Sanglier... (Wild Boar) Poem by Tony Jolley

Saw Fear today.

It was pounding its grey-brown hide, very literally hell-for-leather
Across the fresh-ploughed slabs and furrows
Bolting for hoped-for cover
Like the bullet that would otherwise overtake it,
The product of a primeval ‘fight or flight’, self-preservation mechanism
Triggered by acutely mortal senses, simultaneously overwhelmed
By what had ‘no right’ to be there in Danny’s Wood:
Luminous, luridly unnatural ‘Don’t shoot me – shoot anything else that moves! ’ vests;
A cacophony of football rattles viciously clacking and gnashing their teeth
Like a pack of ravening hounds baying for blood,
And, above all, that unmistakable, sickly smell,
Harbinger of the ultimate predator,
Spreading and encircling like a stalking plague,
Cutting off escape,
Closing in for the kill.

It was still going,
Charging over the ridge
And lost to line-of-sight of one rifle
After both barrels had missed their mark.

Seconds later, from the other side of the hill,
One solitary shot rang out,
Its six or more distinct echoes
Ricocheting and reverberating off every slope between
Brunstatt and Bruebach:
A sort of sorry, last salute for a Sanglier:
A worthy adversary,
But for me more a sad memory
Of a man-made murder unnecessary.




Sanglier = French Wild Boar. They keep themselves pretty much to themselves in the forests here, but that doesn’t stop hunters from hunting them down for sport. This was the first I’d seen not in bits on a butcher’s block…. Ten frantic, fearful seconds later that was exactly where it was headed.