Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

He left them where they fell, and other hogs ate them. This was just one of the many ways in which it all began to seem futile. Hogs ate everything, including other hogs. Grazing animals would eat grass but leave the roots in the ground; hogs tore up the ground and ate the roots. Erosion followed. Only ants could live in what the hogs left behind. Rufus couldn’t kill these things fast enough, and the ones he did kill only became food for the ones he didn’t. They forbade Adele feeding Snout or any other wild pig, but by then Snout had already got the head start he needed; he’d come to associate humans with food, and Rufus began to suspect that he was drawn to the sound of rifle shots in the night, as he’d worked out that it usually meant a dead cousin lying on the ground, free for the eating. So Rufus’s nocturnal shooting only led to Snout’s getting bigger.

A lot of that was hindsight, after what had happened had happened. Just Rufus torturing himself. He should have marked out Snout as a special threat. Should have killed one hog as bait and then lain in wait for Snout to show up. Years later he was haunted almost every night by the possibility that he might once, back in those days when he still had a daughter, have had Snout in his infrared sights, one white silhouette among many, and refrained from pulling the trigger, just because Adele had a soft spot for him and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye over breakfast.

More recently he had learned the trick of sticking out his tongue when the bad self-torturing thoughts began to creep into his mind. He would open his mouth wide and stick out his tongue as far as it would go, almost as if he were gagging the bad thought out, refusing to let it in, and somehow this worked and got his mind back on the track it should follow. It made people look at him funny, but he didn’t spend that much time around people.

His only consolation, and a very meager consolation it was, was that the incident—which took place while he was in town picking up a load of drainpipe—had been a sudden invasion of the property by two dozen or more feral hogs. Snout was the ringleader, but he had so many accomplices that even if Rufus had been at home standing there with a loaded gun he might not have been able to save Adele.

He and Mariel broke up, and she wandered back down south to live with family. Rufus devoted his life to killing feral hogs. He literally made it his business.

Business, by that point in his life—he was forty-four—was a thing he was finally coming to grips with. In the army he’d never had to think about profit and loss. He’d assumed that duty on the farm because Mariel was so manifestly hopeless at it. Over those years he had watched, staring into his QuickBooks late at night, as the numbers had gotten worse and worse and more and more of his army pension had been siphoned off to cover the shortfalls. In all honesty it had become a hobby farm. But it was all neither here nor there since these financial signals were drowned out by the emotional side of things: the story that he and Mariel were telling themselves, and increasingly telling Adele, about why they were living here.

Once Adele was dead and Mariel gone, the story was over. Matters became very clear and decisions easy. Rufus sold what he could and sent half the money to Mariel. He drove up to Fort Sill, where, as a retiree, he still had access to the auto shop, and fixed up his truck: a dually, as people around here referred to pickups with double tires at each end of the rear axle. His grandmother and some of his cousins had gone into the RV business. From them he got a used camper trailer that he could tow behind the dually. He moved all his tools, guns, and personal effects into that. He made up signs and business cards saying FERAL SWINE MITIGATION SERVICES and he just started driving around and parking that rig, with those signs on it, in places such as livestock auctions and county fairs.

Without the army pension he might not have made it through the first six months, but slowly business picked up and Rufus found himself driving his rig along the seemingly infinite network of farm-to-market roads that like capillaries infused every part of Texas—a state with which Rufus, an Oklahoman, had a stranger-in-a-strange-land relationship. He would set up operations for a spell on this or that ranch where the owners had decided they needed some additional firepower in this one area. He was not the only person doing it. Far from it. But he was able to compete with bigger outfits on price. The competitors had mouths to feed and equipment to maintain. Some used helicopters. Others shot hogs at night from all-terrain vehicles. Flashy but expensive. Rufus worked by himself. He didn’t have to make payroll, didn’t have to cover medical and dental. His method was to go out by himself with a rifle on a tripod and an infrared scope and just wait for the white silhouettes to show up against the dark background and then start picking them off, starting with the biggest ones and then working his way down to the juveniles as they scurried around in a panic.

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?