Sometimes it pays to have friends in low places. I’m talking about real rough types who don’t mind a bit of targeted violence to get a friend out of a jam. We fell in with just such a crew pretty soon after arriving in the West Bank.
They were a pack of rail thin, flea-ridden dogs who congregated in a scrubby field near our apartment. For various vaguely religio-cultural reasons that were never fully explained to us, dogs exist as pariahs in Palestinian society. They are considered to be hopelessly dirty and are treated as almost ceremonially unclean. They don’t enjoy the handouts of food lavished on cats, and unfortunately, they sometimes fall victim to idol kicks or thrown stones. In short, dogs have no place in polite society.
We live on the fringes as well, so our friendship with the pack was entirely natural. On our walks we would bring savory scraps to toss their way, and we’d stop to chat for a moment or two, catching up on the latest, seeing who was pregnant now and what new rivalries had formed since we last saw them. We would wish them well from a flea-safe distance and carry on. Sometimes they’d walk with us for a while, but it was a pretty casual friendship, or at least we thought so until one day in early autumn when the pack proved their loyalty.
In the middle of a sleepy Friday walk in the olive grove, we were stopped cold by heavy rustling and throaty, displeased grunts all around us in the trees. Wild boars. For those with no experience with wild boars, let me tell you they are not ideal walking companions. They are ill-tempered, unpredictable, and armed with crooked tusks and enough hulking mass to really pack a punch.
The olive grove near our house where we spent many afternoons.
We had been taught to fear them a few weeks earlier while walking home from a friend’s apartment late one evening. It was a quiet night. The smell of jasmine was in the air, and we were strolling in silence until a passing car slammed on its brakes, and the man at the wheel frantically gestured us over. As we approached, he began yelling, “Khanzir! Khanzir!” Faced with our blank stares of incomprehension, he whipped out his phone and after some hurried tapping he held up a picture of a pink pot-bellied pig with a cheeky little smile on its snout.
“Khanzir! This is khanzir. Very dangerous!” The urgency in his voice was convincing enough to get us scurrying home, and a few minutes of internet searching confirmed that these khanzir were the furthest thing from cute barn animals.
So, as the boars stepped from the trees and blocked our path in all directions, we were understandably nervous. “They’re all around us,” Becca observed flatly.
The menacing image of "khanzir" provided by the helpful stranger.
“Yep, We’re good. We’re good,” I answered in the same measured tone. I tightened my grip on my cane (as if my flimsy little blind cane could do anything), and we began to consider how to edge through the circle of snorting boars.
Thankfully, it was at this point that the pack stepped in to care for their own. We heard them first, barking furiously and pattering in our direction at full speed. The boars huddled together and turned to face the onrushing dogs. Six or seven of our mangey friends burst through the trees and dove at the boars’ ankles. This didn’t go over well with the boars. They shook their immense heads, and their low snorts turned to angry squeals. They gave ground slowly at first, but the dogs didn’t let up, and eventually, the boars turned tail and trotted off. Throughout the skirmish, two dogs stood protectively in front of us, facing the boars with bared teeth and deep growls. Once the pack had chased the frustrated khanzir far away, they came bounding back to walk with us as we retraced our steps. I have rarely felt so included and protected.
Needless to say, they got a lot more turkey loaf thrown their way after that.
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