Boodle feast

My father's stories start when the flames die down. He sits, orange-lit by embers and the heat brings him back to the time when he played with knives and guns.

He took my brothers hunting when they were adolescents. My eldest brother felled combed blackbirds and herons when others hit nothing. Unable to wait for the next trip to the wild, my second brother would sit by the window in his room and lure Asian tree sparrows into traps made of thread. Dots of sweat would form on his nose as he sat like a statue for hours, moving only when a bird, tempted by a mountain of rice, would hop into the invisible circle of death he made in our garden.

My father is the kind of man he is -- one that holds bonfires and boodle feasts on his lawn -- because as a child, he sat in a hut with a slingshot while his older cousins went hunting for wild boar in the foothills of Mount Apo.

With the Aetas as guides, they chased a boar towards the creek and killed it with a single bullet. They threw the carcass in a pit, roasted it, and wiped its blood off their faces. My father partook of the feast, and he remembers how the cold mountain air solidified the boar fat in his mouth. The next morning, they looked at the leftover meat, bloody under the sun. Boars were serious; for fun, they would shoot bats or make arrogant doctors dance to the music of bullets.

And because of that, my father is the kind of man he is. He watched a spider weave its web and counted the number of insects it ensnared. He spat into a river and blew a crowd of needlefish to pieces with his rifle as they fed on his saliva.

Tonight, as I ate grilled pork belly by the light of a bonfire, my father told me stories. He did not eat meat. Instead, he feasted on a bowl of oatmeal and a glass of red wine, with ice.