Neon Pig

Neon Pig

I was coming through Northern California and decided to stop in on an old friend Charley who I’d known maybe fifty years ago. He told me how to get to his cabin and I set out in my rental car for a day out in the woods.

It was a long way going around and back into the forest to the east of Big Sur, where we used to hang out together with a group of hippies in the woods out there. He had basically said he was never going back to the “civilized” world, San Jose, San Francisco, wherever, and he’d meant it. He lived in the forest on his own for a while, then got a small inheritance and bought this place, this small cabin, and had been here ever since.

It was tiny, but had a garden, and he had everything he needed. You’d only find it if you knew exactly where it was, and that’s how he liked it. He was living off the grid, lived off hunting, growing food and finding it, and getting what energy he needed from a little solar setup. He wanted for nothing, he said, and didn’t miss people at all. He was friendly with his neighbors, but most of them were miles away and he liked it that way. He offered to take me hunting and I agreed; he grabbed a bow and arrows and off we walked down a forest path.

We had to go a ways, he said, because he didn’t want anyone seeing, and because civilization was bad for the kind of meat he lived on. “Maybe we’ll find a neon pig,” he said. “Reminds me of our old days on Big Sur.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I remembered well the days at Big Sur, watching the sunset as the waves crashed up against us. We shared stories of those days and the way we’d talk about our experiences. He wanted someone to talk about it with as much as I did, he said, because he had some bizarre experiences that reminded him of those days.

The forest was deep and impenetrable, but it seemed that the sounds of the forest got a little louder, perhaps because way back in there they didn’t know to be quiet when we walked by, or because there was just absolutely no other sounds. To me it seemed that if it was California, it had to have lots of people around somewhere, but to him, he said this was as isolated as it got, but it wasn’t quite good enough and he wasn’t able to hunt the way he used to.

He got the chance to show me what he meant when a wild pig attacked us on the trail. It was the size of a very large dog but fierce and clearly not something to tangle with. I was unarmed, but he was prepared, and killed it with one shot of the arrow. I was shocked but admired his dexterity and skill; I said that I hadn’t learned anything as useful in fifty years out in the civilized world.

“Useful?” he said. “The problem is, these feral pigs have a wide range, and it’s very likely they’ve been in civilization.” With one strong gouge with a hunter’s knife, he cut the pig open. Lo and behold, it was a neon blue color, deep blue like a blueberry.

“A neon pig? How did that happen?” I asked. It seemed like a twisted variation of our psychedelic days, come back to haunt us. But it was real: neon blue, all through his insides.

“Rat poison, most likely,” he said. “They eat it, and then, if we eat them, it poisons us too. I was lucky I heard about it before I tried one.”

It shot the good part of an afternoon, but eventually he’d gouged out a pit where he could bury it reliably enough so that other animals couldn’t get to it. I mostly watched, having very little in the way of digging implements or skill at finding soft earth. Eventually we buried it and headed home. He had plenty for dinner, he said, and he didn’t need any neon pig to ruin my experience.

We ate a dinner of squirrel, venison, and homegrown vegetables; I was surprised a guy on his own could eat so well. “Usually I don’t,” he said, “but it’s good to see someone from those old days.” The neon pig experience kind of stuck in my craw, but he told me to forget it. “It’s a product of how far they range, and whether they get into civilization. I go way back there so that animals back there don’t range that far. But that pig does, and he’s a hungry fellow. He’ll eat just about anything you put in front of him, and that includes rat poison.”

The years of hunting had given him an anti-civilization bias, I told him. Good thing, he said, or we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it.