When we started this livestock enterprise, I was fairly adamant that I did not want a pig. I raised a bunch of pigs in college, and didn’t want that smell close to the house.

So when I casually asked a coworker in the hall how her son had done showing his pig at the fair, I was totally just being polite. But it snowballed. Teach me to make smalltalk.

She said the pig hadn’t made the minimum weight for the livestock auction. He showed it and did well in showmanship, but wasn’t allowed to sell it at the fair. Not thinking clearly, I asked if she needed me to buy it from him. She jumped all over that.

I checked with Junior and considered splitting it with his parents. I crunched numbers and checked with the butcher for their rates. It was seeming like a better and better idea all the time. The coworker and I agreed on a price somewhere between commercial market hog prices and fair hog charity prices, and she said they’d feed it out for a few more weeks. I’d schedule the butcher truck to come the day after I picked the pig up, and with luck, I wouldn’t even have to unload it from the trailer.

But of course, Murphy had his way with us. On my way out of town on Friday, she called in a bit of a panic. The farmer who’s hosting the pig told her it needed to be off his place by Tuesday, and her son’s having surgery on Tuesday, so could we please come get it on Monday?

I frantically started calling around. The friend whose trailer I was planning to borrow was out of town for the weekend, and his gate was locked. Another mutual friend offered up his already-borrowed stock trailer, but had to check with the owner of the trailer first. Fortunately, it worked out that on Monday,  I went and got the trailer and then swung by to pick up the pig. My coworker’s boyfriend and son helped me load it, but after that, I was on my own, as Junior was at work and Seamus was at Boy Scouts.

It took me about 15 tries to get that trailer turned around in our back pen, but I got it done just before dark. The pig wasn’t terribly willing to get into the trailer, but was perfectly happy to hop out and check out her new surroundings. I had to put her in with the goats, which is good for the humility of the bigger, asshole goat.

She’s a nice pig. We’ll have to feed her out for a few more weeks, but I haven’t narrowed down a slaughter date yet anyway. She’s going to be rather spoiled in the time she has left; she likes to have her butt scratched right above her tail and she likes to lay down to nosh on treats. She’s not a greedy pig either, so I should be able to leave her with a big bowl of food for the weekends and she’ll self-regulate.

She’s certainly going to be delicious. Her loins and hams are firm and well-developed already, and I have high hopes for tasty bacon and linguica, which is a specialty Portuguese sausage that my butcher makes. We’ll treat her well, but she’s definitely not staying. A sow can grow to be 500 pounds, and that’s the last thing I need around the place. No, we’ll eat her without guilt. And if this is easier than I remembered, maybe we’ll raise one from scratch another year.

Right when I started running with these bear hunters, before I met Junior, we caught a bear near Cherry Lake. It had gone way out into the bluffs, much farther north than the roads go and what felt like about a mile straight down. I went down with Grey Fox and Wildman, taking what seemed like an easier route than the rest of the men took, but the three of us never got to the tree. We did get all the way down to the lake shore, near the inlet, and rested there a while. Grey Fox suggested that I take off my shirt and flag a boat down for a ride, but fortunately, one never came by so I didn’t have to go to that extreme.

It took the three of us hours and hours to climb back up out of that hole. It still ranks as one of the most exhausting physical efforts of my life, right behind packing my first deer out of a camp seven miles away from the nearest road. As the fat asthmatic woman of the party, I still wasn’t the slowest, which was a good thing. Had I pushed myself any harder that day, they’d have had to quarter me up to get me out.

This was before my digital camera days, but the vivid memories of how the lake looked up close are permanently seared into my brain. I know now that I’m not in any kind of shape to go down that way, although I may have been last year after the diet and I hope to be again someday.

So when we heard that one of the guys had a bear treed even farther in than we’d gone that year, I mentally groaned. He had a client with him too. Fortunately, Junior was out looking for another dog and didn’t get roped into going down and helping out, but Maverick and Jake did. By the time Junior and I got back up to Maverick’s truck, it was time to start thinking about how to get them out. Their handheld radio batteries were expiring, they had four hounds with them, plus the bear, and the client’s knee had given out. It would have taken most of the night if they’d tried to walk out on their own, or been a long cold one sleeping on granite if they’d waited until morning.

But I remembered Grey Fox’s smartass comment about flagging a boat down. We didn’t have a boat with us, of course, but it still sounded like a good idea. Junior’s uncle was in camp, and he only lives about an hour away and is sort of a boat collector. He could go get one and bring it up, and meet the hunters at the inlet.

But first, we thought we might just go down to the launch ramp and see if there was someone there who might take pity on us. Fran and Seamus and I (and her herd of little dogs) did just that. Initially we were disappointed in that there were only empty trailers at the ramp, but I spotted a guy with a little aluminum boat driving away. I flagged him down like a crazy woman, having had the foresight to take my pistol holster off at least, so I didn’t scare people too much. He said that he would have been happy to if his boat had had any fuel, which it didn’t.

I was about ready to call our solicitation off when I spotted a man walking in the parking lot to the trailers. I asked him if maybe he had a boat. It turned out Fran had asked him as well. I explained the situation, and talked to the hunters on the radio to coordinate. He wasn’t too excited about waiting until they got down to the water, another hour and a half, but the more he thought about it, the faster his wheels started turning. He decided to leave the boat in the water and take the rest of his party back to the campground. He’d send off his boat, a party barge, with two of his friends, and be back for it with the boat trailer after they picked up our friends. I went with them to coordinate locating our guys on the radio, since I was the one who’d been down there before.

Fran said she wondered what she was doing, sending me off on a boat with two strange men. Well, she didn’t send me; I did. I sent Seamus off with Junior’s Dad, and she couldn’t have done it with all those little dogs. Sometimes you just have to choose to trust people, and boaters tend to be a pretty good-hearted bunch. These guys certainly were.

I was in such a hurry that I forgot my camera. I wish I hadn’t. This lake is in country so steep that we could nose that boat up all the way to the inlet and tie up to rocks with ten feet of clearance below. The creek trickles into the lake at only a few gallons a minute right now and the water is so clear and green that it’s almost too beautiful to look at. Our rescuers were interested in the rest of the story; how the hunters came to be down where they were and about bear hunting in general, so I filled them in. Between times, I coordinated on the radio with Maverick. When I finally saw people, I climbed up over the rocks so they could find us parked beneath a great granite boulder as we were.

I brought a little bit of their stuff down with me; a drop in the bucket compared to the loads they’d been carrying for as long as they had. Two of the hounds were so exhausted that I had to pick them up and hand them over rocks to Maverick; once they got on the boat, they immediately crashed for naps. Their pads were worn to nothing, and they’ve earned their week off. The client was so glad to see me, and so relieved not to have to go back up that hill that I think he crashed as hard as the dogs.

The ride back was a beautiful thing. Two rescuers, five hunters, four hounds, and me. I wished I’d had my camera for that too. We could not have ordered up a better boat to carry that load all at once. And these guys, these redneck knights swooping in to our rescue, wouldn’t take a penny for their efforts. I know how much that ride was worth to these guys and had a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket alone, but they said they were in it for the adventure, and for the story to tell back at camp, and because one day it might be them who needs rescuing. I knew boaters were good people.

But I told the first guy who went in that I’m not going to be able to conjure up another boat if he does this again. My support-staff magic only works for so long!

Ol’ Seamus has always wanted to hunt. There have been times that he’s been sort of lukewarm about it, but it’s always been true that he’d be my hunting kid. I started taking him camping when he was just an infant, but he didn’t really go hunting with me until he was seven. It was just a little too risky to be hunting by myself with two small kids – what would happen if I got off a bad shot and had to track something? What if I got hurt? I couldn’t leave him and his brother back in the truck, and hunting alone most of the time didn’t leave me with a lot of options, so I mostly had my fun every other weekend.

Once he got older though, and I was running more with other people, I started bringing him with me, more often every season. When he was ten, he worked his butt off to get his hunting license even though we’re not much for hunting the small game that was allowed to him at that age.

But this year is the golden year. He’s twelve now, so he’s got his first big game tags, both deer and bear. He’s been so excited that I suspect all his friends are tired of hearing about it. Two weeks ago, we went and re-sighted in some rifles, and had him shoot both my .243 which he wanted to carry and a 30-06 in a rest, to see if it kicked him too much.

Last weekend was a scouting trip for just the two of us, as Junior had to work. It was opening day for squirrel and quail, so we spent the whole time driving around looking for them, looking for deer, and talking about hunting. He’s fascinated by tracks, so I showed him a lot of those and gave him a book to read at night.

On Saturday, we happened to come across a big four-point buck, as nice as anything I’ve seen in this state and certainly nicer than anything I’ve ever shot. This buck knew it wasn’t season (although it was still archery season, we didn’t have bows) and stood and posed for us to glass him for a good long time.

Up until then, Seamus was more excited about bear hunting than deer hunting. After all, that’s what we do the most of, so he’s seen much more of it. And it is very exciting. But this buck really had him going, and he wanted to deer hunt on opening morning, so that’s what we did. I told him that we were really unlikely to see that buck again and that he should just shoot a decent legal one if we saw it. There are years when we don’t see anything legal, like last year, and forked horns are perfectly legitimate shooters around here.

So we got up way before the crack of dawn. We had to get down to the other side of our area early enough to walk in off the road before daylight. Ironically, all of our friends who camp down there were up every bit as early to come bear hunt up by our camp. We got there in good time and walked off in the dark down a tiny little track I know. He was a little intimidated to be walking off into the dark, but I knew where we were, so he followed without kicking up a fuss.

That 30-06 that I’d had him shoot was sneaky of me. We’d decided to give each kid a hunting rifle of their own on their very first opening day, and he was surprised as hell about it. Of course, part of that was sheer confusion at being awake at 5 AM, but he was thrilled with it once he woke all the way up. He still chose to carry my smaller .243, but kept fondling his gun throughout the day.

When it came to be dawn, we were far enough off the road to be good. We crept along, sat for a while, and crept some more. We heard a shot or two near us, and sincerely hope that it wasn’t that buck. We jumped something in the brush, but it could as easily have been a doe; we never got a look at it. We looked at tracks some more, and found a skull with an old, regressed forked horn rack on it, so I carried that back for him. We were quiet enough that the squirrels and birds got used to us, and that’s all I ask of a first-timer.

A kid’s got sort of a short attention span though, and I didn’t want to burn him out. We walked back to the truck after a couple of hours and drove around a bit. But hearing the bears hunters on the radio was too much for both of us, so we headed back up the hill to join them. I told him that we were as likely to spot a deer stirred up by the commotion as we were to walk across one sneaking through the woods. He’s much more likely to get a bear this year even if he’s not first on our houndmen’s lists, so he was ready to move over to that.

All in all, I had a great time with my new hunting partner. He wasn’t too noisy, he asked intelligent questions, and he was just plain excited to be there. Taking a buck would have just been gravy; but as I told him, the sport’s called hunting, not killing. We had a successful time hunting, even without filling a tag.

Over the last ten years that I’ve held these assorted professional certifications, I’ve also had to collect continuing education hours with which to renew them. Now, that’s not really hard to do. A two-day manufacturer’s class and tour filled my requirements for one renewal cycle. And the professional organizations give quickie classes to fill in an hour or two.

But I’d like to pick up two more licenses, just to keep myself well-rounded. I’ve taken the correspondence course for one of them twice, and passed it both times, as well as taking a refresher course, but life kept getting in the way of taking the actual State test. So by the time I can schedule the test, most of the math required to pass it has flown out of my head. And correspondence courses are not easy to do when you have things pulling you in fifteen different directions.

So I decided to take a class in person. Fortunately, the local community college holds these classes, and of course, they’re at night. It’s something us working stiffs are usually more interested in than the regular nine-to-five college students, after all.

I found myself back down at a school with checkbook in hand for the first time in almost twenty years. It was a little weird, but being a community college, I’m not all that out of the ordinary at my age. I may feel strange, but I probably don’t stick out too much.

The first day in class, I found myself wondering when the desks got that small? There’s no room for anything; you can’t negotiate your notes, your book, and your calculator at the same time. I guess years of working at an actual desk have spoiled me. And I’m not sure when the calculator buttons got so tiny. Considering it’s the same one I had when I was twenty, I think that might just be me. But it still works, and I’m brushing the dust off myself too.

The students are all the same, if a little older. You’ve got your teacher’s pet wannabes; I’ve pegged at least two of them in this class so far. These are the career students, who aren’t going to do anything with this class in particular, but seem to have to tell everyone how much they know about everything, related or not.

You’ve got the boys in the back of the class; there are quite a few in this one. There are a few of us who sit near the front so we can either hear or pay attention over the boys in the back of the class.

There are some people who really shouldn’t have passed High School, and aren’t going to do well at all.

There are a couple of ringers; I’m quite sure I’m one of them. Besides having taken the class before, I’m an actual working operator, if in a slightly different designation. So are a lot of those boys in the back, I suspect. Some of them might look dumb, but they’re probably ringers too. I’m trying not to be obnoxious about it, but I already see two people looking to me for help, and one of the career students has started arguing with me. Whatever, chick, I don’t care how you solve the problem.

I’ve made a friend already, besides the one kid I already knew. I’m not here to make friends, but this might be a pool of potential employees and it’s always good to know the other locals in your field.

I have a whole different attitude about college this go-around. The last time, I was really into cramming as much into my head as possible. I was probably that career student, although I don’t remember boinging my hand in the air every time a teach asked a question. This time, though, I really couldn’t give a shit what grade I get in this class. Grade point average is irrelevant; I already have a degree that I don’t use. I’m here specifically to brush up my math so I can pass this test. And I don’t think I’ll have any problem doing that; the pace of this class seems to be geared more towards the flunkies, and I’m going to find myself rather bored most of the time. But it makes me sit down and practice equations, and that’s what I need. Fortunately, that’s the teacher’s goal too. And since the State test comes before the class final, I don’t have to worry about that too much either. The one that counts will already be behind me; the final will solely exist so I can count these continuing education credits toward my next license renewal.

I think I’ll keep on with it though. There’s another license that I could get next fall, and I could take a class to get a higher license of the variety that I use in the spring. It wold be good for my resume, and for my flexibility should my contract fall through. And that’s what got me into this career in the first place; collecting licenses before I needed them.

I’m still going to grumble about having to go on Tuesday nights, but it’s good for me. Keeps my brain somewhat active.