No matter what else anyone says...the Battle of the Swine King (which happened on the weekend I took all these pictures) will forever be remembered as the Grand Bull Moose of all wierd paddling trip happenings. I've never seen anything like it before, and I hope that I never slide to that grim and gory level again.
It was Friday night, and we were supposed to run Section III the next morning. After a long drive down from Chattanooga the eight of us found a decent campsite near the putin at Earl's Ford and crashed for the night. Warm fire...good food...good conversation...many, many cans of beer. We all crashed at something like two in the morning.
My good buddy, who we'll call Hossenfeffer (or Hoss for short), had left twenty or so beers nestled in a plastic ice chest right outside his tent door before turning in. A tactical error, in hindsight, but we let it slide at the time.
Several hours before dawn I was jarred awake by the noise of an ugly smashing of plastic, a few grunts, and then one of the strangest sounds I think I've ever heard...a soft, metallic crunching followed by a pop and hiss, and then rapid gurgling and snorting.
What does that mean, I wondered. Hottentots? Communists? Boy Scouts? I rolled over to my pack and pulled out the .44 magnum that I reserve for those very special moments on paddling trips, and I crept quietly to the door of my tent. I scanned the camp, and made eye contact with a few of the others who were peering warily from behind tent screens. I flicked on my flashlight...
And then I saw him. Mother of Babbling Pearl! The Swine King!
My flashlight beam jumped out and caught what must have been a three hundred pound wild boar right betwixt his malignant red piggy eyes. He was standing amidst the debris of the cooler he had evidently smashed, and as I watched in horror he turned his head away from me, rooted around through the shards of plastic and ice, and snuffled up a can of beer. He tilted his head back, and slowly began to chew the can. In just a moment came the sounds I'd heard before...a metallic crunching, then the pop, hiss, and gulping. The evil bastard was shotgunning our entire stash of beer!
Ye gods, I thought. What wierdness is this? We must save this beer! Twenty cans! And then the awful thought struck me...he had been through several cans already...and what kind of tolerance for alcohol do swine have, anyway? A three hundred pound pickled pig rooting up the camp in the small hours of the morning is not to be tolerated under any circumstances, but what choice was there?
I considered the merits of creasing the Swine King across his hams with a few hundred grains of copper-jacked hollow point, but he was standing right in front of Hoss's tent, and the consequences of a missed shot might be a new part in Hoss's hair. Single combat, maybe? But no, the tire iron was safely locked in the car several hundred yards away.
The Swine King was still nosing through the beer stash when the answer came to me. I eased the barrel of the .44 out through the tent flap and squeezed off a quick shot straight up into the air. The cannon blast of the fat powder charge knocked me flat onto my kiester from where I'd been squatting, but it had even more profound an effect on the Swine King...he lept at least a foot into the air, came down hard on his belly, actually swallowed the beer can he'd been sucking on, and tore off into the underbrush squealing like Ned Beatty.
We never saw the Swine King again, but the next night we made Hoss sleep outside and we stashed the beer in his tent. You see, paddling isn't about soaring with the eagles instead of wallowing with the swine...the trick is to soar with the swine instead of wallowing with the eagles. We figured that if the Swine King came back, he would know Hoss for one of his own.