Mountain Road // In a country with hares, fairy tales are not romance but everyday life

I still remember that when I was a child, my family ordered box after box of story books, including Grimm's fairy tales and very short chapters about various temperate forest animals, each of which is a thin realistic story about a family of animals. In addition to the cockroaches and geckos at home, I grew up in the concrete jungle. There are wild cats, wild dogs, centipedes, and malu in the nearby mountains. I heard from my father who was walking in front of me that there were snakes rushing past, and I saw squirrels under the banyan tree, flying into the classroom from time to time. A roar of bumblebees, plus several trips to the zoo, seeing cattle in the fields on the train, sheep in the alpine pastures, and almost no other imagination of how natural animals live naturally in our environment and got acquainted. The plots in those storybooks, of course, were taken as part of the exotic from a very young age, at least in the environment where I grew up, it was very unreal.

How Taiwan's wild animals live, and even survive, are not as impressive as those of the temperate animals in the storybooks. Stories and conservation groups about Shihu, black bears, sika deer, and novels about aboriginal and mountain animals were all started later. contacted. Until I lived in Europe, I started to open the windows that brought me close to the natural creatures, so the density and distance of the coexistence between the creatures started to make me unable to leave as soon as I wanted. After all, I often came across unforgettable pictures. The sight is too charming.

Speaking of hares, the first time I saw them was on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Most of the people who have lived in the UK are talking about going to Scotland, and one of the most famous places there is the Isle of Skye. There was no Chinese name on Google Maps at that time. When I remembered the sky island of One Piece, I always jokingly called it sky island and sky island. Everything on this island was impressive. I have been there twice, the second time I drove myself to camp on the island, and drove to many places that people cannot reach by public transportation. Those places without many tourists, although there are still a lot of people, provide a lot of wild animals. disturbing space.

The slope of a valley facing the bay is covered with many weeds, and there are many small protruding and concave holes hidden in it. The pair of long ears appearing and hiding is very cute. I saw one jumped into a clump of weeds and disappeared, and found it again One jumped out of another clump of weeds and looked carefully at the hillside, where there were actually several gathering places with long ears. Some of them are also mixed with a few pairs of relatively short ears. There are even small rabbits here. It should be a very large family of rabbits. We may be stepping on their feet now.

I use the telephoto function of the single-lens camera's body mirror to constantly shift the direction of the lens, trying to find out how many "rabbit houses" live here. I am very busy with rabbit ears in one place and another, and I can't count the number. It was impossible to see if the disappearing rabbit was the one that appeared from another place after a few seconds. Half an hour later, hunger began to overwhelm the sense of wonder. In August, the cold wind of the islands on the west coast of Scotland can blow people shivering. I had to look back at the hillside and walk back to the car to find snacks to replenish calories. Since then, when I think of rabbits, I will never forget the empty island where I first met them in paradise.

A few years later, I was living in Bratislava, Slovakia, a small town surrounded by many smaller towns, villages, and wide fields, to the south-southwest border crossing point of the three countries, to the south-east-south border city of Komarno On the way, you will pass through fields everywhere. When the spring is full of greenery, when the train passes by, you can see rabbit shadows jumping and jumping between the grass from time to time. "There! Rabbit again!" I used to exclaim like a little girl with joy. The appearance of rabbits, perhaps because of their always jumping vitality, is like visual caffeine, which makes people get rid of laziness and refresh their spirits, and the journey that day is particularly lucky.

There is also a rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland". Alice was reading a book under the tree and fell asleep. When she opened her eyes, she saw a rabbit wearing a pocket watch hurriedly passing by. Alice instantly woke up and looked towards The rabbit ran straight over, and then got into the tree hole where the rabbit jumped...

In the past, I thought this story was too incredible, why would a writer think that he was chasing a rabbit, but not other animals? Hedgehogs, foxes, and red squirrels are all animals that I will write down in my diary when I meet them.

In mid-to-late October, on a morning when the grass in the valleys was beginning to frost, MD and I took the train to Myjava, a small town I had not yet visited. When traveling with people, I'm usually comfortable sleeping unconscious on the vehicle, and this day too. I was not woken up until I arrived at the station, and complained a little bit out of bed, grabbed my backpack, put on a layered coat, hung up a scarf, and slowly got off the train at the end. Although I miss dreamland, I still do not forget to take out the camera to record the simple and retro look of this small station. When I finally started to move slowly to get out of the platform, the train had already left and it was just the two of us.

Just as I was about to leave, I found something unusual approaching. When I turned my head, I shouted "Zajac!" (rabbit in Slovak) in disbelief, and a brown rabbit was running straight towards us. The ten paces were detoured, and after running and jumping for about fifty meters, he ran straight into the woods on the left. As the sound of the leaves being trampled disappears. After a few seconds, the surroundings began to return to calm. At that moment, the camera shutter clicked continuously, and everything that happened was like a dream.

This fall, I've come to think that it's just routine for rabbits to jump past my eyes. I imagine the writer taking a picnic mat and sandwiches to sit under a tree outside the village and admire the spring or autumn colors, everything is very peaceful and comfortable, the air is fresh, the sky is blue, undisturbed, and naturally squinting for a while. Until her body noticed a slight commotion, the sound of the branches and leaves being trampled on the grass aroused her awareness, and the moment she opened her eyes with a frown, she saw a rabbit running past her eyes. Without any hesitation, I rushed over to play a game of people catching rabbits...

A modern person is like me, with a thermos bottle and food in my backpack, a single-lens camera in my hand, plus heavy early winter clothes and gloves, and carrying a travel task, I am no longer a carefree girl in a fairy tale, and I can't catch up like Alice. Just looking at the disappearing rabbit, laughing about how the rabbit shadow came and disappeared quickly, leaving this wonderful fairy tale scene.