A handful of Six’s sec men gulped the last of their coffee and grabbed their blasters. The convoy was bristling with Diefenbunker assault rifles. These men came forward with predark bolt-action hunting weapons of .30-caliber or larger.
Ryan checked the loads in his Scout. “You say it’s early for caribou?”
Six shrugged. The one-eyed man was starting to believe that everyone in the convoy’s shoulders, hands and eyebrows were attached to their vocal cords. “I’ve never been this far west, though I’ve heard traders say the St. Lawrence lowlands have sizable herds of wild mustangs. Either way, meat is meat, no?”
Doc strode up to the hunting party. “A morning shoot?”
Ryan frowned at the tangled, impenetrable acres of scrub thorn between the hills. The sound was getting louder. “Thick cover for a migrating herd.”
Six’s brow furrowed. He was thinking the same thing. The thicket rippled with the passage of large animals and the sound of brush snapping sounded like the distant gunshots of an army starting a skirmish. Six pushed off his longblaster’s safety. “In moments we’ll know.”
It didn’t take moments. It took a heartbeat. The edge of the thicket exploded as the herd burst forth. They weren’t caribou or wild mustangs. They were hogs. Boars, bigger than Ryan had ever seen. They came out of the thicket between the hills in a wedge. He made the lead boar to be over nine feet long and four feet tall at the shoulder.
Its companions weren’t much smaller.
“Good heavens,” Doc opined.
Ryan didn’t like what he was seeing. Wild boars were solitary animals. When you saw them in groups, it was usually a sounder consisting of a few sows and their offspring. Over half of the herd were adult males the size of wags. There were no piglets in sight. The fifty-strong herd arrowed straight for the convoy in a rumbling wave. Ryan dropped to a knee and shouldered the Scout. It was time to see what the new weapon could do.
Ryan wound his arm through the Scout’s sling and dropped his elbow to his knee to form a solid firing platform. The scope was mounted well forward, and he could see the entire oncoming herd around it. At the same time the crosshairs of the heavy reticule were crystal clear as Ryan held them low beneath the gargantuan lead boar’s shoulder. His finger slowly began putting pressure on the trigger as he watched the herd rumble into range.
Six watched Ryan with a dubious air. “Long range for a carbine. I would—”
The Scout bucked against Ryan’s shoulder. It was a light rifle firing a high-power bullet. The muzzle-flash and report were impressive; the recoil was surprisingly mild. The huge hog’s snout dug into the turf, and the momentum of its half-ton frame nearly made it summersault.
“Mon Dieu!” Six exclaimed.
The herd continued forward undeterred.
Ryan flicked the bolt on the Scout and trained the scope on his next target. The longblaster kicked and a supersize sow spun out as Ryan’s bullet shattered its skull.
“Come here!” Six roared. “Come to papa!” Six’s .45-70 sounded like a cannon going off. A boar dropped like it had been poleaxed. Longblasters began cracking and popping along the informal firing line. The shooters made hog calls and called out porcine insults in English and French as they shot. A slow smile crept across Ryan’s face as he took his fifth pig. J.B. had been right. The Scout was like lightning. It qualified for the highest praise the Armorer could give a weapon. The Scout was as accurate as the man firing it.
Ryan was deadly accurate.
He took three more pigs with four more shots and quickly slapped in a fresh magazine. “They aren’t stopping.”
“No,” Six agreed. He had stopped his hog calling. The giant beasts didn’t seem to need much encouragement. Insults toward the oncoming pork and one another ceased among the sec men as they grimly fired as fast as they could work the actions of their longblasters. What was left of the herd was starting to get uncomfortably close. Members of the convoy came out and joined the firing line. Their assault rifles were too light for animals this big and only seemed to make them angry. Squealing screams rent the air as the wounded hogs bore down on the convoy in red-eyed, froth-spewing rage. At one hundred yards J.B.’s shotgun began slamming slugs. Jak carefully began pulling the trigger on .357 Colt Python in slow deliberate fire, and Mildred joined him. It was like some terrible shooting game where the prize was not to end up in a wild boar’s belly. The boars didn’t seem to care who won as long as they died going forward. Ryan’s skin crawled as he aimed, shot and shot again.
The last half-ton hog fell to Ryan’s longblaster only twenty yards from the firing line.
The entire convoy watched the plain shake with the convulsions and screams of the wounded and dying monster hogs in a picture of porcine hell. Ryan rose and drew his SIG-Sauer. He went forward to finish off the crippled and dying animals. Six drew his handblaster and nodded at two of his rattled sec men. “Sylvan, Alain with me.” Six and his men joined Ryan in the mercy killings. There was plenty of ammo available, so why leave the animals to suffer?
Toulalan walked up beside Ryan as he put a bullet-riddled, trembling sow down. “I saw you shoot. You are incredible.”
Ryan ignored the compliment. “Pigs like this normal up here?”
“I don’t know about Ontario.” Toulalan shrugged. “But in Quebec we don’t allow our pigs the luxury of this kind of behavior.”
Ryan had to admit Toulalan and his people had a certain sense of style. Right now Ryan wasn’t laughing.
Doc pursed his lips at a specimen that had taken one of Ryan’s bullets through the heart. “I am reminded of the wild boar of Argentine Andes. They were known for their size and aggression, and as famous for a carnivorous bent in their diet. Large males were known to break into chicken coups and sheep enclosures and wreak great slaughter. It was endlessly argued whether the boar were so large and aggressive because they ate meat, or they were naturally large and aggressive and it led to carnivorous behaviors. Nearly every village had a legend about someone’s friend’s, third uncle’s grandmother who everyone knew had been eaten by one.”
Six pushed fresh shells into his rifle. “Perhaps they were attracted by the smell of the pancakes, no?”
“No.” Ryan knew that wasn’t true. “They came for us.”
Mildred’s stomach got the better of her and she smiled at Six. “Pork chops for dinner?”
Six unveiled a mouthful of gold and silver teeth. “But of course. Whatever the lady wishes, the lady gets.”
J.B. glowered.
Ryan shook his head at the slaughter. There was no way a herd of beasts behaving like that could be allowed to reach the convoy, but he hated wasting meat. Something between forty and fifty thousand pounds of pork was steaming in the morning light.
Six shrugged out of his sheepskins. Beneath them he wore a tomahawk and an enormous bowie knife. He drew his blade and cut into a boar’s belly. The boar’s flesh parted like butter beneath the razor-sharp steel. Six leaped back as squirming black horror spilled forth. “Merde!”
Mildred threw up.
Ryan raised his SIG-Sauer.
Doc peered at the ropey, viscous, black masses of foot-long worms as they tried to crawl back into the boar’s carcass. “Surpassingly peculiar.”
Mildred staggered away. “I’m never eating pork again.”
Doc cocked his head as he watched the flesh of the dead boar ripple in waves. “Monsieur Six, with utmost caution, a few more cuts, if you do not mind?”
Six scowled but he stepped around the boar, his knife slashing a leg, making a cut along the spine and opening the head from jowl to ear. Ryan took note of his artistry with the blade. Six stepped away