35

Rae loves his pigs. You can see it in his face. Catherine and I join him on a visit to the piggies. There's a thin covering of snow as we drive into the woods over a bumping track Rae swings open the metal gate and leads us into the enclosure. No sign of animal life as yet. All's quiet in the forest – until he tips a bag of feed into the wooden trough and, on his call, a file of chunky long-snouted beasts, sows and their piglets, dark in the coat, some tinged with auburn, materialise from the trees and cluster round the trough.

Boris delays his appearance. He's last on the scene, an actor making his entrance and not intending to be upstaged. Or perhaps he was just deeper in the trees than his familiars. Down the hill he saunters at last, picking his way among a brash of broken branches. Once at the trough, he shoulders his way through for his breakfast.

We admire his rough coat, his furry heart-shaped ears and the short curled pile on his flanks. At first, I don't see his tusks, which I'd imagined as long scimitars, but not so. They're small, tucked neatly in his jaws but interlocking and businesslike nevertheless. Rae says the grinding together of upper and lower fangs keeps them sharp. I can imagine my shinbone crunched between them.

But Rae, giving Boris a gentle pat on the back, says he's not dangerous – though he adds a caveat: ‘Don't take him by surprise.’ And further: ‘You won't outrun a boar.’ They have to get used to you. ‘Keep talking to them, talk all the time and they'll accept you.’

Rae says pigs have their own words, special sounds which mean different things that allow them to communicate. He hears them conversing at night – they're naturally nocturnal animals and this daytime feeding is not their normal habit. Acorns and beech nuts are their preferred diet – thin pickings around here, where oak and beech trees are uncommon – but they'll root out the fleshy bracken tubers. Which, of course, is why they're here.

A fence divides their enclosure from the adjacent woodland and the difference in ground vegetation is marked. Deep heather and bracken flourishes on the pig-free ground but, on our side of the fence, it's been hoovered. And there's new growth, too. Rae shows us the proof – a sprinkling of inch-high feathery green shoots poking through the snow. These are infant pines, showing that the trees can regenerate here once the ground vegetation is disturbed. All the area where we stand was pinewood until the foresters cut down the best trees for timber, sparing only few gnarled specimens – the picturesque spreading pine trees we like to see now. Then they planted commercial conifers of foreign origin, quick to grow, soon to harvest. Green shoots at our feet show that the native forest can return.

Meanwhile, Boris and friends gobble greedily, their soft snuffling muzzles deep in the trough. Cuddly though they look, they're not pets. These little piggies are heading for market: ‘Monday is pig day at Dingwall,’ says Rae. But don't mention the word abattoir. Rae won't have it. He may be pragmatic about their fate but he prefers the dignity of plain English for their end. ‘I don't like the word. I say slaughterhouse.’

Agreed. Who'd want to read a book called Abattoir-Five?