contributed to the ‘‘degradation’’ of forests, reducing the proportion of
hardwood deciduous species in relation to pines. Ruffin, among others,
shared this bias against conifers but blamed excessive fencing require-
ments on reductions of deciduous trees, not on hogs’ browsing. Pines prob-
ably did gain in proportion to deciduous trees over the long term, but it
seems more likely that burning forests to clear land, then reburning a de-
cade or two or three later, was more responsible than hungry swine. Pines
generally grow faster than deciduous trees, taking over disturbed places
and quickly forming canopies that retard competition until the next burn-
ing.
The more plausible victim of hogs-on-the-range is actually a pine, the
longleaf, most magnificent (in my opinion) of all southern conifers. Fire
is friendliest to longleaves, whose outsized seeds, nestled in large fallen
cones, require heat to pop them out onto ashes covering fire-disturbed
ground. Unique among conifers, however, longleaves, once sprouted, ex-
perience a prolonged infancy—sometimes as much as a decade—called
their grass stage. The expression refers to very young seedlings standing
only a foot or two high but already festooned with leaves (or needles) at
least twelve inches long. At the top center of a grass-stage longleaf pro-
trudes the plant’s bare, almost milky-white terminal bud, about the size of
an adult human’s index finger. When conditions are right—when the tap-
root has reached a safe depth and when rains and sunlight are sufficient—
the tree takes flight, ultimately, if all goes well, reaching feet. Mean-
while, though, the grass-stage longleaf is vulnerable to fire and to hogs. For
that terminal bud, virtually pure protein, stands at eye-level to the typical
foraging pig, a treat perhaps to be compared to barbeque.
So, one might figure, in , when the governor of North Carolina re-
ported that ,-odd hogs were herded from his colony’s interior north-
eastward to Virginia ports—presumably Smithfield (already a pork-packing
town on the James), Portsmouth, and Norfolk—the horde marched through
the northernmost range of the longleaf, especially through Southampton,
Isle of Wight, and Nansemond counties. If each hog found but one grass-
stage tree along the way, then , longleaves were not to be, chawed-in-
the-bud. A century later, the hog drives to James River and Hampton Roads
continued, now from south-central and southwestern Virginia as well as
North Carolina—all this atop the considerable local ranging population
that browsed the forests year-round. But by (as the traveling New York
poet and editor William Cullen Bryant reported), the longleaf was extinct
in Virginia.^8 Multiply the too-conservative estimate of longleaves killed in