Napoleon
It was one step forward then two steps back then sudden leaps
forward, then absolute sudden stand-stills, that describes my relationship with
the Dagda aka Jeff. His tyranny could, I hoped for a moment, be due to a
Scottish accent grafted on to a northern Irish one the barking manner of which
people in Belfast speak; Ian paisley could make the words ‘Thank you’ sound
like an insult…and yet Jeff looks like a western Christmas-card Jesus.
Stewart, who I like immensely, said, while taking me to
Wigtown in his van so I could get a bus ticket to London, that he too had taken
on a low-impact, environmental project and had, consequently become so
fanatical with tunnel-vision that anyone who did not measure up to the ideal
was summarily dismissed. Though the information gave me insight, it didn’t
help. Nevertheless I didn’t go to London
and fabulous things were accomplished like, for example, yesterday.
We, Stewart, Jeff (Dagda) and myself went to another
community off the upper lowland walk, Ayrshire on an errand to fetch a yurt and
ended up with a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig; a male boar, black and named (pending
meeting) Napoleon, after George Orwell’s porcine character in Animal Farm.
A cage was improvised from pliant fence wire and a square metal
cage. The openings were covered with the wire. The cage in the back of Stewart’s
van; we had only to catch the pig. Neither Jeff nor I had caught a pig before.
Stewart flatly refused to be involved.
“I’ll get the head, you get the back end”, I was volunteered.
My adrenaline level went up; there was an unknown quantity in strength getting
suspicious in an extremely filthy pen. Jeff was trying to bond with it by
offering the pig half an avocado pear, my lunch; it wasn’t working. I thought
Jeff was going to evoke the mighty heroes of Irish myth and legend in order to
deal with the mighty energy of the pig, but I detected fear in his voice;
adrenaline surge.
When I jumped into the pen, Jeff stood crest-fallen with the
avocado. My movement made the pig run into an inner pen then run out again and
the race began.
Liz, owner of the pig, suggested, from the other side of the
gate that Jeff , “throw himself on the animal, wrestle it to the ground, then
clamp its head”, and that someone else, (me), grapple hold of its hind
quarters. Without the plank, jutting out, perpendicularly from one of the sides,
into which the pig got stuck after a long drawn out chase, which involved high-pitched nightmarish squeals, and Jeff barking
like a mad man in his grimy plus-fours and old tweed poncho, (which Liz
suggested he throw over the animal) – we might never have caught the him.
So, trapped a second time, we seized the opportunity,
Jeff straddled the neck, head-on, and
with the squealing reaching a terrifying pitch, Jeff, in full rant, I felt, at
everything else on the planet; the whole
becoming a shouting match between the pig and Jeff.
“I’ve got the legs! I’ve got the legs!” I shouted.
The pig, now in an embrace, we lifted it out of the pen and
step by pig-squealing-Jeff-ranting-audience-encouraging-step we forced it into
the cage where it quickly settled on to the bed of straw provided.
Jeff and I huffed and puffed as though we’d fought a
Minotaur, (each others Minotaur more like).
We were to have taken the female but given her position in the
pen with two others and the ordeal we’d had with Napoleon, we decided our good
fortune began ended with one. And anyway, Liz, the owner, had become extremely
fond of her girls.
No comments:
Post a Comment