Termination Shock

The first six months of slow to nonexistent work had got him down in the dumps, but as he later came to understand, the time had been very well spent. He would sit at the little table in his trailer, running the AC off the generator, reading websites and later books about wild pigs. This was fascinating. For starters he learned that pigs, like white people, were an invasive species from Europe. In conquistador times, the 1500s, Spaniards had brought them across the Rio Grande. Probably before the water of the river had evaporated off their bristly pelts, they had got loose. Many such “introductions” (as these events were denoted in the literature) had taken place over the half millennium since. But none of them, taken alone, could explain a Snout. For that, you had to factor in the wild boar introductions, which were more recent. Some people liked to hunt these animals. It seemed to be a particular obsession of the Germans. There were a lot of those in Texas and they had money, as well as large tracts of land on which to stock game. Apparently in Germany there was a place called the Black Forest. Stories were told of it no less harebrained than the ones that hippies and survivalists favored. What these German-Texans were convinced of was that their ancestors had, since long before and continuing long after the Romans, roamed noble and free in this Black Forest killing wild boars with lances, and that to do so was to partake of their ancient heritage, just like the Indians with their drums and their dancing. So they got hold of the biggest and meanest wild boars that could be obtained in Europe, even sending parties into the hinterlands of Russia to find unspoiled stock, and they brought these things to Texas. Usually some effort was made to fence the land, but hogs could root under fences, ford rivers, and wade across tide flats, and so the boars had got loose in the wild almost as easily as their domesticated cousins had done hundreds of years before, and got busy having sex with those.

Rufus lacked a lot of formal education but he certainly knew how to read and he had been a very good mechanic in the army largely because he had had an ability to focus on abstruse maintenance documents to a degree exceeding that of his fellow soldiers. He had a knack for zeroing in on the key fact or figure jutting from a paragraph like a snag from the murky water of a bayou. It came in handy when tackling some of the more academic wild pig literature. For example, breeders of domestic swine aimed to make them as big as possible. The words “in excess of 700 kg” jumped out at him. This had to be wrong. He did the math: it was more than fifteen hundred pounds. Wild boars were smaller by far; the biggest ever recorded was “only” half that weight. But what would happen when a wild boar, carefully selected for ferocity and cunning, hybridized in the wild with a monster domesticated specimen?

The same names kept turning up in the literature. One of them was Dr. I. Lane Rutledge of Texas A&M University. A slight amount of googling revealed that this individual was female, first name Iona. She had made a lot of headway using genetic sequencing to untangle the situation that had developed over the last five hundred years from all these different kinds of pigs having sex in Texas. She turned out to be surprisingly easy to reach on the Internet. She returned his emails. Tersely, but she did return them.

Rufus had learned that people in general were more approachable if you could offer them something and so he began sending her data: samples that she could DNA-sequence, combined with geo-tagged photos of the deceased swine that had provided those bodily fluids. That got her attention and made Rufus feel better about requesting a face-to-face meeting.

He left his trailer on a client’s property about twenty miles outside of College Station and then drove into town and found his way to the campus. Google Maps was all wrong about how to get there because there was a big protest underway and a lot of streets had been blocked off. Rufus had to probe from multiple directions, then park as close as he could and walk. At first the protesters gave him mean looks for driving a huge gas-guzzling dually until they saw through the glass that he was a person of color and then they didn’t know where to direct their moral indignation.

It was hot as hell in College Station despite it being November. Rufus broke a sweat immediately and hoped that Dr. Rutledge wouldn’t turn out to be squeamish about such things. He wondered if in his middle age he was losing some of his tolerance for heat. He rarely ventured out of doors during daylight hours anymore. One of the very few genetic weaknesses of pigs was that they couldn’t sweat, which was why they wallowed during the day and did the hard work of rooting out food at night. Rufus had accordingly become nocturnal.