First the boars came up out of the deep Ashridge forest, then they took the slope above Grove Hospital and would not be shifted, and for weeks that hospital has posted extra guards and walked its visitors in past them. Then one morning that all changed.

The hospital staff will say that there isn’t much to tell. They came in one morning and the boars were simply gone. Security says that there wasn’t any noise or anything unusual that night and there was no physical sign of the boars fleeing the area. The hospital that had been in a standoff for weeks became empty grass by breakfast. The staff are relieved, and I don’t blame them for it.

However, a herd that size does not evaporate, so I went looking and I found them at the southern edge of the Groves, where the trees thin and the land starts to tip over into the northmost reaches of the Faded Lands. They are sitting at the very edge of the road that runs south, strung out in a long ragged line. They are not doing anything a normal boar would do. They are sitting and facing the road. I stood and watched the better part of a morning and they scarcely shifted. I thought they might be petrified but I saw them blinking.

The most likely explanation is that they were driven down here by Rain, the serpent-folk woman in the red coat, who has spent these past weeks putting a hunting crew together over these boars. Rain’s people have every reason to want them clear of the places folk live, and every skill to manage it.

What’s confusing about this explanation is that driven animals scatter, and these have not. A hunted herd runs and breaks and hides in the thick of the forest. It does not line itself up neat along a roadside and sit facing the way the road goes, quiet as a congregation waiting on a sermon that has not started. I do not have a second explanation for you. I am telling you what I saw, and it does not quite match the story we have all agreed to believe.

Kael Dunwick has walked the Ashridge network for more years than he will admit and writes on the backcountry for the Whispering Groves pages. Trail reports and sightings may be sent to him by owl.