If I had accepted Thesiger’s statement that an unwounded wild boar would charge a man unprovoked I had accepted it as a child believes the existence of death; it was not a thing that could have any personal significance for me. I had seen the terrible wounds inflicted by pig, a long scar puckering a brown thigh from knee to groin, a back cross-furrowed by hideous laceration, the calf of a leg that must once have hung in tatters from the bone. I knew indeed that nearly half of all the Ma’dan men carried such scars in some degree.
The stories, however, were all either of wounded pig or of a sleeping beast surprised suddenly by a reed cutter or a fish spearer as he waded, often waist-deep, through the reeds; or of a small canoe coming unaware upon one of the little soggy reed islands which the pig build to sleep on. The picture was always one of a startled animal surprised from sleep by an enemy already on top of him, or of a wounded animal in whom the dull embers of pain smouldered into explosive flame at the approach of its inflictor. To reinforce my euphoric security there was the fact that I had by now killed quite a few pig myself; none had charged me nor displayed anything but fear, and further the marshmen had shown little caution in following into thick reed-beds pigs that we did not know to be dead. On only one point was I not deluded, the ubiquity of pigs. They were as common as rabbits in England before myxomatosis was introduced, and in my secret view I thought, perhaps, that they were little more dangerous. I needed a lesson, and I got one.
We left the fort of Sheikh Hatim that morning to return to Malaya. There were heavy blue-grey clouds all round the horizon, with a mutter of distant thunder and the threat of rain, and my temper matched the sky. It is not easy for two men to travel alone, as did Thesiger and I, unless they know each other very well, and that morning my mind was filled with fancied grievances against him, with the marshalling of trivialities into an orderly assault force. Thesiger was among friends and I was among strangers, and I felt isolated and frustrated. The mood was perhaps not dignifiable by any other name than sulks, but it had not lifted when later in the morning the skies cleared and the sun came out and lit the pale sheets of water and the vivid greens of new growth. We left the dry land behind us and the nomads with their black tents and great sheep herds, and at length there was once more water on both sides of the low canal. It had not been there long, for the reed growth was short and scattered, no more than a foot or two high and thin like lace, so that the extending water showed always through it and beyond it to where the hills of Khuzistan hunched low and curiously pale on the horizon. A group of two or three smuggling boats passed us, the towers on the bank bent and straining as they hauled the heavy boat-loads of contraband grain from over the Persian frontier. There was an ostentatious display of firearms throughout the party. It crossed my mind vaguely that this was the first day for a long time that our rifles were not carried loaded and ready to hand, but I was feeling too flat and sullen to comment upon it.
Not far off to our left an enormous concourse of duck were on the wing and wheeling. They wanted to return to the point from which they had risen, a few hundred yards away, and as I watched they began to pour in again, moving the water with a liquid roar as they alighted in drove after drove. The air above them was a wild weaving throng of wings as the racing packs checked to alight, hurtled downwards, then shot up again. A party would alight, rest tense and motionless with upstretched necks, then take off again in panic, but their places on the water were instantly filled by others. Round the restless throng of pintail, shoveller and wigeon long clouds of teal described dazzling arcs of speed a few feet above the water; one moment they were dark as driven smoke, the next as they wheeled in unison their undersides showed silver as a shoal of darting herring.
Thesiger saw me watching them. “There won’t be much to eat where we’re going,” he said. “Do you think you could do anything with those? Probably bread and some milk otherwise.”
I looked at the place where the duck were alighting. They seemed to want to stay there, but there didn’t seem enough cover to hide a mouse, let alone a man. Still, I would be out of the canoe, I would be able to straighten my aching knees, and I would be quite alone for the first time for many weeks. It would feel like freedom. I could think without being overheard. I said, “I might. I’ll try. But once I put them up they won’t come back while the tarada’s anywhere around. You’d have to take her at least half a mile farther on, give me half an hour and then come back.”
“All right—here’s six cartridges. What are you going to do for cover?”
“I’ll find something,” I said enigmatically. I had been a wildfowler in my youth, and I fancied myself to get duck where the next man could not. As I stepped from the canoe to the mudbank of the canal Thesiger said, “Don’t waste all those cartridges firing wild shots.”
As the canoe pushed off into the channel again I sat down on the mudbank and began to roll up my trousers. It was hopeless, I knew; one could roll them tight and high as a pair of bathing drawers, but in five minutes they would come cascading down again, and the next time one rolled them one would be finding mixed clay and water clammy against the inside of the thigh. With a dish-dasha one had only to hitch it up and tie it round the waist. I finished and stood up; the trousers might be good for a hundred yards. The duck were mostly gone now; only an odd bird circled far out of range, and a pelican sailed by on stiff wings, stately as a battleship.
My plan was to get to the area where the duck had been, and squat down there, if necessary up to the waist in water, to wait for their probable return. There was, I saw, a very little cover which might be made to serve—not far from where I wanted to be there was a lump of earth about eighteen inches high, possibly the corner of a submerged earth dyke, and some way beyond it there was another, even smaller. The nearer was about two hundred and fifty yards from where I stood.
I left the canal bank and began to wade to it. The water came to a little below my knees, and the clay bottom was soft and gripping, with a prickle of burnt reed stubble that hurt the bare soles of my feet. My mind went off on the tack that was its childish favourite that morning. “Thesiger has canvas commando boots for this, but he never told me to bring a pair.” Buffalo had been on this ground before it was flooded, their deep footprints made treacherous potholes, and the bump of the camera on my chest reminded me that if I slipped once I might not be able to take any more photographs at all.
Halfway, and the cuffs of my trousers flopped down into the water; I took a masochistic pleasure in the cold grip of the wet clay at my groin as I rolled them up again. I noticed that the sole of my right foot was bleeding quite a lot. A few duck had returned and were circling; I loaded my gun and went on. When they had gone the sky was great and empty and blue with one long plume of white cloud lying right across it.
I was about fifty yards from the lump of mud when I came to what looked like a ditch. Elsewhere the low green reeds were scattered, thin and irregular, but here was a defined belt perhaps a couple of paces across in which no reeds grew. I tested it cautiously with one foot, thinking it might be deep, but it wasn’t. The water reached just above my knee; I took a pace forward with the other foot.
At that moment I looked up. I had not, I think, heard anything; I was merely re-orientating myself upon my course. A little beyond and to the right of the lump of mud, and about eighty yards from me, was a very large wild boar. That was all my mind registered at first—surprise that so large an animal should have appeared where there had been no cover to hide it before. Next I noticed that the boar was facing me head-on and that it was moving. These stages of realisation must each have lasted a very, very short time, but they were quite clearly defined stages before the full impact of realisation came at me, and with it my heart came up into my mouth: the boar was charging me, and we were all alone, he and I, two little dark specks out in the glittering waste of water, the one stationary and afraid and the other. …
The gun. It came to me quite suddenly that I had a gun, that I was perfectly safe,
that I could kill this creature that was coming to kill me. I almost laughed with relief. Then, even as I brought the gun forward to a ready position, I remembered that the cartridges I was carrying were not LG for pig but No. 5 shot for duck. The gun was useless, or almost useless. Mentally, I panicked, but my feet stood still. Infinitely far away behind me I heard a confused sound of voices shouting. The boar seemed still a long way off, but getting nearer quickly.
I remembered all that Thesiger had told me; I was surprised that I could think so clearly when I was so very much afraid. “If you ever get caught with a charging pig and duck-shot in the gun, for God’s sake don’t do what the Arabs do and waste your ammunition in a panic when the pig’s twenty yards away. It’ll only sting him up and make him madder. You can’t stop him anyway, and you’re going to get badly hurt anyway, but you may not get killed if you keep your head. Wait till he’s not quite touching you and shoot between his eyes and fall on your belly so he can’t get his tusks in your guts. Never fall on your back.”
That reminded me that the camera would be wrecked; even at this stage my appreciation of the situation was evidently incomplete. I think the pig was still forty or fifty yards away by the time all this had gone through my head and been arranged into a knowledge of what I had to do: to stand still and let that great hulk gather pace and momentum until its tusks were almost touching me, then to shoot between its eyes and throw myself sideways on my belly into the water. The whole procedure seemed futile, and already my flesh was shrinking and cowering from the cut of the tusks. When I had killed my first boar I had been astonished by the structure of those tusks, totally unprepared for the long knife edge at their sides.
I could see them by now, though for some reason I only remember one, the boar’s left tusk. He seemed all shoulders and head, massive like a bull, his hindquarters obscured. He was throwing up a white splash of water all round him, and he was getting very near. Then I saw his tail go up over his back in the final concentrated sprint that was going to kill me. I started to bring the gun up and to shift into a more comfortable stance, but I found that my feet had bogged down into the clay and I had to wrench them free. I was feeling sick with fright as I took two paces back into the shallower water behind what, such ages ago, I had at first taken to be a ditch.
I brought the gun up to my shoulder and sighted between the boar’s eyes. He was about fifteen paces away, and I know now that when a charging boar is only fifteen paces away he seems to be already on top of you. It took every vestige of self-control I had not to fire then. Ten yards. Five. After all I wasn’t going to let him touch me before I fired—I was going to shoot when he reached the opposite side of the “ditch”, the little reedless strip of water out of which I had stepped backward. That would be something between two and three yards from the muzzle of my gun. And then he was there and I was shooting, but even as I shot I realised that the gun was no longer aiming between his eyes.
At first I didn’t realise what had happened; I had been so keyed up for that moment that I had been unable to take in the last-minute change in the situation or to understand the freak of chance that had saved me. I had fired without realising that I was already out of danger, or that to fire could, logically, only lead me back into it. At the peak of his final sprint, when he was no more than three yards from me, the boar had reached the little strip of reedless water that separated us. A pig is never aggressive when out of his depth, and, like me before him, he must have taken this strip for a deep ditch. He swerved left along its bank with the full speed of his charge, and the shots that I had been too strung up to prevent myself from firing had taken him just behind the shoulder, right over the heart. A dark patch like a hole sprang out on his hide, but he gave no sign of feeling it; he galloped on across the shallow water, heading to cross the canal a hundred yards or so beyond the distant tarada.
It was over. In all, it had lasted less than half a minute. I was left in a tremendous vacuum of anti-climax.
Over at the canoe there was a lot of confused activity. Thesiger’s shouting voice came to me on the breeze; the rifles were buried among the baggage and were not loaded; the pig had crossed the canal and was galloping across semi-dry country on the other bank before he could take his first hurried shot. A miss, and so was the second, but the third, when the boar was some three hundred yards away and going at full speed, hit him somewhere behind the ribs. After that he was almost tail-on and small in the distance, and there was nothing more to be done.
I found myself unable to feel my usual sympathy for a wounded animal, indeed I felt nothing about it at all except regret that I was unable to see how far my point-blank shot had penetrated, and that I could not keep as memento those tusks that had so very nearly been in me. (In fact this would have been impossible anyway, as their extraction would have involved an insuperable amount of “uncleanness”.) My attitude towards wild pig had changed.
So had my attitude to lumps of mud that provided convenient cover for duck-flighting. There was only one now, where before I had seemed to remember two. I examined it very carefully and suspiciously before I resumed my interrupted wade. It was, however, a genuine lump of mud, very wet and sticky, and it would not give cover or camouflage until I had immersed myself in the water almost to the waist and embraced its clammy hulk with the rest of my body. Presently a garganey came streaking over my head and I missed it; it was not a satisfactory position from which to shoot. I considered the situation; up to the present, I thought, my dignity had been little impaired in the eyes of the onlookers, for they had had no means of knowing how extremely frightened I had been, but to squat here tied in cold slippery knots and miss a lot of duck would strike a false note. The tarada showed no signs of leaving, and after a while I uncoiled myself and hailed Thesiger across the water.
“Do you think it’s worth waiting?”
There was no reply, so I said it again, several times. The reply when it did come was indistinct and baffling. It sounded like “You bloody fool!”
I picked and sloshed my way wearily back to the tarada. Thesiger was in the best of good humours, and the canoe boys were chattering like monkeys; each of them insisted on kissing me ardently. Sabeti’s moustache tickled.
“What a man!” said Thesiger. “Here he is, charged by a boar from an unprecedented distance, absolutely no right to be alive at all, saved by some extraordinary miracle that deflects the boar at the last possible second—and then, when he’s safe, he has to go and fire at it with No. 5 shot! You really are a bloody fool! It was nothing but another miracle that he didn’t turn straight back at you. Well, well! Do you know I became quite fond of you when I saw you were going to be killed? I realised that I should definitely miss you when you’d gone. And then he walks on and wallows about in the mud like a hippo and misses a perfectly easy duck. Extraordinary fellow—quite mad. Anyway, I was very glad you didn’t panic and run away; we should never have been able to hold up our heads in the marshes again if you had. … Do you know I couldn’t help wishing in a way that he’d got you?—nothing personal, I mean, but I’ve never seen that happen before, and I wanted to see what he’d do to you. Incomplete, somehow. … Still, isn’t it true what I said about one’s not being frightened when one’s charged? There just isn’t time to be, is there?—I knew you’d find it so.”
I tried, in the interests of an analytic honesty, to explain that I had rarely if ever been more afraid in my life, but that the idea of turning my back on those murderous tusks and letting them out of my sight had been an even more unthinkable horror. Thesiger, I think, did not understand; I doubt whether he has ever experienced physical fear, as I know it, in his life. “No, no,” he said, “one can tell—you didn’t run away.”
Just as well, I thought; he would have had no respect for me had he known all that had gone on in my head during those long seconds.
Chapter Eleven
M Y encounter with the boar exercised a profound effect upon my outlook. Perhaps it was because I no longer felt m
yself to be so perfect a cypher; at last one living creature in all this alien waste of water and sky had really taken notice of me, had thought me important enough to be worthy of destruction. It gave me some ecological status, as it were, even to be the target of a charging pig.
From the beginning my idleness had irked me; I had been a passenger par excellence. Perhaps for the first time in my adult life I had been responsible for nothing, neither for the least decision nor for the carrying out of the simplest piece of the party’s routine. Leisure has little appeal when all free-will action is removed from it, and indeed to light a cigarette was about all the free-will action I could perform without co-operation. Ordinary physical movement was almost completely inhibited, for I had had perforce to spend the greater part of my time either cross-legged in the bottom of a war canoe or cross-legged on the floor of a house. Even when we were not afloat, to take a walk, literally to stretch one’s legs, was out of the question, either because there was no land to walk on, or, when there was a dry-land village with hard earth between the houses, because of the savage dogs that patrolled the perimeter of every dwelling. Because of them one could not even leave a house to relieve oneself without announcing one’s intention and taking an armed guard who stood over one grotesquely the while.
This extreme restriction upon physical activity and lack of preoccupation with any responsibility did, I think, make me more mentally alert and observant than normally, but on the other hand its total effect was a feeling of reduction to the status of a child, with concomitant resentment and frustration. Like a child, too, I often understood little of what the adults were talking about, and in the long evenings I had found that much of the charm of studying a circle of forty firelit faces is lost when one realises that each of the forty faces is studying one’s own. Now my narrow escape had at the same time satisfied a need of my own and made me the object of a more flattering interest.
A Reed Shaken by the Wind Page 18