Once upon a time there was a single, lonely old wolf. He’d been born without sisters or brothers and he had resigned to the fact that he would now die without them, and though this acceptance didn’t make him happy it did give him a sort of terrible sobriety with which he lived his days in restraint and emptiness, if not tranquility.
Then one day, as the wolf lay in the woods alone, he heard a curious noise. A grunting, grubbing, rooting, chuffing sort of noise. He wondered if it might be a deer turned ill or injured, but then the smell came and oh no, how it made him SNEEZE. Sharp and sordid and nasty.
So he followed his nose out of the woods and into the meadows and there he found a vigorously trampled swathe of land, where the plants had been grubbed through and shredded and the ground-nesting birds and snakes and small animals had been devoured indiscriminately.
And in the center of it was a massive, grunting, hairy monster with hot breath and a curly tail.
“Little thing, little thing, who are you?” asked the wolf of it.
“Feral hog,” snorted the feral hog. “Go away. I’m making a home here. Go away.”
The wolf was a little bit hungry and a little lot-more annoyed at the rudeness of this feral hog, so instead he charged the pig, which stood its ground until the last minute and then fled, squealing and huffing and puffing until its legs ran sore tired and the wolf – though old and shaky – was still fresh enough, and brought it down and killed it and ate until he felt nearly sick.
“How peculiar,” said the wolf. “Maybe if there’d been more of us, this would be a good meal. But it’s a bit much for me.”
Then he went to his favourite stream on the far side of the meadow, but the hog had been there too. The mud had been churned into the water and the crayfish devoured and the frogs trampled or eaten or fled.
The wolf drank some muddy water, which churned most oddly with the hog meat in his gut. Then he slunk away back to the woods, slowly and surely, if not steadily.
***
When the wolf passed through the young growth into the deeper forest where his den was dug he smelt it again: that serrated, silver-edged, smell. Surreptitious in its pungent rot, yet unmaskable.
“I’m full already,” he told himself, “so there is no need to investigate.”
But the closer he came to home the stronger it grew, and at last he came to his den under the roots of an elderly oak and found it occupied. A second giant hairy grunting monster had torn up his home’s front door and its ceiling and was eagerly tearing loose the wood from the soil and gulping it down.
“Feral hog, feral hog, what are you doing?” asked the wolf
“Rooting and grubbing,” grunted the feral hog. “Go away. This is my home now, and I use it as I please. Go away.”
The wolf wasn’t hungry at all, but he had lived in that shallow scrape of a den alone since his aunt died, and to have both it and himself disrespected in that way was too much for him. So he leapt at the pig, full-bellied and groggy as he was, and though it squealed and turned and fought and huffed and puffed it was in a small space of its own making and died there, cradled in the torn roots of the oak tree it had killed. Its thick blood clotted the earth with stinking sourness.
“If I had a family,” said the wolf, “this would be a fine meal for all of us, and we would dig a new home in no time. But it’s too much for me.”
He burrowed a bit around the corpse to see if it could be shifted, but the hog proved even more obstinate as dead weight than living swine. He wore himself out and came out covered in pig blood, sneezing hopelessly at the rankness and necessitating a second trip to the muddied stream.
The wolf came back home once more in the twilight to see what could be done, and the answer was nothing. He searched the woods for other places to dig, to scrape, to shelter and sleep by if only for an evening, and found that the hog had been busy before it had visited him. The new growth had been devoured or trampled; the old growth had been uprooted and torn.
He sniffed at the trees, and they said nothing in return. Several were dead and didn’t know it, in the peculiar manner of root-crippled trees or familyless wolves.
Then he walked away from the woods, head-hung and hard-done-by, if not hungry.
***
The woods vanished and then there weren’t any more.
It was very confusing for the wolf. The harsh asphalt paths were frequent, yes, but there were still trees between them and fields around those trees and shrubs around those fields, but none of them were woods and most of them weren’t meadows and the shrubs appeared to be being kept in line by constant-yet-curiously-restrained grazing rather than being strangled to death of sunlight by trees like the woods intended.
Also, there were small wolves with odd fur and silly voices. They had no manners. Some of them stared, some barked, some whimpered, one that surprised him while he was sleeping under a hedge simply urinated all over itself and then laid down, ears-flat, until he turned his back to it. They were like big puppies.
Annoying as they were, they were still more pleasant company than the rest of the things around. Metal boxes that farted their way down the asphalt with burnt juice squeezing out of their asses; giant piles of dead wood gnawed and grasped and heaved into position until even a beaver would’ve been embarrassed; huge empty unmeadows of the same plant positioned in the same way to its neighbours times ten thousand with only a few nervous rats and some reckless crows for company.
“You’re really not where you should be,” the crows told him. “And don’t eat the rats: if one of them’s eaten something it shouldn’t and you swallowed it then it’s lights out for you too, get it?”
“Yes,” the wolf lied. His aunt had told him never to let birds see if you were confused.
And then, one particularly fitful night, he woke up already-winded from his dreams, legs twitching and teeth bared.
There was a stink in the air.
***
It was a vast building, coated with red-baked blocks of dead burned clay on the outside and metal on the inside and stench to a truly astonishing degree around it and within it and of it. A shimmering lake stretched outside its doors, filled with no water and a truly literally breathtaking amount of hogshit. The wolf’s nose gave up within half a mile of the place, and he found himself hoping it was for good. Each breath felt like inhaling pondscum.
And inside that giant hollow shell of a building, surrounded by their reeking moat, snorted and squealed and grunted one dozen, one hundred, one thousand hogs, more than a thousand hogs. Hairy and grunting and rooting and shredding and popping out more and more hogs. Resigned and dead-eyed bipedal apes wandered around and checked boxes indicating that there were more hogs than there were yesterday, and there would be more tomorrow, and so on and forever. The hogs lay in cages and were pinned in place and nursed and squealed and grew and grew and grew and grew fat and grew cunning and looked through bars at the world outside and grew out to reach it.
The wolf considered all of this.
“If I had a family,” he remarked, “there still wouldn’t be enough of us to make a difference. And I would feel very guilty about this. So I suppose it’s alright.”
Then he walked into the building, quick and quiet, if not quite keen.
***
The Great Jiggsville Swine Plague was not the first incident of hogs hunting humans. It was not the hundred or even hundred thousandth occurrence of domestic pigs escaping into the wild. It WAS the first occasion on which an entire commercial pork plant released its stock into the surrounding landscape within a few dozen miles of a suburban center; the first occasion on which the pigs stampeded towards human dwellings rather than the woods; and to this day remains the only mass jailbreak caused by a nonhuman.
The security footage was heavily damaged in the escape, so exactly how a wolf got its hands on the gate controls is unknown. How it managed to steer several thousand panicking, confused pigs is also unknown. Witnesses agreed it looked pretty old and beat-up, which didn’t help matters.
“I think it was sick,” said one of the few surviving plant foremen. “It was wheezing the whole time, really huffing and puffing.”
They never did find a body, but with thousands of pigs running rampant that was pretty normal. There were bigger problems, like all those homes being invaded by feral pigs.
Awful. Just awful. The poor property values, all gone down.