Great hunt yesterday (perfect, since nobody caught anything, yay) but I think it’s safe to say it was the hardest terrain yet. We had only three dogs, so the four of us who were in the chase had to climb over tremendous patches of blackberry growth, often causing us to get stuck and require use of machetes. Well, I don’t carry a machete and if you need me to stress further how densely knit the thorny vines were: even my dog refused to go first. At some point I lost balance and fell off a rotten stump of a tree, my thick woolly sweater catching the thorns, gripping me so hard I began to worry. Surely the wild boars whom we were chasing must have thought: Guys, just ignore her, she’s zero threat to us…, but if I did by a small chance walk into a pack of boars and that was how they would find me, I would have been killed in a minute and very brutally. The General even found an empty boar nest. But, apart from the threat of imminent slaughter from the things we were hunting and irony (and any time I go along we catch nothing, which I why I go along), the terrain was magnificent, the forest was beautiful and the slopes were so steep we spent most of the time either sliding down very fast or climbing up on all fours. I was so tired by the end I dragged my walking stick and my feet and just kept walking down a path until I got lost. After we got to the cars the General hitched a ride with a colleague to get our own and I stuck around near an old monastery ruin, charring with a young gay cook who worked in the oldest known pub in the country, attached to the monastery. Tired like dogs, Starbark and I sat down in the sun, on a small wooden bridge, and basked, almost napping. I didn’t bring enough water, so my head hurt a little bit, though nothing like what my hands were like – hundred little cuts, like I’ve been whipped by Lilliputians. A day later I’ve taken out most of the thorn, but they’ve began scabbing, which ITCHEEEES like crazy. Another 1:0 for the forest Vs. stupid hunters :D