The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp by Kathi Appelt Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’tcompete. He’s buried somewhere at the bottom of the Mississippi River, and good riddance.
    It also turns out that the descendants of de Soto’s hogs weren’t very nice either. They are still conquering parts of North America, which we’ll discover soon enough.

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    I’ M THINKING IT ’ S SOON ENOUGH, young grasshoppers, because the sorry truth is, the Farrow Gang was on the march.
    There are hogs, and then there are bad hogs (emphasis on “ bad ”).
    Clarification: Wild feral hogs are not to be confused with the native peccaries, also known as javelinas. Peccaries have been here all along. Just check the fossil records.
    They are smaller than the hogs, and even though they look like pigs, peccaries are really not true pigs. There are some who think that they’re related to the hippopotamus. Seriously. Now, don’t laugh. And just like the hippopotamus, you can’t round them up and turn them into pets. That’s for sure.
    Of course, you can’t round up a wild hog and turn it into a pet either. A wild hog is just that: wild.
    On the morning he was born, Buzzie’s mama bellowed in glee at her son’s badness. “This one is going down in boar history,” she exclaimed.
    Right away she named him Buzz Saw Farrow. Buzzie for short. Buzzie lived up to his name. Before he even lost his baby tusks, no boar was better at uprooting a pasture. No hog ever did so much damage to a creek bottom. He muddied it up so much that the water came to a complete standstill.
    Not since those conquistador hogs stepped off Hernando’s boats and cleverly escaped into the Floridian wilderness had there been such a wily hog. Not only that, but Buzzie was enormous, weighing in at almost four hundred pounds. He was a veritable buzz saw of a hog. Nothing could stop him. Nothing.
    Except Clydine.
    At the moment she was born, her daddy declared, “This is the baddest little sow I’ve ever seen.” And she was. As soon as she could stand on her stout little legs, she tore through an entire soybean field. She ruined a season’s crop of peanuts. And she plowed under a pasture where a flock full of little lambs stood cornered in the far side with nothing at all to eat. It was a sorry sight.
    Clydine grew and grew and grew. Soon, she was almost as large as Buzzie. So when they met, it was a match made in hog heaven. He immediately fell in love with her soft sow’s ears. She immediately went gaga over his yellow gleaming eyes and his razor-sharp tusks. He was so crazy about herthat on their first date he dug up three acres of tobacco and let her chew up every leaf.
    The next time they got together, she took him to a watering hole and tramped it down until there was not one drop of water left, only muck. They wallowed in it for hours.
    â€œBuzzie,” she gruntled. “You’re the baddest hog I’ve ever met.”
    â€œClydine,” he snortled. “You’re my little junkyard hog.” And with that they joined forces and tore down a grove of small magnolia saplings that were just getting their new leaves, and gobbled them all up.
    Soon they had a whole litter of little boars and sows. Fifteen of them. Imagine it! Seventeen bad hogs. Bad hungry hogs. Bad ravenous hogs. On the rampage. On the move. The baddest gang of wild hogs in history: The Farrow Gang.
    Mothers and fathers, lock your doors. Pull the covers up to your chinny chin chins. Turn out the lights.
    And here’s the really bad news. One night, a terrorized fox whom they had cornered in a peanut field told them, under extreme duress, that the best, the very best, food in the entire world was the wild sugarcane that grew along the banks of the Bayou Tourterelle, the slow-moving stream that ran through the Sugar Man Swamp.
    Buzzie’s yellow eyes gleamed in the darkness. He chargedat the poor fox, and sent her howling through the night. Then he turned to Clydine and said,