A young man on a hunt with his grandfather Autolycus’s people in the high country. Dogs, spear, the arrogance of being barely more than a boy. The boar comes up out of the brush, white and fast, and the tusk catches him just so. The wound is deep. Eurycleia, then a young nurse, wraps it. The scar runs ragged along his thigh and does not fade. The boar does not survive the day. The scar does. [SPOILER: It is the mark by which Eurycleia knows him when she washes his feet. Her hand finds the line of it and her breath stops and his hand finds her throat. It is the mark he shows Laertes in the vineyard when his father is collapsing under a false report of his death. The boar of his youth becomes the proof of his identity in his old age. The body keeps the receipts.]
The White Boar of Mount Parnassus
The boar that gave Odysseus his thigh-scar in his youth. A lesson in luck and mortality he carries on his body for the rest of his life.