Butchering Time! (Cumberland Saga)

Roger and Alice scheduled the butchering of their two hogs on the last Saturday before Christmas.

They kept them on the east side of their collection of buildings and were out-of-sight (and downwind) of Sarah’s house so Blain had never paid them much attention until butchering day arrived.

The inside of the pen looked like the aftermath of a WWI battle with huge craters and freshly turned dirt and leaves. It had been a good year for acorns, especially the Northern Red Oaks and Roger had tasked a couple of his grandkids with raking leaves and acorns onto a tarp and dumping it over the side of the pen. The pigs enjoyed the rooting around and the acorns were free food.

“We used to notch the ears and let the hogs free-range” Roger told Blain.

“How did you get them to come back?” Blain wanted to know.

“Pigs like their comfort and their routines. I would feed them a half-bucket of corn every night at exactly the same time and then I would shut them into the pen until morning when I let them out again” Roger said.

“Why did you stop?” Blain asked.

“It was a combination of things” Roger admitted. “Too many neighbors who would complain about hogs tearing up their flower-beds. Too many crack-heads and city people who would shoot them just-for-fun.”

“That, and we got wild-hogs running around out there. I am not sure mine would come back. They might join-up with the wild ones or the wild-ones might rip them to pieces and eat them” he said.

Blain looked at the two hogs. To him, they looked as big as the M-60 that was parked outside the VFW Post in front of the airport back home. It was hard to imagine something mean enough to tear them apart.

“How big are they?” Blain asked.

“Not really sure but I figure the bigger one is pushing 400 and the smaller one is not far behind” Roger said. “There are only two times you can get a good price for a pig and that is when it is 30 pounds and when it is 230 pounds.”

“These are a lot bigger than 230 pounds, though” Blain reminded him.

“Farm animals are sorta like humans. First they grow their frames...their bones. Then they grow meat over those bones. Finally, they put on fat. The commercial markets are all about meat and most hogs are all meat and just a little bit of fat at 230 or 240 pounds” Roger told him. “We use a lot of lard up here and it makes sense to keep fattening them up as long as we have culled ‘taters and turnips and free acorns to feed them.”

“Everybody should kill a hog at least once in their life, so today you get to do it” Roger said.

Blain wasn’t too sure that he wanted to but the crowd of “Helpers” was mostly assembled waiting for the main event to start.

Roger showed him how to load a .22 LR into his “barn-gun”, an ancient, bolt-action single-shot rifle. Then he reached through the feedlot panel and traced on the closest pig's face. “Ya wanna draw two imaginary lines. One from his right ear-to-his left eye and another from his left ear-to-his right eye. The “X” marks the spot.”

“The only thing you gotta be careful about is to make sure that you are holding the barrel close to square with his forehead so the bullet goes in straight” he said.

The hog was contently chowing-down on some cidery, half-frozen apples that Roger had dropped along the base of the feed-lot panel that confined the animals. “Wait for him to lift his head…”

The end of the barrel was about 2” from the hog’s forehead when Blain pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot seemed like a pitifully small “pop” and Blain was amazed when the pig dropped in his tracks like a sack of potatoes.

Roger relieved Blain of the .22 and dispatched the other hog, which had suddenly realized that something was up and was a lot more skittery. Blain was glad that Roger had nominated him for doing-the-deed on the first one and not the second.

Roger used the bucket on the tractor to lift each pig, one-at-a-time by their hind-feet. He slit their throat and let the blood run into a large stock-pot. “The ladies will turn this into Blutwurst.”

Then, after the blood flow had dropped to just a trickle, Roger used the tractor to slowly dip them into the scalding cauldron. After lifting it out, he let it cool for a few minutes in the cool, chill air and then laid it down on a large tarp for the kids to start scraping off the hair.

The rest of the day was endless labor of cutting and splitting wood for the rendering pots which were nothing more than steel barrels with the paint burned out of them. The "kettle" was 1/3 of a 30 gallon steel barrel that nested into the top of the 55 gallon barrel.

Walking by the set-up, Blair saw that there was about an 1-1/2" of clearance between the sides of the kettle and the top of the 55 gallon barrel which had a small door cut near the bottom where wood could be added and which could be adjusted to tweak the draft. 

There was almost no stand-around time for Blain. When he wasn’t feeding the fires he was turning the handle on a meat-grinder or cutting pig-fat into strips for Sarah to feed into the rendering kettles.

Sarah used a dipper with screen on the end of it to scoop out the deep-brown, very shrunken strips before adding more new ones. She sprinkled them with salt and offered one to Blain. It was very, very hot...and absolutely delicious; better than any potato-chips he had ever eaten.

Blain passed on the “blood pudding” but surprised himself when he wasn’t squeamish about cleaning intestines for sausage casings.

Blain’s least favorite kettle to feed was the one boiling the pig’s heads. The slow boil kept them roiling up. He didn’t know which one was the one he had shot (the heads had been skinned) but he imagined that both of them were giving him looks of hurt and betrayal through their cloudy, cooked eyes.

The few short breaks he got he spent with the older men who were preparing the “pink brine” for curing the hams, bacon and other bits. Even Sig was chatty. Seeing that much rich food put everybody in a joyous mood.