Jonathan Rogers: The Secret of the Swamp King

Steren jumped up to protest Dobro’s plan, but in doing so, he lost his footing and tumbled out of the tree. Dobro whistled as he watched the prince hurtle toward the moss twenty feet below. “That feller’s so bloodthirsty he can’t even wait for three!” he whooped. By the time Steren hit the turf, he had done a full flip. His feet landed hard on a soft spot in the ground, and he punched all the way through the green moss mat and into black muck up to his armpits.

The boar, of course, was awakened by the commotion and leaped to his feet with a piercing squeal and a roaring grunt. Or he tried to leap. The ground was so springy and yielding that he had to rock his great mass back and forth a couple of times to get his feet under him. Meanwhile, Aidan and Dobro flew out of the tree themselves to come to the rescue of the prince, who was struggling with little success to free himself from the deep peat while the boar decided whether to attack or flee.

Aidan landed just behind the hog’s left shoulder; to his relief, he didn’t go through the moss as Prince Steren had. Aidan grabbed hold of the hog’s left ear and dug his boot heels into the soft turf. Dobro grabbed the hog’s tail and held on like grim death. But, as Dobro had said earlier, it would take more than two hunters to bring down a hog that size. As the boar struggled to his feet, the ground beneath the struggling pile of hog and human rippled in waves, as if an earthquake had hit the bottomlands. The hog wheeled around, tossing his head in Aidan’s direction, trying to slash his attacker to ribbons. Aidan managed to stay out of reach of the flashing tusks, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep his grip.

Dobro was having a hard go of it himself; he had already been kicked four or five times by the boar’s flying hooves, and they were just getting started. But he wasn’t ready to give up yet. “Squeeze that earflap!” called Dobro over the grunting and squealing. “Squeeze it like a duck tater.”

“Steren!” called Aidan. “Steren, we need you!”

The hog was running across the bog now, crazed with terror and fury. Aidan had tried to dig in, but he was being dragged across the trembling turf. The skinny feechie was being trailed along behind the great boar like a flag behind a racing wagon, his feet hardly touching the ground.

Steren managed to free himself from the peat and charged across the greenbog to his friends’ aid. He caught up just at the bog’s edge. The hog had punched a foreleg through a soft spot in the turf and was struggling to free himself when Steren caught up and latched himself to the hog’s right ear. The two big civilizers were able to pin the hog to the turf long enough for Dobro to whirl in and tie the hog’s four legs together. The boar struggled against his bindings, squealing and harrumphing, thrashing his head back and forth, wanting to slash something-anything-wide open. But Dobro’s knots were sure.

The feechie disappeared into a stand of hardwood near the edge of the greenbog and came back with an oak sapling he had hurriedly cut down with a stone saw he kept in his side pouch. “Tote-pole,” he explained, and he began to stick the pole between the boar’s knees just below the bindings, first the front knees, then through to the back. As he worked, he smiled at the civilizers. “Aidan, you got to tell Sturn about the time you come into the feechie camp on a tote-pole, just like this boar hog.” Aidan laughed as he remembered the day he was captured by Rabbo Flatbottom and Jonko Backwater in the magnolia jumble near the Bayberry Swamp.

“Well, boys,” said Dobro when the hog was secured to the tote-pole, “you look stout enough to get this big boy home without no help from a scrawny feechie like me. I’m ready to see my mama. Sturn, it was a pleasure. Aidan, don’t be a stranger.”

With that, the feechie boy disappeared into the forest. And the civilizers contemplated the long trip back to the horses with their massive, bristling, struggling prize.

King Darrow’s trophy room echoed with the chatter of a dozen separate conversations as the hunting party relived the previous day’s adventure in Tamside Forest. Servants were still loading the tables with side dishes and making last-minute preparations before the arrival of the king and chief huntsmen and the presentation of the game.

A hunt feast was the least formal of the regular feasts held at Tambluff Castle. The feasters-noblemen and servants alike-didn’t wear their usual festal robes, but rather their hunting tunics and muddy hunting boots. Hunting dogs milled about the room, eagerly awaiting their own portion of roast boar, for they had been participants in the hunt, too, and were entitled to a place at the feast.

Lord Cuthbert was the only feaster who had not been a member of the hunting party. The oldest of Corenwald’s Four and Twenty Noblemen, Cuthbert had grown too blind to gallop through the forest. But he was still a regular at the hunt feasts. On this night he sat between Lord Cleland and Lord Radnor, who filled him in on the details of the hunt.

“Oh, I wish you could have been there, Bertie!” Cleland enthused. His eyes were alight with the excitement of the hunt. “There has never been such a boar hunt in Corenwald!”

“We were loping through the bottomlands,” began Radnor, “the king and Wendell out in front, the boar dogs out in front of them.” Old Cuthbert leaned forward in his chair and gazed into the middle distance as he pictured the scene he had witnessed so many times with his own eyes.

Radnor continued. “We hadn’t been in the forest an hour before the dogs began to sing.” Lord Cuthbert smiled wistfully at the memory of the dogs’ throaty howl echoing in the cypress.

“We spurred our horses to catch up to the dogs,” said Cleland, leaning forward in his chair as if he were still in the saddle.

“We found them in a little clearing,” Radnor interrupted, unable to contain his enthusiasm, “and we saw that it wasn’t one hog the dogs had jumped but a whole herd of them.”

“A tribe of them,” agreed Cleland. “A dozen or more yearling pigs, seven or eight sows, and the biggest, blackest boar you ever saw.”

“He looked more like a black bull than a boar, he was so big,” added Radnor. “Except for those tusks. No bull ever had slashers like that.”

Cleland picked up the story again. “So we were pressing this herd of hogs-hard after them-and it was one big tangle, I tell you. There were more hogs than dogs, and the hounds couldn’t agree which one they should bay up.”

Cuthbert listened intently. He imagined himself astride a hunting horse, crashing through the forests and swamps again.

“Meanwhile,” said Radnor, “the big boar decided it was time to save his own bristly hide and let the women and children fend for themselves.”

“Not very gentlemanly of him,” remarked Cuthbert.

“Maybe not,” answered Cleland, “but I’ve never been run down by a pack of boar dogs, so I won’t say one way or another.”

“He broke off from the herd and came barreling back through the dogs and horses and men,” said Radnor, nearly out of his seat now. “Two of the dogs lunged at him, but he sent them flying. All the dogs stayed with the herd and let the daddy boar run back downriver.”

Cuthbert’s face fell with disappointment. The boar dogs’ cowardice broke his heart.

“Meanwhile, Aidan and Prince Steren wheeled their horses around and lit out after the boar hog,” continued Radnor.

Cuthbert snorted at the very idea. “Without dogs?” he huffed. “What did they think they were going to do with him if they caught him?”

“We’re coming to that,” answered Radnor. “We pressed the chase, and in the end King Darrow managed to kill a couple of the yearling pigs.”