by Tim Homan
Early morning mid-May, 1990. Cohutta Wilderness. I started walking East Cowpen Trail * from its southern, Three Forks Mountain end in gray-out conditions, the sky thick and cool with blowing mist. I carried my measuring wheel and a small, moving pocket of visibility with me as I hiked hard and fast toward Panther Creek Trail **, my work for the day.
I had picked up the pace where the easy grade straightens out on the wide crest of the ridge north-northwest of Cowpen Mountain -- mind wandering to an upcoming vacation out west -- when I slammed on the brakes, fast walk to full stop in two stutter-step strides. Dark animal bulk had suddenly appeared 10 yards away, a visual jolt well within the leading edge of visibility. Bear? Maybe … no … hell no -- a big wild boar, an impressively tusked male way too close for comfort. He was right there looking at me, squared up and still, just to the left of the wide treadway. A small patch of the forest floor a few feet to his right looked like it had been freshly plowed up with a roto-tiller.
I stayed still where I stopped, fog and rising fear inflating the boar's size. I lifted my wheel off my shoulder and held it as shield in a modified port arms position. Better he chomp on spokes than my gut. The big male boar stared back at me for a few more stretched-out seconds, hesitant, maybe thinking his version of the same thing I was: how in the world had he let me sneak under his radar.
He disengaged. He uttered a single short grunt, deep pitched and guttural, then wheeled around and trotted a surprisingly short 12 or 13 feet further away. The boar stopped a few feet out into the former roadbed, on my left side of the trail. He squared up towards me again, alert and ready. This was new and unexpected behavior. Not only had he allowed me far closer approach than any other wild boar or feral hog, but he was also unwilling to turn tail and run now that we were such a short distance apart.
My move. Slightly emboldened by his giving ground, but still a little unnerved by his refusal to crash away like all but one of the others, I pressed forward, wheel clicking in front of me for extra confusion and noise, to see if I could force him back into the forest. He didn't budge. I stopped. We were playing an interspecific game of chicken, and I was beginning to quail.
No matter what his genotype, his formidable phenotype was all wild boar: shoulders powerful and humped high, legs slender and surprisingly long, dark-brown coat heavy and bristly, upper tusks big and curving upward. His full-length profile would resemble a bison's: massive chest, shoulders rising to a knot of bristle-covered muscle, hindquarters small enough to qualify as an anatomical afterthought. He was a large mature male in prime condition, every bit of 250 to 275 pounds, maybe even heavier, and not an inch of porcine pink nor an ounce of bacon-in-the-makin', porky pig fat.
Brandishing the bright orange wheel high over my head, I took a single step forward and hollered, hyah, hyah -- loud and deep pitched and guttural as my voice would go -- like the wild boar was a willful cur come too close to camp. My one-step-forward charge immediately felt like a ridiculous gesture. The tusker tensed his body for battle, flared his bristled hump into a Mohawk, and hollered back: two deep and rumbling grunts. I had no way of knowing if he had deliberately paired his two grunts to match my two yells, but deliberate or not, the boar had certainly done so. And there was no mistaking his meaning, no possibility of any sketchy anthropomorphism. His truculent and guttural grunts were loud warning mechanisms, spoken in his best John Wayne swagger-voice. They were paired exclamation points to a declarative sentence I had readily understood: That's far enough mister; I'm not moving an inch more!!
He had called my bluff. I flinched and folded first. Fresh out of gumption, feeling foolish and suddenly fearful, I chose dignified flight over fight. I backed down and slowly backed up, my eyes never leaving the big boar. Then I went end-around off trail, making a slow and easy half-orbit bushwhack to the right to bypass the boar. Steadily pivoting in place, the boar's tusked head turned in time with my circling like a weather vane half-looping around to a 180-degree swing in wind direction. I know because I was taking quick glances at him all the way around. Back on former Highway 2, I turned sideways while I walked to watch him watch me as he dissolved into the trailing edge of the gray void.
Danger over, I sat down and cursed my recklessness. Contending right-of-way with a massively muscled male boar armed with two sets of tusks had been alarmingly foolish. I had long counseled myself to err on the side of safety and caution when walking alone in the big woods. But I hadn't heeded my own admonition.
I wrote a quick scribble of notes describing my ineffectual attempt to exert dominance over the imposing wild boar. I reviewed my impressions of the boar's size, taking fear out of the equation. I had plenty of time to get a good close-up look, time to take the full measure of the fierce-looking beast after my sudden discovery. The wild boar was big, real big, I had it right from the start. He was long, surprisingly high at the shoulder hump, deep chested and thick.
I thought about the boar's behavior. The light breeze had been blowing stronger on the left side of my face, probably from the northwest, so he had no chance of smelling me. My footfalls on the former dirt-gravel highway had been fairly quiet, hitting packed dirt or gravel well embedded in dirt, no crunching or scuffing on loose gravel. The boar had been busy foraging, making noise of his own as his tusks furrowed soil and ripped up roots, his breathing heavier with the effort.
The unknown variable in the equation was the boar's degree of wariness. Just how wary was a formidable male boar feeding under the cover of early morning cloud mist? A ground-feeding deer frequently lifts its head to check the sensory radar screen. But this well-armed and muscled-up brute had no need to be anywhere near as skittish as a deer. The first really large wild boar I ever saw, also in the Cohutta Wilderness, had not run either, but I had not encountered him at close quarters. I had been hiking down Rough Ridge Trail when I spotted the dark, thickset form of what I assumed was a bear standing in the head of a hollow to the left. I stopped to make a positive identification. My assumption was wrong; the dark, thickset form was a boar -- a high-humped male, powerful wild boar phenotype -- a little more than 40 yards over and down from the footpath. He looked right at me but chose a nonchalant course of no action as I continued to walk down the trail.
I concluded that an unusual combination of factors had allowed me to cross right over the line: the invisible tripwire that triggers instinctive fight-or-flight responses. The male boar's instinct had kicked into a defensive, prepare-to-fight mode once the potential predator -- 180-pound, heavily spoked me -- had slipped into his stay-and-fight zone. I imagined a time when Eurasian lions sent Pliocene wild boars to evolution's hard-knocks school of slow learning by quick death. Back then, running from a close-range lion probably triggered immediate attack, allowed the lion to avoid the business end of the boar as it brought the Old World swine down from behind. As runners were routinely removed from the gene pool -- hindquarters slashed by big cats, hind legs hamstrung by big wolves -- natural selection's death lesson for large male boars evolved into a hold-your-ground instinct. An instinct that commanded them to look big and burly and bristly, show the white of their gnashing tusks, give their best "you-lookin'-at-me?" grunt rather than run and expose their backs to a faster predator already in close proximity. In short, to act and look more like predator than prey.
I eased off the self-condemnation as I began to walk again. Prior to my new lesson in wild boar behavior, only one four-legged animal that could inflict physical harm had ever held its ground at close quarters. That intimidating animal had been a huge, food-habituated bear in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park the year before. All of the other wild mammals had run from my advance. Quite often the only evidence of their flight was the sounds of wild boar or feral hogs crashing through the forest. My expectation, proven time and time again over a sixteen-year period, was that all wild mammals innocent of human-food habituation would flee from me as I approached them. But I was wrong; my expectations had not met all the possibilities. I had never walked anywhere near that close to a bear or boar before it had discovered my presence.
Less than a half mile beyond my break, I passed a young couple eating breakfast next to their trailside tent. After they asked about the wheel, we exchanged a little of the usual trail talk. And since they had asked if I had seen any wildlife, I told them about the boar before I left. Not wanting to scare them, I kept my voice flat and matter of fact. Didn't mention that I had walked right up on a big and fierce-looking wild boar in the gray mist, that he hadn't run, that he had given me a double-grunt warning, the sounds deep and guttural, his intent as plain as the raised hairs on my forearms. None of that. I casually mentioned that I had gotten a fairly good look at a wild boar a mile or more back. That's all I said. As I walked away I heard the woman say, "They're not dangerous are they? Maybe we should move camp somewhere else." I couldn't catch the man's reply, but their tent was still there on my way back to the trailhead in the afternoon.
Later, back at my Jacks River Fields camp, I wondered if I had crossed an invisible tripwire too. Maybe some of my behavior hadn't come from a conscious mind's choosing. My new knowledge, the knowledge from my single short life, told me the boar's position was strictly defensive, and that I was not on the menu. But an old distrust -- an ancient and deeply embedded instinctual knowing -- may have commanded me not to show my back to a faster and fearsome nearby beast that wouldn't run away. And though my mind wanted to be 50 yards away, right now, the old knowing forbade turning around and running, forbade acting like prey.
Note
Wild boars are not food bullies like bears. It is not in their DNA to think of humans as food or as a source of bullied handouts in the big woods. As far as hikers are concerned, if you don't bother wild boar, they won't bother you. In the rare event that you come in close proximity to a litter of striped boarlets or hoglets, do not move closer for a better look or a photo. Move away from the young immediately. You do not want a female wild boar or feral hog to think you are a threat to her progeny. And just because you don't see her doesn't mean she doesn't smell, hear, or see you. Think of those cute little creatures as highly mobile land mines and disengage. Get out of there.
Free-roaming male wild boar can grow to an extremely stout and substantial size in the Mountain South. They do not attain mythological boarzilla dimensions, but they do fill out enough to become powerful and formidable beasts: the kind you will probably want to step aside for if your right-of-way is contested in the early-morning mist. In his book, Mammals of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Donald W. Linzey wrote: "Some individuals may stand three feet high at the shoulder and weigh over 400 pounds, although most are considerably smaller."
* Running roughly north-south on or near the crest of Cohutta Mountain, today's East Cowpen Trail was once a 7-mile section of old Georgia Highway 2. After the Cohutta was federally designated as wilderness in 1975, the forest service began their long negotiations to close the oxymoronic wilderness highway to vehicular traffic. The road was finally gated in September of 1987 (Chattahoochee National Forest, Fannin County).
** Winding roughly east-west, the 3.4-mile-long Panther Creek Trail is an interior route in the Conasauga River watershed. Hiked east to west, this Cohutta Wilderness footpath loses 1,830 feet of elevation from Cohutta Mountain to Conasauga River (Chattahoochee National Forest, Fannin County). The two-state Cohutta Wilderness -- mostly in Georgia (Chattahoochee National Forest), a small amount of land lapping over the state line into Tennessee (Cherokee National Forest) -- is approximately 37,033 acres.
I had picked up the pace where the easy grade straightens out on the wide crest of the ridge north-northwest of Cowpen Mountain -- mind wandering to an upcoming vacation out west -- when I slammed on the brakes, fast walk to full stop in two stutter-step strides. Dark animal bulk had suddenly appeared 10 yards away, a visual jolt well within the leading edge of visibility. Bear? Maybe … no … hell no -- a big wild boar, an impressively tusked male way too close for comfort. He was right there looking at me, squared up and still, just to the left of the wide treadway. A small patch of the forest floor a few feet to his right looked like it had been freshly plowed up with a roto-tiller.
I stayed still where I stopped, fog and rising fear inflating the boar's size. I lifted my wheel off my shoulder and held it as shield in a modified port arms position. Better he chomp on spokes than my gut. The big male boar stared back at me for a few more stretched-out seconds, hesitant, maybe thinking his version of the same thing I was: how in the world had he let me sneak under his radar.
He disengaged. He uttered a single short grunt, deep pitched and guttural, then wheeled around and trotted a surprisingly short 12 or 13 feet further away. The boar stopped a few feet out into the former roadbed, on my left side of the trail. He squared up towards me again, alert and ready. This was new and unexpected behavior. Not only had he allowed me far closer approach than any other wild boar or feral hog, but he was also unwilling to turn tail and run now that we were such a short distance apart.
My move. Slightly emboldened by his giving ground, but still a little unnerved by his refusal to crash away like all but one of the others, I pressed forward, wheel clicking in front of me for extra confusion and noise, to see if I could force him back into the forest. He didn't budge. I stopped. We were playing an interspecific game of chicken, and I was beginning to quail.
No matter what his genotype, his formidable phenotype was all wild boar: shoulders powerful and humped high, legs slender and surprisingly long, dark-brown coat heavy and bristly, upper tusks big and curving upward. His full-length profile would resemble a bison's: massive chest, shoulders rising to a knot of bristle-covered muscle, hindquarters small enough to qualify as an anatomical afterthought. He was a large mature male in prime condition, every bit of 250 to 275 pounds, maybe even heavier, and not an inch of porcine pink nor an ounce of bacon-in-the-makin', porky pig fat.
Brandishing the bright orange wheel high over my head, I took a single step forward and hollered, hyah, hyah -- loud and deep pitched and guttural as my voice would go -- like the wild boar was a willful cur come too close to camp. My one-step-forward charge immediately felt like a ridiculous gesture. The tusker tensed his body for battle, flared his bristled hump into a Mohawk, and hollered back: two deep and rumbling grunts. I had no way of knowing if he had deliberately paired his two grunts to match my two yells, but deliberate or not, the boar had certainly done so. And there was no mistaking his meaning, no possibility of any sketchy anthropomorphism. His truculent and guttural grunts were loud warning mechanisms, spoken in his best John Wayne swagger-voice. They were paired exclamation points to a declarative sentence I had readily understood: That's far enough mister; I'm not moving an inch more!!
He had called my bluff. I flinched and folded first. Fresh out of gumption, feeling foolish and suddenly fearful, I chose dignified flight over fight. I backed down and slowly backed up, my eyes never leaving the big boar. Then I went end-around off trail, making a slow and easy half-orbit bushwhack to the right to bypass the boar. Steadily pivoting in place, the boar's tusked head turned in time with my circling like a weather vane half-looping around to a 180-degree swing in wind direction. I know because I was taking quick glances at him all the way around. Back on former Highway 2, I turned sideways while I walked to watch him watch me as he dissolved into the trailing edge of the gray void.
Danger over, I sat down and cursed my recklessness. Contending right-of-way with a massively muscled male boar armed with two sets of tusks had been alarmingly foolish. I had long counseled myself to err on the side of safety and caution when walking alone in the big woods. But I hadn't heeded my own admonition.
I wrote a quick scribble of notes describing my ineffectual attempt to exert dominance over the imposing wild boar. I reviewed my impressions of the boar's size, taking fear out of the equation. I had plenty of time to get a good close-up look, time to take the full measure of the fierce-looking beast after my sudden discovery. The wild boar was big, real big, I had it right from the start. He was long, surprisingly high at the shoulder hump, deep chested and thick.
I thought about the boar's behavior. The light breeze had been blowing stronger on the left side of my face, probably from the northwest, so he had no chance of smelling me. My footfalls on the former dirt-gravel highway had been fairly quiet, hitting packed dirt or gravel well embedded in dirt, no crunching or scuffing on loose gravel. The boar had been busy foraging, making noise of his own as his tusks furrowed soil and ripped up roots, his breathing heavier with the effort.
The unknown variable in the equation was the boar's degree of wariness. Just how wary was a formidable male boar feeding under the cover of early morning cloud mist? A ground-feeding deer frequently lifts its head to check the sensory radar screen. But this well-armed and muscled-up brute had no need to be anywhere near as skittish as a deer. The first really large wild boar I ever saw, also in the Cohutta Wilderness, had not run either, but I had not encountered him at close quarters. I had been hiking down Rough Ridge Trail when I spotted the dark, thickset form of what I assumed was a bear standing in the head of a hollow to the left. I stopped to make a positive identification. My assumption was wrong; the dark, thickset form was a boar -- a high-humped male, powerful wild boar phenotype -- a little more than 40 yards over and down from the footpath. He looked right at me but chose a nonchalant course of no action as I continued to walk down the trail.
I concluded that an unusual combination of factors had allowed me to cross right over the line: the invisible tripwire that triggers instinctive fight-or-flight responses. The male boar's instinct had kicked into a defensive, prepare-to-fight mode once the potential predator -- 180-pound, heavily spoked me -- had slipped into his stay-and-fight zone. I imagined a time when Eurasian lions sent Pliocene wild boars to evolution's hard-knocks school of slow learning by quick death. Back then, running from a close-range lion probably triggered immediate attack, allowed the lion to avoid the business end of the boar as it brought the Old World swine down from behind. As runners were routinely removed from the gene pool -- hindquarters slashed by big cats, hind legs hamstrung by big wolves -- natural selection's death lesson for large male boars evolved into a hold-your-ground instinct. An instinct that commanded them to look big and burly and bristly, show the white of their gnashing tusks, give their best "you-lookin'-at-me?" grunt rather than run and expose their backs to a faster predator already in close proximity. In short, to act and look more like predator than prey.
I eased off the self-condemnation as I began to walk again. Prior to my new lesson in wild boar behavior, only one four-legged animal that could inflict physical harm had ever held its ground at close quarters. That intimidating animal had been a huge, food-habituated bear in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park the year before. All of the other wild mammals had run from my advance. Quite often the only evidence of their flight was the sounds of wild boar or feral hogs crashing through the forest. My expectation, proven time and time again over a sixteen-year period, was that all wild mammals innocent of human-food habituation would flee from me as I approached them. But I was wrong; my expectations had not met all the possibilities. I had never walked anywhere near that close to a bear or boar before it had discovered my presence.
Less than a half mile beyond my break, I passed a young couple eating breakfast next to their trailside tent. After they asked about the wheel, we exchanged a little of the usual trail talk. And since they had asked if I had seen any wildlife, I told them about the boar before I left. Not wanting to scare them, I kept my voice flat and matter of fact. Didn't mention that I had walked right up on a big and fierce-looking wild boar in the gray mist, that he hadn't run, that he had given me a double-grunt warning, the sounds deep and guttural, his intent as plain as the raised hairs on my forearms. None of that. I casually mentioned that I had gotten a fairly good look at a wild boar a mile or more back. That's all I said. As I walked away I heard the woman say, "They're not dangerous are they? Maybe we should move camp somewhere else." I couldn't catch the man's reply, but their tent was still there on my way back to the trailhead in the afternoon.
Later, back at my Jacks River Fields camp, I wondered if I had crossed an invisible tripwire too. Maybe some of my behavior hadn't come from a conscious mind's choosing. My new knowledge, the knowledge from my single short life, told me the boar's position was strictly defensive, and that I was not on the menu. But an old distrust -- an ancient and deeply embedded instinctual knowing -- may have commanded me not to show my back to a faster and fearsome nearby beast that wouldn't run away. And though my mind wanted to be 50 yards away, right now, the old knowing forbade turning around and running, forbade acting like prey.
Note
Wild boars are not food bullies like bears. It is not in their DNA to think of humans as food or as a source of bullied handouts in the big woods. As far as hikers are concerned, if you don't bother wild boar, they won't bother you. In the rare event that you come in close proximity to a litter of striped boarlets or hoglets, do not move closer for a better look or a photo. Move away from the young immediately. You do not want a female wild boar or feral hog to think you are a threat to her progeny. And just because you don't see her doesn't mean she doesn't smell, hear, or see you. Think of those cute little creatures as highly mobile land mines and disengage. Get out of there.
Free-roaming male wild boar can grow to an extremely stout and substantial size in the Mountain South. They do not attain mythological boarzilla dimensions, but they do fill out enough to become powerful and formidable beasts: the kind you will probably want to step aside for if your right-of-way is contested in the early-morning mist. In his book, Mammals of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Donald W. Linzey wrote: "Some individuals may stand three feet high at the shoulder and weigh over 400 pounds, although most are considerably smaller."
* Running roughly north-south on or near the crest of Cohutta Mountain, today's East Cowpen Trail was once a 7-mile section of old Georgia Highway 2. After the Cohutta was federally designated as wilderness in 1975, the forest service began their long negotiations to close the oxymoronic wilderness highway to vehicular traffic. The road was finally gated in September of 1987 (Chattahoochee National Forest, Fannin County).
** Winding roughly east-west, the 3.4-mile-long Panther Creek Trail is an interior route in the Conasauga River watershed. Hiked east to west, this Cohutta Wilderness footpath loses 1,830 feet of elevation from Cohutta Mountain to Conasauga River (Chattahoochee National Forest, Fannin County). The two-state Cohutta Wilderness -- mostly in Georgia (Chattahoochee National Forest), a small amount of land lapping over the state line into Tennessee (Cherokee National Forest) -- is approximately 37,033 acres.
