The Wild Boar Hunt

Yesterday we went wild boar hunting.

Well, we need to be truthful here: Yesterday we went for a walk in the Grunewald, a huge coniferous forest that begins in our general neighborhood and stretches eleven square miles to the south and west. Like everything in Berlin, it’s filled with history: It contains the Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain), one of the highest points in Berlin, built out of the rubble of 400,000 buildings carried out of the city after World War II. Under the Teufelsberg lies a Nazi military-technical college designed by Albert Speer. The Allies tried using explosives to demolish the school, but it was so sturdy that covering it with debris turned out to be easier.

What made it especially interesting for the Zetzsche family yesterday, however, was the possibility of a wild boar sighting. Berlin is known as the one of the world’s greenest capitals, and as such has recently also become the resurgent wild boar’s playground. Apparently there are about 8,000 wild boars that make their home within the Berlin city limits year-round, and another 2,000 move in during the spring to have their litters in the many green pockets throughout the city.

Hmmm. This isn’t actually reassuring when you hear these beasts described by hunters as being among “the most dangerous of quarry,” “the size of a motorbike and with much the same acceleration,” and “able to rip up and kill dogs with no effort.” Maybe that’s why all dogs have to be leashed in the springtime when they walk with their owners through the Grunewald.

The Grunewald itself is an eerie place in the late winter. For those Pacific Northwesters familiar with the wet deep green of a forest of firs, you have to think brown: brown bare trees, a brown thick carpet of decaying leaves, brown paths of churned-up dirt. Not a green shoot in sight. To me it seemed, well, very brown. But Jost soaked it up, showing us the birch bark that could be burned even when everything else is wet, and Hannes speculated on the best den possibilities for the female boars (sows?). Anna stayed close to me and held my hand.

We didn’t see any, of course. And I left the camera in the car, of course. Leaving you to imagine those brown beasts lurking in the brown forest among the brown leaves.