Don’t worry,’ said our guide, Niels Bryan-Low, his eyes bright with malice, ‘the only time a wild boar is really dangerous is if you get between a mother and her baby.’ A few minutes later, crunching across a patch of orange ferns, there was blur of movement to our right. Niels froze, sniper-style, and we turned to see a terrier-sized wild boarlet, striped dark brown and fawn, zigzagging towards us through the undergrowth. ‘Shit,’ said Niels, cocking his rifle. ‘Where’s the mum?’ Within seconds, I had hauled myself up into a fork of the only sapling in sight, leaving Niels and my boyfriend to die below. My left foot, balanced upon a slender branch, trembled pathetically.
Over the course of our wild-boar-hunting weekend in France, the oily click of Niels’s gun became a signal for me to stare frantically around for trees. Wild boar or sanglier may weigh more than 400 angry lbs, with ten-inch lung-puncturing tusks but, like Daleks, they are not much of a threat if you are a few feet off the ground.
Until September last year, Niels Bryan-Low was the managing director of an Internet consultancy, and lived with his girlfriend, Michelle, in a flat in Hackney. For the price of the flat, he now has 200 acres of the 15,000-acre Massif du Graffard forest, a lake, a three-bedroom hunting lodge, a converted garage to live in and several hundred ferocious pigs.
‘Chasse de la Loire’ can sleep up to six guests, who spend their weekend fishing, shooting duck, clays and targets, or stalking boar with Niels. Meanwhile, Michelle and her lunatic English setter, George, wander about their fenced-in clearing, doing chores and looking, against the dark forest, like an illustration from a Grimm brothers’ fairy tale.
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