The Golden-Bristled Boar: Last Ferocious Beast of the Forest

SIX: Woodsmen and Boars

Chapter Six Woodsmen and Boars I admit that few things could be more absurd than a middleaged man being jealous of his own mother who was moving into herlateseventies.Surelysomewouldbedismayedthatthesource of my jealousy was my mother’s uncanny luck in seeing boars all the time. Against all reason and financial sense, my mother bought a powder blue sports car. She’d speed on the country roads listening to progressive jazz with the top down and free-spirited wind whipping her long gray hair. She would practically run into boars wherever she went: boars on the way back from the community swimming pool, boars on the way for birthday drinks, boars near the misty canal, boars in the winter wheat, boars on the very edge of our village. I’d seen just two, scrambling for dear life. This had to change. The Petite Métairie is a pizza-pasta restaurant so well hidden in the woods it’s a wonder anyone knows it’s there. Despite its name—which means a “small lease farm”—and its Italian fare, it features décors of the American West complete with cowboys and Indians. One picture shows Sitting Bull riding a giant buffalo while knifing it to death. Yellow Christmas lights are permanently strung across the porch, imbuing nearby trees and a mud-hole playground for geese with an ambient glow. One could easily mistake the Petite Métairie for a backwoods barbecue shack, except all the boisterous talk taking place under longhornsandspursisinFrench .Thefifteen-minutedrivetotherestaurant offers another spectacle: wild boars, a lot of them. Itwasn’tevenduskwhenboarsmaterializedbeforemymother,Mary, 48 • the golden-bristled boar and me on the drive to the Petite Métairie. A whole compagnie of them filed into full view outside our village near the Étang de la Grande Rue reservoir. They trotted briskly, tails erect, out of the edge of an untilled cornfield. The large female in the lead crossed the rue des Postillons, lieutenant females spaced behind her with young boars and piglets between . They formed a majestic tribe as they crossed the asphalt, leaped the drainage ditch, and traversed another field before dissolving into the understory. When I returned to the same spot the next day, I found a welltrodden boar run cutting across the road through the fields on both sides. The sod had been freshly tilled. The run led into the woods, where I saw a small, swampy pond with wallows on its muddy edges. Continuing along the rue des Postillons, I discovered more runs with characteristic prints: cloven hoofs withtwo smaller marks behind each from the vestigial toes. These toes leave a print wider than the front toes, helping to differentiate boar prints from those of a deer. On our next outing to the Petite Métairie, we scattered a group of four panicked rousses—immature, red-coated boars. They may have gotten separated from the rest of the compagnie, or perhaps had simply formed a band of young male exiles. In a very short time, I’d gone from seeing just two boars in my entire life to expecting an encounter with them any time I felt the yen for pizza. You can go to zoos or enclosures to see boars, but they are not the samevigorousanimalstobefoundinthewild,withalltheirnervesand senses on alert. Boars in nature transform the forest, restoring some of itsformermysteryandunpredictability:thepowerfulbêtenoiregetsthe adrenalin flowing. However, catching a glimpse of boars momentarily from a car doesn’t measure up to the experience of observing them in their habitat at their chosen time of day. To reach this end, I didn’t have a clue where to begin, except to patrol some boar-haunted tract of woods and hope for a little helpful moonlight. I recounted my boar experiences to a couple of friends, Catherine and Laurent Harvey, and told them of my plan to observe boars in the woods. The Harveys are both hardworking country doctors, deeply woodsmen and boars • 49 committed to nature and natural foods, as well as such traditional pursuits as quilting and carriage driving. In some ways, they reminded me of the earth-loving hippies of my 1960s adolescence. They often organize their vacations around nature and wildlife experiences, from bear watching in Serbia to birding in Africa. Catherine is directly involved in the protection of local endangered species, in particular the ospreys of the Forêt d’Orléans. Among my good friends, they were the ones who most...