ed that the animal was a
wild boar, which had been munching the root of some plant, and the soil
being gravelly, the noise we had heard proceeded from the chewing of roots
and gravel together. This boar then had not only refused to desist from
his proceedings when I was within five yards of him, but had even warned
me, by the low growl afore mentioned, that if I came any nearer serious
consequences might ensue. On the following day I assembled some natives
and beat a narrow jungly ravine below my house, at a distance of about,
fifty yards from it, and there came out, not the boar, but his wife with a
family of five or six small pigs. She was shot by a native, and the young
ones got away, but the boar either was not there, or, more probably, was
too knowing to come out. He did not, however, neglect his family, but in
some way best known to himself, collected them together, and went about
with them, as, a day or two afterwards, he was seen with the young pigs by
my manager, and their tracks were also to be seen on one of the paths in
my compound, or the small inclosed park near my bungalow. This boar
afterwards became very troublesome, ploughed up the beds in my rose garden
at the foot of my veranda stops, and even injured a tree in the compound
by tearing off the bark with his formidable tusks. But, daring though he
was, he was once accidentally put to flight by a slash of an English
hunting whip. The boar, it appears, was making his round one night when my
manager, hearing something moving outside his bath-room, and imagining it
to be a straying donkey--we keep some donkeys on the estate--rushed out
with his hunting-whip, and made a tremendous slash at the animal, which
turned out to be the boar, so startling him by this unexpected form of
attack, that he charged up a steep bank near the house and disappeared.
This boar was afterwards shot by one of my people in an adjacent
jungle--at least a boar was shot, which we infer must have been the one in
question, as since then my garden has not been disturbed. The boar is more
dangerous to man than any animal in our jungles, and I have heard of three
or four deaths caused by them in recent years in my district. The natives,
however, say that, till he is wounded, the tiger is less dangerous than
the boar, but that after a tiger is wounded, he is the more dangerous of
the two; and I think that this is a correct view of the matter. The boar
has a most remarkable power of starting a