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 was a dozen years old. I hear he died gloriously. It took five hunters to bring him down. He died protecting his people.
“After he died, other alpha monkeys from other tribes wanted to be king, but they were beaten back by this one. At about the time when I was born, there was a battle on Gadu Mountain that every elder in the village can remember. In that battle, the monkeys under Pula fought for terrain and status with two foreign tribes. They say that you could hear them skirmishing and screaming every day at sunset.
“The native monkeys were beaten back deep into the mountains, and the new monkeys occupied the peaks closest to our village.”
Looking up at Pula in the tree, I was thinking that his daddy must have been revered by many monkeys just like him. I could tell why because he was something special. The other monkeys had seemed very uncomfortable and nervous from the moment we appeared. They were squealing and roaring. They were trying to intimidate us. But not him. Every move he made held my gaze. He was dignified, cool, and composed. He had the comportment of a king. He was every inch a leader.
The little monkeys were running around on Pula’s body. Now he looked like a loving father. Pula raised his tail high and looked at me and Father, red of face and big of eye. That freaked me out. When I hid behind my father, Pula leaped to a higher branch, a prestigious place on which only he had the right to stand. From there, he shook the trunk and screamed, baring the sharp teeth that only he had the right to show. He screamed so loud you must have been able to hear him far, far away. It seemed as if every monkey in the tribe understood this as a signal because they made no more sound. It was so, so quiet. None of the monkeys dared make a peep – they all lowered their tails and sat on the nearest branch. They all looked up at Pula.
“What’re they doing?” I asked.
And my father said, “Pula said, ‘Behold, our territory contains fruit to satisfy our hunger and water to slake our thirst. Remember ye this: we cannot eat the food that humans plant. We cannot endanger our lives because of our gluttony. Human beings will use things that make scary sounds. And they will shoot you down out of the tree without warning.’”
Father said, “Pula’s father was killed by the hunting gun, shot out of the tree protecting his monkeys. The Monkey King does not want his subjects to break the rules – the rules of survival, no, the rules of coexistence that keep the peace between the monkeys and the human race.”
Wooowoooooo. All of the monkeys suddenly started singing together. And they all shook the tree as hard as they were able. They shook the entire mountain valley, it seemed to me. Then I understood why father had not pulled the trigger. He respected the Monkey King the way he respected a village elder.
“Really?” I asked.
“Son, they are just the same as us Paiwan, they have their own social structure with different ranks in a hierarchy. Actually, they are just the same as human beings.
“Pula the Monkey King has three wives. In the past few days, his third wife has gone missing, so he has been kind of unhappy because he is worried. The king’s first wife is called Yiku. She is the queen and has a special job to do: delegate tasks to the younger