He earned it as a young man on Mount Parnassus, hunting with his grandfather Autolycus’s people. The white boar came up out of the brush, fast, and the tusk caught him just so. Eurycleia, then a younger nurse, wrapped it. The scar runs ragged along his thigh and he carries it for the rest of his life. He thinks of it on Aeaea, when Hermes appears in the path, and remembers that his grandfather’s cunning came from this god’s blood. Every day the scar reminds him of luck and mortality. [SPOILER: When Eurycleia kneels to wash his beggar’s feet in his own hall, her fingers curve around his thigh and find the scar, and her breath stops, and a name rises in her throat. His hand closes on her throat. Not yet. Later, in the vineyard, he shows the scar to Laertes and says his name and his father, who has just collapsed under the false news of his son’s death, comes back to life. The body keeps the proof of who he is when the face cannot.]
The Boar-Hunt Scar
A long ragged line on the thigh. A boar's tusk in the high country in his youth. Eurycleia bandaged it then. Her hand finds it twenty years later.