Bob Duselschetner smelled trouble before he saw it. That’s the way it is in hog farming. You come out to the feedlot at four-thirty in the morning and the smell of chewed-open hogbelly hits like a ton of bricks. Heart sinking, Bob rounded the fence, hoping it was just one feeder with a burst appendix.

All was quiet at the feedlot. The boys and girls shouldered each other against the fence or wiggled their tails at the troughs. No dead feeder. No bust belly.

No mistaking that smell, either. Bob took his morning’s random urine samples from the drains around the pen, sniffing, while a knot formed in his middle. He dumped mash and water into the mixer, tested the pH, then poured, keeping his feet out of the way. A feeder is only two hundred pounds, but you don’t want him stepping on you on his way to breakfast.

He couldn’t put it off. Bob followed his nose, ever more nervous, into the breeding shed. Emmaline was in heat. Big Jake had been with her since Tuesday, not getting very far. Poor old guy was just about bacon. If Emmy wasn’t such a good farrower she’d have been bacon herself two years ago, such a temper she had. Not that sows were made sweet.

“Now you’ve done it,” Bob scolded as he entered her pen. The boar’s corpse lay on its side, belly bloated up and crap and chitterlings oozing out the anus. That was the smell. Emmaline stood over it with her jaws still buried in its throat. Bob felt sad about the waste—Big Jake had been nine hundred pounds live weight last Fourth of July, but no use trying to salvage any of that, once she’d had her dirty muzzle in him. “Get off now, Emmy. He’s dead all right.”

She looked up at him with red light in her eye.

“Girl, you want it, you got to sit still for it,” Bob said flatly, his fists on his hips. “G’wan. Git.”

The sow licked her jaws and backed reluctantly away from the corpse. Bob ran the one-ton winch over the breeding pen. It’d take him better part of an hour to shift Big Jake, even with the winch. That would put a dent in his morning. He unhooked the sling. “C’mon, Jake.”

When he put a hand on Big Jake’s left fore, he did the double-take of his life. The corpse looked peculiar. Its torn throat gleamed pale pink under the shed’s fluorescents. Bob walked around the corpse’s other end. The entrails were torn out, pretty normal for swine cannibalism, but they hadn’t been eaten. They were licked clean. Bob backed away. The black boar looked gray. Bloodless. Emmaline let out a growl behind him: the unearthly half-human sound of an angry sow.

Bob caught on just two seconds before Emmaline rushed him. He’d been a hog farmer for nineteen years. Two seconds was plenty. He landed on his prat outside the pen with his feet in the air and an aching back, and twisted painfully to watch the sow rush him. She skidded to a stop and slavered at him through the pen slats. Hogs are smart, but they still aren’t smart enough to know that at twelve hundred pounds they’re stronger than when they were sucklings.

There wasn’t a speck of blood on her muzzle.

Bob locked the shed and limped around it to the utility sink outside. He scrubbed his hands, poured himself a glass of water, drank it, and, hands still shaking, pulled his phone off his belt.