A dying oil lamp casted a shadow across the grass between the tents. Tiny tan triangles speckled the lawn, stretching 100 meters up the riverbank. Moonlight gleamed above as a slight breeze rolled through the camp and stirred the last embers of the fire.

A man stumbled among the tents, weighed down by the weight of a rucksack and dragging a rifle behind him. He stumbled through the campsite until his boot knocked into a transport. A clamor reverberated in the night as supply crates crashed down upon him.

"Curse this place. Curse this night!" The man shouted to the stars, the words hardly audible through his drunken slur. He threw a tent flap open and ducked inside. Moments later the canvas fell still in the African night.

This was the sixth night Wilbur Pace spent at the encampment just north of Cape Town, the previous five having been spent quite like this one. As sure as the sun would set, Pace drank himself to sleep each night. The time he was free from one sin, another consumed him: Obsession. He had had a long string of intermingled obsessions in his days, but his most recent was hunting, more specially, hunting boar.

You see, for some time now Wilbur Pace has had his heart set on tracking and killing a boar. The wild hog was a challenge for him. He was consumed with the idea that it was his greatest match yet. It was not for such a simple reason as Man-Over-Beast. No, there was more to it. To Pace, the hog symbolized the last great capture, for it embodied everything that Pace himself was unable to achieve in life: stealth, strength, and survival.

He was an Englishman, having grown up with privilege and educated at Oxford. After retiring some time ago in 1909, Pace spent the last year or so prior to this excursion on a multitude of quests –a hunting bucket list of sorts. See, Pace prided himself one of Britain's finest huntsmen, a title he fashioned after a month-long stay in Argentina and a few nights of drinking in Buenos Aires. But, who could forget about the other month he spent tracking tigers in Siberia? Oh, Pace had accumulated a swarm of stories to accompany the number of locations under his belt, his favorite being Tanzania, Belarus, and Cambodia. In his travels, train rides were spent in dim dining carts, as Pace recalled tale after tale, obsession after obsession.

His new obsession only grew once he arrived in Africa. He wanted to hunt a boar, to taste victory and hold victory in his hands. Pace planned to carve out the hog's heart. Of late, mad ramblings escaped his lips on more than one occasion. The obsession had festered into greed. The others at the camp conspired to stay far enough away. Pace, oft belligerent enough to carry on as though alone in this world, took no notice of his peers. What did he care of them, anyway? He cared only for the boar. Yes, he vowed to stop at nothing if catching the boar was the last feat to his name!