THE FARROWING
By JOHN McNEILLIE
UPON Craig's croft a black sow was " apigging " in an open-sided straw shed. Craig sat on a barrel under me flickering byre-lamp waiting for the event. It was a starry night with a crescent moon riding above the hills that rose from his door, it seemed, right to the sky. The moon just lighted the tips of the fir trees that grew "as thick as hairs on a dog's back" up the heights. It was a lonely place, Craig's croft, with no peat mosses or bogland for the potato crop, but there was water aplenty rushing over the rocks in the burns and fire-wood to hand in the plantations. Craig was smoking a short-stemmed pipe and watching the sow the while. She groaned and rolled flat on her side ; she was hardly ready. The grey of dawn would come creeping up out of the east before she littered, but he was a patient man, and sat almost unblinkingly waiting for her, in her own good time to bring him the pigs he needed. UPON Craig's croft a black sow was " apigging " in an open-sided straw shed. Craig sat on a barrel under me flickering byre-lamp waiting for the event. It was a starry night with a crescent moon riding above the hills that rose from his door, it seemed, right to the sky. The moon just lighted the tips of the fir trees that grew "as thick as hairs on a dog's back" up the heights. It was a lonely place, Craig's croft, with no peat mosses or bogland for the potato crop, but there was water aplenty rushing over the rocks in the burns and fire-wood to hand in the plantations. Craig was smoking a short-stemmed pipe and watching the sow the while. She groaned and rolled flat on her side ; she was hardly ready. The grey of dawn would come creeping up out of the east before she littered, but he was a patient man, and sat almost unblinkingly waiting for her, in her own good time to bring him the pigs he needed.
He had hundreds of things to think of and all night to sit in the mild air thinking. He gazed on the sow's bulging black flank and wondered why she must pig at night, for surely she would litter before morning. Her snout was towards him and her small deep-set eyes reflected the light of the lamp. Quietly and uncomplaining she breathed the straw-scented air and lay waiting ; not even puzzling why she felt so fevered and heavy.
The owls in the fir trees hooted eerily and flew silently to and fro in their search for food. Sometimes they came flap- ping right across the yard and lighted on the red-iron roof of the byre that was, save for the stable, the only other build- ing there was to house all that Craig possessed. He needed that litter of pigs ; needed them more than he could realise at times. In the dark, little house nestling in the shadow of the trees slept his wife and three children, and for them he needed the pigs, because the cow gave little milk since the grass up there was poor ; the rats and weasels were constantly at his hens which roosted in the trees and nested among the fresh green bracken. Clothes and boots for the summer and winter ; bacon for his breakfast for a year ; fresh pork now and then to sweeten a dinner of potatoes and butter ; the pigs would mean all these things. The sow was his god, and she must deliver them from hunger and want. She would : the young pigs would come crawling blindly among the straw ; ten or twelve little pigs ; black and white squealing creatures suckling life from their exhausted mother.
Nothing came to his ears but the soft sighs of the firs and the call of the owls. It was a holy silence, of which, used to it as he was, he could never be really unaware. He watched the sow untiringly till the moon gliding slowly across the sky vanished from his sight and only the ghostly light on the treetops told him it was still up there in the bowels of space behind the shed. His pipe went out and he filled it again; the match revealed the weathered brown features below his battered hat ; the smoke of the pipe went winding up round the glass of the dimming lamp and into the cob-webbed rafters. Till he fancied the night would be everlasting, and the soft chimes of the clock across in the house told him the hours of morning were wearing on, he sat unmoving, but at last he rose and walked across the yard to straighten his stiff legs. The moon in the south-west was waning ; he glanced idly out towards it, where the land fell away into smooth round ploughed hills where the oats were swaying, though it was too dark to see even the hills. They were there just the same ; sheltering the white farmsteads and the well-filled stackyards. He longed for a place like one of those down there in the green fields, where the dykes snaked across hills away into the distance ; where the land was not stony and the kye ate their fill in the succulent pastures of the hollows. The grunts of the sow brought his wandering thoughts back to his own little place on the edge of the wildness of the hills, where the wind roared through the firs in winter and the grouse cackled in the spring and summer. The deep blue shadows of the night were still unbroken on the eastern sky ; he went back to the barrel and began watching the sow again ; she was becoming more and more uncomfort- able; moving restlessly in the straw and grunting the air out of her lungs. The clock in the house chimed another hour away and a drowsiness began to creep over him. The cold air of the morning came in a light breeze that swayed the firs on its way down the hill and ruffled his greying hair. His head nodded . . . the glow died in his pipe . . . he slept. . .
A cock's crow from the shadow of the trees aroused him. A faint streak of grey was breaking in the east. He looked at the sow ; her labour was beginning to mean something at last. She groaned resignedly and her eye seemed to wink at him as a dribble of water ran down her jowl. He slithered off the barrel and went down on his knees at her side. A wet little black and white body lay in the straw. He lifted it gently ; it was hot, but unmoving, and he placed it back by the sow's side. The labour went on ; the cock crowed again and the streak of dawn broadened right across the east. The chill of the morning revived him and he wanted to pray, for the pigs were being born ; not just pigs, but life and food and clothes ; all part of the savage struggle against the land, the wind and the rain ; the rats and the weasels ; the shallow soil ; the thinly sprouting oats. The sow sweated in pain as the light of day came streaming across the hills ; the cat came back from his prowling through the woods.
Just as he pictured them they lay there ; eleven wriggling little pigs. The sow's labour ceased and she lay still again as the blind life she had given birth to crawled to her for milk. Craig sat on his barrel and watched that she did not roll over and crush the life from them. The cocks were crowing in a glorious misty morning and the fir trees seemed a brighter green. Soon the wood smoke would rise from the blackened chimney of the house and they would bring his steaming bowl of porridge across to him, for the news that part of the year's troubles were over. If only the oats had come up thicker ; if only the grass on the slopes were richer so that the cow could give more milk ; if only life were peace- ful always and not mostly painful and cruel and hard ; if only they could be sure of those things, the year would be the best ever and life almost pleasant.
He re-lighted his pipe and waited for his porridge, listening to the world awakening, with all the small sounds of the wrens in the wood and the pigeons stirring, as the sun rose in a blaze of soft gold light.
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