In the Shape of a Boar Read online

  Matters might have stood otherwise. The dew condensing in the soft hair of his underpelt and the cool gusts of the Etesian wind pushing down from the north cased him in their different contexts. The continued swayings, abrupt flattenings and rebounds of the resilient grasses leached the original welcome from its gesture and replaced it with mere repetition. Paths ran through the meadow, but not his. He walked along them, hooves sinking a little in the springy turf. And then?

  Or perhaps ‘Otherwise . . . ‘?There were gaps in the account, between ‘And’ and ‘Then’ or ‘Otherwise’. There were gaps which might better have been termed mutilations, for their edges were jagged as the shadows cast by fir trees on wind-waved grass, hard as hooves and sharp as tusks. A boar is built to destroy creatures greater than himself: low-slung with massive armoured shoulders for the upward blow, tusks for the toppled enemy's fall and then the slash. Groin to throat is effective.

  Standing amid the grasses of Aracynthus, he had pricked his ears at the sound of muffled grunts and curses. His snout had twitched at the smell of sweat. Men were advancing upon him. His eyes narrowed at the sight of their spears and the sky against which their figures were etched seemed to clog with haze then glow as though the breeze were fanning a dormant ember into life, growing redder and redder. How many? He walked forward, searching for Yellowhair, but he was not among their number. Eight of them. A few more steps. How could these striding men not have seen him? How, when their lifeless bodies were to hang from the branches of the trees could they have advanced on him with their spears and knives? How could that have happened?

  The boar stamped his hooves on the stone floor of the cave. They would hear him, the ones who had tracked him here and were advancing upon him now. He heard their footsteps scattering stones outside. They would be able to smell him. They would fear him and their fear would nourish him like milk from the teat. He was a patient feeder, nuzzling under the slack soft warmth of a sow's belly for the ragged lozenge of flesh that was his. He could wait for them a little longer.

  He had thought that these ‘men’, who hunted him and perished, or continued and survived, were brittle and liable to snap. So thin and tall. They scattered, or grew entangled in one another, then split apart again. There were densities of them, places where they were thick and impenetrable so that his more brutish advances crushed them and they crackled underfoot. As twigs did. A flood had carried many of them to oblivion. The survivors had walked through a forest to the lake. Eight cadavers hung in the trees behind him. But forget them now, for here was Yellowhair, his woman and her animal. Of the other dogs, there was no sign. They must have been lost in the flood. The hunters had growled and scraped at the ground in their unhappiness, recalled the boar. They had lurched upright and staggered into the woods. So few of them were left. Might there be wounds which they concealed from him, or a sickness which they were carrying in their bodies? He had followed them into the woods. He drank the water which pooled among the exposed roots of the chestnut trees, then ate the roots and watched the escaping water sink into the soil, darkening it. He ate a worm. His weight sufficed to snap oak branches the thickness of his neck. He had tossed a goat upwards into the air and watched it rise three times its height. The landscape was the collection of things which resisted him. He stood on it.

  But the hunters were not landscape and they too resisted him. In the woods they resisted him, for otherwise he could not understand how they remained alive as they split and filtered through the maze of trees. There were times when he was close enough to hear them breathe. A prohibition hung about them which had to do with the woods themselves, with the thickness of the dark trunks and the twitchings of the canopies which they upheld against the rich warmth of the sun. This was not the place where they were to die, just as the reedbed beyond was where Yellowhair and his woman must survive. Light glittered through the leaves and fell in shafts finer and swifter than the path of an arrow. It broke them into creatures of darkness and light. Mixed animals.

  They were circling Yellowhair. They were going to snuff out his flame.

  No. That came later.

  They carried spears, arrows and sharp-pointed knives. They walked through the sun-dappled spaces of the woods. In the reeds of the lakeshore he saw the grasses of his waving meadow grown stiff and monstrous. He felt his bristles rise to horrid spikes at the sight of the tall blades and when his hunters disappeared within the mass of greenery he thought of the fragments of sharp metal they carried with them to pierce him and slice him. They floated in the sea of reeds, borne by currents he could not trace. Their desires, he presumed. He could not wallow there. Their spears would surround him and their arrows fall from the sky in a mockery of his own spiked armour: an inside-out boar with daggers for bristles and spears for tusks. He did not hate them. But the sun fell and left him in darkness, alone with his foaming appetite. The earth began to quiver beneath his hooves and shake the bones in their fleshy sheaths. He heard the furtive scratching at his back which signalled the coming into being of the one he might not, might never . . . The beardless ‘him’ whom he could not flee, whose tracks were to circumscribe and frame the shape he must assume. He could not be when that other's being neared his own.

  And so he ran at his hunters, as he was bound to do. He must have run at them and found them cowering in the false sanctuary of the reeds. He must have ripped and trampled, gored and butted and broken them. Eaten them? He did not know. There were gaps. He should have stayed closer, kept their scent strong in his nostrils and his ears pricked for their footfalls, as earlier. He had allowed himself an intervening distance. He would have to gallop, for the ground yawned beneath him and seemed to stretch when all four hooves left the rough turf which separated the trees from the edge of the lake and its lapping waters. There were brief, airborne moments when he knew nothing of the terrain beneath him. He ran towards the acts which were to be performed in the reeds fringing the lake of Trichonis, which were to be recorded in the bodies of the hunters, and then, once done, he ran from those acts. He fled his damage.

  He ran here to the cave and waited and now the waiting was all but over.

  He heard the scrape of their feet up the incline and the rattling of the pebbles. He saw their outlines rise in the mouth of the cave. First the helmetted and armoured man, spear twisting in his hands, then the woman, her bow strung, and last of all her dog, head low and belly flattened to the ground. They halted at the entrance. The man turned to the woman and spoke to her. She nodded her acquiescence, reached for her quiver and notched an arrow to her bowstring. The boar saw her strain to bend the stave until it seemed it must snap, the bronze-tipped arrow trembling, its point searching for the line that would speed it through the air and bury it in his flesh. The boar listened for the note of her single-string lyre, waiting for the hard pads of her fingers to loose the cord and send the signal for his own rough music to begin. Soon, he thought.

  His lungs filled and emptied, swelled and collapsed. One more breath, he thought. In and then out.

  Now.

  ***

  The stones cut his feet and cracked against his shins. Meilanion ran, and knew as he ran that he would not catch them. He saw Atalanta turn away from him, reaching for an arrow as she did so. The mouth of the cave breathed a darkness that rolled over them like thick smoke, engulfing Meleager first, then the woman too. She walked into the cave with her dog at her heel and disappeared. Then the crater was bare of everything save himself, silent except for the dying echoes of his footsteps.

  And no trail. No hoofmark or footprint or mark of any kind to tell the tale of what had passed. The night-hunter reads signs where others see nothing, but when the signs give out . . . He looked up from the ground to the dark blade of the cave-mouth but nothing moved and no one emerged. Atalanta, Meleager, the boar; they had moved past the point where he could follow. What was he without them?

  The cold dry air stung his throat as he heaved it into his lungs. He knew this place, though he had never
seen or heard of it. Its sunlit double had been raised on the shores of the gulf, where they had first met and joined, shouting their names as they came together to build a sanctuary of sound whence they would march against the boar. Here was that place's counterpart and cancellation: a silent crater scraped out of stone.

  Tied between them was the twisted braid of all the paths which the hunters had followed, which had thinned as each thread had frayed then snapped. And here, here beneath his feet, and now, there was no trace of them at all.

  They were in the cave, the survivors, in a place whose darkness resisted him and whose silence thwarted him. He waited in the failing light.

  Then, issuing from its mouth, came a sound. It began as a whisper, then gathered as if a voice were urging itself into intelligible speech, or vast lungs were drawing breaths, each one a little deeper than the last. The sound swelled until it filled the air and echoed between the cliffs. He crouched on the ground in the encroaching darkness while the roll-call raised a pillar of noise whose base was the whole volume of this empty place and whose column threw itself into the sky.

  He heard first the cries of those who had died among the reeds and the roar of the fire in Kalydon's temple. Then the song regathered itself and he heard the first of the names – the names of the heroes – and he recognised in this the wreck of their palace, raised across the water from Kalydon. Only the names of the two he had tracked here were not heard: Meleager and Atalanta. They were with the beast whose shape was their fate and whose own fate was shaped as they were.

  But their shapes were so various and the boar too seemed to frame himself from moment to moment. His epithets glinted, his attributes jangled in Meilanion's ears. In this song he was the pieces of a beast: all the jumbled hoofprints of his trail, the fragments scattered and buried in the soil of Kalydon, on the slopes of Aracynthus and here.

  Here was where Atalanta must become ‘Atalanta’ and Meleager clothe himself in the garb of ‘Meleager’. Here was where the boar must be divided as though to make a sacrifice: meat to the men, offal to the gods.107

  The boar's music broke over the night-hunter's head and the names of the hunters whose company he had quit tumbled in slow confusion. He heard the record of the hunt unbind itself from the shaft yet to be staked in its victim's flesh and come apart: its noises, fleeting odours and flashes of colour, the changing tints of the sky, the corrugations and textures of oak-bark, dry earth, pine needles, the coarse wire of her hair slipping between his fingers. All this must be lost and the gaps left by those losses, the shapes of the absences, these too disappear. Hindsight's tales will fill the truthful silence and flood its darkness with lies.

  The true fates of the heroes are to become their own apocrypha. Some of those who escaped the hunt must return to die there; some who perished there must rise again, being destined for graves elsewhere than Kalydon. Agelaus108 and Ancaeus109 die in the reeds, gored and trampled by the boar, as does Eurytion, whom Peleus's blind spear finds among the tall stems.110 But Jason's course veers from the hunt and leads him through the years to the beach at Iolcis, where he is crushed beneath the poop of the long-careened and worm-eaten Argo when it collapses upon him as he sleeps.111 The twelve sons of Hippocoon are scattered and regathered, then slaughtered by Heracles beneath the walls of Lacedaemon, perhaps for the murder of the son of Licymnius, whom they cudgelled to death,112 perhaps for the ousting of Tyndareus, whose kingdom they usurped:113 whichever, they are buried in Sparta.114 Castor's nemesis is sharp-eyed Lynceus, who falls in turn under Pollux's spear and whose brother Idas is burnt to a cinder by a thunderbolt hurled by Zeus.115 Toxeus bleeds to death in a ditch.116 Theseus is driven out of an Athens which has no use for him and is murdered by treacherous Lycomedes on the distant isle of Scyros.117 Thersites is. cut down at Troy by Peleus's son Achilles for defiling the body of his beloved enemy, the Amazon queen Penthesilea.118 Achilles’ son buries Phoenix, his father's aged tutor, somewhere on the road between Tenedos and the country of the Molossians on the march home from Troy, the cause of his death unknown.119 Peleus himself survives his son to expire of old age in exile on Cos,120 or Icos,121 or perhaps in the depths of the sea.122 His brother Telamon dies in a raid on Elis undertaken with Heracles, who buries him there, perhaps,123 while Amphiaraus digs his own grave, dragged into the earth by his maddened horses in the ill-fated campaign against Thebes.124 Caeneus is bludgeoned into his tomb by the centaurs at Pirithous's wedding,125 or changed into a woman,126 or a yellow-winged bird according to Mopsos.127 Mopsos himself meets his end in the deserts of Libya: snakebite.128

  The boar's music is unmelodious: these are roguish trails. They fork and split and fork again, dragged this way and that by incompatible destinations. Anomalous tracks suggest feints and detours, retreadings and rejoinings among the heroes impelled along them. The last imprint is always a grave.

  The other huntsmen fade away. Their strides lengthen. Their footprints thin until the trail becomes a scattered archipelago, their acts marooned on islands separated by eventless oceans. So Nestor loads the bones of Machaon into his hold and sets sail after the victory at Troy,129 finds landfall at Poeëessa,130 then Gerenia131 and the palace at Pylos. And then he disappears. Laertes is waiting when his son Odysseus returns from the same war; when Odysseus dies,132 he vanishes. Phyleus takes Heracles's part against his father Augeas, is banished to Dulichium and the Echinades, hunts the boar. But a generation later it is his son, Meges, who leads the islandmen to Troy. Of the father, there is no trace. The heroes’ footprints grow ever lighter and their traces appear ever more faint. They reach their own truthful silence, find it useless, and their final steps take them clear of the tell-tale surface altogether. They were nothing . . .

  Meilanion heard in the fading sounds of the battle within the cave the trail rebounding, as water will when it dashes against a cliff, scends into unresisting air, and its backwash retreats in search of more impressionable terrain in which to stamp its signs: stiff clays and marls, freshly-fallen snow, the damp soil of the forest floor. He listened for the prints of the beast within the cave and read their succession as characters unspooling in a high wind, as ribbons revolve and whip about the thin staves to which they are fixed.

  Cleaves and dew claws identify the tracks of a boar, their depth his weight, their grouping his gait.133 In melting snow such imprints swell, the hooves which made them seem to grow and the boar perched upon them grows monstrous. The tracks multiply and become jumbled: the boar is confused or furious. Broken ground signals his hunger134 and muddied pools his thirst.135 He rubs himself against trees, in either martial136 or sexual137 frustration. The boar is the sum of his inscriptions.

  Meilanion watched the mouth of the cave, waiting for whoever or whatever might emerge. But nothing now disturbed the air save his own breathing. Where nothing happens, time stands still. He was suspended between the two openings: where the boar had been run to ground and the gorge which had led them to his lair; between preservation and extinction.

  And both must happen. The running daughter of Schoineus and the hunting daughter of Iasius describe two different Atalantas. The Meleager who slaughters the sons of Thestius cannot at once be the Meleager who walks into the cave. They grow out of different trails. So too the boar is two-fold: at once flesh and bone, and a spectral beast who emerges out of the prints and traces which will become the tale of the Boar of Kalydon. The beast in the cave will not suffice to consternate and terrorise, as the ‘Boar of Kalydon’ must. A shadow-boar accumulates in the story's negative space.

  But whether he is conceived in the vengeful brain of Artemis or in the womb of the sow Phaea,138 whom Theseus will later kill, he must swell to fill his allotted shape. Thus he fattens himself on roots, barley, millet, figs, acorns, wild pears, cucumbers, mice and snails.139 His favoured haunts have been assigned: the quarries of Pentelicus in the Attic mountains, Mount Taygetus in Sparta and the border disputed with Elis, the oak-groves of Phelloe and Soron by the banks of the Ladon, the slo
pes of Mount Pholoe.140 Most of all the heights of Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, for the boars who forage there are white.141 Like himself.142

  So he grows, and roots, and grubs, and roams, and grows again. He builds his lair from stock materials: in ‘a thicket’,143 therefore, ‘through which the strength of the wet winds could never blow nor the rays of the bright sun beat’,144 and the thicket itself in some inaccessible location145 where he can revel in the quiet and darkness.146 Safe within the lore of his den he feels the ground shudder with impending catastrophe: earthquakes, pestilence, famine.147 He relishes the cellular swell of enzymes granting immunity from salamanders and hemlock.148 Outside, his enemies are gathering.

  Sheep butt him to the ground and the wild oryx impales him on its horn.149 He competes with the weasel alone in his hatred of snakes.150 A boar who ventures into water after suffering a bite from the scorpion of Caria will die; but is his enemy then the scorpion or the water?151 Henbane causes paralysis. It can be cured by eating crabs.152 He chases wolves.153 His hackles rise at the sight of a lion.154

  The boar girds himself with epithets and fights. He grows intimate with his sources and more complex under their injunctions, which render him at once quick-tempered, ferocious, unteachable, gluttonous, implacable, devoid of justice, a cannibal, and the progeny of a coward.155 On his wary return to the watering-hole from which he has been chased, whose mudclouded waters have cleared in his absence, he bends his neck to the mirror-like surface and sees in his own wavering image the faces of the men who will one day be compared to him: Hector, Ajax, Heracles.156