Wild Animals

photo by Daniela Gast

When I am hiking in the European wild areas and I am lying there in my sleeping bag, this time in a small tent, I start thinking about all the wild animals out there roaming around. It’s not a comforting thought. It’s not the kind of thinking that goes well with the soft lilting completion of the Mozart sonata, as your fingers lift off the keyboard, and all is peace and stillness, and for once your piano teacher is quiet too. No, the ears are carefully straining in the darkness, trying to pick out how the sound you are hearing is associated with the bigness of the animal.

At least this time I am in a tent. I repeat that, I know, but I tramped in the Pyrenees without a tent, which I am very pleased about as the stars were extraordinary, and I loved watching the bats flying all around me. But when I was sleeping in amongst wild horses and cattle, the desire for a small structure of flimsy material seemed kind of attractive. Not having a tent had other very excellent attributes, like sleeping amongst wild blueberries and just reaching out and munching in the middle of the night, realising too that there were wolves around but the blueberries were comforting and too beautiful to feel worried.

Which is how come I ended up buying a hiking tent, prepared, at least with a tent, to go hiking in the Rhodopes mountains in Bulgaria.  It was there, lying in the tent cocoon, hearing the jackals barking and running all night that I wished I had studied the life of a jackal, because I had no idea what the jackals were hunting.

And I was grateful to my tent when emerging from the Rhodopes, we found a rather gorgeous field to camp in, and as I crawled into my tent at the end of the day, the whole floor was rippling with small animals. It was late summer and there were many invertebrates and so there were many small animals and snakes who were happy to make their home there, possibly exactly under my tent. Exhaustion is useful in these moments.

Where one sleeps becomes very important and when, as a New Zealander, the skills of land reading are usually linked to such hazards as flash flooding, damp, cold and the possibility that a half-blind kiwi could stab you with its beak – well that would be terribly terrific of course – so land reading in Europe is like hmmmmm is that a deer track I am placing my sleeping bag in the middle of? Or is that hollow which seems perfect for a tent, is that a bear lounging-around place? Both of which, of course, I have innocently parked a tent and a sleeping bag over. In Poland there was the added intensity that the deer were rutting and running and barking loudly all night, with wolves howling in the background.

So, this time in the Tatra mountain range, in southern Poland, with Rowan and Daniela and little Aka we put up our tents close together at the edge of the pine forest and this is how come I fell asleep listening out for the rustle of animals amongst the soft pattering of rain.

Before I went to Tatra, I made a list of animals with Rowan. Here are some of them, the list was rather extensive; Tatra chamoix, marmot, snow vole, brown bear, wolf, Eurasian lynx, red deer, roe deer, wild boar, alpine shrew and also there amongst the particularly rich fauna of invertebrates and other small animals was the Carpathian blue slug which I didn’t see.

However, we did see a brown bear. It crossed the path in front of us. We were walking down from the mountain, having been rained and hailed on, and seeing the landscape below us revealed and then covered by dark clouds and rolling thunder, we emerged into mountain fields covered in wild flowers and a bear nonchalantly wandering and grazing metres away from us before deciding to climb further afield.

We walked a bit further on until we came to some shepherds’ huts and cooked up a large and welcome dinner to contemplate our sleeping situation with a bear roaming around. A mountain guide came down the mountain with a small group and we told her about the bear. There are fourteen bears in the Tatra and it is rare to see one. She reminded us to always hang food in a tree away from the tent and if a bear comes to act dead. I imagined how I could possibly act dead with a large brown bear exploring my tent.