The goat ear was so cute and tiny and I went and shot it.
Everyone was dumbfounded, and my father’s face colored. Why? Because for the ear-shooting ritual you have to shoot either a deer ear or a roebuck ear. If you miss and shoot a wild boar ear it means you’ll get scared whenever you see a boar. And a boy who shoots a goat ear will always walk along the brink of a cliff, just like a mountain goat.
I shot the goat ear. My father wouldn’t talk to me for what seemed like forever. I thought he was mad at me. Only later did I realize he was actually worried for me.
My father is a Lavian, the captain of a hunting party. Our hunting ground is huge. We pile badan around it. See those piles of reeds over there? They mark our territory. Though I’m my father’s son, the title of Lavian is not hereditary. Whether a young hunter can become Lavian or not depends on many things — hunting, cooperation and leadership skills, and much else. Only the best young hunter has a chance to become Lavian. Although I had shot the goat ear, I still performed the best in the hunting ground. But I sensed that my father remained very worried. He thought that shooting the goat ear was bad luck that would come back and haunt me.
One time we tried to round up a large boar infamous for its repeated getaways. It had killed a number of hunting dogs, and once it even managed to escape after taking a couple of my father’s bullets. My father said it was Hanito, an evil spirit, and that you shouldn’t look it in the eyes when you shot it or you would become enthralled.
The Lavian that time was my father, as always. Before dawn, the party assembled and formed a ring in an open field and waited for my father to sprinkle wine and sing.
“Tell me what has come before my gun?” my father sang.
“All the deer have come before my gun,” sang the other hunters.
“Tell me what has come before my gun?” my father sang.
“All the boar have come before my gun,” sang the other hunters.
Our guns overflowed with the smell of liquor. On the way to the hunting ground, I overheard my father whisper to my uncle that he’d seen a sign in a dream, but somehow he’d forgotten it after the wine sprinkling ceremony. My uncle reassured him, saying that people forget dreams all the time. Besides, not having a dream or forgetting one is no reason to leave the hunting party.
That time we carried out Mabusau, a hunting technique. First the Lavian judges where the boar is hiding and lets the dogs drive it out. Then the hunters fan out to surround it. At about five in the morning, when the sky had just gone light, the dogs caught a whiff of the boar and started barking like crazy. My father saw something rustling in the grass from far away and knew it was a huge boar, maybe that Hanito of a boar. He guessed which way the beast had fled and assigned pursuit routes to each of the hunters. I got the left-most route, because I was still a child of these hills with everything to learn. I ran and ran, listening to the dogs barking and the grass rustling as the scent and shade of every tree went swooshing by. Then I tripped and fell, head over heels. I picked up my gun, got up and ran, pressing down on my knife with my hand to keep it from slapping against my thigh.
I don’t know why, but after I got up I couldn’t hear anything at alclass="underline" the forest had gone completely quiet, as if the world had been silent from the very beginning. I stopped to check which way the wind was blowing, what direction the distant grass was swaying in, when suddenly a huge shadow swept past up ahead, moving fast as wind. I took a deep breath and went after it, running so swiftly I was almost holding my heart in my hands. I don’t know how long I had run when that shadow stopped dead, turned, and bellowed at me.
I was scared stiff. It was like watching a video that appears silent until it starts playing with the volume turned up all the way. Standing before me was a man. He was staring at me, his hair flying vinelike in the wind.
The man began to speak … if it can even be counted as speaking. His mouth didn’t move in the least, but I heard him loud and clear: “Child, you are fated never to catch a boar, never to become a good hunter.”
“What can I do then?”
“What can you do?” he asked me back. I discovered his eyes weren’t like human eyes. They were more like compound eyes composed of countless single eyes, the eyes of clouds, mountains, streams, meadowlarks and muntjacs, all arranged together. As I gazed, each little eye seemed to contain a different scene, and those scenes arranged to form a vast panorama the likes of which I had never seen.
“What can you do?”
The question echoed back on a gust of wind, and I found myself standing over a sheer cliff, just like a mountain goat. It was like I was standing on an island. The distant sky was the color of a ginger lily, with dark green trees and a creek below.
I only found out later that the whole hunting party had been looking all over for me because something had happened to my father. My uncle’s gun misfired and shot my father in the right eye, rupturing his eyeball and ripping a hole in his head. Father did not die right away. On the third day he actually managed to take out his breathing tube and summon my brother and me to his bedside. He asked me, “Where did you go that day?”
“I don’t know.”
“He was found by a cliff, just standing there like he was dreaming,” my elder brother explained.
My father pointed at my brother. “You must learn to be a Bunun hunter.” Then he pointed at me and said, “You cannot be a hunter anymore, not after shooting the goat ear.”
“What should I do then?” I asked.
“Become a man who knows the mountains.” Father’s voice became very far away, and the blood from the wound to his right eye started seeping through the gauze again. He started losing consciousness. My elder brother pushed the button by the bed and the nurse rushed to find the doctor. My father held on in a kind of stupor for only seven more days before leaving us.
I didn’t tell him I’d met a man with peculiar eyes. I thought there wasn’t any need. Now my father’s eyes were shut for ever.
After that, every time I went hunting I was found standing in a daze at the edge of a cliff. People avoided taking me along. Luckily I did well at school, and ultimately I even went to a university on the west coast. By the way, have you ever seen this hat of mine? I really like it. Those are bamboo partridge feathers on top. When my father named me, he caught a bamboo partridge, fed me the meat and kept the feathers for me as a memento. This might well be my most precious possession.
After Millet left, I started coming back to the village now and again to help Anu operate the Forest Church. Maybe I’m slowly getting to know the mountains. Now I just feel we have to make sure mountains like this don’t disappear, mountains without potholed roads or tunnels, mountains where goats and boars and deer can run wild.
It’s been blazing hot the past few days. Yesterday, looking up at the mountain from the coastal highway, I saw many trees that seemed scorched by the fiery Foehn wind. One time my father took us swimming at the seashore. “When the sea is sick, the mountains will be sick, too,” he said, squeezing my little willy between his fingers.