By Barbara Boyle

It’s Wednesday morning in Piemonte, and a still, smoky grayness clings to the ground. The hunters arrive outfitted and armed, guns slung over their backs, floppy-eared dogs in tow. Their camouflage fatigues are paired with fluorescent orange vests, a puzzling combination. Do they want to be seen or not? Leaning against their cars, they puff on their Marlboros, take their posts along the ridgelines, and wait.

The night before, returning home in blanketing fog, we were forced to bring our car to a full halt by a sounder of wild boar in the middle of the road. Two sows and a brood of piglets were ambling down from the hazelnut orchards, in no particular hurry. One sow, patiently wrangling the littlest baby across the roadside ditch, turned towards our headlights and looked me directly and purposefully in the eye.  

We waited until the last pig had slipped into the russet bush and slid down into the gully near the creek before continuing home. Lying in bed, we could hear their squeals as they foraged in the shallow water.

Now the posse of men stalk the boar, not on foot but in mud-splattered Fiats, using cell phones and walkie-talkies to text and plot. They drive from hilltop to hilltop, calling to their dogs to surround and trap their prey. A flurry of shouts, and the excited barking of dogs running and yelping in the gully leads to a chase, and a single gunshot echoes through the valley. Then silence, as the dogs trot back up to the cars.

Leaving empty beer cans and clumps of toilet paper in their wake, the men drive off to fill their bellies at the nearest trattoria. 

A musty scent of wood fires hangs in the air. There is a distant clamor of pigs playing in the creek again, Fiats and cellphones be damned.