Written in April 2015 and published in April 2016 for The Dark Mountain Project Issue 9: The Humbling.

the last time I held a baby

The last time I held a baby was when I stood over the split belly of a wild sow in the half-moonlit vineyards of the Sonoma coast in November. She had been shot through the heart by the man I will marry.

We should all be so lucky, our exit announced by a quick shriek and then darkness. I wondered if she was imbued with the awareness of her children. I could see their snouts, feel their developing hooves. They were almost fully formed. There were eight. Another month and they would have sprung forth to roam across the rolling hills of California, inhaling salamanders and breaking apart the mycelium that give us the chanterelles.

The fault was not hers. She did not ask for her ancestors to be brought here. Her straight, wire-haired tail told us of her Russian heritage. If she and her children reached their full potential, she would be responsible for seven million in ten years. Her very-great-grandmothers were brought to a land which was unprepared for them, and now we must kill them to save what little is left.

In New Zealand the pigs devoured almost all of the ground-nesting birds. Big, fat, flightless parrots. But in California most birds raise their broods in the branches. When it came my turn to try, it was not so easy. I shot three of my own in the dark, and I watched them run off bleeding, but I never found their bodies, and it left me dull and aching.

So I drove home in the snow, and the tires were bald, and I cried in fits and starts as I skirted the edges of two-thousand-foot cliffs and I thought about the pigs heaving, alone, vultures circling, bile entering their wounds to eat away at their breathing because I had miscalculated.

And there was never such a feeling of misanthropy as my knowing I held a weapon in my hands that I was perhaps not yet skilled enough to use. Like so many before me, I had shot in desperation to try and bring my people back something to eat. Something to lay kisses on my prideseeking heart. Something to smile over while the flash held my face in its 155 sarah rea hands. The kill zone on a wild boar is the size of a gallon water jug, and I had blown those apart at a hundred yards. There is so much more to it than that.

But I had in the back of the truck, cocooned in snow, a little rabbit. I had shot it in the shoulder, and it looked me in the eye as its stomach opened up and it ran straight towards me and fell, kicking. It died right at my feet. I sobbed over its body.

And you opened up my knife for me and told me how to take the rabbit apart. And you took a photo and in it I looked like a little girl, hands covered in blood. And its entire stomach lay right where I had shot it once I followed the red trail back to the fence where we had first seen it pause, and you had said shoot.

I thought of the night when we took apart that mother sow. Her skull sits on my wooden table now next to a bowl of pomegranates, and one of her cutting teeth keeps falling out because we did not take the care to fill it with epoxy. It was my birthday when we cut her into named pieces, and we drank whiskey from the bottle, and you fell and hit your head by the fireplace when I was asleep and you lay there for a long time.

There was no sisterhood for that animal, no arms around her to celebrate the impending birth of her piglets, no outrage when she was taken from the herd. Had we not found her they may have eaten her body themselves. She just died, her jaws clenched with clover, heart exploded and sucking in the cold night air. I watched her ribs being sawed apart. God, she was glorious.