Once upon a time when I was little, we lived on a farm on a dirt road, a thousand miles from nowhere. Now this was not one of those picture book farms with white rail fences and pretty barns. It was a labor house in a crick bottom where pavement and sidewalks hadn’t been thought of yet.
There wasn’t a barn on the place worthy of the name. The fences were mostly held together with baling wire, which was the old farmer way of doing things without spending any money because there wasn’t any money to spend. This is a long way of saying the fences weren’t very good.
The driveway was an epic mudhole in the best of times, and mom was just ready to leave for work that morning. A loose pig was not something she could take care of in good clothes and shoes and get to work on time. All the same, we couldn’t just let a year’s worth of bacon, ham and pork chops run off.
Now, my older brother had been hanging out with some rodeo cowboy friends. They had set up some roping dummies (hay bales with horns) and been practicing. At the local rodeo, they watched the ropers in action. In the rodeo event, the calf runs out, the cowboy on horseback chases the calf, throws the rope, dallies the rope to the saddle horn; the horse anchors the rope while cowboy ties the calf’s feet with a piggin’ string.
Problem was, my brother didn’t have a horse. But he had a bicycle. Hey, close enough, right?
With the piggin’ string in his teeth and one hand on the handlebars, he took off after the oinker with the rope a’swingin. He must have been practicing well, because he caught the sucker and before the rope played out, had dallied the rope around the handlebars.
That’s when things got complicated. A bicycle doesn’t have the weight or training of a horse. Certainly not enough to stop a full-grown butcher hog hell-bent on freedom. The good news was that brother didn’t have any broken bones, although his clothes needed mended on the sewing machine later, and there was a fair amount of blood involved.
I’m not sure what happened after that. Logic would say that the pig probably ran as far as the next farm down the road and dad went after it later. Mom still didn’t get to work on time, since she had to take my brother into town to the doctor for stitches.
The bicycle did not survive. The pig came home in packages wrapped for the freezer.