“What is the Man?” he asked.
“He is the enemy who never tires,” answered his mother. “He has two legs instead of four, he has no tusks, he does not know the forest as we know it, but he carries death with him, and the boar he follows is doomed.”
All this was quite unintelligible to little Tusker, and the first few years of his life brought him no reminder of the warning. He travelled with the herd, but as soon as he was able to look after himself his mother’s affection came to an end, and she would push him out of her way on the feeding grounds, as readily as though he had been a stranger. The herd went many miles in search of food, and did most of their travelling and eating by night, when only the jackals and hyænas made a noise in the forest. They rooted for sweet potatoes and wild turnips, tearing up great patches of ground, and they hunted for the young maize at the proper season of the year, ravaging the lands of the farmers to get the grain.
Luckily for them the farmers, being Moors, were without guns and full of superstition. They would not sit up at night to wait for the marauders, and so the herd grew fat. Every season saw some of the full-grown boars leave to live their solitary life, and in the early winter sows would go away for some months and bring their litter back with them later on.
On his nightly rambles little Tusker often met the porcupine who also fed after dark, and was quite harmless in spite of his formidable bristles. He heard the jackals crying and was amused; he saw the shining eyes of the hyæna and was afraid. Slowly he learned all the lessons that a boar must know, and the forest yielded him some of her many secrets.
There was no real winter there. The forest enjoys almost perennial summer, but there is a rainy season when the days are cooler than at other times. Then the best lairs are under the Argan trees; when the greatest heat is on the land, the moist sandy places high up above the valley are best. Again, in the brief days of tempest the hollows and gorges are most sought for, since the wind cannot reach them.
Young Tusker learned to know how and when the weather would change. He knew if any stranger were coming down the wind ever so far away. The meaning of the cries that the herd uttered, the signs that showed if water was near, and the significance of the footmarks that crossed the forest in all directions; he learned all these things.
As he grew up, sleeping under the sun and feeding under the stars, finding food plentiful and life pleasant, Tusker gradually ceased to be little. His shaggy skin became covered with bristles, a bristly ridge covered his spine; his heavy head grew larger and heavier, and the milk-white tusks developed until the lower ones took the upward curve that made them formidable. He could fight now with his fellows, but little harm was done, for all boars learn to receive their neighbour’s tusk-thrusts on their own tusks or on the shoulders, where the hard, coarse skin is not readily torn.
With consciousness of strength came the desire to travel, and when Tusker found any track that moved him to curiosity, he would leave the herd to follow it. One night, when he was rather more than three years old, he saw the mark of a boar, the track of a large hoof, and he followed it industriously, leaving the herd far behind. The big hoof-prints fascinated him, he tracked them all through the night, and through the next night, too. Then, under an Argan tree, he found the stranger in his lair.
“What are you doing here?” said Tusker rather rudely.