IN THE darker corners of the forest stood a small wooden building surrounded by the whites of prying eyes.
Were small children to stray too near, they'd be impaled on pearlescent tusks and reduced to bony piles by their ravenous owners.
Bloody hell.
It certainly put the fear of God up me as a child growing up in mid Germany. Mollycoddling parents told us never to wander too far into nearby forests and a bogey beast was used to underscore the warning.
In the case the animal being demonised was the wild boar. I remember them scratching around a local German farm - behind fencing - and found it hard to imagine them being dangerous.
Yet Hannibal author Thomas Harris muddied their image still further, and in recent years they've been the source of medieval-type alarm-mongering following escapes from woods in Kent.
It's as if the devil himself is at the door of civilisation in south east England.
Last week the UK government decided the good burghers of Kent and elsewhere could tolerate this no longer. It is to allow selective culls, where local communities decide for themselves just how many wild boar need to be shot.
There are few of the animals in North Wales, though CALU has promoted the animal as an alternative agricultural product. There was talk of a private woodland owner near Maentwrog starting up a herd and letting them run behind fencing, but I'm not sure anything came of that.
But there are no wild breeding populations - the nearest are in the Wye Valley - so there will be no shooting round here.
Up north we just shoot wild goats.
Huntsman will pay £2,500 for a week's wild boar hunting on the continent, though in this case hunting is a bit of a misnomer. I remember seeing the heads of wild boar on the walls of the lowliest German bar: shooting them was no great achievement.
Canadian huntsman thirst after the "savage nobility" of European wild boar
Groups such as the Wilderness Foundation have repeatedly called for the introduction of species like wild boar as part of the “re-wilding” of Wales. It argues there is an economic justification as rural areas, bereft of farming, could support themselves through nature tourism and hunting.
So perhaps one day we might see wild boar scuttling across the A470 with groups of red-faced huntsmen in tow. But don't bet on it: you can't get a bigger economic justifcation for culling wildlife than bovine TB, yet the government continues to obfuscate.
Tomorrow sees the publication of an EFRA report which is expected to recommended the hotspot culling of badgers, but with caveats so onerous as to make such an outcome unlikely.
Can anything save wild boar from persecution? Perhaps if they develop an ability to infect farmed animals with some kind of nasty disease......
