Terrier terror
Jeremy Clarke
In 1998, six of us went to France for the World Cup. While we were there we met these extraordinarily friendly French blokes, who persuaded us to go boar hunting with them. The hunt went like this. Everybody met in the village hall at about 7am for breakfast. We ate roasted chestnuts, garlic sausage, potato soup and Roquefort, and drank new wine out of old bottles, then we piled into pick-up trucks and drove to a wood. The huntsman went into the wood with a variety of large and small dogs — more of a zoo than a pack — while the rest of us arranged ourselves around the perimeter of the wood. Any boars that subsequently emerged from the wood were shot dead.
One of the dogs was badly injured by a boar during the day. The local doctor — Dr. Death we called him — laid the dog on the tailgate of his pick-up, sprayed the gashes with antibiotic aerosol, and stapled them shut with what looked like an office stapler. It was griffon-type dog; very effeminate-looking and lightweight, I thought, compared with our sturdy British hunting dogs. Later, during the post-hunt boozeup, I got a bit mouthy. From what I'd seen of them, French dogs weren't a patch on our hunting dogs, I told our hosts. Our hunting dogs, I bragged (I was wearing my England shirt), are the best in the world. To prove it, we'd send them one down. Which is how I came to know Tonto.
When I got back to England, I bought Tonto for £100 from a local terrierman. Tonto was a two-year-old snow-white Jack Russell-cross-Lakeland. His sire, which had reputedly cost the terrierman £1,000 (and when his wife found out, his marriage), came from a strain of Lakeland terriers bred in the Midlands that is renowned for gameness. When I asked the terrierman whether Tonto would give a good account of himself against a boar, the terrierman said, 'Oh, he'll latch hold, don't worry.' On hearing this, however, I did worry. A 14lb dog that latches hold of a 200lb boar isn't going to last five minutes.
Tonto stayed with us for six weeks until his papers were sorted out. We kept him in the house, which was another big mistake. He was such an affectionate, intelligent little dog that we grew to love him, and the day he sailed for France, my boy in particular was heartbroken. A friend with a holiday home in Languedoc took Tonto down. He reported back that the boar hunters were thrilled to bits with him, and that they had immediately rechristened him Tolstoy.
The following year the hunters invited us back for another boar hunt. Naturally our first question on arrival was to ask how Tonto had been coping with the boars. The hunters were evasive at first. They stared at the floor and shook their heads. Eventually it transpired that each time they'd taken Tonto on a hunt, he'd been too terrified to leave the huntsman's side. In the end they'd given him away to the priest in the next village, who was training him to hunt for mushrooms.
I made a show of being disappointed to hear this, but in reality I was relieved, and couldn't wait to tell my boy the good news. Sending a young and affectionate dog like Tonto to hunt boars had been foolish and callous. To give them their due, though, the Frenchmen were very polite about Tonto's poor performance. Not one of them reminded me of my silly boast the previous year.
Yesterday I received our by now annual letter from the huntsman, inviting us down to Languedoc. The letter also said that Tonto was dead. While out mushrooming with the priest recently. Tonto had encountered a boar, attacked it, and the boar had crushed him to death against the tree trunk. The huntsman gallantly added that perhaps Tonto would have made a good boar dog after all, and that maybe he ought to have persevered with him. I haven't told my boy yet.
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