(16th September post 2007 continued)
Bambi hovers some distance away, then moves on with no assistance from me whatsoever. I am both relieved and disappointed.
We sit for a while longer then leave. I can't believe that we have been there for perhaps 3 hours or so. We go for a coffee, meet some of his friends who have made two kills and Guido asks if I want to visit the refrigeration unit to see the catch. I say yes, suddenly guilty for my fleeting desire to spoil this mans hunt, who has been so open and generous in allowing me this access to what he does, when I am sure he has no real idea what I am doing and finds me a bit of an enigma – but still he says yes anyway. I have taken him a bottle of what I think is whisky for this trip, but he has asked for no payment. I think to myself that if I go out with him one more time I must get him a bigger bottle of better whisky, and I realise how much I want to develop some really excellent new work around this footage, how I would love to be able to then give a piece of this work back to him…
We go to a private house and in the refrigerator see 4 dead wild boars, hanging for the meat to tenderise. His friends turn up with one more wild boar and what looks like a deer, though I think it may not be (must try to identify what it is) because Guido doesn't call this one Bambi, he has another name for it, which he cannot translate.
His friends are jovial as they wash and hang the catch in the fridge. I find that I really like them, 4 men total. They shake hands with me and introduce themselves, we can talk little owing to my lack of German (I was so lucky with Guido to find perhaps the only hunter in the whole of east Berlin who speaks some English; I had been warned this would not be possible as the second language amongst most older east Germans is Russian and definitely not English owing to the history)…
They all shake hands with me and although I cannot talk with them, I am on the one hand pleasantly 'ignored' in the sense that they take no notice of my filming various parts of their activity. On the other hand I am included very often in their activity with a warm smile, a glance or a wink and I feel very grateful for the warmth and generosity that allows me to be here seeing this.
