Hunt Abroad - A Hunt Around Europe
I started duck hunting and abroad in November 1978 - after four months of marriage, at just 24 years old - on Lake Skadar Yugoslavian shore - brought by some hunters who are friends of the family and I was immediately "electrocuted" by the love for this game.
I continued, from November to March 15, leaving every weekend and returning the following Monday, until 1994 and also during the Yugoslav civil war, bypassing the embargo with the first destination in Tirana and here by taxi reaching Titograd.
I've been to he always hunts for ducks and geese in Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Crimea, Ukraine, Russia; to quail and woodcock hunting in Montenegro, Craozia, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria; to partridges and hares in Spain, as well as turtle doves and pharaohs in Morocco and Kenya.
I have asked myself several times why I have and still have this irrepressible desire, almost craving, to hunt abroad.
Well, the answers are many and many identical: hunting peace and tranquility, no one who looks at you with contempt and hatred, serenely recounting the day's experiences with other hunters patrons, exchanging new and old emotions and stories with them, making new friends. and a whole other set of things that the reader will easily imagine.
But the main truth in my case is: to know as much as possible the land and the local people, their habits and customs, their problems and needs, food and drink, in short, everything I can learn from those who kindly host.
Yes, they kindly host me! In fact, even if to be there I pay, this does not mean that these people have to be my slave or servant !!!
This is what I hate most in the vast majority of my compatriots hunters abroad, especially when I find - you can immediately understand it from how he moves or talks or gestures - the many peasants, not so rich but self-styled wealthy, who treat all premises as their property.
I like, I said, living with them, eating their cuisine enjoying their flavors, their wine always sour, because it lacks our warm sun, their many grappas after dinner in the warmth of the fireplace, admire their mirrors of water remarkably cleaner and more transparent than ours, the water lilies, sedges and reeds more luxuriant and abundant than here, the green of the boundless plains sown with wheat, maize or potatoes or salads.
What about the countless flocks of birds? From crows to cormorants, from mallards to teals, from geese to swans without forgetting pelicans, from thrushes to larks, from quails to partridges ... in short, unimaginable visions for the Italian habitat.
Every time I return to Italy and meet my hunting friends, reflecting on what I have seen, I tell them: God must love us so much if he allows an infinitesimal part of the terrestrial game to reach us in a very bad and worse ecosystem than where he could easily to live!!!
I want to tell you about an experience that happened to me last January in Romania: one morning still in the dark, it was 4.00, after an excellent Turkish coffee and cake filled with abundant homemade egg cream, we leave to reach a mirror where make the dawn. It had snowed for 10 days and there was snow everywhere then, with a ramshackle Defender 110 we were trudging through the furrows, previously left by the tractors, now frozen. We arrive near the clear and already there is our guide waiting for us. We get out of the car and the two of us approach the small boat in the snow to take it into the water when the little man tells us that it is not needed.
How is it not needed? The shed is over 1 kilometer away on the water !!!
He drank, we think, he is drunk in the early morning.
He, without getting upset, loads the bags with the molds of ducks and geese on his shoulder, takes the snack bag and sets off down the ditch.
He definitely drank or went crazy !!!
My partner and I scream at him trying to make him stop before he falls into the water when …… we see him quietly walking and lighting the way on the ice.
It was all frozen; the body of water was frozen !!!
And now where do we hunt? He smiles at us and inviting us to follow him sets off. With a case of cartridges, a rifle and a box of callouts, we follow him. After more than thirty minutes of terrified and sweat-soaked footsteps, more for fear of sinking into the water than for fatigue, we reach the shed.
He invites us and helps us to climb up, he passes us all the household goods and seraphically asks us where we would have liked the molds. Between dismay and anger, between surprise and drama, I tell him: 5 geese on the left of the shed, towards the outside, all the ducks totally on the right with a tip of 4 mallards that visually comes out of the rods trajectory so that from a distance notice.
He obediently does this by digging lightly into the ice to make the mold sit well. We observe the scene carefully following everything when he, returning from this job, "wakes us up" encouraging us to load the rifles and start with the mouth calls
It had not been 30 seconds that a dozen teals flicker in the dark on the molds.
After a while I stopped shooting, I dedicated myself only to the direction of the sounds, watching the dance of the birds approaching and lowering on the game, enchanted. My partner did "almost" the same by shooting a few more shots every now and then.
The birds, from a distance, were attracted by the song and the sight of the molds, arriving on these they danced on them - especially the geese - trying to alight deceived by the clarity and transparency of the ice. It was very nice, as well as funny, to see the ducks that, prepared for ditching, instead slipped away on the ice. We had more fun watching these scenes, the approaches and the dances on the calls than continuing with the shot to make the meat exaggerated as useless.
It is true, all this was possible thanks to the harmony between us two hunting companions, but the fact remains that these experiences can be had and are granted to you with hunting abroad.
Greetings to all those who have read me begging them to consider that not all hunters are the same, many of us are good people who truly and seriously respect ALL NATURE
Mimmo Tursi