Last Days of the Bus Club Read Free Page B

from their belts. Archly, I ask these manly men for the boar count, knowing full well that they hardly ever see a boar and almost, but not quite, never bag one.
    There’s a curious theory linking the fortunes of the wild boar with that of the
butano
, the gas sold throughout Spain in orange steel canisters that almost everybody cooks with. Before the introduction of this gas, found beneath the desert in Algeria, cooking was done on wood fires with fuel bought from
leñeros
– firewood collectors – who wouldscour the countryside for any combustible material, load it onto their mules and take it to be sold in the towns. The activity of the
leñeros
almost stripped the land bare, leaving very few thickets and wooded
barrancos
– the gullies or gulches where the boar likes to hole up during the day. This lack of cover, along with the scarcity of meat and perhaps the greater skill and courage of earlier, less camouflage-costumed hunters, resulted in a severe reduction in their numbers.
    When the gas took over and the
leñeros
were out of a job, the countryside soon returned to its natural wild and overgrown state, a state that the Jabber finds congenial, and the boar population began to rise. At the end of the 1980s, when we arrived at our farm in the Alpujarra, there were hardly any at all, but now the place is seething with them.
    The damage they do has to be seen to be believed. A family of boars visiting in the night can dig up a whole field of potatoes or maize. They like to make mudbaths in recently watered earth, too, in which they can roll to ease the terrible burden of fleas with which they are all afflicted. They destroy cultivations, dig up whole plots of vegetables, expose the roots of trees, and the churning of the earth that these activities entail ruins the course of the water across the land, making it impossible to irrigate.
    I have a vivid memory of walking down to the river one evening and passing our flock of sheep, who, contented and with full bellies, were lying amongst the long grass and wild flowers in the field by the river. The low evening sun shone from behind, illuminating the outline of each of them in a halo-like blaze of wool; they looked to me like celestial sheep in a paradisaical meadow and I lingered forlong minutes, bewitched by the scene. When I returned the next morning the Arcadian idyll had been transformed into something closer to the aftermath of the Somme – the earth churned into formless craters and hills, the grass chomped, shat on and ground into the mud. A few sheep were gingerly picking their way between the ruts and craters. The boar had been in the night.
    Wild boar are a menace, the agents of chaos, wrecking the order of things, and their only saving grace is that the younger, tenderer ones are delicious in the pot.

    Some years ago, Ana, whose mind is much exercised by strategies to confound the Jabber and keep him out of her vegetable patch, decided to create a hedge of pomegranate, using the tiny plants that come up all over the farm in the autumn. The pomegranate has long thorns, and she figured that the tangled mass of a thorny hedge would be a match even for the bulldozer-like boar. We dug up hundreds of saplings and planted them in a trench along one side of the triangular vegetable patch at the bottom of the farm, then covered them with a line of chicken wire to protect them from the sheep, who would otherwise nibble the young leaves and kill the lot.
    Manolo, who helps us labouring on the farm and was in charge of watering this garden, didn’t think much of the idea. Manolo is very conservative in a typical Alpujarran way and, if a thing is not traditionally done, it’s a hell of a job to get him to accept it and cooperate. He didn’t like the pomegranate hedge because such a thing had never been done in the Alpujarra, and he couldn’t see thepoint of it … and didn’t water it. Pomegranates are pretty drought-resistant, though, so the hedge survived in spite