'I Call, You Respond?': Game Calls, Hunting and Sound Mimicry in the Black Forest

This paper focuses on game calls, also known as appeaux in French or Wildlocker in German,
instruments located at the intersection of interspecies communication and aesthetic
creation. A reciprocal barking encounter with a roe deer in the Black Forest in Germany
serves as a starting point to explore alternate semiotic registers that involve similarity and
mimicry, beyond the exclusive symbolic structures of human language. This article
highlights several non-symbolic properties that emerge through sound mimicry with game
calls: a kind of playfulness of magic, a deep emotional implication, a familiarity and
embeddedness in the particular Umwelt of the individuals, and the impossibility of translation
into (human) symbolic language. The article suggests that new tools for investigation need
to be developed to be able to learn about these issues, as called for by recent posthuman
literature on multispecies relations.