Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Nick Hunt is a writer, journalist, and storyteller, and the author of Walking the Woods in the Water

and Where the Wild Winds Are.

In this piece, Nick ventures into the forest of Dean, an ancient mixed woodland, where

he searches for the unruly twilight realm of the boar.

A creature, the boundary, between wildness and civilization, history and myth.

An hour before sunrise, I leave the cottage and walk into the woods behind,

slipping in the churned mud of an uphill forest track.

Wind roars in the trees, and icy rain splatters my face,

smearing my glasses so that all I see are silhouettes in wet murk. In the half-light, less than half-awake,

the walk feels like a disturbed extension of sleep, and I'm about to retreat and crawl back to bed

again when I hear it. A deep earth-grown, followed by a bellow of fright or indignation.

A heavy shape, densely black, heaves itself between the trunks.

I hear the thump of hooves on loam as it crashes into the bracken.

I only get a glimpse of it, but it leaves a reverberation of shock.

Seconds later, it is unreal as a dream.

Twilight now, in a crunching dell where the leafful lies ankle-deep.

Centuries-old beech trees are scattered up the slope, their grey trunks scarred and muscular,

far older than the plantation conifers in other parts of the

forest. Signs are everywhere, once I've learned how to look. The mud marks around the

...