I’ve made semolina for Patrick and I but his foot is hurting and he won’t be able to join me on the hunt. I ask him if it’s the same foot he stepped on the rusty nail with at the end of summer when he refused to go to the doctor. It is, of course, the same foot, although probably unrelated, however my question sounds contemptuous and I regret making the point. He speaks to Stefan, and tells me that I’ll go with someone else. I’m driven in silence by someone just passing through, down to Vachear Stein, the meeting point. I get out early next to a trio of men as luminous as me, but they’re the wrong men and seeing some more in the distance I go on to greet Sasha and two others whose names I’ve either forgotten or couldn’t spell anyway. Sasha is also clad in the surreal orange that by divine right is clearly visible to man but not animals. It’s his first time too. He’ll be a jaeger next week, sitting on the high seat waiting for the game we are driving through. With our bodies through the bush, and our smells, and a near constant HOP HOP HOP that Sasha and I will take it in turns to shout into the forest. All I’ve understood is that we must be between 50 and 100 meters from the road that runs between here and Eisenach, and always loud so the hunters know you’re there even if they can’t see you. Last night, after signing my rights away, (to what I don’t know) I asked what would happen if someone actually got shot, ‘That would be bad’, Stefan replied. ‘No shit’ I thought to myself.
Sasha takes the low side and me the high. I quickly relinquish any embarrassment at hollering my way through the forest, and can hear Sasha testing his feeling towards this alien noise emanating from his own mouth. Our voices both crack now and then, but there is no shame in it. It’s hard to shout loud, up hills and down hills. Through wild forest. The only paths here are made by animals that run under the arches of brambles and fallen trees. The hill we are walking down is sandstone. Fluvial valleys run tangent to our path and so we are almost always on a bank, either climbing, descending, or delaying the inevitable by walking along the slope. Intermittently we see hunters. The first two have shot Reh, small roe deer, but they won’t be found until the dogs are sent to search for them. I’m walking up a steep bank, shouting HOP, but hearing no echo from Sasha in the distance. Nothing for a while, and it is only until I have rushed to the top of the hill that I see him sucking air on his way to the top. He can’t have heard me calling his name. ‘Nicht so einfach’ i say to him, ‘Stimmt’ he replies. We have reached the top of a sandstone prominence. A big cliff that juts above The Valley, stark in the white, late morning sun. I roll a cigarette but my lighter isn’t working. I ask Sasha if he has one, and by the time he has finally produced it from deep within a series of nested pockets, each slightly smaller than the other, my lighter has sprung to life and my cigarette is lit. “Natürlich”, I say, which gets a small laugh. We drip back into the trees, and my mind wanders behind the reflexive HOP HOP HOP Sasha and I call to one another, slightly different in tone and execution. I ebb between physical satisfaction and weariness. It is impossible to stay up right, and I slip on wet autumn leaves, and down slopes. The latter is great fun but fills your boots with grit. I quickly learn not to step on fallen trees slick with moss, or to walk through brambles if I can help it. The raspberries are not good enough compensation. I wonder how effortlessly great woodsmen can really move through the forest, and ancient hunters, if they really moved silently on thin leather shoes. I wonder of course about the ethics of what I’m doing, Tipping an already unfair fight further in favour of the hunters, who sit coddled with steaming thermoses, inconvenienced only by an early start. I wonder this last thought when I see Sasha talking to a hunter in an especially beautiful seat.
The seat is sat on the bank of a valley and looks over to the bank on the other side, with a clear view almost to its top. A sandstone cliff juts out of the trees to the right flank of this bare patch about 80 meters away, you cannot see its base. And casting eyes further right and over the hill that this seat sits on is the Wartburg totally exposed. It is a painting. This was the first high seat I saw here. When Daan showed it to me he told me that once he was sat here after dark and saw a red stag walk to the edge of that sandstone cliff and just stand there in the light of the full moon. How could he not have known how majestic he looked. Daan couldn’t make the shot. He was too far away.
I debate walking over to Sasha as we have split up around a fenced off piece of recovering forest and I am quite a bit further down the trail so would have to walk up to him. However the hunter has clearly shot something and as I get closer the unmistakable sound of a dying animal can be heard clearly in a dense thicket of brambles. The hunter says the animal has been there for half an hour but he has only just left his seat when we arrive. It is a Wildschwein, a boar, and as I move around the thicket to get a better view of the animal for the killing shot it roars at me and any pretence I may have had to my courage in the face of a wild animal leaves me as I slide down the slope on my arse. “Es ist besser hier” I say, “Der Schwein ist unter der Baum”, under the fallen tree that it has made its place to die, with or without us. The hunter comes round and places a shot just behind the ear, and the animal kicks hard at the ground in its death throes until its tail stops twitching. I step into the thicket with far more confidence than I should have and the hunter pokes the animal with my stick to make sure it’s actually dead and then to brush aside the brambles. He conveniently cuts himself on one and Sasha and I are left to drag the animal out onto the exposed earth and up the bank to the road behind his seat. Fresh blood stains my trouser legs and I cannot help stroking the animal and thanking it absurdly. I am not sentimental about hunting. At least it doesn’t arouse particularly strong emotion in me anymore. But respect seems to wane over time, desensitised to death, and perhaps subconsciously I want to make a point that we have taken an animals life from it, we are animals too, and that the least we can do is acknowledge that sacrifice in the transitory moment from ragged breaths to still resignation. “Danke”, I say as I stroke and scratch its head between the ears, and squeeze under its legs, as I do with Erwin. The hunter is back on his perch when we leave, waiting for another. Neither Sasha or I see anymore game. Neither has the next hunter, or the next, and I am quite self conscious that I am doing something wrong. I am coming up to their seats from behind and although that is definitely preferable if you do not want any chance of getting shot, perhaps there is an animal waiting in a thicket or hole in the forest beyond them. But perhaps I am doing it right and pushing the animals away from the forest they are not looking at, into the bit that they are. Not everyone on these drives gets a kill, but everyone has a reason why they didn’t. Aside from the odds being heavily in the hunters favour it reassures me to know that the variables are such that, although you can get better, no one knows for sure that they will get an animal. I suppose that’s what keeps the hunters coming back. Trading in the speculation and mystery that keeps these animals wild. At noon Sasha and I reach his car, left at the end of the trail we have been driving, earlier in the day. We are both very thirsty and every time i say “ich habe Durst” I get a very enthusiastic “ich auch” in response that feels like bonding. Although Sasha never once asks what I am doing here, or why I only speak basic german. He doesn’t even ask where I’m from which is one of the few questions I can actually respond to in a simulation of perfect Deustch. “Ich komme aus England, in der Nähe von London. Der Stadt Heißt Brighton, In Sud England, bei de Meer”.
We drive to the field where all the animals shot today will be laid on the grass and counted by the forester. First comes the pig we pulled from the thicket and then slowly more animals start to arrive and are placed in rows respective to their species. To the left are roe deer, all of which are small and seem very young. Most shots are clean, but one has shattered a leg, and another’s has clearly been broken by some final act. Then the pigs. Ours is the second largest but none of them are much older than a year. And then the Rot Hirsch, the red deer. Five were shot, all of them stags, and two with quite impressive antlers. Another is a yearling and has wands protruding from his head, yet to have branched into a full rack. Daan later tells me that some of the older hunters say that having shot such a stag in the past would have warranted a fine as the trophy is too small. And even the best trophy here would have been left they say, as their genes are desirable in future generations. The forester doesn’t care. These animals are shot in his concession to stop them eating trees, not for trophy’s or even for meat. For him the meat is a bonus, the trophy is a perversion. The trees are what’s important. To produce a resilient ecosystem that can withstand the climate change that these animals had no part in creating. And besides, these trophies litter the flea markets here and in every other village. No one remembers who shot this one in that cardboard box, or the one next to it. The only one who cares is the one who shot it. And no one remembers him either.
The area where the animals have been placed is surrounded by pine tree branches, their dark needles clearly demarcating a square on the grass. There is no apparent reason for this other than I suppose respect for the animals. Respect does exist in small ways. One of the red stags has a pine branch gripped firmly between its teeth as if it had clamped down upon it in one last effort. The Schwein we pulled from the thicket had clung to a branch too. Ripped from somewhere in a real attempt to exert some authority, some decisive action that proved it was still alive, that it had some bite left. In the stag this is purely ceremonial, a tradition the name of which translates as ‘giving the last meal’. I’m not sure if the animal bites down on it reflexively or if it is held as rigor mortis sets in. Or maybe the jaw muscles hold the jaw closed naturally in death, just as the muscles around the eye keep the eyelids held open. A trio of men sound the horns, a small tune played well, to signify the end of the hunt. Nobody claps when it is over. Another small reverence. Perhaps it is the animals who should be clapping. Then the names of the hunters are called, and a small pine branch is given to each, to be placed in their hats, and to each is said, ‘waidmanns heil’, which can mean hello, good luck, or congratulations, depending on the context. Sausages have been promised but they come after this ceremony and somewhere else. It’s past one in the afternoon, I’m still thirsty and I’m tired of not understanding, and not being understood. The horns are blown after every species. That is to say, after each hunter who had shot each stag has collected their branches (and every stag had been shot by a different man) the horns are blown and then the the hunters who had shot the pigs are called and so on. I stand outside the circle surrounding the animals after the first horns. Ostensibly because I want a picture of the scene, but really it’s because I don’t want to be there amongst people I don’t know and probably never will. I don’t like the prevailing attitude amongst those that are inspired by this grim scene, and who, after the horns have played their last tune, rush to carve away their trophies.
Daan and I drive back home. I don’t remember what we spoke about. He has a small branch in his felt hat. And when he pulls his bag out of the back of the car it is splashed with blood. He has to go to a chess tournament his two boys are playing in straight away so I have lunch alone, and after I go to my room where I sit and write this.
