Trapped wild boars or many other items can also be carried in the same way. In thick rainforests, hunting is an art. The dense vegetation offers plenty of protection for animals. Monkeys and birds stay thirty meters high in the tree canopies, deers and pigs run away at the first sound or smell of their only predator. With only a bow and poison arrows , Mentawai must become one with their environment to become hunters.
Babies start carving their first arrows as soon as they can walk.
From four years old, they start practicing with little bows, shooting coconuts. Young children from age seven start hunting birds with round arrow tips. From ten years old, they can join adults on real hunts and perfect their skills. Walking in the jungle without a sound is a skill they possess that is seemingly impossible for western outsiders.