ON A GOOD spring day he paused to rest at the side of the road. He had been walking for a long time and he had been hearing them for a long time before he knew what the sound was, a faint murmurous droning portending multitudes, locusts, the advent of primitive armies. He rose and went on until he reached the gap in the ridge and before long he could see the first of them coming along the road below him and then suddenly the entire valley was filled with hogs, a weltering sea of them that came smoking over the dusty plain and flowed undiminished into the narrows of the cut, fanning on the slopes in ragged shoals like the harried outer guard of schooled fish and here and there upright and cursing among them and laboring with poles the drovers, gaunt and fever-eyed with incredible rag costumes and wild hair.
Holme left the road and clambered up the rocky slope to give them leeway. The first of the drovers was beating his way obliquely across the herd toward him, the hogs flaring and squealing and closing behind him again like syrup. When he gained the open ground he came along easily, smiling up to where Holme sat on a rock with his feet dangling and looking down with no little wonder at this spectacle.
Howdy neighbor, called out the drover. Sweet day, ain’t she?
It is, he said. Whereabouts are ye headed with them hogs if you don’t care for me astin?
Crost the mountain to Charlestown.
Holme shook his head reverently. That there is the damndest sight of hogs ever I seen, he said. How many ye got?
The drover had come about the base of the rock and was now standing looking down with Holme at the passing hogs. God hisself don’t know, he said solemnly.
Well it’s a bunch.
They Lord, said the drover, they just now commencin to come in sight. He passed his stave from the crook of one arm to the other and cocked one foot on the ledge of rock, his sparse whiskers fluttering in the mountain wind, leaning forward and watching the howling polychrome tide of hogs that glutted the valley from wall to wall as might any chance traveler a thing of interest.
They’s more than one mulefoot in that lot, he said.
What?
Mulefoot. I calculate they’s several hunnerd head of them alone and they ain’t no common hog to come upon.
What’s a mulefoot? Holme said.
The drover squinted professionally. Mountain hog from north of here. You ain’t never seen one?
No.
Got a foot like a mule.
You mean they ain’t got a split hoof?
Nary split to it.
I ain’t never seen no such hog as that, Holme said.
I ain’t surprised, the drover said. But ye can see one here if you’ve a mind to.
I’d admire to, Holme said.
The drover shifted his stave again. Seems like that don’t agree with the bible, what would you say?
About what?
About them hogs. Bein unclean on account of they got a split foot.
I ain’t never heard that, Holme said.
I heard it preached in a sermon one time. Feller knowed right smart about the subject. Said the devil had a foot like a hog’s. He laid claim it was in the bible so I reckon it’s so.
I reckon.
He said a jew wouldn’t eat hogmeat on account of it.
What’s a jew?
That’s one of them old-timey people from in the bible. But that still don’t say nothin about a mulefoot hog does it? What about him?
I don’t know, Holme said. What about him?
Well is he a hog or ain’t he? Accordin to the bible.
I’d say a hog was a hog if he didn’t have nary feet a-tall.
I might do it myself, the drover said, because if he was to have feet you’d look for em to be hog’s feet. Like if ye had a hog didn’t have no head you’d know it for a hog anyways. But if ye seen one walkin around with a mule’s head on him ye might be puzzled.
That’s true, Holme allowed.
Yessir. Makes ye wonder some about the bible and about hogs too, don’t it?
Yes, Holme said.
I’ve studied it a good deal and I cain’t come to no conclusions about it one way or the other.
No.
The drover stroked his whiskers and nodded his head. Hogs is a mystery by theyselves, he said. What can a feller know about one? Not a whole lot. I’ve run with hogs since I was just a shirttail and I ain’t never come to no real understandin of em. And I don’t doubt but what other folks has had the same experience. A hog is a hog. Pure and simple. And that’s about all ye can say about him. And smart, don’t think they ain’t. Smart as the devil. And don’t be fooled by one that ain’t got nary clove foot cause he’s devilish too.
I guess hogs is hogs, Holme said.
The drover spat and nodded. That’s what I’ve always maintained, he said.
Holme was watching the activity below them.
That’s my little brother Billy yander, the drover said, pointing with one tatterclad arm. This is his first time along. I thought mamma was goin to bawl sure enough when we lit out and him with us. Says he goin to get him some poontang when we get sold but I told him he’d be long done partialed to shehogs. The drover turned and bared his orangecolored teeth at Holme in a grimace of lecherous idiocy. Holme turned and watched the hogs. The drovers stood among them like crossers in a ford, emerging periodically out of the shifting pall of red dust and then blotted away again. They seemed together with the hogs to be in flight from some act of God, fire or flood, schisms in the earth’s crust.
I better get on and give them fellers a hand, the drover said.
Luck to ye, Holme said.
We’ll be stopped up on the river somewheres come dark. If ye chance by that way just stop and take supper with us.
Thank ye, said Holme. I’d be proud to.
The drover waved his staff and scrabbled away over the rocks like a thin gnome. Holme sat for a while and then rose and followed along the ridge toward the gap where the hogs were crossing.
The gap was narrow and when he got to it he could see the hogs welled up in a clamorous and screeching flume that fanned again on the far side in a high meadow skirting the bluff of the river. They were wheeling faster and wider out along the sheer rim of the bluff in an arc of dusty uproar and he could hear the drovers below him calling and he could see the dead gray serpentine of the river below that. Hogs were pouring through the gap and building against the ones in the meadow until these began to buckle at the edges. Holme saw two of them pitch screaming in stifflegged pirouettes a hundred feet into the river. He moved down the slope toward the bluff and the road that went along it. Drovers were racing brokenly across the milling hogs with staves aloft, stumbling and falling among them, making for the outer perimeter to head them from the cliff. This swept a new wave of panic among the hogs like wind through grass until a whole echelon of them careering up the outer flank forsook the land and faired into space with torn cries. Now the entire herd had begun to wheel wider and faster along the bluff and the outermost ranks swung centrifugally over the escarpment row on row wailing and squealing and above this the howls and curses of the drovers that now up-reared in the moil of flesh they tended and swept with dust had begun to assume satanic looks with their staves and wild eyes as if they were no true swineherds but disciples of darkness got among these charges to herd them to their doom.
Holme rushed to higher ground like one threatened with flood and perched upon a rock there to view the course of things. The hogs were in full stampede. One of the drovers passed curiously erect as though braced with a stick and rotating slowly with his arms outstretched in the manner of a dancing sleeper. Hogs were beginning to wash up on the rock, their hoofs clicking and rasping and with harsh snorts. Holme recoiled to the rock’s crown and watched them. The drover who had spoken him swept past with bowed back and hands aloft, a limp and ragged scarecrow flailing briefly in that rabid frieze so that Holme saw tilted upon him for just a moment out of the dust and pandemonium two walled eyes beyond hope and a dead mouth beyond prayer, borne on like some old gospel recreant seized sevenfold in the flood of his own nether invocations or grotesque hero bobbing harried and unwilling on the shoulders of a mob stricken in their iniquity to the very shape of evil until he passed over the rim of the bluff and dropped in his great retinue of hogs from sight.