OCR Text |
Show The Bench FARMER PIGS About sixteen years ago my wife and I moved into the Basin. Ba-sin. We had very little in material ma-terial goods, we had big ideas, high ambitions and plenty of confidence that only the young can have. We moved into a house with bare floors, the walls had been plastered with gyp which had partly fallen off. Our furniture consisted of a cook stove, a table, a bed, one chair and a creamery can. I had to sit on the can if my wife beat me to the chair. In our minds we had the world by the tail and a downhill down-hill pull. We had 30 brood sows and a sure-fire idea on how to get rich. We had it figured this way. You know how fast pigs will multiply, well if it didn't cost us anything to feed them, no matter how long it took to grow them out, it would all be profit. We didn't have any close neighbors at the time, so we turned the pigs loose. It wasn't long till we had well over a hundred pigs of all sizes and colors, and not a kernal of grain to feed them. The pigs kept getting thinner and thinner, some of those old sows with seven or eight pigs sucking were sure razor backs. We thought we were having good luck, we weren't loosing any more than 50. The pigs kept straying a little farther each day till it wasn't long till we were herding pigs. I wish you could have seen my wife chasing pigs. It was auite a sight. One day after a hard rain and the ground was all muddy, the pigs got in our nearest near-est neighbors grain. Mr. Paxman came to tell usr to take care of them. I wasn't home, so my wif bridled the old lame buckskin mare and started after the pigs. The mare was so slow she decided de-cided to walk, her shoes stuck in the mud and came off. It had started to rain again and to make matters worse, she had ripped her dress climbing ov" a fence. Mr. Paxman must have felt sorry for her. She was all ready to cry, shoes gone, a rip in her dress she was trying to hold together, and she was soaking soak-ing wet. He helped her home with the pigs. Believe me, she doesn't like pigs. We sold pigs that fall, six months old, that must have weighed all of 60 or 70 pounds. We weren't a bit proud of them. You can't starve a dollar out of anything, and if you try, honest to goodness you're not very proud of your work. |