Huon The Truffle Hog

Prints of this image are for sale here: [link]


One of the more unusual talents of pigs is the ability to find truffles. No, not the chocolate candy (though I'm sure pigs like those just as much as humans do), I'm talking about a fungus that grows just under the soil and is prized by European chefs.

A bit of fiction to go with this image:

There once was a young woman named Jacqueline. She lived in 18th century France in an area in the south of the country known Gevaudan. She was the oldest of three daughters of a poor farmer. On her eighth birthday, her parents gave her a piglet. They had expected her to raise it for slaughter, but the ever adventurous Jacqueline had plans otherwise. She named the pig Huon (even though it was female) after her favorite knight in stories her grandfather had told her. Venturing barefoot into the nearby forest, she taught Huon to find the valuable black truffle which she would give to her mother to sell at the market. After several years, the family had become rather prosperous off the culinary treasure. Then, one day, people in the area began to fall victim to a killer in the woods. It was said to be the work of a wolf. Fearing for her safety Jacqueline ventured out early in the year to hunt for truffles when it was still late in the summer. She figured that wolves would be less ravenous in the warmer months. But when it came to the Beast of Gevaudan, she was wrong. In the middle of the day, the monster attacked her, but what the beast didn't count on was Huon, for a pig, when angered, can be quite a vicious foe. Huon fought and drove the beast away and, for several months, no more attacks happened. As for Jacqueline and Huon, they never again encountered the beast.

Note: This image uses purchased content. The wolf was sculpted in ZBrush. The other characters were posed in poser 6 then imported into vue 9 where the rest of the scene was built. Final rendering was done in Vue 9 and took about 24 hours on an Intel I5 2.8 GHz with 8 GB of RAM. Post production was done in GIMP.