time, I will catch it, somehow,” Father vowed before blocking the back door with underbrush and hiding the branch to use when we returned.
“Dad, is there really a college for flying squirrels?”
“Yes, there sure is. They all attend their classes at night.” I didn’t get it, so Father went on to explain, “They go to night school because they’re nocturnal. They often get together for midnight cram sessions on the principles of survival. Fleeing and hiding from eagles are compulsory credits. Outwitting hunters is an advanced elective.”
The next time Father asked if I wanted to go hunting with him, I immediately agreed. Of course I wanted to go! Father had prepared the hunting implements. This time we were ready for that sneaky flying squirrel. This time we’d get him.
We walked a long time, so long that it was after noon before we returned to where we’d faced off with the squirrel who had lived to fight another day. We moved slowly, stepping so softly it seemed the flying squirrel had not noticed our arrival. Father told me to keep an eye on the squirrel, tracking where it went, while he found the stick. When he did, he made the same rough and ready trouser net, stood under the tree hole, and, slowly and softly, held the opening of the net over the hole. Whereupon I walloped the trunk with the axe. But no flying squirrel came flying out.
“Dad, hasn’t the flying squirrel come back yet?” I asked.
“It’s possible!” Father told me to knock harder. Still nothing.
Father had me hold the net while he climbed up the tree with kindling and grass in hand. “If we can’t scare it out, we’ll smoke it out.”
He crammed the cracks in the underbrush with which he had blocked the back door with the kindling and grass, lit it and blew hard to waft the heavy smoke into the hole. Soon it was coming out of the other hole, the front door. But still the squirrel – a true squatter – refused to budge!
Father was truly flummoxed. Then he discovered that it had already found another hiding place, even higher up, another hollow in the same tree with another opening to the outside. It was curled up inside this hollow with its nose poking out, so that it wouldn’t inhale any of the smoke from Father’s fire. The only way Father knew was because he saw its nose.
The third entrance was too high up, no way Father was climbing that far. That was it! He’d had enough. He would just cut down the tree down with his saw. He sealed the first entrance – the front door – to the squirrel’s den we had discovered with branches and mud. Now the squirrel was really trapped.
Father said, “This is the smartest flying squirrel I have ever hunted. I think it has not only graduated from college but also studied abroad. Otherwise, how could it know that I would come back to catch it? It’s so smart to find a tree with two connected hollows and three entrances, a front door, a back door, and a side door kind of like an escape hatch.”
That night, Father went to tell his father how he had finally managed to catch the flying squirrel. My grandfather said, “That flying squirrel was nearly as smart as a hunter! Lucky you caught it, or it would have shared its experience with its kind, making life all the harder for us hunters. You can imagine what humiliation it would have been for us to be outsmarted by a highlander.”
Father ran a college of his own, a hunter school, where you majored in hunting philosophy. The description for one of the required courses was as follows: “Treat animals as you would human beings and imagine that you are an animal, so you will understand their habits and their speech.”
When you can understand what the flying squirrels are saying, you can listen in on the college classes they hold at night, not just in order to get the better of them, but also in order to learn to respect them. I eventually figured out that Father was just joking when he said the flying squirrel was the stupidest animal in the forest. I realized he went to the forest in all humility, for it was there that he himself had been schooled in the principles of survival.
I’m so grateful Father took me hunting when I was just a boy, and I’ll never forget the way he respected the creatures of nature. I’ve never seen the flying squirrel college, but I believe that the squirrels must go to a school very much like the one my father ran for me and like the one that I have been running for others – a place to learn the hunter’s philosophy, an attitude of respect for everything in the realm of nature.
The Mountain Boar School
I could talk your ears off telling stories about hunting with my father. But if I had to sum up his hunting philosophy, which he was trying to teach me by taking me hunting, I would put it like this: relate to each creature in nature like it is a fellow person.
Maybe because I was naughty and found it hard to sit still when I was young, adults were sometimes not that happy to see me coming around, and I was the first kid they thought of if something went wrong. If someone’s house got broken into or something went missing, my father would hear about it, and I would get a licking. It did not matter whether I had done it or not – all that mattered was that it was the sort of thing people thought I might do.
Father was afraid of me getting in trouble and giving his fellow villagers even more to complain about, so on weekends and holidays he would never leave me to my own devices. He would take me to the hunting ground, not just to teach me to hunt. I didn’t like weekends and holidays. When I was in elementary school, the days I liked the best were Monday to Friday. On those days I could cut class, run off and steal corn cobs or sweet potatoes, make a fire, and roast ‘em. Later in the afternoon, when my classmates 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