I have walked the Ashridge network in every season, wet and dry, for more years than I care to count. For years I have used this space to tell you what the old forest looks like and how to move through it safely. This is a harder piece to write, because the tuskboars are telling us something, and I do not like what I am hearing.

The plain facts first. The boars have come out of the deep forest. The northeast Groves have always had tuskboars, but they kept to the burn country, far back where the new forest comes in after a fire, and they wanted nothing to do with us. This spring they are on the lower Ashridge trails in numbers I have never seen. They are bigger than the animals I grew up giving a wide berth. They are no longer turning back at the forest’s edge, and they are rooting through ground that runs right up against the townline, including the wooded slope directly above the Grove hospital.

But first I want to tell you why they are here. A tuskboar is a creature of the burn. People forget this. They look at a boar and see a nuisance with tusks, but a boar is really a piece of how this forest is supposed to heal itself. The animals live off what comes up after a fire: the fireweed and the bracken and the tender green flush that floods a burn scar in the season after. That regrowth is their larder. It is the whole reason the burn country could ever feed them. And the forest is not burning anymore.

It cannot. You cannot have a fire season without a dry season, and the dry season has not come. The rain has simply kept on, week after week, and a forest that never dries out is a forest that cannot burn. The wet season we have all learned to call a blessing has quietly starved the burn country of the one thing it was built to need, which is the burn. The shoots the boars depend on never flush, because the ground they grow in never opens. So the boars are doing the only thing a hungry animal can do. They are leaving the deep forest to look for another table. That is not just a boar problem.

I wrote previously this spring about the newts and their pilgrimage to Lake Viralora, how the run has thinned a little more every year for longer than I have kept notes, and how this year, for the first time anyone in the Groves can remember, it did not happen at all. The newts that have crossed the forest floor to return to the water they were born in, since long before there were people here to watch them do it, simply did not come. I went out and stood at the shallows for three mornings. The water stayed empty. Old Valvahr stood over it the way she always has, that enormous mother tree the old families will not raise their voices near, and the whole place had a dooming silence.

I am not going to pretend I understand what is happening out there. I am a simple fae who reports trail conditions and argues about brooms. But I have spent my whole life in these woods, and a forest has a spark to it when it is well, the same way a person does, and that feeling has gone out of the old forest. They say the old word for that tree means something close to keeper of the slain, that Valvahr is holding onto something and waiting for the right time to give it back. I never put much stock in the old words. I am putting a little more hope in them this spring.

So set the two things side by side. A pilgrimage that stopped. A migration that should never have happened and now has. Two halves of one forest moving the wrong way at the same time, in a year when the wet would not break and the cycles the forest was built on have begun to fail. The boars are not the problem. They are the latest symptom, and the loudest, and the one closest to your door.

Which brings me back to the hospital. A tuskboar is not malicious, but it is half a ton of bad eyesight and worse temper, and the slope above a hospital is exactly the wrong place for one to come crashing through a hedge at dusk. So until this rights itself: make noise on the lower Ashridge trails, keep your dogs leashed and your children close, never get between a boar and whatever it has found to eat, and if you are visiting the hospital after dark, take the main road. Treat them gently in your mind, too. They are not invaders. They are frightened animals a long way from where they are supposed to be.

I will keep reporting as I learn more, on the boars and on everything else the old forest is trying to say.

Kael Dunwick is the Whispering Groves section’s backcountry travel and gear correspondent. He has been walking the Ashridge network since before he was old enough to be trusted to do it alone. Sightings and conditions you have seen out there that did not sit right can be sent by owl.