The Wild West

This is about as wild, and as west, as India gets — the Little Rann of Kutch, a cracked sweep of salt and grey silt out near the country’s western edge. Across it, a wild boar (Sus scrofa cristatus) picks its way in the evening light: rust-red against the pale earth, ears up, snout down, a dark mane bristling along its spine. This is the Indian subspecies, taller and leggier than the boar of Europe.

Few animals are at home in as many places. The wild boar roots its way through forest, farmland, marsh and desert alike, an omnivore that takes more or less whatever the ground gives up — tubers, roots, insects, carrion. That appetite and adaptability have made it one of the most widespread large mammals on earth; out here it shares the salt flats with wild ass, flamingo and harrier.

For all its rough reputation, the boar is quietly exalted in Hindu tradition, as Varaha, the third avatar of Vishnu — the boar who dived beneath the cosmic ocean and lifted the drowning earth back into place.

This one had the flats to itself, moving with the unhurried purpose of an animal that knows exactly where it is going.