The sport par excellence of India is pig-sticking.  Call it hog-hunting if you will, I prefer the honest old-fashioned name.  With a good horse under one, a fair country, with not too many pitfalls, and ‘lots of pig,’ this sport becomes the most exciting that can be practised.  Some prefer tiger shooting from elephants, others like to stalk the lordly ibex on the steep Himalayan slopes, but anyone who has ever enjoyed a rattle after a pig over a good country, will recall the fierce, delight, the eager thrill, the wild, mad excitement, that flushed his whole frame, as he met the infuriate charge of a good thirty-inch fighting boar, and drove his trusty spear well home, laying low the gallant grey tusker, the indomitable, unconquerable grisly boar.  The subject is well worn; and though the theme is a noble one, there are but few I fancy who have not read the record of some gallant fight, where the highest skill, the finest riding, the most undaunted pluck, and the cool, keen, daring of a practised hand are not always successful against the headlong rush and furious charge of a Bengal boar at bay.

A record of planter life in India, however, such as this aims at being, would be incomplete without some reference to the gallant tusker, and so at the risk of tiring my readers, I must try to describe a pig-sticking party.

There are two distinct kinds of boar in India, the black and the grey.  Their dispositions are very different, the grey being fiercer and more pugnacious.  He is a vicious and implacable foe when roused, and always shews better fight than the black variety.  The great difference, however, is in the shape of the skull; that of the black fellow being high over the frontal bone, and not very long in proportion to height, while the skull of the grey boar is never very high, but is long, and receding in proportion to height.

The black boar grows to an enormous size, and the grey ones are, generally speaking, smaller made animals than the black.  The young of the two also differ in at least one important particular; those of the grey pig are always born striped, but the young of the black variety are born of that colour, and are not striped but a uniform black colour throughout.  The two kinds of pig sometimes interbreed, but crosses are not common; and, from the colour, size, shape of the head, and general behaviour, one can easily tell at a glance what kind of pig gets up before his spear, whether it is the heavy, sluggish black boar, or the veritable fiery, vicious, fighting grey tusker.

Many stories are told of their enormous size, and a ‘forty-inch tusker’ is the established standard for a Goliath among boars.  The best fighting boars, however, range from twenty-eight to thirty-two inches in height, and I make bold to say that very few of the Present generation of sportsmen have ever seen a veritable wild boar over thirty-eight inches high.