The Great Hog Hunt

     My great-grandmother was a wise woman. It was her decision to move the Johnsons from Kentucky to Arkansas. She started a family tradition that endured for about fifty years, prior to dying out by 1960. In order to prevent the problems they encountered in the valley and ridge country of Tennessee and Kentucky, she set up a system by which the feral and domestic hogs belonged to the community. She established an annual hog hunt with each family sharing in the harvest.
     During the 1950s, the locals around Cave Springs, Arkansas conducted the annual hog hunt at my grandmother’s farm. At that time, pork products were an important source of protein. Whenever a farmer butchered a hog, nothing was wasted. Farmers found a use for every part of the hog. The hog harvest was a very important time for farmers in Northwest Arkansas. My Grandmother Wright called everyone for the hunt when the conditions were right. It was a complex calculation of moon cycles and temperatures. Whenever the conditions suited my grandmother, the family met early in the morning. Most of the children, like me, would be asleep when we arrived at the farm. I was only 4 or 5 years old at the time. If you were wondering how I could remember something that occurred over sixty years ago, you would need to take a psychology course. There are certain traumatic events that a person never forgets. A hog hunt is extremely traumatic for a young child.

     The feral hogs were the most dangerous, but best for smoking. The feral hogs consisted of a cross between the local wild hogs and domestic hogs that the Spanish introduced to the area. They had a high backbone and were very narrow from the front. The hogs may stand as tall as four feet, but be less than a foot thick. The hair on their back is extremely coarse and stood up whenever they were excited, giving them the local name of razorbacks. The smaller wild hogs were becoming extinct due to over hunting. Making them prized was their byproducts and pickled pig’s feet. If you have eaten pig’s feet purchased from a store, then you have no idea what pig’s feet taste like. Everyone in those days ingested pig’s feet for a snack sometime during the day.

     We killed many hogs during our annual hunt. The razorback hogs were very dangerous so the young children stayed at the house while the men and older boys went out to hunt. The hogs normally gathered at the mud holes along Puppy Creek. The hunter would stealthily move up the creek into an “L” formation. The hunters employed the “L” formation because of the razorbacks’ characteristics. As I previously stated, the hogs were very narrow when they were facing you. They were also extremely fast, but that is the subject of another story. Someone could always get a side shot while in the “L” formation. My Uncle Lester was one of the few people in Northwest Arkansas to kill an attacking razorback hog with a frontal shot. Usually, a head shot would just glance off the thick skull and irritate the attacking hog. It was common for an attacking hog to run over a man, requiring hospitalization. My Uncle Herb caught tetanus from a hog encounter, but fortunately survived. After about two hours and a thousand shots, the children could venture down and help dress the hogs. Very little went to waste in the process. The men tied the hogs legs and pulled them into tress for processing. The men removed the heads and the blood drained into a glazed ceramic tub, which was set aside to congeal. The blood was later used to make blood sausage for a morning treat. The men opened the hog bellies after draining the blood from the carcass. A metal tub was on sight to hold the insides. This is where the process got strange. My Grandmother would put her head inside the carcass and take a deep sniff, participating in a process called hog sniffing. It is now a lost art and some people do not believe it, but it is true. Hogs are actually rather selective eaters when they are in the wild. Some hogs eat primarily acorns and hickory nuts. Others thrived on carrion and some even had a fetish for crawfish. If a hog had survived on crawfish, their flesh took on a fishy odor. The smoking process failed to remove this odor. These hogs required special processing to become pickled meat. 

        The traumatic part for the young children was the requirement to take the hog intestines to the creek, running water and sand through them. Once my grandmother approved them, we could play. This was a horrible process. Once we had the intestines clean, we got the bladders. We did not eat the bladders, but we made balls with them. A hollow bladder creates a Neff ball. We put water in some of the bladders, creating water balloons that would not burst. We packed some bladders with old yarn and cloth, forming soft balls. We had enough bladders stored in the smoke house to play with until the next hunt.