There were eight of the pigs. The first thing I heard every morning

at daybreak was the whole outfit crashing under the fence and

rushing under the floor of my bedroom for a matutinal rubbing of

backs against the crosspiece. The rubbing ended, and the grunts,

my room stopped shaking....[Then] the happy congregation moved

on to the trays of biddy-mash, the skimmed milk and the fluffy-

ruffle petunias.—Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,Cross Creek, 

[My work in North Carolina] asserts a proposition which must

ultimately be at the base of forest preservation in this country:

namely, that it is not necessary to destroy a forest to make it pay.

—Gifford Pinchot at the Biltmore Estate, 

3

   

t

The very first history of Virginia—Robert Beverley’s, pub-

lished in London in —glimpses the delights of great

planters’ domestic lives and much else of nature and the

countryside. At William Byrd’s Westover on a warm day,

Beverley luxuriated in Byrd’s honeysuckle-covered gazebo,

hummingbirds fanning his face. Beyond Byrd’s carefully

fenced big house and crop fields, though, there was wilder-

ness-apparent, plus innumerable packs of swine running

at large and amok. ‘‘Hogs swarm like Vermine upon the

Earth,’’ Beverley wrote, ‘‘and are often accounted such, in-

asmuch that when an Inventory of any considerable man’s

Estate is taken by the Executors, the Hogs are left out,

and not listed in the Appraisement.’’ Counted or not, ‘‘the

hogs run where they list, and find their own Support in the

Woods, without the Care of the Owner.’’ Twenty-three years

later, Byrd himself, on the North Carolina side of the Great

Dismal Swamp, supervising the survey of a dividing line

with Virginia, scoffed at the laziness of locals: ‘‘The only

Business here is raising of Hogs,’’ he observed, ‘‘which is

manag’d with the least Trouble, and afford the Diet they

are most fond of.’’ Only five years later (in ), the gov-

ernor of North Carolina reported that in good mast years,

, fat hogs were driven through his colony to Virginia