Bleedin’ Like A Stuck Hawg
H. Steven Robertson
May 7, 2006
It is a time worn saying, heard mostly in rural areas. When I was a boy, most of Florida, save Miami, Jacksonville, Tampa, and Tallahassee was rural. Old Cecil would say, “Yep, he‘as hurt bad. He’as bleedin’ like a stuck hawg!” I heard it many, many times, but I never really knew what “. . . bleedin’ like a stuck hawg,” meant except that somebody was bleeding bad. Well, one day I found out. It is a terrible story, but it is entirely true and representative of what happens in the real world..
In the early 1970’s, several of us were trying to live as close to nature as we could. We were also cash poor, so we were able to eat good without spending a whole lot of money. We raised chickens and rabbits, and we butchered our own pigs for meat. We also had our gardens full of vegetables. About this time, my good friend and running mate Doug Marcy got a job working on the Dee Dot Ranch. James Ellsworth "J.E." Davis, one of the four brothers who founded the Winn-Dixie grocery chain, bought large tracts of property southwest of Jacksonville. He named this area Dee Dot Ranch, which is comprised of 51,000 acres the in southeastern Duval County and northeastern St. Johns County. It borders the Intra Coastal Waterway on the south end of Jacksonville Beach. The Dee Dot Ranch is one of the most wonderful naturally preserved pieces of land in Florida.
J. E. fenced in his property and loaded it with prime wild life and even a small herd of American Bison more commonly known as buffalo. He had a getaway home on the property and invited guests to hunt on his land. Among other things, he started a very modernized pig operation. The pigs were machine fed and lived in concrete block buildings that had screen-like floors so that the animals never touched the ground. All the feces would fall through the screen, to a concrete floor below. It was constantly washed, so the pigs were very clean. Sometimes a pig would not be gaining weight like it should, or maybe it had a herniated naval or some other malady that would hurt marketability even though the meat would be fine. Doug arranged for us to purchase these pigs inexpensively and we would slaughter them and cut them up into meat ourselves.
Normally, I would take my .22 pistol, a farm hand would separate the pig or pigs into a small enclosure and I would humanely dispatch the animal with a slug between the eyes. To tell the truth, I never liked doing this much. I’m not much of a killer (unless it’s a fish), but a six-pack of beer helped me get over my qualms. Then we would haul the animals into the back of my truck and drive out to where the workers had used a backhoe to dig a huge trench. We would gut the pigs and throw the entrails into the trench to be covered over later with dirt. Then we would drive to one of our houses, haul the animal hind feet first up into a tree, and skin it and slice it up into the different cuts of meat, which we threw in coolers of ice and divided among us. It was gristly business, but we ate well, and we learned a lot about nature. At least we knew first hand how food got to the table. Most people have no idea what happens that results in the food they eat and never even give it a thought.
Well, the Dee Dot Ranch got a new pig foreman one day and Doug made a deal with him to get a pig. We jumped in my little Toyota truck with my home made camper shell on the back and headed for the ranch. Doug is an artist as well and had done some elegant pencil drawing for J. E., so he was welcome anywhere on the property. He hopped out and opened the huge gate so I could drive through. When he had closed it again and gotten back in the truck, he pointed to a right fork in the road. “Turn down there. Nobody’s home, but I’ll show ya’ J. E.’s ranch house. It’s pretty neat.” As I turned, the herd of bison walked past my truck. They are huge. Even though I was sitting in the cab of my truck, they towered over me. Without more than a cursory glance, they ambled on by.
About a mile down the two-rut dirt road, we came upon the house. It was a rustic looking building that had hewn trees acting as posts to hold the roof of the porch up. It was really neat. We parked, got out and walked around the property. The house was situated just above a small, wild lake, which had a rookery in a copse of mostly dead trees over to the left side of it. There was a long wooden dock that culminated in a boathouse that extended out from the shore. Doug and I walked out onto the dock and down to the platform at the end. The whole setting was very natural. Snowy egrets, green herons, and other birds stood on the branches in the rookery. Grasses and cattails lined the shore on both sides of the dock An anhinga popped it’s snake-like neck up from beneath the surface with a flopping fish clamped in it’s beak, which the snake-bird promptly threw it’s head up and swallowed. We were standing in old Florida.
I am a true , second generation Florida boy. When I was just a lad, my grandfather, Cecil Morrow, and my uncle, Freeman Horton, taught me to grunt up alligators. It is kind of an “Ulk, ulk, ulk, ulk,” resonance. The sound mimics the call of young gators and females, both of which are attractive to bull males. If any place looked like it would have alligators, this one did. I looked at Doug. “Hey, you wanna’ see me grunt up some gators?” Doug sort of chuckled as if to imply, “You’re full of hokum!” Doug is from Nebraska and at the time, didn’t have much experience with the different type of wildness characterized by Florida.
So I threw my head back and let it rip, “Ulk! Ulk! Ulk! Ulk!” I didn’t really think it would work, but to my surprise, gators came swimming out from everywhere. There must have been ten or fifteen of them, all huge, swishing their tails back and forth, propelling themselves towards us on the dock. Doug’s eyes got as big as poker chips, whereupon, he wheeled about and hauled ass off of the dock. I was amazed at the approaching gators and totally amused at Doug’s rapid departure. I wasn’t worried, alligators can’t climb. I walked off of the dock, still chuckling, to where Doug stood, eyes still wide in astonishment. He was still staring at the alligator filled lake. “They ain’t catchin’ me out there! I thought you were full of shit and trying to fool me again like you always do about things here in Florida.” He was probably referring to the time I dropped a live octopus on his head, but that’s another story.
Still chuckling, I walked with him back to the truck and we set off for the pig barn. This time, however, we didn’t go to the huge concrete pig building. This was a small barn across from the foreman’s cottage. I parked the truck on the side of the road and Doug and I climbed over the fence and walked up to the barn. The foreman, Jeb, was just coming out of the door with a couple buckets of feed. Jeb was in his early fifties. He had a beer belly and several days of scraggly beard covered his jaws. He had dirty blue jeans that were full of holes on and wore a red and black checkered shirt. He turned his head to the side and spat out a stream of brown tobacco juice. “Hi there fellers. Guess y’all ‘er here to pick up that pig. That’s him over there in that small pen.” This was a pretty big pig. It was larger than others we had gotten before and probably weighed 150 to 175 pounds.
Jeb looked down and espied the pistol case I had in my hand. “Whatcha’ gonna’ do with that there pistol, young feller?”
“Well, we usually shoot the pigs in the head and then take them to the pit to gut ‘em.”
“Y’all don’t need to be shootin’ that pistol ‘round here. Y’all‘ll scare my other pigs. Why don’t you just stick ‘em?”
Well, I’d never stuck anything before that I knew about and neither had Doug. We looked at each other and shrugged. I had heard tails as to how a knife could be slid into an animal’s brain from behind the ear, thus killing it humanely. I assumed this was what was going to be done. Here again, dear reader, you may be nonplussed with all the talk about killing. I don’t like it myself, but in the real world, this is what happens.
Anyway, I looked at Jeb. “I guess that would be fine, Jeb, but we haven’t ever done that before. I don’t know how to do it.
“You boys got a knife?”
“I got one out in my truck, I can go get it.” All I had in my pocket was my small pocket knife. Ironically, if anyone ever asks me if I have a knife, my reply is always, “ I got my pants on don’t I?”
“Never mind, I got one.” He reached in his pants pocket and came out with a huge folding knife. When he opened it, it had a wide, rounded end, six inch blade. We were standing in the grass beside the barn and pig pin. “Y’all boys lift that there hawg over the fence and hold him down.”
So Doug and I stepped over the low fence. I grabbed the big by the forepaws and Doug grabbed the hind ones and we dragged the squealing creature over the fence and held it down on the grass. To our collective horror, Jeb came over, stuck the ugly blade on the pig’s neck just above the collar bone, shoved it in, and twisted it around. Blood came gushing out and the poor creature was squealing pitifully. I don’t know whose eyes were bigger, Doug’s or mine as we stared at each other. Both of our mouths were open and nothing was coming out of them.
“Okay, boys, you can let ‘em up.” The poor creature stood up with it’s life spurting from its body.
My throat was constricted, as I looked at Doug and stammered, “Er, we’re gonna’ go get the truck. We were horrified. Both of us could take lives and had many times, but we both respected the animals and wished to do as little traumatic harm to them as was humanely possible. We walked in a daze to the truck in silence.
When we got back, the poor creature was dead. We loaded the carcass into the truck and drove to the pit. For the rest of my life, I will know exactly what is meant by, “He’s bleedin’ like a stuck hawg.”
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Reviewed by R Coston
1/2/2012
Great story. I spent time working on Dee Dot ranch when I was around
18 yrs old. You described the gate entrance, road to the the Davis house and the
pond and dock just like I remembered it. When I worked there, Marshal Denison
was the ranch foreman and Mack McNut ran the hog farm. Some of my fondest
memories are from my time there. I to experienced a hog being cut and it was
not a pretty sight. But as all things from Old Florida, it was an end to a job that needed
to be done.. There where about 5,000 head of hogs and you are right about the barns. They worked great until there was a back up in the drains or the hogs chewed a hole in the wood floors in #2 & #3 barns.
By the way, when I was working there, we had approx 90 Buffalos on the ranch.
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