experience and oral history research. As you will notice as you read, Sakinu has a very strong sense of local identity, of being a Paqaluqalu – east coast Paiwan – from Lalaoran, a village with its own distinctive practices.
As an adaptation, Sakinu’s culture is an approach to survival in premodern times, when if you wanted dinner you had to hunt it or grow it yourself. Is hunting your own meat and growing your own millet still adaptive when you can now drive to the supermarket and get everything you need? Sakinu thinks so. He thinks that there’s something missing in the modern or postmodern lifestyle, which has alienated many of us from nature and stranded us in screen-based media. That’s why, in 2006, in his mid-thirties, a half a dozen years after publishing the Mandarin edition of the collection you hold in your hands, Sakinu founded the Hunter School. You can understand the Hunter School in terms of ethnic or eco-tourism, but if you talk to Sakinu you’d realize how sincere he is about helping young people reconnect with their original home, which remains the source of anything they could buy in the store or see on the Internet. Tragically, the Hunter School burned down in May, 2019, but then the school is a state of mind, and will, I am sure, get rebuilt.
I first met Sakinu in the summer of 2010 when a friend of mine, Professor Terry Russell, and I were doing some research on how indigenous writers write about the topic of home in their works. We wanted to interview Sakinu because in a way he doesn’t do anything but write about his home. We were very grateful to him for showing us the Hunter School, introducing us to his father, who as a construction worker has visited more countries than Terry and I had combined, and for showing us his millet field and hunting ground. This visit helped me imagine the places in Sakinu’s stories as I was reading and translating them. It’s an honour for me to finally give Sakinu a gift in return by translating his stories.
This collection was published as Shanzhu, Feishu, Sakinu in Mandarin. As you can tell, the three words in the title rhyme. Sakinu rhymes with shanzhu, meaning “mountain boar”, and feishu meaning “flying squirrel”. As you can also tell, the English title wouldn’t rhyme.
I considered calling the collection The Sage Hunter, the title of a 2005 feature film based on Sakinu’s stories. But in the end, I went with Hunter School, in honour of the actual school that Sakinu built and will rebuild.
I’ve reordered the stories in the collection to tell the story of Sakinu’s life and the lives of his fellow villagers: from an idyllic childhood to an adolescence in which Paiwan people get buffeted by socioeconomic forces beyond their control, to a maturity in which they are finally able to reorient themselves and choose their own path.
Sakinu’s path is a hunter’s path. As someone who as a child used to read The Call of the Wild by the light of the moon, I wanted to follow Sakinu down this path, only to discover that to Sakinu it’s not the call of the wild, it’s the call of his Paiwan ancestors. To Sakinu, there is nothing wild about a Paiwan hunter, who is every bit as civilized as you and me, if not more so. In these stories, Sakinu translates the call of his Paiwan ancestors into terms that modern Mandarin readers can understand, and I’ve done my best to relay-translate that call into English.
Darryl Sterk
PART ONE
A Paiwan Boyhood
The Flying Squirrel College
With the approach of spring, flying squirrels used to go in search of nubile mates, hoping to fall in love. At night you once heard flying squirrels wooing each other. Sometimes the entire valley resounded with the rhythms of squirrel courtship, when there were a half dozen flying squirrels singing the song of love on each and every tree. What a magnificent sight! What an amazing sound!
Alas, the last time I heard the flying squirrels sing their songs of squirrel love was when I was in secondary school. I didn’t immediately notice when they stopped, or rather when they failed to sing one spring, perhaps because I had never fallen in love myself, either with a girl or with the mountain forest. But I knew someone who had not only fallen in love but had a lover’s intimate knowledge of the object of his love.
“Hey Dad! What happened to the flying squirrels?” I asked him one day. “Where have they all gone?”
“Sakinu, I thought you’d never ask,” he replied. “It’s not just the flying squirrels that have disappeared. What about the mountain eagle that used to soar over the peaks hunting for prey? I didn’t need to notice the silence of the squirrels. The quiet eagle told me all I needed to know, that the animals of the forest had started to migrate further afield.
“As for why, you can blame it on the destruction of habitat due to development and on the overuse of the crossbow by unscrupulous hunters. No matter how many flying squirrels there were, hunting them night and day with advanced technology could only end in the local extinction of the species. But you can’t lay all the blame on people, you know. Partly the squirrels themselves are to blame.
“The flying squirrel,” he said, “is the dumbest animal in the world. A flying squirrel is so dumb it will stand there waiting for you to catch it. Maybe dumb isn’t the right word. Maybe I should say stupidly curious. At night the flying squirrel finds nothing more fascinating than a bright object. All you do is shine your flashlight at one, and it will stand there transfixed, not moving an inch.
“Flying squirrels hide in their dens in the daytime. A flying squirrel may have dens in two or three trees, but it usually chooses one to make its bed in. Unless a human comes or its tree den is forcibly occupied by some stronger squirrel, it won’t leave or move into another one.”
I always looked up and tried to spot the entrances to flying squirrel dens in trees when I hunted with my father as a boy. It’s all down to experience: as long as a person learns to see the world through flying squirrel eyes, Father said, he’ll be able to find one.
For example, if you see a hole in a tree that looks damp, especially one that is funnel-shaped, you know there’s no way you’ll find a squirrel inside. Who would want to live in a place that makes your skin itch or turns into a swimming pool every time it rains?
But flying squirrels are still the stupidest. Every time Father discovered a likely hole, he covered it with a hand-woven net he’d tied to a bamboo pole. Then he knocked the tree trunk with his machete. Knock knock. At that, the flying squirrel inside instinctively flew towards the entrance into the trap Father had set. Trapped in the net, the flying squirrel struggled, making the net even smaller until it couldn’t move. In the end, all we would see was a tightly wrapped grey-brown ball.
Flying squirrels may be thicker than bricks, but they are also the most hygienic animal. A flying squirrel is so clean almost every part of it can be eaten or otherwise used.
Even undigested food in the intestines can be squeezed out and enjoyed with millet wine. Old folks say this is the most nutritious part. In the village, I often see elderly hunters washing back bites of the undigested stuff from the guts of a flying squirrel with swigs of millet wine as they reminisce about all the battles they fought and won when they were young.
One time on a hunt for flying squirrels, my father said, “Son, flying squirrels are divided into ‘lowlanders’ and ‘highlanders’, just like people in Taiwan. The flying squirrels we normally see with ash-brown fur are lowlanders, while flying squirrels with dark-gray fur and white spots on their heads live higher up.
“In winter, when food is scarce in the mountains, we can see the highlanders below the ridgeline. The highlanders are even stupider than the lowlanders, which have had to learn how to hide from hunters and to avoid people in general, in order to reproduce and survive.”
