Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald
followed by weeks of white light lying alone on a blanket in a Perspex box, had done something wrong to me that echoed with a room full of eggs in forced-air boxes, held in moist air and moved by wire. Now I could put a name to the upset I felt. It was loneliness.
That was when I recognised the particular power of eggs to raise questions of human hurt and harm. That was why, I realised, the nests in my childhood collection made me uncomfortable; they reached back to a time in my life when the world was nothing but surviving isolation. And then. And then there was a day. One day when, quite by surprise, I discovered that if I held a falcon egg close to my mouth and made soft clucking noises, a chick that was ready to hatch would call back. And there I stood, in the temperature-controlled room. I spoke through the shell to something that had not yet known light or air, but would soon take in the revealed coil and furl of a west-coast breeze and cloud of a hillside in one easy glide at sixty miles an hour, and spire up on sharp wings to soar high enough to see the distant, glittering Atlantic. I spoke through an egg and wept.
I’m baffled. My boyfriend and I are standing up against a short barbed-wire fence shaded by sweet chestnut leaves. Woods are quiet in autumn: just the sifting hush of a small wind above and a robin making dripping-water noises from a holly bush.
I’m not quite sure what to expect because I’m not sure why I’m here. The boy said he’d show me something I’d never seen before in the woods, which made me raise an eyebrow. But here we are. He whistles and calls, whistles again. Nothing happens. Then it happens: a short, collapsing moment as sixty or seventy yards away something walks fast between trees, and then the boar. The boar. The boar.
When I saw Jurassic Park in the cinema something unexpected happened when the first dinosaur came on screen: I felt a huge, hopeful pressure in my chest and my eyes filled with tears. It was miraculous: a thing I’d seen representations of since I was a child had come alive. Something like that was happening now and it was just as affecting. I’ve seen pictures of boars all my life: razor-backed beasts on Greek pottery, sixteenth-century woodcuts, trophy photographs of twenty-first-century hunters kneeling over them with rifles, ink drawings of the Erymanthian boar in my book of Greek legends. There are animals that are mythological by virtue of being imaginary: basilisks, dragons, unicorns. There are animals that were once just as mythologically rich, but have had so much exposure to us now that their earlier meanings have become swamped with new ones: lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, bears. They’ve been given modern stories. For me, boars still exist inside those older stories, are still emblematic, still rich and passing strange. And now here one was, called into the real world.
This creature was not what I expected, despite its slap of familiarity. It had the forward-menacing shoulders of a baboon and the brute strength and black hide of a bear. But it was not really anything like a bear, and what surprised me most of all was that it was nothing like a pig. As the beast trotted up to us, a miracle of muscle and bristle and heft, I turned to the boy, and said, surprised, ‘It’s nothing like a pig!’ With great satisfaction he grinned and said, ‘No. They’re really not.’
For the first time in centuries, free-roaming wild boars are thriving in British woods, descendants of animals bred for meat that escaped from captivity or were released on purpose. Adaptable and resilient, wild boars are also increasing in number across continental Europe and in places far from their natural range, which spans Eurasia from Britain to Japan. From the first introduction of boars to New Hampshire in the 1890s, boar-like wild pigs have now been reported in at least forty-five states in the United States. In Britain, they have strongholds in Sussex, Kent and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, an ancient hunting preserve that stood in for an alien planet in the movie The Force Awakens. Sixty farm-reared animals were secretly and illegally dumped there in 2004; eleven years later, night-time thermal-imaging surveys suggested the population has grown to more than a thousand.
I lived near the forest some years ago and I went looking for them. My motives were more than just natural-historical curiosity: their presence made me feel I was stepping into something like the wildwood of ancient times. I never saw them, but I did come across signs of their presence: deep ruts and broken ground on woodland paths and grassy roadsides where they’d rooted for food. Boars are landscape engineers that alter the ecology of their woodlands. Wallowing holes fill with rainwater and become ponds for dragonfly larvae, seeds and burrs caught on their coats are spread wide, and their rooting on the forest floor shapes the diversity of woodland plant communities.
Knowing that boars lived in the forest I walked through also charged the English countryside with a new and unusual possibility: danger. Boars, particularly farrowing sows protecting their young, can be aggressive, and will charge and attack intruders. Since the boars’ return to the Forest of Dean, there’ve been reports of walkers being chased, dogs gored, horses newly nervous upon familiar paths. As I walked, I found myself paying a different quality of attention to my surroundings than I ever had before, listening apprehensively for the faintest sounds and scanning for signs of movement in the undergrowth. It made the forest a wilder place but in a sense a far more normal one, for conflict between humans and dangerous wildlife is commonplace in much of the world, from elephants trampling crops in India and Africa to alligators in Florida dining on pet dogs. In Britain, wolves, bears, lynxes and boars were long ago hunted to extinction, and we have forgotten what this is like.
The boar I met up against the fence wasn’t a threat. It was a captive boar, one of a few kept by a local gamekeeper and safely behind wire, but it provoked intense introspection about my place in the world. This creature was one of the semi-legendary beasts charging straight out of the medieval literature I’d read at university, the quarry hunted in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, creatures renowned for their formidable ferocity and power. In medieval romances, boars were seen as a challenge to masculinity and hunting them a test of endurance and bravery. When we meet animals for the first time, we expect them to conform to the stories we’ve heard about them. But there is always, always a gap. The boar was still a surprise. Animals are.
We have a long history of territorial anxiety over wild animals intruding on our spaces. The seventeenth-century English garden writer William Lawson advised his readers of the tools they’d need to keep their properties free of marauding beasts: a ‘fayre and swift greyhound, a stonebowe, gunne, and if neede require, an apple with a hooke for a Deere’. Concerns about the danger of Gloucestershire boars have led to efforts by the Forestry Commission to reduce their population in the Forest of Dean: three hundred and sixty-one were shot in 2014 and 2015, despite anti-hunting activists attempting to get in the way of hunters to prevent the cull. The controversy over how to manage English wild-boar populations points to the contradictory ways that we understand animals and their social uses. Wolves can be depredators of livestock or icons of pristine wilderness; spotted owls can be intrinsically important inhabitants of old-growth forests or nuisances that inhibit logging and livelihoods. These creatures become stand-ins for our own battles over social and economic resources.
When animals become so rare that their impact on humans is negligible, their ability to generate new meanings lessens, and it is then that they come to stand for another human notion: our moral failings in our relationship to the natural world. The world has lost half its wildlife in my own lifetime. Climate change, habitat loss, pollution, pesticides and persecution have meant that vertebrate species are dying out over a hundred times as fast as they would in a world without humans. The single boar appearing from behind the trees felt like a token of hope; it made me wonder if our damage to the natural world might not be irreversible, that creatures that are endangered or locally extinct might one day reappear.
So many things were affecting about this encounter: not just the calling-forth of an animal icon into flesh, but the realisation that there is a particular form of intelligence in the world that is boar-intelligence, boar-sentience. And being considered by a mind that is not human forces you to reconsider the limits of your own. As the boar looked up at me, it was obvious that my knowledge of boars was limited, and only now, face to snout with a real one, its eyes fixed on mine, did I wonder what a boar really was and, oddly, what it thought of me. I had fitted