Thomas Nissen joins Jens Kjær Knudsen in Macedonia, discovering some of Europe’s most beautiful mountains and a large population of Balkan chamois
For a second it looks like my travelling companion lets his hand slip over his knife. Jens Kjaer Khnudsen wears it on the right side of his belt, and he appears to move towards it as we step in. We enter the ski hotel restaurant, which is like stepping back 50 years in time. Here, smokers are not considered pariahs and the focused enjoyment of alcohol is the principal diversion. It is like visiting a time when lager was something that could be drunk straight from the bottle and gender roles were sharply divided.
Whether it is a modern man’s insecurity at entering into such a simple and strangely old-fashioned place, or the fact that the tobacco smoke in the room is so thick that one can cut through it, that makes Jens slip the knife, I don’t know. In fact, I doubt whether he touched it at all, and basically it doesn’t matter, because tomorrow we will be hunting, we will be going after one of the few chamois subspecies that Jens has not yet hunted – the Balkan chamois.
WHITE HELL
To find this subspecies, we have traveled to Macedonia, which is one of Europe’s poorest countries. The country, which has about two million inhabitants, is located on the Balkan peninsula and borders on Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo and Serbia and was formerly a republic of Yugoslavia. Beside the chamois, you will also find ranging free wild boar, red deer, roe deer, fallow deer, wolf and brown bear (which is completely protected). There are no statistics for the numbers of different species numbers, or of how many are killed each year, but the most interesting species for visiting hunters are clearly chamois, roebuck and, to some extent, wolf.
While we eat dinner in the restaurant, it starts to snow quite heavily. The snow is not a big problem for the hunt, as the quantities that fall will not create an avalanche risk, but as it is also windy there is a risk that we will not be able to drive the 20km along the mountain roads to where the chamois are found.
As we leave the next morning, we are already more than an hour late. The guides will be sure that we have enough light to see where we are going, as the road is hard to see in some areas along the way. In some places there is a very steep drop just half a metre from the car’s outermost edge, and we now understand – and welcome – the guide’s decision on a later departure, even if it means shorter hunting time b
