Both trails, the one leading to Radhog Hollow, and the one which circumvented it, went uphill.
"It's about a half-mile until we enter the Hollow," Lana Hunter explained. "If anybody starts feeling funny from the altitude, the Hollow dips down back into higher air pressure. Also, I don't know if there were hot springs in the Hollow before the War, but there are now. That's one of the real attractions for the pig—nice warm wallows all year long."
"The springs smell like rotten eggs," Janey added. "Between that and the pigs, it smells like the worse latrines in the world. Even ghouls like me can smell it."
"Quite right, Kiddo. The warmth also means the vegetation never stops growing, which gives the pigs something to eat besides people and animals. I think the stranglevines would take over the Sierras if it weren't for the radhogs. They've become an important part of the ecosystem, not to mention our home defense system. Plus, they taste good."
"I've been noticing the signs along the way," Cooper Howard commented, because he had. Half were written warnings about the hogs, and the other half were illustrations likewise warning any wanderers about the hogs. "Do you take a lot of people through the Hollow?"
"Some people think they want to hunt the big pigs. They're willing to pay decent caps for a local guide, and so," Lana shrugged, "we have the Rules. Almost all of those rules are because somebody f—fooled around and found out."
"Like the harmonica playing?" Lucy asked.
"Exactly like the harmonica playing. That includes other musical instruments, by the way. Man, that was an awful hunt." Miz Hunter shook her head. "If it had been the first, I might never have tried another."
"Seriously, someone just whipped out a harmonica and started playing?" Lucy followed up.
"Yes…that group was responsible for two other rules as well and…."
"And that happened!" Janey dimpled up and pointed to a particular sign that showed people running away, one of them crushed into a pulp under the trotters of an enormous radsow. It had to be a sow because she had about a dozen piglets surrounding her.
"Did you paint that yourself, sweetheart?" Cooper asked his daughter.
"Uh-huh. I do most of the pictures. It's one of the things we do over the winter. That was from our second year here. I think my artwork has improved a lot. This one's from this past winter." She pointed at a picture that was a few trees ahead.
That one illustrated the point that while radhogs were terrible at climbing trees, they were very good at ramming into them until either the tree or the person in it fell. The artwork was indeed better, as the expressions on the people hiding were vivid with terror.
He was hoping these were drawn from imagination rather than life, but given Janey's familiarity with the rules, he doubted it.
"Yes," he said. "This is a long way from the pictures that used to hang on our refrigerator. Good job, Janey."
"Thank you, Daddy!"
It was a reminder that he was five years behind in watching her grow up. He had missed out on five birthdays, five Christmases, who knew how many visits from the Tooth Fairy—all right, she was beginning to cotton on to the Tooth Fairy actually being her parents back when she was seven, but still…. So many events in her life, and he had missed them.
However, someone had been there, and for that he was profoundly grateful (and a little resentful, and somewhat ashamed as well). Lana Hunter.
The two of them were going to have a long talk, and soon. Without Janey or Lucy involved.
"So what else do you do during the winter?" he asked.
"Lots of things, like sewing new clothes for us and making leatherwork for sale. I can't talk about it all now because we have to get ready to go into the hollow."
"That's right," Lana Hunter confirmed. "It begins right over that hill. It will take about three and a half, maybe four hours to cross it. So prepare yourselves like we said."
The path through the Hollow was fairly easy to walk, once you got used to the smell. And once you realized the reddish-brown boulders dotting the landscape, the ones that looked rounded by thousands of years of water and time, were actually breathing.
'Big' did not begin to describe the radhogs. Cooper Howard wondered if the region had gotten a different strain of the Forced Evolution Virus, but now was not the time to speculate aloud.
Along the way, he noticed evidence of previous hunting parties that had not been lucky. A number of them looked to have been supermutants, judging by the pieces of armor strewn around. Yeah, he was willing to bet that howling 'I Am Supermutant! I am unstoppable!' was enough to rile the hogs up.
Occasionally there were some valuable looking guns, but those weren't within reach, and he had not gotten to be well over two hundred years old by dancing on landmines and he wasn't about to start. The dogs were surprisingly quiet despite the obvious temptations, although Dogmeat did roll in something better left unexamined.
Now and then a pig made a snuffling noise or snored, startling them, but they had to be over halfway across before they started hearing gunfire back the way they came.
"Reckon that's the Legion?" he asked Miz Hunter quietly.
She nodded.
The gunfire noises swelled in volume, and they could hear faint squeals, human screams, and even some angry oinking. The pigs closer to them began to stir, but settled down as the gunfire did.
He didn't think it was because the Legion had massacred the radhogs. It was far more likely the other way around.
After the Hollow bottomed out, they began climbing uphill again. Occasionally they took to the trees, crossing wood and rope suspension bridges from one cluster to another. Finally there was a nearly sheer cliff face, which happened to have a wooden-rung rope ladder hanging down from the top. There, Kirby demonstrated that a dog could clamber up a ladder that was very close to straight up. Lucy went next, at Lana's urging, then Dogmeat, and then him. Dogmeat needed a bit of a boost now and then, but had no major problems. Next was Janey.
Last one up the ladder was Miz Hunter, who then pulled it up behind her and rolled it into a bundle, storing it in a tree.
"All right!" she turned and smiled brightly at them. "Feel free to haul out your tubas, your bagpipes and your cellos. The radhogs can't climb cliffs."
"Goldarn it, I knew I forgot something," he said, returning her smile. "I left my accordion somewhere. Guess I'll just have to go back for it."
"Daddy, no!" Janey grabbed him around the waist.
"I'm just joking with you, punkin. You want me to give you a piggyback ride, like I used to?"
"Yes!" He bent down, and she hopped up on his back, putting her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. He boosted her up, hooking his arms under her legs to hold onto her knees. They started down a road which, although buckled and broken in places, was still fairly intact.
"This is our neighborhood now," Miz Hunter said. "Although by neighbors, I mean people who live at least a mile away or more."
"I have to say, it sure is green around here," Lucy commented. "So many trees and plants, and they're all so—so alive. Mostly not that mutated, either."
"Yes. This area didn't get any direct hits, and we're high enough up that most of our water is snowmelt. There's no heavy metals from factories or chemical dumps. It doesn't mean we don't test it, though."
"Smart thinking…"
As they went, Janey and Miz Hunter made comments like, "Melinda and Ruth live down that road; they keep geep—a hybrid of goats and sheep," and "Down that way it's very marshy, and there's too many bloodbugs, so we stay away."
Finally, though, they directed them down a graveled road, through a meadow, and to a cabin. He had expected a hovel, mostly broken down and full of trash, but this was a sturdy looking house made of stone and logs, gilded by the sunset light into a rosy, idyllic dream.
"This is it," Lana Hunter announced. "Home."
A/N: So I have a confession to make….I just got Fallout 76, which I passed on when it first came out thanks to what were, at the time, lousy reviews. However, it has come a long way since then and now ghouls are a playable race! Ghouls that look like ghouls, I mean, not just the 'Ghoulish' perk. I have been playing it a lot lately. Just hit level 60, in fact.