Not malicious. Just large, hungry, and in the way.
Below the monsters of legend are the beasts — the bears, boars, and wolves that maraud the deep country at the ragged edges of cultivation. One of them is a hunt. A pack of them, driven down by hunger or hard weather, is a battle, and exactly the sort of work a frontier company is hired to handle when a village’s own militia cannot.
Bears are the worst of the common kinds: heavy, thick-hided, and strong enough to stagger a knight. Boars are faster and come in greater numbers, goring and scattering a loose formation. Wolves rarely fight a company head-on, but they harry stragglers and the wounded.
The real danger is the dire specimens — the great old bears and boars that grow far beyond their kin and lead the packs that follow them. A dire bear can soak punishment that would put down three ordinary ones; a careless company that lets a dire-led pack close on it can be broken outright. They are not cruel, and they want nothing but range and a full belly. That makes them no less deadly when a hungry pack decides your column is in its way.
For a company, beasts are also profit: a kill yields pelts, tusks, and trophies that sell well enough in any town that has lately lost livestock — or people — to the wild.
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