Last Days of the Bus Club Read Free Page A

was
coeducación
… Who would have thought it?



CHAPTER TWO
RICK STEIN AND THE WILD BOARS
    W HAT YOU GET when you live out in the sticks, as we do – the only inhabited farm on the east side of the river – is wild animals wandering about the place.
    We enjoy and, in certain cases, encourage the presence of wild animals around us. We leave milk thistles to go to seed, for example, because this encourages goldfinches. Ibex, which we see almost every day, are welcome, too; they don’t do any damage at all and they are lovely to watch, with their delicate grace and their predilection for posing on the sheerest of pinnacles and crags. Foxes inhabit a grey area, because once a fox has got into your chicken run and massacred your poor hens it’s hard to love them. But at times when we do succeed in keeping the hen house foxproof, the fox, too, is a welcome member of the wild.
    The sound of foxes barking in the night is a sound of savage yearning melancholy. Of course it drives the dogs,who are not allowed to roam the hills at night, to utter distraction; foxes are what the dogs want to be, and much of their day is spent racing around fruitlessly following the trails of foxes and, occasionally, what they like best of all, finding a particularly ripe dollop of fox shit, and rolling in it. Thus respectably redolent of fox, a smell which is truly loathsome to us humans, they come home and flop down in the house. This is not something we particularly encourage.
    I have a firm belief that foxes have a sense of humour, a rare enough thing in an animal. They particularly love to taunt the dogs, and one dark winter night, as Ana and I lolled before the fire flanked by the dozing dogs, a fox had the temerity to walk onto the flat roof and look down at us through the skylight. Bumble and Bao went berserk, rushing about the room, barking and snarling, and fruitlessly leaping at the skylight … which didn’t do much for our candlelit evening by the fire. The fox considered them for a moment, then turned, calmly shat on the glass, and wandered off.
    It’s harder to be so sanguine about the wild boar –
jabali
in Spanish, which sounds pleasingly like ‘Jabber Lee’ – of which there are hundreds living along the river and up in the hills. They, too, are nocturnal creatures, who prefer to hole up in dense thickets during the hours of daylight, though occasionally they misjudge the hour and you come across them trotting home early in the morning. Once, taking Chloé to school in the morning, I saw a mother and no fewer than eight stripy babies. They trotted across the track in an orderly line and disappeared into the thick scrub of oleander and broom on the other side. We felt as if we were on safari.
    The wild boars’ apparent timidity, however, belies a terrifying ferocity. You don’t want to corner a boar, nor find yourself between a female and her babies. They are equipped with terrible tusks and immensely powerful neck and shoulders for delivering the blows. Both males and females are built like battering rams and covered all over with bristles as thick as fencing-wire. And it’s no use running; they can run a lot faster than you. Sometimes, walking home late at night, along the track from the bridge to the farm, I hear them snuffling and snorting in the dense scrub beside me. I stop for a moment to listen, and then hasten quietly on.
    The boar are multiplying fast in our part of Spain, for they have no predators except the hunters, and most of the hunters who hunt on Campuzano, the hill behind our house, are next to useless. From time to time they organise a Sunday-morning
montería
, where, bristling with guns and arrayed in the very last word in green-drab hunting clobber, dozens of men and scores of dogs bash their way through the scrub on the hills. Sunday morning, though, seems to be a time when the boars are never in. I sometimes come across the hunters on their way back, usually with a tiny dead bird or two swinging