Two thousand years of breeding for ability rather than looks had made all the difference. His dazzling white coat and build reminded me of Snowy from the Tin-Tin comic strip.Admittedly he tried to kill my ferrets the moment he clapped eyes on them, but apart from that he didn't seem half as thuggish as Eddie had made him out to be. Around the house he was mostly a quiet, well-mannered, honest chap who thrived on affection, and who could become utterly demoralised by a single stern word. With other dogs he was friendly but self-contained, and he was treated with respect by all but the most hare-brained or maladjusted dogs; even with those, he only had to make it clear that he wasn't to be trifled with and they kept their distance.
And still only six months old.I would have loved to keep him, but it was out of the question. With a heavy heart I took him up to London, where I left him with friends who were driving down to Cannes the following week for their honeymoon, and had volunteered to stop off in Sylvanes and hand Tonto over to the boar- hunters.My sister and my son cried the day he went Tonto seemed to have this effect on people. And on his return my friend reported that after leaving Tonto with the boar-hunters, his marriage had got off to an unhappy start because his wife hadn't been able to stop crying for days. He also told me that the first thing the hunters did when they saw Tonto was take a stuffed boar's head off the wall of the local bar and thrust it at him. Without thinking twice, Tonto savaged it, much to the hunters' approval - so that at least boded well for his future. Owing to a breakdown in communication, however, or because they have a higher level of culture over there, the hunters called him "Tolstoy" and bore him triumphantly off to the kennels.That was in the spring of '97. Last November - again, funnily enough, when West Ham were away to Newcastle - three of us drove down to Languedoc to take up the hunters' open invitation to join them whenever we could for a boar hunt.
We were looking forward to seeing Tonto again, and speculated about how he had been getting on with the boars.We drew up outside the hunters' cabin in Sylvanes early on the Saturday morning, just as they were clambering aboard their muddy pick-ups, about to set off for a day's hunting. We shook hands all round and they looked genuinely glad to see us I didn't ask about Tonto immediately None of the hunters mentioned him either. Instead they brought us up to date with the number of kills since we were down last Last season, all told, they had killed 94 boars. Since the beginning of the new one (which kicked off in the last week of September) they had killed 14 That was the good news. The bad news was that Banana, one of the more reliable griffons, had been fatally injured by a boar only the day before.
Showing great presence of mind in a crisis, the boar had simply crushed poor Banana to death against a tree trunk. The boar had got away, and the hunters were wondering whether this was the animal that was currently making a name for himself throughout the Aveyron department of Languedoc. In a fortnight this rogue boar had killed two dogs belonging to one neighbouring hunt He had also wounded all 12 dogs belonging to another. The hunters explained that from time to time a boar realises that in the long run it makes more sense to stand and fight than to run away. Once a boar has acquired the knack of feinting with his head, then getting his tusks underneath and tossing the dogs, the local vet can be seen smoking cigars in public.As we drove up into the steep beech-clad hills, Guy pointed out signs of recent boar activity. In one field we passed, their excavations looked like the result of a ploughing match.
The boar population has increased dramatically in the last 10 years, he explained, the main reason being that the boars have been interbreeding with domestic pigs and as a result the boar sows' litters are larger than they were before. Also, unscrupulous hunters are illegally releasing captive boars to increase local stocks.We parked in some woods and the dogs were released from their wooden crates I noted that Tonto wasn't among them, but said nothing. The dogs - about half a dozen in all - wore melancholy-sounding sheep's bells around their necks. They leapt down off the trucks and bounded melodiously away into the forest, le chef de la chasse staggering after them as fast as his limp would allow.
