They passed out of sight, to our left; and very soon, on our right, we saw Sam. His shoes were ripped open, and his overalls, in strips from his knees down, revealed legs and ankles scratched and bloody. In his hard-set face I scarcely recognized the softly placating features of Sam. As he passed us he was muttering something about old Drum. “Ef ol’ Drum’ll ever git here!” A few minutes later Len and Ted came up. “Where’s Burl?” asked granpap. “Back yander, tendin’ that no-’count dog o’ hisn.” They hurried on, and Len called over his shoulder: “Come on, pap, with yer rope. I hear Ben an’ ol’ Drum. We’ll git him now.” We listened, and a long, deep, fresh-sounding bay echoed through the woods. Granpap grabbed his rope, dropping his lameness and twenty years of his age. “Smoke yer heels, boys,” he said; and like boys we followed. “He’s bayed agin,” said granpap, as we neared a discord of indescribable sounds. Soon we saw the boar, on top of a lichen-covered boulder, sitting on his haunches, his eyes, like two little black stars, pouring vitriol that ought to have made the forest crumple. The rock itself, with its green, black, and creamy spots and veinlike roots climbing over it, seemed a part of the creature’s body, making a monster as superior to attack as granite, as formidable as if Nature had condensed her forces into his resisting form. The yapping dogs at the base of the rock, and the men with their ceaseless “sic, sic,” were as negligible as squeaking gnats. Sam was the only one with any apparent dignity. He had yielded to fatigue, and lay motionless on the ground, probably forty feet from me and an equal distance from the group about the rock. A long musical sound came from old Drum. It was not loud, but of a sure timbre that made the woods quiver. The boar threw up his head and his sides thumped. From my safe distance I fancied a trembling among all the little ruffled scales of the lichens. Suddenly Ben’s young voice called out from somewhere above the rock “Go it, Drum, sic ’im, sic ’im!” and Drum’s huge yellow body vaulted from the slope to the upper edge of the boulder. At that instant the boar shot into the air, curved downward, and struck the ground near the men, scattering them to cover. He rolled for a second, like a knotted ball, then found his four feet properly under him and made straight for Sam. For a second I felt blinded by a swirling black cloud, then stood clear-sighted in a small but painfully vivid human world. Nature with her everlasting forces retreated and consciousness was trivially reabsorbed in the by-product, humanity. I could even see Coretta, a pale widow, in the country store with a basket of eggs, insisting on an exchange of black percale; and myself distractedly guiding the destinies of her fatherless young.