Free The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery Page A

writer. Even when he later became a professional chef, seldom did he get to see anyone enjoy a meal as much as Christopher did.
    And when presented with foods of even larger dimensions? Imagine our excitement when the family of a seventh-grade gorilla enthusiast, whom I had met on my first book tour, drove out from their home in Saugus, Massachusetts, to visit us. As a present, they brought a fruit basket full of melon balls, beautifully carved from the shell of an enormous watermelon, which must have weighed twenty-five pounds. As it happened, my friend Liz Thomas’s sixtieth birthday was the next day—and the day after that we would celebrate the birthday of her anthropologist mother, Lorna, who would be ninety-three. This presented a quandary, as it did every year. Liz was a bestselling author (
The Harmless People
on the Bushmen and
Warrior Herdsmen
on the Dodoth were still in print after three decades, and her newest books, a set of Paleolithic novels, were instant hits); she could afford anything she wanted. Surely Lorna, after ninety-three years, had acquired everything she wanted, too. I’d had no idea what to get for them, but now I had the perfect gift: I would invite them over to watch Christopher eat the remains of the watermelon.
    He did not disappoint us. Chris was already in position when Liz and Lorna drove up. Liz helped Lorna walk with her cane out to the Pig Plateau. I carried the huge melon from the refrigerator and placed the hollowed-out giant before him. Christopher bit into it joyfully. With a grunt, he picked it up. He shook it. Pieces of the watermelon flew in all directions, as dramatic as fireworks. With each new bite, sweet juice mixed with his foamy drool and flowed down his jowls like pink champagne on New Year’s Eve. And, of course, the action was accompanied by the festive chewing, grunting, slurping, and snorting of a happy pig.
    It was a huge hit.
    Liz and Lorna both loved animals. Liz had studied animals all over the world, and she and her husband, Steve, had shared their home over the years with a kinkajou (a South American relative of the raccoon, with a grasping tail), a dingo, a team of huskies, two large iguanas, six orphaned possums, and at present two dogs and four cats. (Lorna was more than welcome there, too, but still insisted on living at her own house across from Harvard University—the better to finish her scholarly analysis of her family’s pioneering studies of the Bushmen. When Lorna wanted to visit New Hampshire, she drove the two and a half hours up to Liz and Steve’s house.) Lorna loved animals and they loved her, too: whenever Lorna came over to our house, our cockatiel would fly immediately to Lorna’s snowy white hair and ride around on her like an animated beret.
    Liz had been one of Christopher’s special friends ever since he first came to live with us. Like Gretchen, Liz was an indispensable consultant on matters porcine. It was Liz who had taught me how to induce Christopher to lie down. It didn’t work under all conditions—if Chris was in the middle of eating, for instance, no earthly force could stop him. But generally, Liz showed me, if you rub a pig along his inguinal region—the area of the belly just in front of the back legs, particularly along the nipples—he will almost irresistibly drop to his front knees, and then, with a thud, fall over onto his side, succumbing to a swoon of pleasure. This intimate caress is almost hypnotic for species across the mammalian spectrum, Liz told me—probably because it emulates the feeling of the mother licking her baby clean, which is often done after nursing. (I later discovered it’s effective even on rhinos, experimenting on a captive animal I met while visiting a sanctuary in Texas.)
    Of course, Christopher wanted you to keep rubbing his belly forever. In fact, doing so was tempting for everyone. Who would not wish to continue such an exchange of comfort