Wild Boar

Overview

Wild boar are the rooting swine of the woods. A sounder of them can turn a field margin over in a night, and a cornered boar has killed more lords than any war of the march country. They are game for Human lords, meat for the Thornbound circles of the Briarreach, and a danger to anyone gleaning at a wood's edge in autumn.

Appearance

A boar is the size of a large dog but far heavier, a wedge of a beast: huge in the forequarters, narrow at the rump, with a long snout ending in a flat disc of a nose. Its coat is coarse bristle, dark grey-brown to black, with a ridge of longer bristles along the spine that rises when it is angry. A grown boar carries tusks curving up out of the lower jaw, as long as a finger and sharpened against the upper ones. Sows are smaller and tuskless. Piglets are striped lengthwise in buff and brown.

Boar trot with a stiff, short gait and charge low and fast. They grunt and squeal as they feed; a charging boar is often silent. They smell rank and earthy, and their wallows stink of mud and musk.

Habitat and Range

Boar live in oak and beech woods with thick undergrowth and water: on the edges of the Elderweald, throughout the broken thickets of the Briarreach, and in the woods between the farms of the Confluence Basins. They are common too in the overgrown country of the Broken Marches. They move with the mast and come out to the fields at night.

Behaviour and Temperament

Sows and their young go in sounders of a dozen or more; grown boars go alone. They root for acorns, nuts, roots, grubs, and fungus, and eat crops, eggs, and carrion. They are shy and nocturnal where hunted. A boar that is wounded or cornered turns and charges, and keeps charging: it will run up a spear shaft to reach the hunter.

Life Cycle

Sows farrow in spring, four to eight piglets in a nest of grass and branches, and the striped young follow the sounder until autumn. Boar may live ten years. They are food for grey wolves and bears, and a striped piglet is a fox's or an eagle's prize.

Uses and Dangers

Boar give pork, bristle for brushes, hide, and tusk for ornament. The boar hunt is a lord's hunt, ridden with hounds and finished on foot with a crossbarred spear, and it is the one most likely to end in a funeral. Thornbound hunters take boar as part of the circles' ordinary work, with snares and pits on the paths they keep. The cost is the field margin turned over, the gleaner gored at the wood's edge, and the hound opened by a tusk.

Lore and Belief

Basin Humans say a boar's tusk hung over the door keeps rot out of the stores. A lord killed by a boar is thought to have hunted on a day he should not have. Goblins of the Marches say the boar in the ruins are the ghosts of the settlements' pigs, which is not so: they are wild stock, and the feral pigs of the ruins, the Ruin Hogs, are another matter.

The boar-hunt is the lords' most dangerous sport, and more young lords have died on a boar's tusks than in war in some Basin houses; Basin hunters still drink to the death of the great boar of the Briarreach edge that killed three hunters and a lord's heir before a swineherd's daughter brought it down with a pitchfork.

Where It Appears

• The Confluence Basins