The Boar Read online

  His stink hit me before he did. I could hear him skidding up, I felt his weight slam into the top of my head… and nothing happened.

  Slowly I took my hands down and raised my head. I was nose to nose with the varmint. His tusks were sticking up on either side of my face. My shot had killed him and he had fallen and belly slid right up to me.

  I looked into his eyes. They were open. They were still the same color, but different now. The devil had gone out of them, and all that was left was a big dead hog.

  Nine

  Strange. That’s how I felt. Strange.

  Abraham tossed his shield off and came over. He let out a whoop and hopped around the clearing. “You got him, Ricky, you got him.”

  I felt bad enough without Abraham hopping around. It was making me sick to watch him. I managed to sit up, my hands between my legs, half slumped over.

  “We got him,” I said. “You and me, Abraham. Just like we said we would.”

  “Every hunter in East Texas been after this old hog,” Abraham said. “And we got him, Ricky. Me and you.”

  I looked at Old Satan. Up close I could see that he was covered in scars and there were fresh wounds made by me and Abraham.

  “Just looks like an old, dead hog now,” I said. “Not like no Indian medicine man, demon, or devil. Just a dead hog.”

  “Well,” Abraham said, “before he got dead, he sure made a lot of other things dead, and I figure he planned on a long career. So don’t you go and start feeling sorry for him.”

  Abraham bent down over him. “He’s an old one all right. Bet he’s old as they say. And all scarred up.”

  “I don’t feel so good,” I said.

  “Oooie, Ricky, you’re losing a lot of blood.”

  “You noticed,” I said. My pants leg was ripped from knee to hip and my leg was covered in blood. Abraham took off his shirt, tore it up, and tied off my cut. Not hard enough to stop the flow of blood, but enough to keep it from gushing.

  “He didn’t get a main pipe,” Abraham said, “but he got you some good.”

  “It ain’t good in my book,” I said. I was starting to feel light headed. Things suddenly seemed funny. “You goofy thing. You and that shield and spear stuff. You ain’t no African.”

  “Hadn’t been for that rickety shield, you’d be getting my dead body down from one of them tree limbs over by the river. That hog would have tossed me like wet wash.”

  The silly feeling went away and was replaced by pain. “I don’t think I’m going to be walking back, Abraham. I ain’t sure I’m going to be going back at all.”

  “You going to make it back. That river, that’s how we’ll go. Ain’t neither one of us going to walk. I’ll take the cane knife, hack some small trees down and use the rope to make a raft. Float us home in a lot less than half the time it took us to go through the woods.”

  “I ain’t going to be much help.”

  “You ain’t going to be no help. Lay down there and rest while I get to work.”

  I laid down next to the boar. His stink filled my head, but I was too weak to move.

  Abraham went away and a little later I heard the cane knife hacking. I thought about Old Satan. He had killed a lot of things, caused a lot of pain, and I had hated him. Now, somehow, I just felt sorry for him. He was only being what he was meant to be. A wild hog gone touchy in the head.

  Whatever, he was gone and the Sabine River Bottoms had most likely seen the last of his kind for good. The dark god of the forest was dead.

  Ten

  There’s not much left to tell, really. Abraham made a raft and he got me on it and we floated down to the Wilson place. The dogs, including the young tired one, came home on their own.

  As for the trip, well, I don’t remember much of it. I kept passing out, and what times I was awake, I recall looking up into Abraham’s sweaty, smiling face as he held me on that little raft.

  Next day a team of men followed Abraham’s directions to Old Satan. They gutted him and skinned him right there. The meat wasn’t any good to eat by then, least not for people, but the dogs enjoyed it. But before all that, they brought a scale with them and they weighed him. He was four hundred and forty-eight pounds. His tusks were ten inches long and sharp as a sabre. I could have told them that much, and the place on my hip could have testified.

  The dogs may have gotten the hog himself, but Abraham got the hide to rebuild his shield with, and I got the tusks. I keep them in the box with my typing paper. I use them as paper weights.

  After that time, I guess I thought of myself as a man. If it was true or not. I had faced a mad killer and bested him. I had gotten a wound as a badge, a wound that sometimes aches in cold weather and left me with an ugly set of scars on my hip. And I had been saved by a friend and had returned the favor. What more could you ask?

  Let’s see, what else?

  Not much left to tell. As I’ve said, the crops didn’t do good that year. The heat and the bugs were awful. But Papa made enough money wrestling so that we not only got through the year, we bought a car and I started going to school more often.

  Uncle Pharaoh lived another three years, got him a hog named Phil and trained him to the cart. He never missed a chance to tell a stranger, or even someone who had heard it a dozen times, about how Abraham and I killed The Devil Boar. He told the story so good, you would have sworn he was with us. I know this, I never missed hearing him tell it if I could.

  Abraham came to visit me while I healed up, and I read Doc Savage and every magazine we had aloud. They all went back to the tree house when I finished, and they’re there still.

  Oh yeah, Mama and Ike came home with a brand new baby sister. Her name is Melinda.

  Also, as you can see, I learned to type pretty good. But that’s pushing ahead of this time I’m telling you about, and has nothing at all to do with the summer of ‘33, when, with Abraham Wilson, I hunted down and killed Old Satan, The Devil Boar.

  About the Author

  With more than thirty books to his credit, Joe R. Lansdale is the Champion Mojo Storyteller. He’s been called “an immense talent” by Booklist; “a born storyteller” by Robert Bloch; and The New York Times Book Review declares he has “a folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace.”

  He’s won umpty-ump awards, including sixteen Bram Stoker Awards, the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, a British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, the Horror Critics Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, the “Shot in the Dark” International Crime Writer’s Award, the Golden Lion Award, the Booklist Editor’s Award, the Critic’s Choice Award, and a New York Times Notable Book Award. He’s got the most decorated mantle in all of Nacogdoches!

  Lansdale lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen, writer and editor.

  Find him online at www.JoeRLansdale.com.

  Also by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Hap Collins and Leonard Pine” mysteries

  Savage Season (1990)

  Mucho Mojo (1994)

  Two-Bear Mambo (1995)

  Bad Chili (1997)

  Rumble Tumble (1998)

  Veil’s Visit(1999)

  Captains Outrageous (2001)

  Vanilla Ride (2009)

  Hyenas (a novella) (2011)

  Devil Red (2011)

  Blue to the Bone (???)

  The “Drive-In” series

  The Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (1988)

  The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels (1989)

  The Drive-In: A Double-Feature (1997, omnibus)

  The Drive-In: The Bus Tour (2005) (limited edition)

  The “Ned the Seal” trilogy

  Zeppelins West (2001)

  Flaming London (2006)

  Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal (2010)

  The Sky Done Ripped (release date unknown)

  Other novels

  Act of Love (1980)

  Tex
as Night Riders (1983) (published under the pseudonym Ray Slater)

  Dead in the West (1986) (written in 1980)

  Magic Wagon (1986)

  The Nightrunners (1987)

  Cold in July (1989)

  Tarzan: the Lost Adventure (1995) (with Edgar Rice Burroughs)

  The Boar (1998)

  Freezer Burn (1999)

  Waltz of Shadows (1999)

  Something Lumber This Way Comes (1999) (Children's book)

  The Big Blow (2000)

  Blood Dance (2000)

  The Bottoms (2000)

  A Fine Dark Line (2002)

  Sunset and Sawdust (2004)

  Lost Echoes (2007)

  Leather Maiden (2008)

  Under the Warrior Sun (2010)

  …And that's not counting the pseudonymous novels, the short stories, the chapbooks, anthologies, graphic novels, comic books and all the rest. Get the full story at www.JoeRLansdale.com.

  Copyright

  The Boar was first published by Subterranean in 1998. This digital edition (v1.0) was published in 2011 by Gere Donovan Press.

  If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please consider purchasing a legitimate copy—they are reasonably priced, and available from all major outlets. Your author thanks you.

  Copyright © 1998 by Joe R. Lansdale, www.JoeRLansdale.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Errata

  Gere Donovan Press is committed to producing the highest quality ebooks possible. If you encountered any obvious errors, typos or formatting issues in this text, we would appreciate your bringing them to our attention, so that the next edition of The Boar can be improved for future readers.

  Please email [email protected], stating the name of the ebook, the type of device you are reading it on, the version (see copyright page) and the details of the error.

  If you are experiencing difficulty with the display or function of the book, we suggest you first contact the vendor from whom you purchased it, to ensure that you received a complete, uncorrupted file.