Free The Boar by Joe R. Lansdale

guts were on fire.”
    “He’s sure he hit him with that shotgun?”
    “Didn’t know how he could have missed standing at that range.”
    I thought about Mama and me taking a shot at Old Satan when we were standing at the door. I wondered if either of us had hit him. And if we had, I wondered why it hadn’t hurt him. Was he really a devil or demon? That didn’t make much sense, but then a hog like this one didn’t make much sense either.
    “Where’s your mama and Ike?” Abraham asked.
    I told him everything that had happened last night, and that I aimed to kill Old Satan myself. Today if I could.
    “That’s what I come over here for, Ricky. I couldn’t tell Mama or Papa, they’d be against it. But I got to do this for Grandpa. It ain’t going to bring Jesse back, but I can make sure Old Satan don’t kill nothing else. Grandpa, he won’t even eat. Won’t get out of bed. He used to use his crutches to go out and hitch Jesse up, and have that hog pull him around places where them crutches wouldn’t carry him. That hog was his legs. Now he don’t even act like he wants to live.”
    “I reckon we ought to form a pact,” I said.
    “A what?”
    “An agreement. I read about it in a story once, about these two fellows who were going to go off and make their fortunes and be kings. They signed a pact to do that, and to help each other.”
    “We’re going hog hunting, Ricky, not fortune hunting.”
    “Well, maybe we don’t need to sign nothing, but we’re going to shake on it.”
    We clasped hands. “This is to the idea of killing Old Satan on account of the harm he’s done us,” I said. “We’re going to go after him and we ain’t going to come back until it’s done, and ain’t nothing going to stop us.”
    “Deal,” Abraham said. But when we quit shaking, his face fell. “We got us one problem, Ricky. Neither of us know the first thing about hunting no wild hog.”
    He had a point there.
    And that’s how Uncle Pharaoh came into the picture.
    If there was any person that ought to have been able to tell us how to hunt a wild boar, and Old Satan in particular, it was Uncle Pharaoh.
    But would he?
    We were afraid he wouldn’t. And worse yet, we were afraid if he didn’t help us, he’d spoil our hunt by telling Abraham’s mama and papa. It was, to say the least, a tricky situation.
    Though we didn’t want to go against the best wishes of the adults, because of the whipping we might get over it, we were bound and determined to do what we intended. Old Satan was going to get hunted if we had to walk over every inch of bottom land and climb every tree in East Texas looking for him.
    Still, it would be a whole lot easier if we had some notion of how a wild hog acted on the hunt and in the woods. Abraham and I weren’t green hunters, but Old Satan and a squirrel or possum were quite some different.
    We didn’t go straight to see Uncle Pharaoh. We rode Clancy out to where I’d left Roger in the fork of the tree and buried him. Then we went to the tree house and left the shovel and Winchester there. That way, if the adults decided against our plans, they couldn’t take the rifle away from us. I didn’t tell Abraham, but no matter what happened with him and his folks, I was going after that hog. With Papa gone, Mama not able to stop me, and Doc Travis at least two or three days away from finding Papa, I had my chance to get Old Satan. I’d probably get a switching to end all switchings later, but that didn’t matter.
    In the tree house I saw that Abraham had been busy since early morning on his shield. It was near finished and ready to hang on the wall. Though I figured since what happened last night, along with him getting up early to work on it before coming to see me, he had other plans for it first.
    When we got to the Wilson house, it was as quiet as a funeral on Sunday morning. Most of the time the place sounded like it was being attacked by wild Indians on account of all the kids and Mrs.