He was content working on his fences. He planned them in the winter, built them in the spring and summer, and made posts in the fall, splitting them out of redwood, finishing them with broadaxe and drawknife till at ten feet you'd swear they'd been milled. By the time he was out of grade school he'd built line fences around the ranch; he spent his high school years cross-fencing, rebuilding, and working on gates, forging his own hinges, fliers, and bolts. When he received his diploma, he started over, perfecting them. He had numerous offers at outstanding wages to build fences for others (two came from as far away as Montana), but he always said, "Gosh, I'd like to help out, but I just got too much work on my own place-and I kinda have to look out for my Granddaddy."
Tiny and Granddaddy Jake also shared the sufferings that inevitably attend serious passion. In Granddaddy's case, the cause of his pain was Emma Gadderly, for she-having discovered Jake's still-demanded action from Sheriff Hobson, who, sworn to his peaceful duty, came out and made Granddaddy move it. Until she discovered it again. It was a pain in the ass to keep moving it constantly, seriously irksome to have her leaning on his life, and he invariably included her in his oath-soaked screeds against the mendacious and venal, the tainted and corrupt, mentioning her in the same slimy company as card cheats, beer drinkers, and a sprinkling of his ex-wives. Tiny's nemesis was wild pigs. With their gristled snouts, powerful necks, and purposeful greed, wild pigs are the natural enemies of fences. They like to poke their snouts under them and rip upwards with wanton delight, creating a comfortable passage for their rotund bodies under the upsquashed arch of wire, and if that fails they just tear the fucker down. Tiny had seen three cases where they'd bitten right through the wire. One pig in particular was a personal torment. Lockjaw, so known because he'd never been heard to utter a sound, was a legend in the coastal hills both for his size and the wantonness of his destruction. Tales-subject to the usual human exaggeration-abounded, and even if you reduced them by half, he'd still tore up every garden from Humboldt County to the Marin line, killed enough lambs to keep the valley feedlots in operation for at least five years, rooted enough earth to make tractors blow gaskets in envy, bred so many sows that if they were lined up snout-to-tail they would stretch the length of the San Andreas fault, and all the while eluding the best hunters in northern California. To Tiny, he was the embodiment of suffering. Not only had he destroyed untold stretches of his excellent fence, he'd tore Boss up so bad he'd died. Tiny had taken to hunting Lockjaw occasionally as part of his fence maintenance program, but Lockjaw was not only silent, he was sneaky-and he got a lot sneakier after Tiny put a 100 grain.243 bullet hole through the tip of his left ear at 200 yards. Lockjaw retaliated by trashing Tiny's fences whenever he needed to pass through on his way to a seep-spring wallow he favored on the back of the ridge. There had been skirmishes going on for at least ten years, but it had flared into war when Boss died. Which was one reason Tiny was so antsy to get back to his fencing when the last Hawaiian storm had passed: he'd taken down the northern stretch to rebuild it, and since it had been down for almost half a month Lockjaw might think he was giving up.
The weather had held clear for almost three days, but he was still caught in the checkers marathon with his ailing Granddaddy, who, although claiming he felt just horrible, hadn't coughed or sneezed in four days, consumed his daily jar of whiskey with his customary relish, and generally looked as pert as ever- almost becoming hearty as he closed the gap in the checkers match, cackling with delight as he hit Tiny with moves he'd never seen nor heard of, much less imagined-moves like the Biloxi Blitz, the Double King Kong Dick Twister, and, most dependably, the Ol' Switcheroo-moves so incomprehensibly foolhardy that Tiny had to stretch his talent to succumb to them.
On the first day of April, the score knotted at 499-all the night before, they held the playoff at high noon. Tiny brilliantly maneuvered himself into a position where he could be triple jumped for a king, and though it had taken Granddaddy Jake two moves to see it, he finally seized the opening and eventually won.
"Gotcha with the Triple Dip Overland Sledge-Hammer Nut Crusher," Granddaddy crowed as Tiny ruefully shook his head. "Last time I used it was against Pud Clemens up in Newport 'round' '46, '47. But don't feel bad Tiny; you played real good early on when I was weakened with the pneumonia, but I just eventually wore you down with experience."
"You made a great comeback" Tiny agreed. "Wish you could whip that cold as easy."
"Oh, I'm better today-not prime, but passable… might even get out of bed."
"What do you want for dinner?"
"Hell, long as I'm getting up anyway, I might as well rustle up the grub. Should get another batch cooking, too; supply is falling behind demand. And besides, if you don't get back to work on the North Fork fence pretty soon, Lockjaw's gonna be wallowing under the front porch."
Tiny was out the door and gone. But when he topped the ridge fifteen minutes later, eager to finish digging the last 100 holes, he saw a sight that enraged him: he'd left the dirt from each previously dug posthole tidily rounded to the left of each hole, and now not a pile remained-they had been trampled, scattered, and generally ravaged. Even before he saw the distinctively huge tracks etched in the damp remains of the first few mounds, Tiny knew it was Lockjaw. This wasn't merely a case of wrecking something in your way or defending yourself against some berserk macho beagle snapping at your face; this was maliciously deliberate.
Tiny allowed himself one ringing curse worthy of his Granddaddy, then started cleaning the mess up as best he could. He soon discovered that most of the mounded dirt had been pushed back into the postholes, and was diligently scooping them out, working down the line, when he noticed that one of the holes near the end was particularly devastated: it looked like it had been rooted, chewed, and rolled on. Flicking the sodden muck from his fingers, Tiny went to investigate.
The earth around the hole had been torn down to the clay layer, the slash and gouge of tusks visible around the rim. The focused destruction puzzled Tiny until he started scooping out the hole. Near the bottom, half buried and three-quarters drowned, he found a newly-hatched duckling, its feathers matted into a ball of muddy goo.
Tiny was perplexed. There were no ducks on their ranch or on any of their neighbors' that he knew about, and he'd never heard of any ducks nesting on bare ridgetops. Holding it in the hammock of his left hand, Tiny took it back up to the house to see what his Grand-daddy thought.
"What the fuck is that!" Granddaddy screeched when Tiny laid the mud-encrusted duckling out on the kitchen table where Jake was finishing his fourth cup of coffee and reading an old copy of Argosy.
"A baby duck, I think," Tiny said, and went on to explain how and where he'd found the bird while his Granddaddy examined it, peering down close and occasionally prodding it with a gnarled finger, muttering to himself, "Hardly alive except for a heartbeat, and even that's ragged." He looked up at Tiny: "You sure it was Lockjaw?"
"Yep," Tiny nodded, "tracks were in clay… unless you know of something else that would leave a pig track six inches long and sunk in about finger-deep from the weight it was packing."