There's a hog skull in my kitchen, next to the stove.

It's soaking in three-percent peroxide as we speak.I spent the early morning taking it out of its enzyme bath, scraping bristles and cartilage, miraculously rehydrated, off its surface. Then I soaked it all day in Dawn dishwashing detergent and warm water, to see if it needed degreasing. It didn't. So now it's soaking, upside down and looking rather ghastly, in a sixteen-quart Sterilite container with lid, on special at Target for $2.59.It has two unerupted molars and inch-and-a-half long tusks that curve out and up, leading me to believe that this was a 14-month-old (or thereabouts) male hog. I know it's male; I do not know its exact age because it was feral.Boyfiend owns a parcel of land waaaay to the northwest of here, where towns with names like Uz now exist only in old folks' memories and brackish wells. If you go way up past Yeehawton and past Joe and west of Era, you'll find his ancestral lands. Back in the day, the communities there were so insular that the German-language newspaper was still published during the Great War. Pretty much everybody is related to pretty much everybody else. There are tiny winding roads that cut through the llano and run past tumbledown stone houses, and those roads have the names of his grandfathers and uncles.And, of course, there are hogs.Feral hogs are nasty. They turn arable land into wallows, kill young trees and sometimes young livestock, foul water and trample native species into the mud, and can and will kill a man with little not...
Source: Head Nurse - Category: Nurses Authors: Source Type: blogs