a break in to darkness

 
 
We smelled the pig before we saw him, the dogs around the truck all alive to the scent but their path pulled sideways by the screams of a young suckling, them gone bounding off into the dark away from us in the wrong direction and then across the spray of our lights that big boar ran, the stink of him unmistakable. The 5 of us, drunk in various degrees, took up the howl of pursuit “get the fucker, get the cunt”, the truck leaping forward across the paddock, us thrown around the inside of it, each bracing an arm against the roof, bodies kept in place only by the crush of us in that small space, the pig flashing in and out of the headlights, the dogs still on the young one now well behind, the truck spinning jumping turning sliding across the paddock in the darkness, the pig spinning and leaping, his strong dark coarse-haired body twice or more disappearing under our bonnet only to leap free and away again, finally bursting clear, flicked himself hard left and disappeared into, under, a low copse of thick gorse, us sliding to a stop and all piling out. The engine shut off and now silence, only the sound of the dogs tearing up the screaming young one well behind us and just as easy as that the boar was gone, into the safety of the bush and that unloving night.
 
I climbed out last, not really a keen man for the hunt, so my hand wrapped tight to the whisky bottle we’d been passing around, happy at least to have not spilled it, took another belt while we stood and swore, smoked, waited for the dogs to catch up, the scent of the big one fading quickly and the other men, all fired up on the bottle, were large with it and the adrenaline of the thing. Big-talking now, how close we’d been to murder and in the darkness I smiled, pleased for the luck of the desperate, never any urge to see a wild thing die, us getting what we wanted; the feeling of being men, of doing a grand thing, while really just children playing at danger, nothing in it for us but the story, and that big crusty boar out there somewhere in the dark, hunted from birth, living to fuck another day. The hero, victor, surviving life and death in a split second of luck that the dogs heard the young one first. No reason other than that, than luck. I smiled again that he made the gorse before we mowed him down or got him off his feet long enough to get a knife up under his ribs, and I listened to the men swearing, laughing, filled my ears with it. Got back in the wagon, sat, asked myself one more time the question of how we came to be here, senseless meat and mock bravery, while the women slept at home, too sober for this kind of game, probably glad to be away from it, to let the boys play superman in the dark. Took another drink, felt the slow spin of hard liquor, shoved the bottle down into the seat pocket in front of me, nothing to celebrate here except rituals as old as men have been hunting, and god only knows there was not enough darkness to make any more sense of it than that.