Short Story: Classic Porcine Foraging Behaviour

Short Story: Classic Porcine Foraging Behaviour

Classic Porcine Foraging Behaviour

(part two in the Bestiary of Inspector Blond)

I was still thinking of Frou Frou's soft fur and rasping tongue when during the morning of my next day at work I was invited down to the basement for what the technical people were calling 'a significant find'. For people who couldn't normally find their own arses with two hands I wasn't expecting to be too surprised. Dave met me at the door and punched the code. Bad haircut, overweight, thick glasses, sallow skin, nerdy cardigan and drain pipe jeans….I don’t like to stereotype, it's bad for a detective to allow prejudice to inform analysis but……

'Look at this will, you?'

Dave was unusually animated. He appeared almost excited. My attention was directed towards a steel table top. It was the one they'd borrowed from the morgue and which, rumour had it, they used to concoct illicit booze. It had the drain at one end and a sill all the way round the edges. And now it was covered in what appeared to be the contents of a large barrel of apples and in the mix were bits of vegetation. I thought I could make out some acorns and other fragments of tree produce. The whole place stank like a farmyard.

'Ok, so what are we looking for?'

'Bite marks,'said Dave the Techie. 'Look at that apple, that one there, the green one near the centre…See those marks…..it's been bitten straight through……. and there too, next to it with the red and yellow…….same thing….'

'So you're saying it was a large animal that did this?'

'Well, I'm saying that whatever was eating these apples had a large mouth and a bigger appetite.'

'You don't think it was the Big Bad Wolf? I thought he was still inside.'

'No, he's inside alright and not looking at parole for a few years yet and it's almost certainly not one of his cubs. Don't get me wrong, Mr. Wolf will eat an apple if he's hungry but it's not really part of his five a day. No, the pattern here suggests a different kind of animal. Here, take at look at these stills.'

I looked at the photographs. They were taken in a piece of woodland and showed taped off sections of the floor. I could see the white suited figures of the Scenes of Crime Oppos on the perimeter. And sure enough I could make out apples and acorns.

'Ok, so what does this suggest?'

'In four words, classic porcine foraging behaviour.'

Don't you just love it when the techies speak in plain English? It's not their OCD that prevents them from dating real women, although that must be a hindrance, it’s their utter inability to communicate in anything that resembles conversational English. Dave was, in my untutored and unscientific way of thinking, not just borderline autistic, he was possibly five star Asperger syndrome, with cream on top. True to form he never missed a beat, failed to note my puzzled expression or read my uneasy body language. He just continued as if I weren't there.

'There are two naturally occurring phenotypic variants in foraging behaviour. One is the “rover” another variantis the "sitter". The rover moves around, searching for food to forage, the other is more relaxed and hopes that the source will come to them if they've chosen a good spot. And we can tell from the prints on the ground that we're looking at rover behaviour here and further we can tell that there was more than one involved, certainly two, maybe even three……'

He let that hang there while I did the arithmetic.

'You don't mean…..'

'I don't mean anything Inspector Blond. I just assemble the forensic evidence. Meaning is another country. But if you want to know what I think…… I'd say the Three Little Pigs are back in town…..except now they're not so little.'