Henrietta was actually Henry

     It was a beautiful spring day early in the morning. Just right for branding pigs. In the pasture were assorted shelters for the animals. In a small pen was a group of hogs that had given birth to several pigs. Today they were old enough for grandpa and his helpers to go in and cut brand notches in the pig ears. As you can imagine there was a lot of squealing pigs and excited sows around. Being a small child I thought those pigs were just needing to be picked up. So I did. Big big mistake. When I scooped him up, he squealed like I had cut off more than his ears. The mama sow was just a few feet away and made a bee-line for me with her teeth a clacking and stomping her feet. All the color drained from my face and settled in my lower end as a brown spot. Lucky for me, grandpa was closer than the the sow and he reached down and plucked me out of there.
     Now fast forward 53 years and meet Henry. He was an escaped pig from my trapper neighbor. He would trap hogs for the state, collect the money, turn the hogs loose, and trap them all over again. When we first noticed Henry we called him Henrietta. As he got older and bigger we could see our mistake and shortened his name to Henry. He was wild as a jack rabbit, but he loved our horses and actually bedded down in the roll of hay while they were eating. I knew that the neighbors thought he was my hog and as long as he stayed in the pasture he was ok. When I awoke one morning and saw Sheila's flower bed plowed up I knew Henry had to leave town. With neighbors on two sides I was afraid to just shoot at him anywhere. Plan #1 was to pull the truck down to the barn at 10:00 and wait for him to show up.   At a little after ten, I pulled the truck just outside the barn.  This was highly unusual for me and the horses were nervous.  After a few minutes they settled down and went back into the stalls.  I sat there for what seemed an eternity.  I should have known better than to drink all that coffee.  It kept me awake, but my bladder was stretched to the max.  I could not get out or I would scare the hog away.  So I sat there in agony for a while longer.  The radio was calling in some good old tunes, but I had the volume down low, so as not to scare Henry.  Twelve o'clock came and went with no sign of Henry.  I had the light on at the rear of the barn so that I could see him come in from the woods and he would not be able to see me.  That did not work out very well.  By three a m I was in misery, but could not give up now.  Surely he would be here any moment.  After all, I was being as quiet as possible.  The horses smorted, snored and farted all night, but not a sound from Henry.  Where is that hog?
     When the sun came up I saw him asleep beside the horses. He had been sleeping all night while I was just sitting there. When I shot at him with my 45 he could not keep up with the horses.  I just knew that the barn was torn to hell and back.
     For plan #2, I borrowed a friends trap and baited it with sour corn. It took several weeks to coax him into the trap and then he would eat all around the trigger without tripping it. Frustrated Sheila put a mirror at the back of the trap and covered the back of that with bushes, and I piled brush around the trigger. That night when he saw his reflection in the mirror, he thought that was the prettiest pig he had ever seen, and tripped the trigger.
When I got out there that morning he was asleep. One of the pins did not latch when the gate came down. I eased over real quiet like to push it in. That 300 lb hog woke up, lunged at me like lightening, clacking his tusks and grunting like a freight train. In 53 years that brown spot still worked the same. When my son-in-law came over that afternoon I asked him to latch the pin. First time in ten years he was speechless. His face was white too.