got let out, I would slip into the line and make my way home with everyone else. Friday night, when my classmates were celebrating, I started to worry, because I knew it was only a matter of time before Father would call me over and say, “Tomorrow we’re going up to check the traps.”
We would walk practically the entire day before reaching my father’s trap line. Sometimes the journey seemed endless, but at other times I would forget the passage of time and simply observe the things around me in the alpine forest. I spent so much time walking through the forest, even I started to notice things. I became extremely sensitive, and if anything happened, I would react immediately. Every breath of nature, every pulse, I could somehow sense.
“Poor me!” I used to think whenever my father took me hunting because of all the walking I would have to do, because I couldn’t go out and play with my pals. But in retrospect, I think I got more out of my childhood than any of my classmates. My life was fuller and richer. Without all the weekend hunting expeditions, I might never have learned to relate to nature the way most kids relate to other people. I might never have realized that natural creatures have their own life histories, just like people do. For all of this, I have my father to thank. He gave me a precious gift.
When I was a kid, I had the nickname likucu, which in my dialect of Paiwanese means “talking all the time”, asking too many questions, or never shuts his trap, so to speak.
Every time I went hunting with my father, I would often ask, “But why?” about things I did not know, had not seen before, had not heard about before, or was otherwise unfamiliar with. “What’s that?” I would ask. “What’s it doing?”
Father would often lose his patience and yell, “Maya su likucu!” Don’t you talk so much!
Even so, I would ask him until he gave me an answer that I could understand. My curiosity drove me to get to the bottom of things. That meant that from a young age, I came to know nature like the back of my hand.
A bee had only to fly past me and I could find the hive. But the experience of getting stung by who knows how many honeybees taught me to observe them carefully and respectfully. The same goes for mountain boars.
“You know, my son,” my father asked me one time, “why the wild boar gets caught in the hunter’s trap?”
I thought it over and replied, “Is it that he’s boneheaded, or is it that he has eyes but does not see?”
“No, silly,” he replied. “It must be because he was always cutting class and missed school the day the teacher explained how to prevent a hunter from getting downwind, how to see through the disguises hunters put on their hanging snares and the traps that catch an animal’s leg in a steel vice.”
Well, I found that very interesting, even though I heard it from my father, a fellow who had himself only graduated from elementary school. Only then did I realise that there were some things you could not learn in books, but that were required courses in the school of hunting. (And only later, after I’d learned about logic, did it occur to me that if there are some things you can’t learn from books, then there are other things you can only learn from books, and that Father was trying to tell me something about my own attitude towards my formal education.)
“Dad, is there really a school for mountain boars?”
“Of course there is. Didn’t you see the boar with the camera? It was taking photos of us with a telephoto lens to turn into slides to use as teaching materials. It’ll assign us each a code and tell its pupils about us. ‘This is the most dangerous hunter,’ it’ll say, ‘watch out for him, and that smaller one is pretty dangerous, too.’ Sometimes it takes its students on a field trip and gets them to observe us and smell us from far away, so the next time they smell us they will know well enough to hide.”
One time I was looking down from the top of a cliff with my father when we saw a group of wild pigs. “The big one is the principal,” said my father, “and the one behind it is the teacher.”
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“I bet it’s wrestling practice,” he replied. “Maybe they’re training for a regional championship.”
Another time, my father and I were chasing a wild pig that had escaped from a trap, over hill after hill, through dale after dale. Finally, we caught it on the verge of the Ta-wu Mountains, the place we call Kavulungan, which is to say at the edge of our hunting ground. The wild boar was tired. And I was scared, because this was the first time I had seen such a big boar up close.
My father unsheathed his machete and moved his thumb across the tip, which apparently told the beast that its life would come to an end at my father’s slightest motion. It started to squeal and circle. Then it charged! My father yelled for me to climb a tree to get myself out of harm’s way. From atop a branch, I watched my father fight it out with that boar. In the end, the big animal was exhausted. My father flashed his knife and stabbed the tip into the wild pig’s pumping heart. The pig used its very last strength to make its last stand, but it wasn’t enough.
My father patted the pig and said, “Before you give yourself to my clan, the meat on your body and your beefy hind legs, we will sing for you. Let us pray that the next time around you will run even faster and farther, so fast and far not even I could catch you, so that you can teach your children and grandchildren how to avoid my trap. That way, they won’t get complacent, or lazy. That way, we’ll keep one another on our toes, generation after generation.”
Only when he had finished delivering this message did my father pull out the knife, the tip dripping with the wild boar’s blood. I watched as the boar’s spasms slowly came to an end and waited until it just lay there on the ground before coming down from my perch and patting the pig, just as my father had done. “It was a warrior among warriors,” my father said. “If he hadn’t stepped into the trap and injured his leg, I might have been no match for him in hand-to-hand combat.”
“Dad,” I asked, “what was that you were saying just now?”
“I told the wild boar we feel very thankful in my clan for the cycle of nature. My son, there will come a day when you are a hunter, too. Remember this: when you end the life of an animal you have hunted, please let it know how grateful you are. Let it hear you thank your ancestors for wisdom and a pair of legs that you can run with. Let it hear you thank it and its ancestors for the sustenance it will give. Only then will the animals that you catch go gladly into the great beyond. Only then will we receive the generosity of the ancestors.
“We are a family of hunters,” he went on, “and we follow a moral code. If you have no respect for life, the ancestors will never give you any more prey animals. If you have no reverence for nature, if you fail to obey the laws that hunters must follow, then the animals, they will not run in your hunting ground – never again.”
It has been a long time, but I still have the tusk from the boar that we caught and killed that day. I attached it to an armband that I often wear, not just as a token of my father’s hunting prowess, but also as a sign of our respect for life.
The Monkey King
When I was twelve years old, Father told me the story of the local monkeys who had to defend their land from foreign invaders.
“Son, see that big monkey in the tree?” my father asked, raising his rifle and clicking on the safety. “His name is Pula. He has a dozen years on you, and his clan has led all of the tribes of monkeys on this mountain for generations. His daddy died when your grandfather
