Hunting at its peak

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