Hunting bear is too troublesome
In her younger days, Hwang Mei-hsiu often came across bears with severed paws. Some may misread this to mean that Aborigines were hunting the protected Formosan black bear. "Aborigines don't go out for the specific purpose of hunting bears," says Hwang. After Lin took her to interview many hunters, she learned that the Bunun have a complex love-hate relationship with bears. First of all, it is very difficult to predict the whereabouts of a black bear; second, there's a lot of risk in bear hunting, and there are many taboos before and after the hunt.
For the most part, the reason that these bears were missing a paw was that they had been caught in traps meant for other animals (such as wild boar or muntjac). Such traps aren't usually powerful enough to hold an adult bear, so when a bear struggles to free itself, it will drag the snare along with it, which constricts the paws and leads to necrosis. To save their lives, some bears chew their own paws off. And the findings of Hwang's survey revealed that three quarters of the bears that had been shot after mistakenly getting caught in a trap were young bears.
"Bears are as tall as us when they stand up, they only give birth to a few offspring in their lives, and they eat anything we eat, so the tribespeople see killing a bear as akin to killing a person, bringing bad luck to families," says Lin. A hunter encountering a bear in the mountains won't kill it if there's no danger. When he was young, he once came across a bear on the trails of Maxishan. He happened to be downwind from it, so it didn't detect him. He then hid and observed the bear's gait, and found its habit of taking several steps and then lifting its head to look around to be quite adorable.
For a long time, the Bunun have felt that hunting bear is too troublesome. If they hunt during the time millet is planted or when it ripens, the entire village has to stop working for one day; to do otherwise would be inauspicious. If someone ignores this taboo and plants millet anyway, it will turn black, as if scorched.
But if a hunter kills an especially ferocious bear, the Bunun believe the bear is a gift from their ancestors, and the hunter will be seen as a hero by the tribesmen.
Lin shot his first bear when he was 19, at a time when the government had not yet listed the Formosan black bear as a protected species. While hunting in the mountains, he saw that a bear was caught in a trap and couldn't escape, so he shot it with his hunting rifle. Risking the possibility of attack from another bear that was lying in wait in the nearby silvergrass, he carried the carcass to the Gongliao cabin for preparation: removing the fur, skinning the animal, and butchering and cooking the meat to prevent spoilage. All the while he heard the constant roar of the other bear coming from the ridge, as if it were still waiting for its companion. That night the bear prowled around the cabin, and Lin and his cousin fired their guns and lit fires to scare him off.
The second time Lin bagged a bear was after he served in the military. He and his father were hunting muntjac at Maxishan, a three-day trek from the village. Lin hid in a tree and blew on a piece of bamboo to mimic a muntjac's barking call. But to their consternation, the sound attracted a bear! They were unable to get away in time, so Lin shot it with his rifle.
"To kill a bear you have to fire a fatal shot into its chest. If you don't kill it, you risk being attacked," says Lin. This was a rather large bear, weighing about 100 kilograms, and it took two careful shots from up in the tree to bring him down.
Lin plays multiple roles. Besides serving as a guide for the our reporting team, he is a consultant for Hwang's research on animal bones and head chef for the work team.