Monday 29 September 2008

A Walk on the Wild Side



I found this article in a recent edition of the Taipei Times. One of the Taiwanese indigenous tribes has an annual celebration where the men go into the wild central mountains hunting wild boar. Here we have a group of young men with their glorious porky catch.

Quite coincidentally not so long ago I went walking with a friend on the north east coast. It's one of Taiwan's national parks. Rugged mountains with fantastic views of the Pacific ocean. It's challenging stuff especially for us pedestrian walkers. Anyway to cut a long story short we got lost and trapped on a very narrow overgrown path on a steep sided valley. We didn't realize we were in boar territory. As it turned out this was Mr Boar's path and he wasn't happy when he saw us. A big grunt, I mean a very BIG grunt alerted us to his presence and there he stood, blocking our only means of escape. He was mean looking, assertive and had the physique to back up his grunt...




...We realized that to escape we'd have to plunge down the valley side to the river below. Images of us being gored by a large pig kept the adrenalin flowing and we were into full flee mode. It must have looked quite funny to see two middle aged, white guys tumbling through the undergrowth in total disarray. Mr Boar didn't follow us, he had better things to do. Needless to say we survived our ordeal. I decided to write about our little adventure and to illustrate it with a silk paper cut for a local magazine. Here's the cut. I scanned it in two halves as it is quite big. I'll let you know when the article is published.

3 comments:

Mike Hemsley said...

Should have turned away from the Pacific and headed uphill... there's a secret military base up there which was abandoned in the sixties. Creep up close enough and you'll hear an important message from Mama Cass... ;-)
Can't wait to read the article - I love this larger than life story, it's kind of 21st century Taiwan meets 13the century England!

Anonymous said...

I like the expressions. The cut lines and curves work well.

ZenCrafter said...

Brilliant cuts!