“Shh. Look.”
I am about three paces behind
my girlfriend, and I am not sure if she can hear me, but I don’t dare speak louder.
She turns back to look at me, and I make two simultaneous gestures. With my right
hand, I use a finger to cover my mouth, and with my left, I point out into the
forest, away from the rocky path.
I crouch down low, and, when
she sees it too, a hand covers her mouth and she crouches as well.
It looks at us with large,
coal-black eyes in a small, slender head. Light brown fur with white dots on
its back, it looks as though snow has been falling on it for a few minutes, and
it has yet to shake it off. Perhaps only two or three meters away, it looks at
us with curiosity, not fear. It looks healthy, surrounded by plenty of
vegetation in the tropical forest, and it chews away happily as it looks at us.
After about five minutes (or
was it an hour?) a smaller version of it scrambles out of the undergrowth to
join the bigger one. It stays behind her, and she gestures for it to wait
behind her until she can determine whether or not it is safe. My girlfriend takes
pictures, which I am thankful for because I am not a photographer, and even if
I were, I would be too afraid to make noise by searching my backpack for a
camera. They stay for about ten minutes, then slowly, casually walk away, as if
they were trying to leave a rather uninteresting conversation.
We watch them
until they disappear, then we look at each other. We realize that we witnessed
something special.
* * *
We saw two Formosan Sika deer,
which in Mandarin are called “plum blossom deer” for their white dots on their
back that resemble the national flower of Taiwan. Although the plum blossom is
a rather common flower, the Sika deer, we later learned, is truly uncommon. Our
encounter with the mother Sika and her child was note-worthy, as most Taiwanese
people have probably never even seen one in captivity, and even fewer would
have seen a wild one like we did. But, in our travels around Taiwan, we have
noticed that many places have names including “Lu,” the Mandarin word for deer.
Two of the most popular
tourist destinations in Taiwan are “Lu Gang” (Deer Port) and “Lu Ye” (Deer
Wilderness). Next to “Lu Ye” is “Chu Lu” (First Deer), and in Miaoli County
there is a tribal village called “Lu Chang” (Deer Field). Others include “Lu
Cao” (Deer Grassland), “Lu Gu” (Deer Valley), and “Sha Lu" (Deer Sands), while there
are surely many others I don’t know about. But where are all the deer?
Before the mass immigration of
Han Chinese people from mainland China to Taiwan, indigenous people hunted deer
in the flatlands that would eventually become developed into big cities along
the west coast. The city of “Lu Gang” (Deer Port) got its name because Taiwan’s
first highly-prized commodity was Sika deer pelt. Throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, thousands of deer pelts were shipped through Lu Gang
every day, until the flatland deer populations depleted. As Han Chinese pushed
indigenous people out of the flatlands and into the mountains, indigenous
people hunted mountain-dwelling Sika deer to sell to the flatlanders. Overhunting
brought the Formosan Sika deer to near extinction, and today, only about one
thousand remain.
* * *
After our encounter with the
Sika deer, we check into our B & B just outside the borders of the national
park. With a large, smooth white stone building, a green lawn, picnic benches,
and a large wax-apple tree, it almost looks like it might belong in the American
countryside. Black letters spell out the word “summer” on the outer wall.
Walking along a stepping-stone path, we go into the first-floor kitchen to meet
our hosts.
A man introduces himself as
“Ah-Ben.” He is a bit shorter than me, but has a roughness about him that tells
me I would certainly lose a fight with him. His wife is taller, with thin,
round glasses, and her smile seems to be permanently attached to her face.
After the formalities about the accommodations, they ask if we saw a deer in
the forest. We happily report that we did, and we show them on the park map
roughly where we were when we spotted them.
Just then, one of their cats
walk in. It has a twisted paw, and is limping horribly. Ah-Ben’s face looks
physically struck when he says “the poor thing stepped in a deer trap.”
He shows us pictures on his
phone of traps he has uprooted. As he scrolls, he begins a tirade. “I walk
every day looking for traps, and sometimes I pull out more than ten in a day.
It’s an endless game; they set them, and I remove them. I’ve talked with the
park rangers, but they’re in on it, too. They look the other way and pretend
that an endangered species isn’t being hunted.”
He stops for a moment to
breathe, then asks us, “Do you know what the punishment is if you are caught
killing a Sika deer?”
We look at each other,
blankly, then look back at him.
He wags three fingers in front
of our faces. “Three-thousand Taiwanese dollars. That’s it. A three-thousand
dollar fine, a stern talking-to, and away you go. But you can earn
eight-thousand Taiwanese dollars just for selling the antlers! By the time you
sell the meat, the pelt, and everything else, you can earn as much as
thirty-thousand Taiwanese dollars! The government won’t crack down, because it
is a part of the indigenous peoples’ culture to hunt deer. But that culture
will die along with the deer.”
By this point his face is
visibly red. It is clear to us that those thousand-or-so remaining Sika deer’s
safety is the most pressing social issue to this man.
In my head, I convert the
numbers from Taiwanese dollars to US dollars. You would be fined about $90 US,
and you would earn about $900 US. Sadly, that’s a pretty good deal.
I ask him, “Is the economy so
bad here that people must resort to killing deer to make enough money to live?”
He waves a hand in the air to
dismiss my question. “Of course there’s work, but why work when you can set
traps and earn a month’s salary every time a deer steps in one? And those deer,
I love them, but they’re stupid. They walk the same routes every day! It
doesn’t take long to learn their routines. And then it’s just too easy.”
He pauses for a moment. My girlfriend asks, “Do many people around here know about this problem?”
He says, “My friends and I
take turns leading Sika deer tours, but the only people who sign up are the
Grandmas and Grandpas. What we need is for the children to know, so that a new
generation will learn to protect the deer. But what can the kids do if it’s
their fathers and uncles who are killing the deer?”
We sit in thoughtful silence
for a while, but we don’t think of any answers.
I look out the window and
admire the wax-apple tree. It is as tall as the house, and strong. It looks as
though it had been here long before the house, and I think about how similar it
looks to an apple tree. The picnic bench under it also makes me nostalgic for
autumn back home.
I tell Ah-Ben that it might
not help much, but I’ll write his story. He thanks me, and offers to give me
some of the pictures he has taken throughout the years. As my girlfriend and I retire
to our room, we continue to think about how to solve this problem, but we still
have no answers.
* * *
It truly was surreal to see a
Sika deer. Across the entire island, only about one-thousand deer remain, most
of which live either in captivity or in Kenting National Park, on the
southwestern tip of the island, which is where we saw the mother deer and her
baby.
It was extraordinary, but it
ought to have been ordinary.
In earlier times, the amount
of Sika deer almost certainly exceeded the population of humans on Taiwan, and
they used to graze in the flatlands which are now city centers with
skyscrapers, department stores, and hardly any wildlife anymore. The Formosan
Sika deer will probably never regain its former numbers, but, seeing it slowly,
proudly walking away, its child in close pursuit, there is a small hope at
least of its continued survival.
In the forest, we watched them
until they disappeared. We did not know then that one day they might truly
disappear.
