pops out like a cork from a bottle. By midnight she’s had seven, a jumble of baby elephants with truncated trunks. At four a.m. there are nine piglets and she has cast both placentas. Aunt Ag lies there, unmoving, exhausted, spent, grunting no longer to me, but to her sleek, black, demanding brood.
Published in The Landsman October/November 2009 Issue 16
