The wild boar enjoys a mythic status in France.

Except for a raised eyebrow, a quietly spoken "Vraiment? (Really?)," no one chided me or said anything discourteous about my failure on the wild boar front. But I could see that a serious reappraisal was going on in their minds.

After all, I was the American who loved escargots, who always ate at least a hundred and twenty oysters between Christmas and New Year's, who enjoyed the subtle delights of a well-truffled foie gras.

The French of my village had not begun to think of me as one of them, but they had granted me a tentative dispensation as an American.

Max, unlike my other French friends, did not react quietly when he heard. But that wasn't entirely unexpected: Max is not the quiet-reaction type.

"C'est pas vrai!" Max exploded, examining me closely to see if I was putting him on. "Never eaten sanglier?"

When I confirmed that I hadn't, Max cupped his hand and kissed the tips of his fingers, his way of saying that I was headed for a three-star dining experience. "We'll fix that soon enough."

Actually, I wasn't sure that I wanted Max to fix it.

For some years before we moved to Panou's village, we had kept a country house in the Loiret, a 90-minute drive south of Paris, mainly for weekends and vacations, although I also used it as a writing hideaway.

The stone house, with its walled-in garden, sat on the outskirts of a village of three hundred souls and faced the open countryside--fields of wheat, rye, corn, sunflower, broken by small woodlands. Each morning when I took my walk, I passed a large fenced-in compound of scraggly brush and saplings that served as a holding pen for boar and their offspring, which were hand-fed until they reached maturity. At a certain age, the sangliers were turned loose in the nearby woods for the sporting pleasure of hunters from Paris.

I was disgusted. What could be more unsporting than to shoot a domesticated boar, the fiercely independent ancestor of our modern pig. To add to my disgust, cage-raised pheasants that could barely fly a few feet off the ground were also released for the hunters.

My friend Max (left) is not the quiet-reaction type. He set out to initiate me into the French rite of the wild boar.

Moreover, the game and fowl that existed naturally in my neighborhood--plenty of rabbit and partridge--were nearly annihilated by the end of the hunting season.

I came to detest Sundays from September 20 to February 28; Sunday is the big hunting day in France. In my youth, I'd once done some hunting myself--deer, quail, duck, and rabbit. I got my first 12-gauge pump at the age of fifteen. But as I grew older and saw my share of war and turmoil, I grew less enamored of the idea of killing anything.

The hunters who arrived from Paris every Sunday morning, to begin shooting at eight a.m. on the dot, pushed me over the line. Their fancy cars, the designer hunting duds, the silver-plated shotguns told me they had no respect for the rural traditions of hunting. They saw it only as a status symbol, the macho ideal of office workers.

Besides, they scared me.

Often standing shoulder to shoulder, they fired at anything that moved. I was afraid to let my cat and dog out of the house.

As Sunday afternoon wore on, I would dart outside and peer at the roadside near the big chestnut tree where they parked their Citroëns and BMWs, cheering when I saw them leave.

There is a growing controversy over hunting in France, and the French are choosing sides. Unlike in the United States, this has nothing to do with gun control. Guns are highly regulated in France, and even shotguns that hold over two shells must be registered. To the French, the idea that Americans would drive around with pistols and rifles in their cars seems criminally absurd.

So it's not about guns, it has more to do with the feeling that too many hunters have too little respect for the land and the traditions of conservation. From the beginning, therefore, I was skeptical about Max's insistence that I be initiated into the French rite of the wild boar. And I set some stringent conditions.

First, I wanted to make sure that the boar in question was indeed wild and not some pen-raised animal with dull instincts, which had been turned loose for the pleasure of urban hunters. Then there was the hunter himself. Was he dedicated to the traditions of hunting?

Max gamely accepted my conditions, and kissed his fingers again, this time twice. It was going to be a real dining experience, he assured me.

In fact, I soon forgot about it. Every several months or so, Max would send me a bulletin: he was working on the wild boar, I should not become discouraged. The hunting season came and went. No boar. I figured it was another one of Max's enthusiasms that had flared and died like a Roman candle.

A year and a half passed. Then one day Max sped into the yard in his white panel truck and slid to a halt. I could see that even his Irish setter, Horace, was excited.

"Sunday is the day!" Max shouted. "It's already marinating."

"What?"

"Julien's boar."

"Julien?"

"Julien is the son of a friend of mine," Max explained. "He's seventeen-years-old and studying to be a chef. He just got his first boar."

Still a little skeptical, I asked to meet Julien, and Max agreed to set it up.

"You'll see," Max said. "He's a real hunter."

And he was. Julien was a descendant of a family that had been hunting for hundreds of years. He was shy and soft-spoken, but confident when it came to talking about hunting and cooking. I liked him immediately.