1001 Nights Cast

It is exciting to weigh 350 pounds. If you have very strong legs. Four of them. Otherwise I doubt it.

The velvet pad of the snout extracts a wonderful range of delicate fragrances from the forest floor. Autumn’s sweet damp gets things cooking underground in the most delicious way. Here is rabbit poo with its acrid tang, a bit like tea-smoke. Here is wild turkey poo with its nutty scent. The turkeys like to peck on bones to keep the beak sharp, and bits of bone and? I daresay? beak get in the poo, giving it this particular texture. It gets in my hairs a bit…(sniff, sniff)

I am whiffling about for truffles but can only find foxpaw, that is to say the fungus we pigs call foxpaw. We call it that because, growing under the soil it makes a bit of a depression, as though a fox has run past. For instance, you can just feel it here with the edge of your snout pad if you whiffle under this fallen branch. You can smell a lot of foxpaw at this edge of the clearing because the conditions for it are especially good. The moisture gathers in abundance all along here, from trees that have been felled by the hormones.

Hormones is the pig word for humans. This is quite a complex pig joke which is difficult to translate. Um…I won’t bother. Just to say it refers to their smell and that we have a whole comic eroticism based on the possibility of a pig/hormone, pig/human coupling, or more precisely a kind of orgy. A sort of huge rutting festivity. There are songs about it. But really I suspect you have to be there, and also to be of a certain age.

This is my favourite part of the clearing. I might just trot across…avoiding the thistle. It’s a bit warmer here, with some sun splotches as you can see. It’s warmer also because the compost is richer as a result of falling leaves and the rabbits and squirrels who like to eat upon this natural mound. Perhaps they like to be visible? I’m not sure. The visible is not something I know too much about. It is quite usual in the morning to see steam rising from the ground here because it is so fecund. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! The warmth of the soil on the snout pad is just so good. Mmmmmmmmm. I’m just going to push my snout in up to my eyes if you’ll excuse me one moment.

‘HELP! REE-REE! WHAT A MONSTROUS CRACKING! HORMONES!’

The wild pig scuffs her front hoofs on the ground in alarm as a hideous grinding sound roars through the clearing.

‘REE-REE! SMASH! SMASH THROUGH THE UNDERGROWTH!’

With a wild grunting cry she turns and plunges into the bushes. True to her word she knows little of visibility. Her flight is based less in looking than hurling her mass at every obstacle. She crashes through the forest, flattening shrubs, splintering rotten timber, forging through muddy ground, sending rocks and clumps of earth flying.

As she runs she continues to speak to herself.

There are several ways to get out of the forest which I know. Here I am smashing north to the beech forest. This is the most direct way. There are many obstacles but none are sharp. The thumping-against is painless, every surface quickly gives way to pressure, and most disintegrate with a puff.

Ree! Ree! I crash straight into another clearing full of hormones!! There is nothing to be done except keep going. They are lying on the ground so I pound straight over the top of them, their yelps and roars pierce my ears; their soft bodies squish under my hoofs.

With this strange sensation ghosting my hoofsteps, I rampage all the way to the beech forest. The hormones seldom come here. It frightens them, its eerie green glow. Now we can slow to a trot and hear that the forest around us is peaceful. I have a feeling. I am feeling angry. I am miles from the truffles now! It is awful to be a delicious animal. You are always being hunted by someone who wants to eat you. This is true in every instance. Hormones are the exception to this rule. Since developing guns they have become fearless. No-one eats them anymore and since no-one eats them they have gone mad with unspent aggression and a profound lack of humility. I have sweat in my eyes from running.

The pig rubs her head along the forest floor in an attempt to wipe her sore eyes.

One day I will not run. One day I will stand and charge. One day I will not consent to be that pig they make me be. Oh yes, I might run straight into a hail of bullets. But there will be an important moment between the bullets entering my body and the moment when I lie dead on the ground, and in that moment my body, with all of its force, which even bullets cannot obliterate, my great body will fly and my body will fall with a crash on the body of the one who holds the gun.

In this dream of my death I am still alive, a little alive, at the moment where I crush my tormentor. I feel his bones crack and body-mass slide beneath me, his coarse clothing slide over flesh as it turns to slime. Hear the flutey gurgle and liquid groan of his drowning lungs, smell the spicy blood and entrails as they ooze out to mingle with my own.

What an achievement this will be for the two of us.