It may be largely coincidence, but it is a fact at any rate, that in nearly every place in the world where the wild pig is found it is not considered quite the sporting thing to hunt it with guns. There is no hard and fast rule against it, of course, but in these places shooting a wild boar, except as a dernier ressort, is considered about on a par with potting ducks or pheasant. Thus, in Germany, Austria and the Balkans it is customary for the keenest sportsman still to take his chance with a boar on foot, and armed only with a spear; in India the British army officers ride that animal down in the jungle and dispatch it with a short lance, and in Africa the sporting thing to do is for the hunter to endeavour to give the coup de grace with a native assegai. In North America, for some reason, this custom is honoured only in the breach, and the Texas peccary and the Mexican javelin—neither of which is much more than an oversized razor-back hog—are dispatched on sight with rifle and shotgun.
Boar-hunting with a spear or assegai,—or even according to the Indian practice of killing from the saddle, which requires the greatest steadiness of seat, hand and nerve,—are certainly not open to criticism on the ground of being un-sporting; but the Marquesan native, in attacking the boar of his islands with a two-foot cutlass or macheté, which has been made for slashing underbrush and opening coconuts—for cutting, not thrusting—unquestionably goes all of them one better on the score of taking chances, for he works literally at arm's length and with his body unprotected even by the lightest of clothes.
A Marquesan boar hunt, with no other weapons than knives or cutlasses, is as exciting and hazardous an undertaking as the most adventurous can desire. The pigs are scared up in the bush by dogs and men, headed off in their flight along the narrow run-ways in the guava scrub, and dispatched by a knife-thrust between the base of the neck and the shoulder. Killing a large boar in this manner is an extremely nice piece of work, as a difference of an inch to the right or the left in plunging the knife means that the thrust will be almost harmless and leaves the hunter open to the deadly sweep of one of the scimitar-like tusks of the powerful animal. The commonest scar one sees on the body of a Marquesan is a long diagonal welt of white where the flesh of calf or thigh has been laid open to the bone by the tusk of a charging boar. If, as occasionally happens when the boar is a large one, the slash is across the abdomen, the hunter rarely survives to bear the scar.
McGrath was as good as his word in the matter of arranging the pig hunt he had promised, but unfortunately, through being called to Hatiheu to look after the loading of one of his schooners, was unable to go along himself.
"Be content to remain a spectator," was his parting injunction; "and don't think because it looks easy for a native to drop a charging boar with a cutlass and a twist of the wrist that you can do it yourself. That was the way I got this limp of mine—it comes from a tendon that was cut by a side-swipe from a tusk of the first—and the last—boar I ever tried to stick. Best take your six-shooter along, but don't use it unless you have to. It might serve to turn a boar that was charging you; but it also might make one that was running away swing around and come back. There are only two or three small spots on a wild pig in which a pistol bullet—or a half dozen of them, for that matter—will prove fatal, and these you would hardly be able to locate with the animal at a run."
McGrath laid special stress on my adhering to the spectator rôle, and I set out with that injunction firmly impressed on my mind. But the sticking trick looked so ridiculously easy after I had seen it performed once or twice that it was not long before I began to tell myself that it was a case of "once bitten, twice shy" with my trader friend, and that he had probably lost his nerve on account of his unpropitious initial experience. And so it chanced—but I had best tell something of the way of a Marquesan with a pig before obtruding my own troubles.
We set out from Taio-haie on foot in the first flush of a heliotrope and daffodil sunrise—a dozen or more natives, about twice that number of dogs, and myself—followed the Typee trail for a mile up the mountain through the endless ruins of the old Marquesan villages, finally to branch off by a barely discernible foot path into the veritable carpet of low scrub which belts the island at the 500-foot level. Guava and lantana it was for the most part, the former heavy with lucious yellow-red fruit and the latter bright with tiny golden flowers. As we fared farther from the main travelled trail, dim runways through the bush began to appear, and these, gradually converging as they led down toward the neck of a rolling little valley which opened up beyond a sharp ridge we had crossed, formed a narrow but well marked path.
Four of the natives and I headed for a point where two jutting walls of rock formed a natural gateway, which was scarcely a dozen feet wide between the cliffs and choked with several giant trees and a maze of lianas and brush. Through this opening ran the runway we were following, the only path by which pigs going back and forth between the upper and lower valley could pass. The others, with the dogs still held in leash by strands of light liana, circled to the upper hills preliminary to swinging around and beating back down the valley. I was led, gently but firmly, up to a natural "grandstand" in the angle of the buttressed roots of a big maupé tree, one of the natives—a servant of McGrath's who was evidently acting under orders—stopping alongside in case I showed a disposition to "stray." My three other companions—strapping bronze giants with the muscles of gladiators—took their stands in the centre of the runway. One behind the other, at ten or twelve-foot intervals, they lined up—there was no chance in the narrow, bush-walled passage for anything in the nature of a three-abreast, Horatius-at-the-Bridge formation—each with his cutlass hand resting lightly on his hip, like a fencer standing at ease. Cool, alert, ready, they waited, three living, breathing incarnations of deadly efficiency. So had I seen a puma waiting, patiently tense, upon the limb of a tree above a path where deer were wont to come on their way to water; so have I since seen sharks lurking in quivering readiness among the coral spines where ventured the divers for pearls.
Ten minutes passed, in which occasional stifled yelps, now from this side, now from that, told that the dogs, still in leash, were being spread out as quietly as possible across the upper valley. Only occasional sharp crashes in the scrub gave evidence of an increasing current of uneasiness among the pigs. Tebu, who stood at "Number 1," broke into a low crooning chant, with a throaty kluck and a queer chesty roll to it, which my "guard" translated as an invitation to the pigs to come down and join our party. Presently the other two natives took up the air, the three of them swaying gently to the rhythm of the barbaric chant.