An excited, slightly startling cry comes from a corner of the camp: "Some of them aren't aborigines!" Wiry, dark-skinned Hu Shan-fu points to a white-faced, bespectacled, crew-cut kid who seems to be of mixed aborigine-Chinese ancestry.

In the Camp's seminar on "Country and City Differences," Hu Shan-fu elaborates.

"City kids don't know things that we know," Hu Shan-fu relates. "They think our longans are grapes, and banana trees are betel nut palms. They don't even know about jackfruit and persimmons--things we Amis eat all the time!"

"Overfed Chicken"?: After a few day of getting to know the city kids, Hu Shan-fu sees that they, too, love to run and play in the mountains and streams, and that they like small animals as much as he does. He starts to look at them in a new light. A little sheepishly, he admits, "We call those people who come to play in the mountains, the ones who pass out when the hot sun hits them, 'overfed chickens.' At first I thought these kids would be like that, but now, I guess they're OK."

In private he told us just how "aborigine" he thought these city kids really were. "Sixty percent aborigine, forty percent flatlander," are the figures he confidently lays down.

Just what is the difference between the mountains and the city? What sets these Chimei children apart from the others?

Hu Shan-fu tells us that he has to work in his family's fruit orchard every day over summer break. He helps weed, hoe, feed the chickens, and find pasture for their cattle. Traversing the maze of footpaths in the dense mountain slope grass takes time, so returning home for lunch is out of the question. Hu Shan-fu carries a handful of salt, a small cooking pot, and a box of matches up the mountain with him. When he drives the buffalo home, he has to gather wild plants for his family's dinner. Little by little, he learns to survive on his own in the wild.

Friend of Nature: The mountain children reveal their wealth of knowledge through an understanding of the natural environment. Seeing watermelons rushing past on the typhoon-swollen waters of Hsiukuluan Stream, Hu Shan-fu takes a calculating look up river and concludes, "Someone in Yuli is out of luck!"

A beer bottle tied under the leaves of a betel nut tree traps insects, the black, bean-like part of the mulberry can be eaten raw, new pomegranate leaves help relieve diarrhea . . . . The list goes on and on, all of it within the mountain childrens' field of expertise.

Most interesting of all is their familiarity with the common cow.

One day a few children out wandering from the study camp spotted a cow and calf in a grassy field. Without the slightest fear, the Chimei children moved in to take a closer look.

"It's a newborn. The umbilical cord is still attached!" Noting the traces of blood where the cow was licking the calf's back, Hu Shan-fu could determine the day and time of the calf's birth. The calf kneeled before its mother, staring with bovine incomprehension at the human visitors.

"Come on! Try to get up!" Hu Shan-fu and a couple other Chimei children, just like a human mother holding the hand of a child just learning to walk, stepped in to raise the calf to its legs. For the city-bred children, it was a magical scene, and one that lifted Hu Shan-fu to heroic status.

Sigh of the Mountain Hero: The domain of the hero, however, reaches no further than the mountains. During the entire course of the camp, Hu shan-fu and the other chimei children may haveeen the masters of all they surveyed when in natural surroundings, but in the classroom they took to the fringes, from where they watched their young Taipei compatriots.

As they should, the city children look up to their aborigine counterparts' understanding of things natural. But Hu Shan-fu and the other children admire the city kids most for the resources at their disposal--their education and their transportation. Hu Shan-fu tells us about his own "pet peeve":

"Why is it that tour buses can make it up here, but the public buses can't?" Hu Shan-fu is talking about the convoys of Hsiukuluan raft-trip tour buses that wind through his hometown every summer. These buses roll past non-stop, while the children at Chimei often have to live at their school for lack of busing. If there was a public bus to take, I'd probably have a better chance to go to Hualien Higher Vocational School!" With graduation from junior high school coming up next year, he's already concerned about his future. City kids and country kids, all of the same origins, but living life on very different terms. Is there perhaps a balance to be found among the privileges they see in each others' lives?

[Picture Caption]

Hu Shan-fu says that nature is his friend. (photo by Diago Chiu)

A mortar molded by one of the children has just the right look, fully capturing the spirit of Ami pottery.

Hu Shan-fu says that nature is his friend. （photo by Diago Chiu）