He was, though badly wounded by the first shot, running from the dogs, and I got in his way. _Voilà tout_! On only one other occasion I nearly came to grief while boar shooting. On my arriving at a Turkish village one night, I was told that there was an enormous boar in the neighbourhood, who for a long time had been the terror of the country, inasmuch as he, accompanied by a large party of the pig tribe, had rooted up the crops all round the village, destroyed gardens, and tradition even said had killed children and eaten them (this latter story I don't take in). However, the poor people prayed me with tears in their eyes to rid them of their enemy, which I promised to do if possible. So the next morning off we started in the following order: first, myself and friends, accompanied by the elders of the village armed with old-fashioned guns; then the young men with knives and big sticks, the women and children bringing up the rear as lookers-on. I and my two friends were escorted into the centre of a large wood, in which very original _seats in trees_ had been knocked up for us. The object of these seats was for our personal safety, but I as a sportsman saw at once that to be up a tree was not only advantageous in that respect, but also that we should be much more invisible, hidden among the branches of a tree, than by being stationed on the ground. So we mounted our trees, and the beaters went into the woods some half a mile from us. I never heard such a row as they made when they began the drive; they beat drums, fired guns, rang bells, and it was evident to me that no wild beast would hold to his lair under such a torrent of abuse. I found the words they were using were curses on the wild boar. I saw two or three fallow deer glide past me, with their usual ghostlike silence, and shortly afterwards the woods very near me seemed to shake with something coming. Suddenly some fifteen to twenty wild boar appeared among the bushes, coming straight towards me. The first of these was an enormous brute, evidently _the_ boar we wanted. I heard shots on either side of me from my friends, but I kept my eye on the big boar. To my astonishment he came right under the tree where I was sitting, and stopped to listen. He cocked his head on one side, looked all round him, but forgot to look up the tree he was quite close to, in which was his enemy.