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Not for 14 years had Dr. Graeme Alexander Canning, a professor of Zoology at the University of Tennessee, fired a gun, but when he heard about the wild boar hunt being planned in his State's Cherokee National Forest (TIME, Nov. 16), his sporting blood was stirred. He paid his $5 fee for ambulance service, borrowed a rifle, set out one morning last week with the first batch of 30 hunters. His guide was an oldtime woodsman named Homer Bryson. The hunt for the savage, sharp-tusked progeny of Russian boars imported some three decades ago had been made doubly dangerous and difficult by rules that the hunters must go afoot instead of by horse, must use no dogs for fear of injury to the Forest's fawns.
When the 30 hunters straggled back to their rustic hotel that evening, only Professor Canning had bagged a boar. He told his story with becoming modesty: "Bryson saw the tracks and said, 'Get in front.' About that time he pointed out two boars in a briar patch. I tried to shoot the big one, but I started shaking and my eyes watered until I couldn't see. When I got control of myself the big one was gone. I shot at the smaller one and he went down. We got close and had to shoot three more times to kill him."
Crestfallen were two other huntsmen when the Forest rangers pronounced their scrawny trophies of the day to be merely wild hogs, with little if any boar strain in them. Real boars were credited next day to a Tennessee housewife, a Chattanooga grocer. When the footsore hunters went home from the hills at the end of their third & last day, rangers revealed to reporters that not one of the six animals bagged was of the true wild Russian stock. This week, however, in a new batch of huntsmen, two Knoxvillites named Carey House and Hugh Vandeventer killed an authentic Russian 250-pounder which suddenly dropped after rushing "so close that we were unable to shoot during the latter part of his charge for fear of hitting each other."