Everyone in his life has faced a point of extreme fear.
I can remember a few
....my first parachute jump
...meeting a pacific ocean banded sea snake
that fell in love with my diving mask.
..and breaking one of Mom’s prized porcelain doggie statues
(that was SHEER terror).
Everyone of those recollections
still put a chill and shiver down my spine.
But none, and I mean NONE of the before mentioned
harrowing adventures could compare with that
dreadful day back in 1956.
That was a day of infamy, when three young country
boys got a lesson in "Swineology."

It still seems like yesterday when
three twelve year old bumpkins,
....oh their names you ask???
(I guess I’m getting ahead of myself.)
To begin with, there was Freddy Moore,
a young lad who wasn’t nary as smart
and brilliant as he had lead himself to believe.
If fact, I think if you looked up the
word ‘Stupid’ in Webster’s,...
you’d probably find his picture right beside the definition.
Then of course there was Willie Moore.
He was another one of those prize winners
from the Moore clan, whose elevator didn’t always
get up near the top floor.
The third musketeer was Henry Leighton,
a boy known through the rural neighborhood
as a lad who try anything once....only once.
Most of the time when he got the stitches out,
the cast off, or after a lengthy recuperation period,
he normally never tried that particular task again.

There wasn’t much positive to say about
these three worrisome scalawags;
even though I heard tell that they all grew up
to be rather passable adults.
Even in some circles, they were noted
to be right decent human beings....
( ‘Course there are those who’s judgement is a mite lax).
But in them days, I am sure they were the subject
of many a mother’s celestial prayers,
asking for wisdom and help for those three
wayfaring cretins, and their abhorrent behavior.

Yes, that was us.
In the true spirit of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn
and all other venturesome children;
we were pirates, explorers, soldiers,
space cadets and frontier prospectors.
Our playground was hundreds of acres,
on top of Windy Point, southwest of Atherton, Missouri.
(Pop. 257 souls)
There was mile upon mile of high limestone cliffs,
winding along the Missouri River basin,
crowned by unabound hardwood forests,
towering above the rolling hills.
As it was Lorelei, it’s pristine and primitive beauty
aroused and beckoned us to the very depths
of our adventurous souls.
Everyday we found new areas to explore,
always looking for a cave, or a unique place
that had never before been gazed on by human eyes.
We knew, in our hearts, that out thee in that wilderness
there was an unfound treasure or two.
Treasure left by Yankee raiders, Jesse James,
or perhaps from that old elusive hermit,
who had once lived out there in the unknown.

On that particular day, the three of us
were coming out of the woods and discovered
to our amazement, a clearing with wooden troughs scattered about.
Now that was really a shock to us,
three world renowned explorers of the Missouri outback,
survivors of uncivilized wastelands and
organizers of expeditions into this vast no-mans land;
that we should find this touch of civilization
in an otherwise uncharted track.
Well, true to our reputations, we set out to investigate.

We weren’t there three minutes
when young Henry found a baby pig.
A real tiny critter it was, obviously lost,
lonely, and in need of help; forlorn and abandoned.
And I must say, Henry made one of those really
GREAT decisions of his life.
He picked up the baby pig;
and it was definitely against the porklet’s will.
I thought in all my life,
I have never heard anything as small
as one pound make a twenty pound squeal.
And yes, dear and gentle reader, it did squeal, and squeal.....AND SQUEAL !!!

The response to those squeals,
today, still makes the hair on my neck raise up,
and turns my knees to jelly.
First there was an answering squeal.
Then a series of snorts, woofs and grunts,
except they had the volume of a train whistle.
Suddenly from behind a rise,
stood the maddest, biggest, meanest looking sow,
that I had ever looked upon.
Another series of screams and grunts from the sow,
loosely translated meant,
“ Unhand my charming off spring, you PIG-A-PHYLE !!”
With that she charges straight at us,
and all I saw was an image
of my about-to-be-mauled-and-ate-up-alive body,
reflected in her piercing eyes.
With a quick glance around, I saw that I was alone.
Everyone else had vacated before the message
had even gotten to my cranium, that I was in mortal danger.
I was the potential prey of five hundred
ponderous pounds of provoked and perturbed primeval porker.

I saw that snout, filled with a picket fence
of jagged teeth and tusks, all a snappin’
...all a slobberin’...AND COMING STRAIGHT AT ME !!!!
I took the second part of valor....I RAN.
With a brief subconscious thought
of “feet don’t fail me now”..I was gone.
I ran on FEAR.
Virgil once said that fear lends wings to one’s feet.
I can personally attest to the
accuracy of that statement, for I flew.
But I must say, the pig was no slough herself.
I tried to increase my lead,
but that humongous thing was gaining on me.
Inspired by the fetid vapors of hog breath directly behind me,
I put it in overdrive. The pig put it in passing gear,
and was right on my tail.
I was now feeling hot air on my posterior,
and the sound of snappin’ jaws
was only inches from my legs.
I went into afterburners, and got a few feet ahead.
Suddenly I saw my salvation...a tree... a GIANT of a tree.
I moaned to myself, the first limb was at least
twelve feet above the ground.
I knew that I could never reach the first branch,
it was just too high.

But fear can do strange things,
an overdose can do the unbelievable.
I put everything into that jump.
Michael Jordan couldn’t have
held a candle to me that day.
I leaped as if my life depended on it...
(I think it did).
I soared towards that limb.
I put a death grip on that branch.
I clung and hung, scrambled and clawed.
With a gargantuan effort, I pulled myself into that tree,
wondering still today, how I ever got up there.

That sow circled the tree for quite a while,
snorting, grunting and chewing off the bark.
(It’s a known fact that pigs aren’t good sports about losing.)
She was bound and determined to teach
this errant country boy a lesson in Swineology 101.
My lesson was learned:
don’t mess with Mrs. Piggy’s darlin’ baby.
After a very long period in which she tried
to invite me down and play Pig-a-robics, for the second time,
she finally left. Taking her little porker,
she finally headed for the high brush.

I waited a while longer before I decided
to give up my throne of salvation.
(The real reason was that I was so high up,
I feared I would break my neck trying to get down.)
It took some doin’, but I finally scraped
my way back down to ole’ terra firma.
Willie and Henry finally thought it was safe
enough to come out of hiding.
Both were torn and ragged from every thorn, bramble
and wait-a-minute bush on the hill.
What a bunch of renowned, fearless adventurers we were.
Scratched and torn, smeared with mud, blood and pig patties,
we had been bested by five hundred pounds of porcine parenthood.

As an aftermath to this exercise in sheer terror,
absolute humiliation and authentic stupidity,
I have replayed that chase many times over in my life.
I look back and still wonder how I ever survived that day.
I never told my mother where that nasty, barnyard smelling slobber,
on the back of my shirt came from.
I never brought to her attention the three inch gash
in the back of my jeans.
If our parents had found out about what had happened
in those woods, we would have never been allowed off
our front porches for a month of Sundays,
or until Satan got central air conditioning.

We avoided that area for a long time,
but even a close call like that couldn’t keep us
away from those woods.
We were under the spell of it’s nature, and our fantasies,
for years to come.
But all good things come to an end.
The sudden awareness of girls, loud cars and some new singer
named Elvis, gradually lured us away from the call of the wild.

A long time has passed, since that day in 1956,
yet today I can still sense that deep musty,
muddy smell from that big old river.
I can still hear the wind through the trees,
high up in the hills; even though I am now a thousand miles away.
There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t take a few seconds
to visualize a creek bed, teeming with arrowheads;
limestone cliffs abound with fossils,
narrow paths that twist and turn through a labyrinth of massive rocks.
But most of all, I remember the huffing, puffing
and snorting of a huge monster pig,
ying to take a chunk out of my posterior.

Rest assured, I definitely learned a lasting lesson in SWINEOLOGY.

04/29/2009

Author's Note: This an absolute true story from my ancient past

Posted on 04/29/2009
Copyright © 2026 Fredrich Mohre