Like the European wild boar, the Caucasian beast is of a blackish-grey colour, covered with a long coat of stiff bristles, which he erects along his spine when irritated, making him appear some inches taller than he really is. Professor Radde, of the Tiflis Museum, has been kind enough to supply me with the following particulars. ‘The largest solitary boars,’ he says, ‘measured at the shoulder and measured straight, stand about 105 centimeters, and their total weight not dressed rarely exceeds 15 puds (600 lbs.).’ These are undoubtedly big beasts, but in the chestnut forests of Circassia, and in the reed beds of the Kuban, there are such rich feeding grounds that in them even a 600-lb. boar seems possible. In India, I suppose, to shoot a boar is as vile a crime as vulpecide in Leicestershire, but, except on the plains of Kabardah, there is no place in the Caucasus where the boar could be hunted on horseback, and even there the hunting would be but a very short scurry at early dawn from the maize fields to the foot-hills, the shelter of which once gained, the quarry would be absolutely safe from any mounted enemy.
Enormous as their numbers are, wild boars would be even more numerous between the Black Sea and the Caspian, were it not for their nocturnal raids on the maize fields of the natives, most of whom, being Mahommedans, only hunt the marauders in self-defence, not deigning to so much as touch them when dead. The Cossacks, of course, have no such scruples about pork, and the principal object left in life to the old scouts (‘plastouns’), who were wont to keep the Kuban red with Tcherkess blood, is the pursuit of the boar.
In the great reed beds in which they used to lurk waiting until the men of some native ‘aoul’ went out to harvest, that they might give the village to sword and flame, these same scouts wander to-day, grey as the boars they hunt, rough, savage, and uncouth as their quarry, wounded probably in a score of places, but silent-footed, enduring, and as well acquainted with every game path in the reeds as the very beasts which made them. These are the men to obtain for guides if you can get them, but beware of paying them a single kopeck as long as there is a cabak (whisky shop) within a day’s march of you. As a rule the plastoun shoots his game at night, waiting by some wallow or by the side of some swine path leading to water or fruit trees, until he hears a rustling among the reeds, sounding strangely loud in the moonlit August night, and growing nearer and nearer until between the watcher and the skyline comes a great dark bulk. Round the muzzle of his old musket the plastoun ties a white string with a large knot in it, where the foresight should be, and aiming low into the middle of the dark mass, pulls his trigger when the boar is almost on the muzzle of his rifle. My first experience of boar shooting was connected with such a shot as this; but on that occasion the victory rested with the boar. Through a long summer night I waited for my gillie to come back from his vigil by the Kuban, and at dawn he came, four men carrying him. He had wounded the old grey beast on a narrow path through the kamish, and had lain still while the boar gnashed his teeth and glared about for his foe. But the tall reeds hid the hunter, and the boar turning retraced his steps, leaving a broad blood trail as he went. Until the grey dawn the Tcherkess waited, and then, confident that he would find his enemy cold and stiff not far away, he got up and followed the tracks. Before he had gone far, there was a crash among the reeds behind him, followed by a fierce rush along the trail, and as he turned to face his foe, the keen white tusks ripped him from knee to thigh-joint and across and across his stomach, until his bowels rushed out and he lay across the pathway nearer death than the boar.
The boar’s charge
When his companions found him he had still life enough left to tell the story, and an examination of the scene of the encounter proved the extraordinary cunning of the wounded boar, who, failing to ‘locate’ his enemy when first struck, had retraced his own steps along the trail, had entered the reeds at a point higher up and on the opposite side to that from which the shot had come, and, returning by a line parallel to the trail, had lain in hiding opposite to the ambush of the hunter.
Only once in eighteen years’ wanderings have I seen anything to match this in cunning, and as it was in the same neighbourhood, I may be allowed to allude to it here.
In the Red Forest, near Ekaterinodar, the wood is cut up into square versts, divided by rides. The snow had fallen, and in one of these squares old Colonel Rubashevsky, the forester, showed me where a pack of wolves had surrounded a small band of roe deer, having taken up positions along the four sides of the square, from which, on some preconcerted signal, they appeared to have converged simultaneously upon the centre where the deer lay. They had surprised in this manner four or five roe deer, whose remains we found. But to return to the boar. If anyone should care to hunt this beast specially, the best plan to ensure success is to sit up for him at night when the pears round some Cossack settlement are fresh fallen, or else to hunt him with a small pack of hounds. Half a dozen curs will suffice, and with these, in the chestnut forests on the Black Sea, or in the lovely pheasant-haunted woods near Lenkoran, very good sport may be obtained, for not only will the boar, shifting rapidly from holt to holt in an almost impervious tangle of thorns, tax the endurance of the hunter to the utmost, but should that hunter be tempted to take a snap shot at the black quarters and crisply curling tail of which he gets a glimpse as it vanishes into dense covert, it is a thousand to ten that the next thing which he sees will be the other end of the gallant beast coming straight for him at something less than a hundred miles an hour. There is no beast alive for whose uncalculating courage I have so much admiration as I have for the boar’s. I have seen him scatter a pack of hounds nearly as big as mastiffs (they were mongrel harlequins) and go straight for the hunter. I have seen a sow with her back broken trying to worry with her teeth a hound nearly as big as herself, and fighting till death stiffened her muscles, and I have also seen an old boar, with a bullet in his neck, trying for my wind like a pointer trying for birds, and as angry as a drunken Irishman who can find no one to fight with. Luckily, he gave me a broadside shot at him before he had discovered my whereabouts.
As to a locality suited for hunting boar, it is hard to choose in the Caucasus. Wild swine swarm on the coast of the Caspian; they are the road-makers and chief denizens of the kamish jungles on the Kuban; they abound in all the scrub oak districts among the foot-hills, but perhaps they are most numerous where Circe tended her herds of old, on the wooded slopes near the Phasis, between Sukhoum and Poti. Like most beasts, they are more or less nocturnal in their habits, coming out to feed on the peasants’ crops, wild fruit, oak-mast, chestnuts, or the roots of the common bracken at dusk, and retiring during the day to the densest thorn thickets, where neither sun nor man can molest them, and where the thick black mud is most moist and dank.
A smooth-bore (No. 12), with a round bullet in it, is the handiest weapon for shooting wild boar over hounds, as with it you can make better practice snap shooting in the dense jungle than you could possibly hope to make with a rifle.[5]