The Holy Sow

Wild, Wild Pigs
from the story "Ordinary Monsters"
in Aliens in the Prime of their Lives by Brad Watson

The hunters hung the boar by the heels, sliced it gut to sternum, let fall the beautiful entrails onto the ground. They removed skin, hooves, packed the head in ice, carried it and the meat back to camp. Every evening, the pigs gathered in stealth at the edges of firelight, watching the revelers drinking, roasting, slathering jowls with barbequed wild pig grease. They weren't feeling so wild, anymore. They began to believe the hunters would never go away, not until they had killed, gutted, skinned, eaten every wild pig in the world.

They went to the holy sow for advice, roused her from the mud hole from which, as long as any of them could remember, only her old gray snout protruded. They holy sow stumped around awhile, blinking gouts of mud from her eyes. She sent them into the forest to gather the roots of a certain strange plant. When they brought them to her, she grunted twice and wolfed down every last tuber.

A moment later, standing very still, a look of dull anticipation in her smallish red eyes, the holy sow disappeared, poof, she vanished.

The pigs ran screaming and squealing into the woods, certain that they were all quite doomed.

That night, however, the holy sow appeared to the hunters in their dreams. One by one the hunters rose and sleepwalked down various animal trails into the woods. They walked into bottomless swamp mud holes and sank. They happened upon and were devoured by packs of wild, rangy, slobbering dogs. They walked into the river and floated on their backs downstream, out of sight.

The pigs rejoiced, got drunk on fermented berries, fell asleep. But that night, they dreamed of their brethren turned and blackened on spits, the meat smoked tender and tangy and sweet, and woke up the next morning murderous, blond, ravenous with unspeakable lust for their own kind.