The wild boar of dreams: It is no longer known where reality mixes with dreams when a group of friends talk about this elusive wild boar, which for too many years filled the evenings to talk about itself.
For years he had left the Maremma fort, for a life of solitary existence, along ditches, mottos, shores of lakes and reeds, but without ever being able to be found despite the assiduous search, and then disappeared making us assume that he was dead and reappear systematically. when no one believed in it anymore. His huge footsteps as if he were a calf were printed in the minds of those who for years chased him. "He's back, it's still him, he's not dead even this time", were phrases that had been heard repeated hundreds of times and then ended up in ghostly unsuccessful searches, suggesting that they were looking for a ghost inspired by the imagination of these hunters . "But you will see that this year he dies, he can't always go well". Yesterday he injured a setter in a ditch, today he was at the edge of a pond, but then he vanished into thin air as always, but even the dreams end and one December morning Marco while he was hunting pheasants calls me saying "my setter has found a boar huge at the edge of a ban, inside a ditch, he can't have gone far ”A round of phone calls and the hunt begins.
The hounds, loose where he had been spotted, take very little to find him, because instead of vanishing into thin air as he always did this time he returned a short distance from where he had been found, inside a reed bed sure that with a pointing dog he would never released. But this time the accounts were wrong and a furious fight begins between brambles and reeds, the small reeds are surrounded and now it becomes difficult for the boar, the forest is too far away and the plowed land makes escape difficult, the only salvation is to unravel of the hounds, but Fabrizio an inexperienced but tenacious canaio throws himself into the fray to help the injured dogs, the boar does not give up and fearless also hurls himself against him, seriously injuring him, but now he has to come out into the open.
On the edge he stops, looks around, thinks about his raids in those areas where for years he has been the undisputed King and like a leader he does not try to escape. In his mouth he still feels the taste of human blood and wants to sell his skin dearly, he looks at me, widens his ears opens his mouth in a defiant way showing his huge white fangs, I know he is about to load because thirty years spent among the boars make me aware of what is about to happen, perhaps he wanted to challenge me to measure his strength.
He loads, I remain motionless, I let him approach and only in the last three meters do I raise the gun and pull the trigger. Another legend ended a short distance away where one hundred years ago Domenico Tiburzi, the mythical brigand from Maremma, died on a December day. But who knows if I wake up now and it will be just a dream!
Giampiero Bernacchi