My Year in a Log Cabin

by William Dean Howells

Chapter IV

The geese were not much profit—they had to be sold, finally, for little or nothing; but their soft and woolly goslings were a great pleasure to all the children, who were plunged in grief when the miller’s sow made a foray among them.

This was a fierce and predatory, animal that was in some sort a neighborhood terror. She made her lair in the reeds by the river-side, breaking out a perfect circle, which she kept against all comers, especially boys, till her young were born; then she returned to her sty near the miller’s house, convenient to the young turkeys, chickens, and goslings, leading forth her brood in a savage defiance which no one dared to front, except the miller, who did so with a shot-gun at times, when her depredations became outrageous. Wherever she appeared the[Pg 15] children ran screaming, and the boldest boy was glad of the top rail of a fence.

She was, in fact, a wild beast; but our own pigs were very social creatures. We had got some of them, I believe, from the old Virginians whom we had succeeded in the cabin, and these kept, as far as they could, the domestic habits in which that affectionate couple had indulged them. They would willingly have shared our fireside with us, humble as it was, and being repelled, they took up their quarters on cold nights at the warm base of the chimney without, where we could hear them, as long as we kept awake, disputing the places next to the stones.

All this was horrible to my mother, whose housewifely instincts were perpetually offended by the rude conditions of our life, and who justly regarded it as a return to a state which, if poetic, was also not far from barbaric. But children, and more particularly boys, take every natural thing as naturally as savages, and we never thought our pigs were other than amusing. In that country pigs were called to their feed with long[Pg 16] cries of “Pig, pig, pooee, poe-e-e!” but ours were taught to come at a whistle, and, on hearing it, would single themselves out of the neighbors’ pigs, and come rushing from all quarters to the scattered corn with an intelligence we were proud of.