The Pig

I don't remember the exact month the following happened.  All I know is that it's one of those stories I'll be telling on my death bed.  The year was 1994.  Myself and three friends were bored one evening.  We had been hanging out around my parents' dining room table when we collectively decided to go buy a pack of smokes.  We ambled down to the nearest gas station (which is where Mike was working at the time) and sent one friend in for a pack of DuMaurier regular.  We needed a place to hide while we smoked, so we trekked out into the farmer's field behind my parent's house.

We walked along the old, grown over road, chatting and laughing.  Eventually, we veered off the path and down a small embankment.  We found a a pile of logs that served as a sitting area.  We lit up our treasured cigarettes and started to puff away.  The logs weren't very comfortable, so I started to skulk around looking for a better place to sit.  I looked back up the small hill and saw a large, white-ish rock.  As I started to climb back up the hill, I realized I wasn't looking at a rock.  My first thought was, "Wtf is a polar bear doing out here on the prairies?".  All four of us climbed back up onto the road to get a better look at this 'rock'.

Someone started shrieking, "It's a pig! It's a pig!".  To call this thing a pig was an understatement.  This was a friggin' monster hog...in my memory, it was five feet long and a thousand pounds.  It was HUGE, to say the least.  After the screaming died down, we all stood silently, staring at the dead beast.  It had no legs and had bright green spray paint marking its back.  We all jumped to the same, logical conclusion - it must have been some type of animal sacrifice by a satanic cult.  As we were staring at the pig, the silence was broken by one friend, N, who let out a loud "Snnnnnoooorrrrtttggggghhhh!" (that's supposed to be a pig snort sound).  We all SCREAMED and ran back to my house as fast as we could.

My sister was home and we all started blathering on about cults and dead pigs and satanic markings.  My sis, never one to miss out on being a part of something dramatic, decided we should phone the cops.  When the female cop eventually showed up at the house, we all loaded into the squad car and drove into the field.  We walked her back out to where the lifeless behemoth lay.  As we stood on the road, the officer to my right and the pig to my left, I darted a glance back and forth, back and forth.  Cop.  Pig.  Cop.   Pig.  I so desperately wanted to make some kind of pig/cop/bacon joke, but felt I was too young to be arrested so I kept my mouth shut.

It turns out, there were no satanic rituals involved with the pig's death.  It had escaped from the local slaughterhouse and had gotten stuck in the underbrush.  The reason we couldn't see it's legs was because the pig had sunk into the ground while frantically trying to get itself un-stuck.  As for the green spray paint, the slaughterhouse used different colours to denote who the pig belonged to or what truck/chute it was destined to ride.  I must say, I like our explanation much better :-)