The Boar Read Online Free Page A

simple. Lot of standing around and grain eating, mostly.
    Papa liked Clancy to high step like that, because, like the mule, he hated the work and wanted to get it over with. I wasn’t overly fond of it either, but Papa’s legs were longer than mine and he could stand that quick walking better than I could. By the end of the day I’d be nearly at a dog trot and my legs would feel like a couple of amputated stumps.
    But today, with the chance of wrapping up the work by or just before noon, I was more than willing. In fact, I was in high spirits and was singing me a song about Old Dan Tucker.
    When I got to the last rows of corn, though, the words just turned to dust in my throat.
    There wasn’t much left to plow. It looked like a square dance had been held there. Corn was ripped up by the roots and shredded and some of it had been knocked over and mashed as if out of sheer meanness.
    Dropping the plow lines, I left Clancy standing in harness and walked out for a close look. I could see deep wallows and rooted-up places, and peppered all around in the soft dirt were tracks.
    A cold chill went up my back like a wet finger and lifted the hair at the base of my scalp.
    Those prints were near large as a big man’s hand and they were hog tracks. I didn’t have to do much figuring to know I was looking at the handiwork of Old Satan, The Devil Boar.

Six
    It crossed my mind to tell Mama about the corn—and any other time I would have—but there was the problem with the baby. More than likely, I figured this wouldn’t be too hard on her to know, but I didn’t want to take a chance and find out. It wasn’t a total disaster to the corn crop, but it was a pretty good loss. Papa could have picked up quite a few dollars off those six rows of corn, or it would have made quite a few meals for us. Instead, some hog I didn’t even know, who might be a Caddo medicine man or the devil himself, had come out in the middle of the night and snacked on it. Those sorry dogs of ours that barked at everything hadn’t even whimpered this time.
    I couldn’t figure that. Those dogs weren’t exactly bloodthirsty when it came to people, but they didn’t cotton to other critters being on our land, other than those owned by us. They wouldn’t even let a possum shortcut across our yard without barking him deaf or chasing him up a tree so Papa could shoot him and Mama could stew pot him.
    The oldest of the dogs—Blue—wasn’t going to be hung for no picture, as he was the ugliest dog in creation, what with his ripped up ears and nose from all those coon hunts, but he could smell a drop of sweat on a gopher in the next county. So why hadn’t he smelled Old Satan?
    Papa would probably have said the wind was blowing so that it carried Old Satan’s scent away from the house and the dogs. Or maybe he’d have said the hog smelled too much of the river mud from wallowing in the shallows.
    And all those sounded right possible. Even likely. But there was an old saying that kept hopping around in my head like fresh frog legs in a skillet— ”the luck of the devil.”
    Disgusted and mad, I piled up all the wrecked corn stalks at the edge of the field so I could haul it up to the barn later on and feed it to the stock. Least that way it wouldn’t be totally wasted. This job took me about half as long as it would have taken me to plow out the rows, so I was through quite some time before midday.
    I had Clancy drag the plow back to the barn and I hitched him up with a sled. We went back to the corn patch, and I loaded the stalks on the sled and hauled them out back of the barn and stacked them so they’d dry out good.
    When that was done, I put the sled away, unharnessed Clancy, and groomed him. I groomed Felix too, just like he’d been working.
    While I groomed, I thought again on telling Mama about what Old Satan had done to the corn, but I came right back to my first decision. It was best she didn’t know.
    One part of me felt good about the fact