Eating meat is not an easy thing in itself, going to the supermarket with tribal friends
An Indigenous friend once joked: Why should we protect Taiwan, China's mountain forests? Because that is our supermarket! When you lowland people need food, you go to the supermarket; we go up the mountain to hunt!
That day, I finally had the chance to go browse the "supermarket" with an Indigenous friend......
The supermarket in the mountain forest: coexistence with all things takes wisdom
The cool air rising from the summer-night forest is more comfortable than anything else, and the newly risen moon flashes bright light, as if aliens were about to land. Setting out at 11 p.m., the hunters stepped briskly, wearing powerful LED headlamps and swinging their beams to track the shining eyes in the night, while we stumbled along, our lights only able to illuminate the road beneath our feet, or else we would fall at any careless step.
Although the group included the best young hunter in the tribe, tonight the supermarket did not open smoothly...... Even at the spot where prey is usually easiest to find, today it was silent and pitch-black; we spotted two flying squirrels, one of which ran off after being startled, while the other was too far away, and after aiming for more than half an hour, now east and now west, several shots were fired, yet the two eyes still glittered as they stared at us, and neither was hit. The hunter could not help complaining: I have never been this unlucky.
The leader "Ren"-ed again, sprinkling wine on the ground to pray to the ancestral spirits.
"Here, here!" the leader suddenly whispered softly, whoosh - rushing onto the forest road, and the young man hurried forward to take aim...... bang! - the two of us lowland people still had no idea what was happening, and the leader had already plunged into the thicket to search for the flying squirrel that had been shot. In theory it should have fallen straight to the ground, but without a hunting dog, how easy is it to find in a dense, pitch-black forest? Even a veteran hunter like the leader only came out half an hour later carrying a red giant flying squirrel......
He immediately struck the flying squirrel's head hard with a mountain knife, and this action aroused our puzzlement:
"Hurry and knock it unconscious! Otherwise it hurts so much. We only want to eat its meat, not torture it!"
What the leader blurted out so frankly is the compassionate wisdom of coexisting with all things and taking only what is needed, something lowland people can never learn.
The author is a worker at Howsfood Agricultural-Food Integration