Hog Heaven
by
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(From Chapter One)
Buster Pray didn't do much living in his head or dreaming neither. No time for it. Just another working stiff. The closest he'd ever come to thinking about other worlds was that day in Devil's Canyon, back at the old Indian spring.
It was a secret place, you might say, which was why he loved it. As a kid, he used to hide out there, plinking whatever animals come in to drink, and mostly escaping his Momma's chores at home. Often, he saw lions, tawny loners moving silent in the dawn, or sometimes a momma with a cub. 'Shoot every one of them sonsofbitches,' his Daddy would tell him, but Buster couldn't bring himself to, back then. Too fierce and beautiful, belonged, that's all. Then his Daddy come back from the Big War. Shot up and broke as usual, he gets this wild hair, borrows the neighbors Cat and blades a road down into the steep canyon where the spring set. 'Got to be gold in there,' he tells Buster's momma. Hell, nothing but canyonsides of knobby old black rocks. They looked scorched like a volcano or something had melted 'em into each other. In a week, his Daddy pops a track off the Cat, can't pay for repairs, just comes home and falls into the bottle again.
So the spring never was disturbed after that. Went to sleep, dozing there along the slash of the red arroyo. Beside it stood this one old oak, big around at the base as a Volkswagon bug. Some said the tree must have been here before Columbus come, but Buster couldn't prove none of that or care much neither. Some days, beat out from hunting, he'd just set under the oak's shade, listening to quail calling on the sidehills. Presently, when the sun was dying, they'd pass the word, and here they come, skittering down to drink from the bubbling black hole in the mud. In their cackling, it was like Buster could hear 'em saying, 'come and get it, trees and ferns and birds and beasts. This is life, is, was, and always shall be, if them two-leggeds would just kindly leave us the hell alone.'
But Buster couldn't. He had a hunting business to run. He had to protect and improve this sorry piece of what little ground he had left. The sidehills above the spring were growing up with scrubby oaks and pinion, but worst of all was the chamiso brush, thick greeny-black jungles of the stuff that even hog and deer couldn't punch through. Worthless to man or beast. Gotta go, Buster says to himself, a country longing for a match and crackly dry in the fall was just the right time. Only it ain't that easy no more. Even if a feller owns ground, it ain't his, they tell him. Before he can drop the match, he's got to get permission from the great state of California and all them chickenshit bureaus with their pollution and preservation rules. Ain't nobody gonna torch off ground that might be holding Indian artifacts, metates or stone bowls for grinding acorns, the usual junk Buster had been stumbling onto since boyhood.
So the state sends down this archeologist lady, khaki uniform on her and Smokey the Bear hat, little rock hammer on her belt. Severe type. Buster wasn't about to mess with her, he had fence to fix. Next thing he knew, down she come from the spring, all smiley and rejoicing. In little plastic bags she had red and brown spear points about five inches long. Buster had never seen such humongeous buggers, the usual point being a couple of inches at best. What's more, she'd found rings of green jade that she said wasn't even natural to this country, must have been packed in here. 'It's a burial necklace!' she cried. 'That spring was a burial site. The artifacts were lying right on the surface!'
Buster said, 'Come on, sister.' All the years he'd hunted and cowboyed that place, he would have seen 'em if they'd been lying out on top.
'You didn't know what to look for.' Her hands trembled. 'At least 2000 B.C.'
He said, 'What?' and she shook the spear points in their little bags. 'The design, Mr. Pray! The type of chert, the chipping. It's identical to earlier sites we've located on the south coast. The Chumash down near Santa Barbara. Construction identical, carbon-dated. These spear points were used for killing large animals that haven't existed for centuries. And here,' she shook another bag that had a small white point in it with a funny-looking broad base. 'This is an atlatl. Do you know what that is?'
(162 pages)
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About the Book
Buster Pray, a tough California redneck, was shot up and decorated as a Marine in Vietnam. Now, though, with most of his grandpa's hardscrabble ranch sold to a movie actress, he's just one more marginalized man, more or less a bust in the boom. In the mountains near Monterey, on what's left of the old ranch, he guides pig hunters for a living and pumps septics in his off hours.
The famous redhead, Joan Dubarry of the silver screen, lives right up the hill from Buster's hunting camp. They tangle over Joan's dog, who's been killing the wild turkeys Buster is trying to raise. When Joan jets off to Paris for a new movie, her lonely, adopted son, Aaron, age 13, begs Buster to take him along on a pig hunt.
Buster once had a son Aaron's age, and a wife, too -- both shot down in a drive-by. So he relents and takes the spoiled kid with him. Aaron goofs up, and plunges Buster's truck off a cliff.
Together, they blast through time into an entirely different hologram. Here, in Hog Heaven, a pig-like race of people have risen high enough in consciousness to be able to govern themselves by love. In this Loveland, as compared to the Hateland Buster and Aaron left, money is regarded as a controlled substance and forbidden. In a raucous satire echoing Animal Farm or Wizard of Oz, Buster and Aaron are shown how our primitive society failed and even pigs could create a better one. They learn how to heal themselves by living in the high end emotions of 'LOVEJOYPEACE.' Plunged into a chase and then a revolution, Buster and Aaron finally get their bodies back, and come home with love in their hearts -- and for Buster, a new mate in the beautiful Joan Dubarry awaits.
Hog Heaven draws on the latest in consciousness research, by one of its pioneers, David R. Hawkins, MD, PhD, formerly the leading psychiatrist in the U.S. and collaborator with Nobel laureate, Linus Pauling. This is the world of wonder that we don't yet know we know, but Hog Heaven takes us there in an irreverent, riotous way. We'll never be quite the same again!
-Otis Carney
About the Author
Otis Carney is the author of thirteen books, including the best sellers When the Bough Breaks and New Lease on Life. In film and TV, he has created series and screenplays for major studios and networks, for such actors as Jack Webb of Dragnet, Marlon Brando and John Wayne. The winner of Freedom Foundation and Western Heritage awards, he does occasional journalism for national publications, and has written for presidential candidates.
According to the New York Times, his landmark campaign film, Choice was 'unique ... a forerunner that enduringly altered political discourse' in the U.S.
A graduate of Princeton and a Marine Corps captain, he flew in the Pacific for 22 months during World War II. Mr. Carney and Teddy, his wife of 50 years, have three sons, six grandchildren, and in their spare time are cattle ranchers in Wyoming and California.