THE PORKY CHRONICLES, Part 2:
Cheaper than Wolf Urine

When I got home that evening from a full day of some of the most modern activities on the planet, Echo told me she had found in one of the local farm stores a product that claimed to be an inoshishi repellent but was pretty expensive, should she get some. It also claimed to repel bats, cats, snakes, rats, moles, raccoons,  just about everything except the IRS, which claims gave me pause, but though expensive it was a lot cheaper than wolf urine, so I put the mental barbed wire on one of my mind's wayback shelves and sprang for the stuff.

Next evening I came home from another day riddled with more of said modern activities to find sitting on the kitchen table what looked like a box of Satan's favorite cereal. The red-flaming garish package indeed claimed to repel wild pigs, prominently among all the other things. As proof, on the  front, above a wild pig in a red circle with a bar across it (could this really be as easy as No Parking?) growled a big, angry, sharp-fanged habanero pepper that evoked devilish gratification at sprinkling this stuff around my property, now pocked all over with holes that pigs had made in the ground.

It was darkly satisfying to imagine large porky pig snouts snorking along in the night, coming upon a little pile of this devilish stuff and just sucking it up into flaring pig nares-- oh, if I could only see the flames that would follow as the beasts ran off into the night, never to return; imagination is almost as good as being there. How many are the degrees of surreality, I wonder.

Repellently curious, I opened the box, then the plastic bag inside; sniffed, reeled. One kilo of pig antimatter, uncut. Looked like (but did NOT smell like) a chunky instant coffee packet for a large creature of the night. Contained dried habanero, NEET, creosote, garlic, an occult concoction of stuff that would repel anything, including vampires; it certainly repelled this mere mortal to a considerable distance, and might even work on zombies.

The next morning, with delightful images of flaming pig nostrils dancing in my head, I sprinkled the black magical piggypowder everywhere a porker might snork. The bag was quickly emptied, but those little nosebombs were everywhere enough that  during the night I might just hear the wild pig equivalent of Porky Pig sniffing up some scoville 5 million. Couldn't wait. At the end of my task, I split open the empty bag, laid it smelly-side-up in the middle of the slope the porks had made of the stone wall into my little deckside garden, and there pinned it to the ground with a rock, like a figurative middle finger salute to the night invaders.

The next night was pigless. And the night after that. It was working, at least; the porkers could smell it for miles and wouldn't be coming back, suggested the the "Curly" portion of my brain’s Corpora tristoogia. Cerebrally speaking, I should have twisted his nose with some pliers.

[Stay tuned for Part 3!]