DRY CRIK Journal

After several successful hatches last summer, the quail remain centered around the house and horse troughs, our leaky faucets and sprinklers, pipe threads stretched by last winter’s freeze, all to keep coveys of various-sized quail chicks close by. Little puffs of feathers, they are literally ‘born on the run’, shepherded with intense titters from the adults, male usually on point while the female cowboys her brood to and from protective cover. More often than not this year, we’ve had to stop to let them cross the driveway. The roadrunners have returned, new red-tails perch on fence posts and the Cooper’s hawks bravely watch from the oaks above the garden.

So much of our own nature can be validated by observing the quail’s wild show of domesticity, our entertaining respite come evenings, certainly worth stopping-for during the day. So too have the feral hogs fallen out of the dry canyons, drawn on the scent of damp earth. Knowing better, we let a couple of poor sows with two tiny piglets apiece linger too long too often around the pond in the horse pasture as it dried-up, compassionately clapping our hands and throwing rocks to ease them off.

Robbin’s garden, raised beds of sandy loam and horse manure collected with the skid-steer, includes tree-like peppers and eggplants in rows requiring irrigation morning and evening when temperatures approach 100 degrees or more. Small enough still, the piglets came back last week to slip under the fence at night and cultivate the onion bed, then spread the word and returned, despite our more drastic deterrents, with a herd of hogs to uproot the vegetable plants like a Valley orchard toppled for a new sub-division. Devastation and heartbreak, it’s now war.

Harmony with hogs doesn’t come easy, and I defer to porcine poet David Lee for further insightful metaphors liking these beasts to humans. But it ain’t easy being smarter than a hog, any peaceful balance is hard-fought and seldom sure.