December, 1919 
FOREST 
AND STREAM 
695 
A BOAR HUNT IN FRANCE 
WHILE WAITING TO BE SHIPPED HOIME TIME 
IS FOUND FOR SOiME RARE DAYS OF SPORT 
By william D. LEETCH. 
A fter the armistice was signed, we 
were billeted in a little town named 
Chatonrupt, in the Haute Marne 
district in France. It is a beautiful coun- 
try. The hills come right down to the 
east bank of the Marne; well wooded, and 
full of small game. I spent the majority 
of my time in tramping over the country 
in the vicinity, and was delighted with 
the scenery and the people, though the 
climate was not all it might have been. I 
flushed numerous flocks of quail, and 
there seemed to be a great many rabbits 
in the brush. 
One afternoon Chris Dyne, a soldier, and 
myself were walking through the woods 
above the little town. It was a drizzly 
sort of day and raw cold. Everything was 
soaked and the numerous little paths 
through the brush were slippery with 
mud. We noticed hog tracks in the trail 
we were following, but thought nothing 
of them, supposing they belonged to some 
domestic pig which had broken out of its 
pasture. They were distinct and evi- 
dently quite fresh, so we decided to track 
him down if possible and return him to 
his owner. 
The trail let out into a little pasture 
with a garden at one end, and there we 
saw where Mr. Hog had played havoc 
with some Frenchman’s rutabagas. We 
were a long way from any farm house, 
and thought it strange that the pig would 
have made such a bee line away from civi- 
lization, when suddc-nly the thought 
dawned on me. I'ly early memories of 
natural history hit me in the head, and I 
exclaimed: “Chris, it’s a wild boar.’’ 
We nosed around a while, looking over 
the signs, and found where the hog had 
entered a big thicket of scrub trees at the 
end of the pasture. His trail ran cut here 
in the dead leaves, so we decided to back 
track, and find out where he had come 
from. We were all excited now, and made 
sure that our Colts were in working order. 
Neither of us were passing up any chance 
to get a whack at a wild boar. 
We tracked that pig for over a good 
English mile through the woods, and 
finally came right on to a wallow in a 
little dip in the ground. Rain water set- 
tling here made an ideal place for a hog 
to bed down, and we found holes where 
some enormous hogs had spent the night 
in the red mud. The trees were smeared 
with mud as high as three feet off the 
ground, and several small saplings had 
been ridden completely down by the ani- 
mals straddling them, while scratching 
themselves. We scouted around and found 
two or three more pools where the hogs 
had been, and a regular maze of tracks. 
You could even smell hog. We counted 
seven large beds and four small ones. Ev- 
idently it was a favorite wallow for them. 
It was nearly dark now, and we made 
our way back to town through the falling 
mist, and climbed into our billet to talk 
things over. I was sure that the tracks 
were those of a wild boar, but to make 
sure I asked our “landlady” in my imper- 
fect French, and she said that there were 
“Beaticoup clcs sanglicrs dans les hois" 
and it was permitted to hunt them, they 
being very destructive to crops. ’Nough 
said. What we didn’t know of the habitsi 
and haunts of the animals would have 
made a book, but we sure were going to 
find out if possible. Our hostess also told 
us that one man in tlie town had been 
badly mauled and permanently crippled 
by a big boar two years before, while home 
on a furlough. The element of danger 
of course gave additional spice to our 
I'lans, and we spent the rest of the even- 
ing oiling up a captured “Erlich” rifle, 
and our Colts, turning in early to dream 
of the morrow’s sport. t 
W E got up before dawn, and going 
down to the mess shack, w'heedled 
Che mess sergeant to grub stake 
us. When he saw us and our guns he 
surely gave us the raz, asking us if we 
didn’t know the war was over, and there 
never had been any Germans in that lo- 
cality anyway. We kept mum with a 
great effort, and talked him out of a steak, 
some potatoes, bacon, salt, pepper, coffee 
and sugar and a bit of flour. This wo 
packed in half of an old haversack and 
proceeded to climb up through the church 
yard to the hilltop above. 
We located the wind direction, and 
making all speed, quartered around to- 
ward the wallow we had located the day 
before. Wo had to wait about a half an 
hour before it got light enough to see to 
shoot, and then making our way up wind 
with as much stealth as our heavy trench 
shoes permitted, proceeded to the Avallow. 
The hogs had been there during the 
night, but had left for the hills before we 
arrived, so there was nothing for us to do 
around there. We followed hog tracks all 
the morning through some of the rough- 
est wood country I have ever been in, 
but not a sight of a boar did we get. 
We saw tracks everywhere we went. The 
woods were full of runways, and there 
were many places where the boar had been 
rooting during the night. About noon we 
cooked our grub, and it sure tasted good. 
We must have covered seven or eight 
miles during the morning, and we were 
hungry. We saw two flocks of quail, and 
one rabbit but didn’t shoot at the latter. 
After lunch we held a council of war, 
and decided to knock off for a few hours, 
and then to locate in the trees near the 
wallow, and trust that some hog would 
stray our way. So we made our way 
slowly back to the wallows, and climbing 
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