We’ll be doing three more in November. And yep, this is the butcher from Coop. A pleasure to watch him work. Plus there was some shooting of the breeze.

5 whole chickens

3 5-gallon buckets of windfall apples

Some water

Boil in cauldron

Stir until repulsive

Let cool overnight

In morning, feed to joyful pigs.

A sentence or two later he writes of the men he has known who died “betwixt the very thighs of women,” so danger is everywhere.

Fed the pigs a mix of hog feed and curdled goat milk. In the background you can hear Anne Murray singing on the pickup truck radio. It was tuned to WCFW, where FM means Fine Music.

This is when I really got rolling on the writing, finally. Just under three hours of sleep then it was up to fix the chicken coop (the original one, the one on the cover of this book), move the barred rock chicks out of the stock tank and into the repaired coop, clean the stock tank and move in the 50 fluffy yellow meat chicks that arrived today, then move the new coop and chicken fence, then put up pig fence. Never would have finished without the help of my pal Mills, a friend going way back to the “Silver Star” days. We spent the last 30 minutes fencing in a deluge, but got’er done. Yessir. Got’er done.

Now some more writing. And a heart-shaped thought for my wife, who is running the whole show in spite of my ridiculous hours, obsessions, and avocations.

Rest of the story (and action photos!) after the page break.

You can see the hutch in the background of this photo:

It was the perfect hutch…allowing enough light so the pigs were emotionally uplifted, but impermeable to sun, wind and rain. The only catch was that it was so heavy that the only way to move it was to waller it around with the tractor and loader. I know it looks like a little plastic thing, but trust me, it’s dense.

So for three years I’d push it here and there, wherever I wanted to put the pigs. We’ve got another batch on the way soon (they’re here now!), so the other day I took the tractor out back (over winter the hutch served as…umm…a deer blind) and proceeded to flip the hutch over on its roof like I always do (it’s easier to push around that way). Only this time when it flopped I heard a strange sound – a combo of cracking and tearing. My view was obstructed by the end wall of the hutch, but my buddy Mills was helping me, and when I looked at him he had his wide-eyed-dismay face on.

Dang thing split. Two big cracks running half the length of the structure. My best free score ever, and I broke it.

After Mills consoled me (I kept saying, “It was free… It was free…), I got to looking the situation over. It was clearly suck it up and walk it off time.

I fetched the Sawzall (OK, my wimpy version of a Sawzall) (I went through about six battery changes), and began doing this:

And when I was done, we had one reconfigured pig hutch…

…and two piggy cabanas!

And here we are unloading the last one of five. She goes 18 pounds. How we came to have an 18-pound feeder pig is a whole ‘nother story. Workin’ on that for the next book…*

*I always get emails when I say that, so: sometime in the Spring of 2012.