Chapter 53

The next morning we had a big breakfast and I knew they'd even recruited Kita to help them when she started bragging on me over yesterday's hunt.

"I was so happy when I saw all the bison George, Bill, and you brought home for us to eat. I really like eating Daddy," she said, before we even got started.

As I started my job of getting her filled up and helped her top Chiqa's little belly up even the baby seemed extra charming with lots of grins and attempted giggles which she wasn't so good at yet, but liked to try.

After I had them down for their post meal nap Rose mentioned we'd need some bacon before long. I knew I'd been set up to soften the blow then, but I didn't have a bitch coming. In fact I was looking forward to it.

Bill and George had both been in on hog killing time before back where we'd come from and even thought I'd never I had a good handle on what was involved. Even Rose had done her excellent thinking ahead over it. We had five large stainless steel barrels for scalding the dead hogs. They were nominally the size of fifty-file gallon drums, but were made to fit inside each other to save space in the pallets by being shipped nested inside each other. I'm sure they'd originally been filled with other things too.

They were empty now though and had been separated. We also had hardware to build a-frame type hoist for each barrel to be used when lowering a prospect into the near boiling water and then pulling them back out. We even had a sort of lifting arm to attach to the Farmall's three point hookup for moving the dead hogs from place to place as we processed them.

Of course there was some building we needed to do to augment the hardware Rose had brought along. We had legs and cross pieces for the hoist to cut from smaller trees. We had to gather up rocks for fire circles under and around the barrels, and we had to cut plenty of firewood for the fires. It takes a lot of wood to heat up one fifty-five gallon barrel and much more to do five.

The best thing about it was we had plenty of help. First things first we needed to catch the hogs and before we could we needed to build a large pen so we could catch them and sort through them too. We would probably have plenty this year, but we wanted to save plenty of sows and a few mature boars so we'd have plenty next year too.

There was also some training of our people needed. Killing wild hogs isn't as easy as killing hogs you'd raised in a pen and that expected you to manage them. Since hogs are experts at crawling over, under, around, and through the pen had to be stout and leave damned few ways out.

Our first job was to build a good fence across the opening of the first pasture/canyon to keep all the hogs locked in. I was sure we were going to cause them a lot of agitation while we were working on our preparatory projects and it would be pretty dumb to let them slip out and move while we were making plans to turn them into bacon et cetera.

Most of the blocking fence was just changing it from a fence into a wall. We had to redo the gate too, but it wasn't such a big deal after I let the others in on my plan. After we had it taken care of we had time to build a couple of pens and some other fencing to herd the hogs into. The arrangements were a little like the ones I'd built earlier for catching the horses, but things had to end up with more of a solid wall look.

By the time we were done with the hog's catch pens it was getting late in the day so we headed back to the cave for supper. Tonight was more of an early to bed affair and we were settled down for a good night's sleep fairly quickly.

Breakfast the next morning wasn't such a reward beforehand as it had been yesterday. We had more work to do getting ready for the hogs, but by the end of the day everything was ready to get started as soon as the weather turned colder and things had seemed pretty cool during the afternoon.

Tonight was the first one we spent in our new bedroom and of course we took advantage of our new bathroom first. I was damned glad to have a decent shower going again and all my women were excited over them too. We had plenty of showers, but it seemed they all wanted to shower with me. I didn't mind a bit, but I did have a lot of washing to do.

The cooling spell yesterday afternoon must have gone on through the night since it was noticeably cooler in the cave when we woke. The main door was still shut when I made it out of our bedroom and I walked over and opened it. There was frost over everything.

"It's perfect weather for killing hogs," I said, announcing it as I made my way to the table.

"What you mean?" Chalta asked, as I sat down and waited for my two cuties to be delivered.

"There's frost outside and I remember at my old home the first frosty morning was the perfect time to kill hogs."

"Why?" she asked.

"I don't know why. I know there was some reason for it, but I don't know what the reason was. It does feel right to me though. Today will be the day."

After the kids were full I put them back into their furs and had my breakfast and then we were off to see the wizard, or most of us were anyway. Most of the conversation as we were heading for the canyon was about the new clothes and foot wear Rose, Catla, and the others had showed everyone how to make. People were raving about having warm feet on a frosty morning for the first time in their lives.

I had been a little worried over actually rousting out and catching the hogs. After all, they weren't going to cooperate. Goondoe's people probably had the same thoughts. They knew we wanted to drive all of them we could into the pens, but all the men and most of the women had their bows and plenty of arrows along.

"I told them not to kill hogs unless they needed to. They want to do it your way, but we can't take chances of getting someone injured," Goondoe said.

"You're exactly right too. Penning them up and dealing with them slowly will be better, but tending to any we have to kill during the process won't hurt the way they taste later."