I can't touch myself after doing this job all morning -- not without thinking how much their flesh feels like my own. How the little pin hairs on my legs could use singing off with a butane torch, too.

Once the carcasses are smooth, Lenny takes over. He uses his father's knife to split bellies, spill guts and reveal thick slabs that will soon become bacon. Gary carts blue totes filled with viscera to the ocean-view road and tips them over the steep bank, the unofficial dumping spot for unwanted animal bits of all kinds. Tom's saved the kidneys and livers, but is crestfallen, later, when he finds a recipe requiring the discarded lungs. The eagles and ravens will feast, we say.

But Lenny has lost his heirloom blade. Could the lovely curved knife have fallen in with the guts? Yes, it's possible. Gary goes to look, comes back and says no. I walk out into the gushing rain with a hunch. It doesn't hurt that it takes me away from the scene of the slaughter for a bit, although where I'm going isn't much better.

Water courses over the riprap covered with twisted intestines slumping down the hill. I scramble down and pick through gall bladders and frothy pink lungs. I look out over the blue-grey ocean and remember the story of the killer whale found dead on the beach north of Tlell. During the autopsy, the scientists found pig remains in the belly. How did an orca eat a pig? Then I see a gleam under a grey sausage of innards, and I walk back with the precious knife.

Lenny is ecstatic. Gary is surprised. "Were you looking like a man?" I tease. He blushes and the women laugh.

Pig products

My rusty old fridge sat on my back porch for five years, and now I regret shipping it away. BC Hydro paid me $50 for it in the spring, but I want it back because I find Internet instructions for turning it into a temperature-controlled home-curing facility -- think salty pancetta and dry-aged chorizo.

Instead, the salted jowls hang from the ceiling of my basement on strings. The heads once dangled there too, but Tom finally dealt with those. He plans to make headcheese. Zero chance of me helping, I say, but I have to listen to him sawing pig skulls in half one night while I huddle in the living room.

"They have brains the size of golf balls," was all he said when he was done. The next morning he ran to the window.

"They're gone," he said.

He'd left the pig noses on the deck. Each one of the pink snouts had been whisked away by unknown scavengers -- maybe rats, maybe raccoons.

We invite our vegetarian friends Tyler and Hilary for dinner. We will still cater to our celiac friend, but it's hard to find a meatless meal in our house now -- too many pork chops in the freezer to get through. Excessive amounts of home-smoked bacon. Jellied pigs' feet anyone? Tyler grew up on a farm. He's been caving. Before the pigs, it was seafood. Oysters, baked until barely opened, fresh from the local farm. Scallops too. He loved the Telkwa lamb roast and Dexter beef stew.

Hilary, who's from Toronto, is a harder sell. Locally raised pig, we say, waving our cured jowls (in Rome they call it guanciale) in the air. Those eggplants come from far away. Have you seen any lentil farms on the islands? One could stick to hunting and gathering, of course -- berries cluster on bushes, salmon abound in the ocean, introduced deer need culling anyway. A Haida friend wonders how anyone finds time to garden when there is so much available outdoors as it is. Seaweed varieties, edible plants, clams. So much food.

But there is something about a nice piece of pork. As the platter of spaghetti carbonara passes, I catch Hilary's nose twitching. She'll relent, I know it. The value of eating locally is not lost on her. They've even been talking about going hunting with friends. Think of the driving you'll have to do, I say. Those deer, you can't shoot them off the highway. You've got to go way up the backroads. Maybe you'll find one. Maybe you won't. But a pig in a pen -- it's a sure thing.

I'm still working on her. Hell, I'm still working on my own commitment to the project for next season. A hog of one's own is a lot of meat. And if everyone gets in on the game, who'll want to come over to eat?

Tags: Food