Ruin Hogs

Overview

Ruin hogs are pigs gone back to the wild. When a settlement of the Broken Marches failed and its people left, their swine stayed, and over many generations their descendants became a rangy, bristled, tusked wild kind that lives in the old works. Salvagers say a herd in a ruin is worse than bad air, because bad air does not come looking for you.

Appearance

A grown boar stands as high as a man's hip and is far heavier than he looks, all shoulder and head, tapering to narrow hindquarters and a thin tail. Its coat is coarse grey-black bristle, often patched with old pink or brown from the farm pigs it came from, and thick along the spine into a ridge that rises when it is angry. Its tusks curve up from the lower jaw, yellow and sharp, as long as a finger in an old boar. Sows are smaller and lack the long tusks. Ruin hogs trot with a stiff, quick gait, grunt and huff constantly as they feed, and squeal like tearing metal when frightened. Their wallows and sleeping hollows smell of mud, dung, and rank musk.

Habitat and Range

Ruin hogs live where cover, water, and something to dig lie close together: overgrown fields, ruined storeworks and root cellars, culverts and service tunnels, and the edges of old burial grounds. They are commonest in the Broken Marches and come down to the abandoned storeworks and culvert mouths of Lowbank on the Greyford Reach. A herd keeps to a run of ground it knows and beds in the same dry vaults for years.

Behaviour and Temperament

They eat almost anything: roots, bulbs, acorns, grubs, carrion, the stores in an abandoned cellar, and whatever they can dig out of shallow ground, which in the Marches includes old graves. Sows and their young move in herds of a dozen or more; old boars go alone. They are wary of people in the open and bolt, but in a tunnel, a cellar, or a culvert, where they cannot run, they charge, and a sow with young charges anywhere. They learn quickly where food is left and come back to it.

Life Cycle

A sow farrows twice a year in good seasons, six to ten striped piglets each time, in a nest of torn bedding in a dry vault. The striping fades in the first summer. Most die young to dogs, foxes, wolves, and hunters; those that survive live eight or ten years.

Uses and Dangers

Ruin hogs are meat for salvage households and Goblin warrens, trapped in pits and snares at the run mouths or hunted with dogs in the open, and their bristles go to brush-makers. In the underlayers they are one of the hazards a crew reads for, beside collapse and trapped water: fresh rooting, droppings, and the smell of a wallow mean a crew goes in with light, noise, and spears, or not at all. A boar in a culvert has opened a man's thigh to the bone.

They also undo work. A herd will root up a sheltered ruin-court plot in a night and dig into a cellar store, and the dead of a forgotten burial ground are sometimes found scattered by them in the morning.

Lore and Belief

Lowbank Goblins say a ruin hog remembers the house its swine came from and goes back to dig there, which is why they so often turn up in the cellars of empty homesteads. Human settlers on the Marches' edge call them the last tenants and will not eat one taken from a burial ground. Kindred danger-marks have a sign for a hog run, and it is chalked beside the marks for unsound stone.

Hog-hunting in the ruins is a delver's sideline and a deadly one: a boar cornered in a cellar has killed more salvagers than collapsing stone in some seasons, and the tusks of a big one hang in many Lowbank houses as a boast.

Where It Appears

• The Broken Marches