The Boar

" We didn't own many books. The Bible, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, and a book of his short stories, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Complete works of Kipling, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and my all time favourite, A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs."

"Papa nodded."Why you want to do that son? Write stories?"
"I just want to," I said."I felt like I just got to do it."
And that was true. The more I thought and talked about it, the more determined I was to be a writer. The idea was comfortable, like drinking a big cup of hot coffee on a cold morning and having it spread around the inside your stomach."


"Papa always thought that was a bad thing, and told me time and again that a mans colour ought not to have anything to do with his thinking or working. That had to do with the man.
All I knew was that I'd gown up with Abraham and we'd swum the river together and had sword duels with willow limbs and fishes since we were old enough o wander off from the house by ourselves. His colour didn't seem to make none of those things less fun."

"That hog is crazy and a born killer. It tore up the best hunter in these parts and left him a cripple. Men have tried to kill it for years without luck. Not putting you down, son, but don't get to thinking that a youngster like yourself can kill a demon like that."

"Thing you of to remember," Uncle Pharaoh started,"is this. You ain't dealing with no farm hog. This ain't even no everyday wild hog. This here is a devil hog. Smartest critter I ever seen. Hogs is smarter than dogs, and this hog is smarter than other hogs. This hog is also crazy. He's got the devil in him, like some folks gets. The way Old Man Turner got it that time."

"But those eyes. That's the thing I recall best. They were so pink as to be nearly red, like watery blood. Those eyes alone were enough to make you think that what you were looking at wasn't any ordinary hog, any wild boar for that matter. Those eves looked old and wise. In that instant, I believed Old Satan was indeed a devil or demon or an Indian medicine man who could shift shapes at will."

"But there was an old saying that kept hopping around in my head like fresh frog legs in a skillet -"the luck of the devil."

Storia breve e intensa con la stessa ambientazione di "In fondo alla palude"
Come tutti i racconti di Lansdale ti cattura e non ti lascia andare finchè la caccia a quel maledetto cinghiale non è finita....