Charlotte's Web? Not Exactly.

While I was an undergrad, Yankee John convinced me to get a job working on a farm for the summer. "It'll be great," he said. "We'll hang out, do lots of manual labor, drink beer, and terrorize hippies and migrant laborers." So I got a job on the farm, only to find out John had bailed and gone somewhere else for the summer. So it turned out that it was me getting terrorized by hippies and migrant laborers, with not nearly enough beer to be found.

But there was a pig.

This pig was a very interesting beast...I noticed him early on in the summer. He had sort of a wise, intelligent look to him, but more noticeable was the missing back leg. He'd sort of hop all over the place.

So I asked my boss (a garrulous sort of salt-of-the-earth type named Paul) about this pig's leg, or lack thereof.

"Well," he told me between spitting massive amounts of tobacco saliva into the beans, "that's a mighty special pig right there. He's saved us countless times. Why once, we couldn't find our daughter, Bean. Looked all over the place for her. All of a sudden, the pig comes running up, just a-squealin' and a-oinkin', and generally being a nuisance. So we foller him, and he takes us down to the irrigation pond where's Bean's fallen in. She was only about four at the time, so she couldn't climb out...Heck, I probably wouldn't have been able to climb out of that pond, the banks were all steep and slippery. But the pig, he just jumps in there and pulls her out. Saved her life, he did."

"Did he break the leg jumping in, so you had to amputate?" I asked.

"Nope. This other time, I was plowing the west field and he comes a-tearin' out to where I'm on the tractor, jumps up next to me and knocks me off. Then he grabs me and pulls me away from the tractor. I was pretty ticked off, I can tell you. Thinkin' about spare ribs for dinner. But then the tractor caught fire and went up--whoosh!. If I'd've been on it, I'd've been burned to death, or worse."

"Did he get burned, and lose the leg that way?" I queried.

"Nope." said Paul, pausing to adjust his truss. "This other time, he actually broke down the door to the farmhouse and came and jumped up on the bed, woke us up. The wife was pretty irritated, I can tell you. She'd just finished making that quilt. But then we noticed that there was smoke everywhere, 'cos the house was on fire. We jumped up, grabbed our daughter, and got out of the house just before it collapsed."

"Did he hurt his leg in the collapse?"

"Nope."

"Well, what happened to his leg, Paul?"

Paul paused, and looked at me in that wise, world-weary way that men get after picking tomatoes for a couple of decades.

"You don't eat a pig like that all at once," he said.