Bog Myrtle & Peat

I was minding my own business at the time. I was out for a run on the back road to Caulkerbush with cuckoos regaling me, and I didn’t ask to be part of the story but the smell brought me to a standstill.

I followed my nose and just a little way from the tarmac, I found the melted remains of a wild boar. Weird scenes in the roadside nettles; a stink like nothing you’d ever dare to mention, and the slumping frame of black canvas on the bone poles. I know these woods are full of boar, but you rarely get more than a glimpse of high-backed bodies as they flit between the myrtle banks. Here I could take my leisure in his company and the slippery slop of bristles falling audible from the sunken hide.

He’d been there for some time. It would be hard to say how long given the dry days we had in April. Nothing can rot without moisture, and it’s amazing how much a corpse can endure without rain to soften it. But a few muggy days had run riot over the boar; he was little more than a seething black mass of hair with a shelled-out trotters at each squared-off corner. I leaned in for a closer look and heard the maggots crackling like the sound of a fizzy drink; punch-drunk, roistering sexton beetles came tumbling up from the soup to fart and lick their lips. It was a paradise for those bugs which fly for miles on the offchance of rotten meat. But when they catch that scent, they have no idea where it’s coming from. It might be a mouse, and fifteen beetles fighting over a thumbnail of sludge. Or it could be the mother-lode; seventy kilograms of forest-fed pork. Sexton beetles have cockney accents. These ones tucked their thumbs into their braces and said things like ‘Appy days and Gor luv ya.

Nothing else had touched the corpse in all the time it lay in state. There was no sign of the boar being picked over or pulled to pieces by badgers or foxes. That’s bizarre, but perhaps these animals instil such a degree of fear in their woodland companions that even dead pigs are left in peace.

Of course I was desperate to recover the skull. I have no particular use for such a thing, but the urge to collect natural curiosities is hardwired into my brain. I didn’t have a knife or a saw to cut it free; only my trainers and a piece of willow stick. It was a slow and smelly process, rubbing the head with the soles of my feet to free it from the skin, then twisting it back on its joints with the stick. The head and jaws came up together, stained chocolate brown and weeping maggots. It’s an extraordinary thing, with the eyes set right back at one end like one of those absurd sports cars from the 1960s where the driver sits in the boot and the rest is all bonnet and snout. There are stubby little tusks in there, and perhaps they’ll clean up beautifully. It’s only when I was lathered in grey brains and reeking like a septic tank that I wondered what the hurry had been. I could have walked back another time with wellies and rubber gloves and taken the head for a far less scented cost. I suppose the fever was on me.

It’s fair to reckon this boar was killed by a car, and I pitied the driver and the bills. It must have been a costly collision, and if I had just struck a boar in the night, I would think twice about getting out for a look. But it’s surprising how often people drive on, even when it’s a small thing or a rabbit in broad daylight. I often stop to kill things lying injured or spent in the verge. Even last week I went home for the rifle to kill a roe buck which lay just over the hedge with a mess of its own bones jagging out of it. You are not under any obligation to get out of your car to kill an injured animal; it’s unreasonable to expect it of folk, but it’s not fair to leave the creatures either. At least with pigs around, people might learn to drive more slowly down forest roads at night.

So I have the skull and the smell is transcendent. I’ll clean it up and show it off, but for now the novelty is tempered by an ecstasy of gagging.