**** Please note this article contains images of a dead animal (sorry Vegans!) ****
Given a gun at 5 years old and taught to hunt, Nines eye sight was unparalleled. He called me out of the kitchen about 11pm to show me a snake he had shot high up in a tree next to his house. Using his dimly lit touch I had no chance of spotting it until we hooked it out of the tree to see that it was a Python and not one of the many deadly brown snakes lurking on the farm. I met & stayed with Nine and his family while doing my farm time in Australia. Nine & Mai are from a mountain village called Kanpetlet in Myanmar and for them hunting is a way of life. Living off the land is second nature and I could hear when he was out on the prowl by the occasional crash of his gun during the night and more often in the early hours.
One day being a man of few words Nine asks if we could assist him down by the river a short distance from his house. We head over, following him through the vines crossing a small stream, as we pass a large shaded tree we notice it’s covered with thousands of butterflies all gathering and floating in a dance with each other. We continue our walk and in the leaves on the ground we see a black shadow, last nights hunt reveals a large wild bore lying motionless. Nine ties the bores legs together to a large branch and we help him carry it back to the farm where he prepares it to be frozen and used over the next few months to feed his family. Later that evening I’m outside with the other travellers and Nine appears with a huge skinned leg of the bore as a thank you for helping him to which I accepted and made jerky from!
I wanted to give something back to Nine as we had shared his living space for the past few months and I felt almost something spiritual - the way he survived off the land, an experience far removed from my time in London and even whilst travelling in Australia. When I arrived to the farm his wife Mai had recently given birth to their baby boy and as it was just the two of them they struggled to take pictures of them all together to send home to their eagerly awaiting family. Here’s the results shot on Fujifilm X-T3 with 23 f2 & 35 f2 lenses.
