A day and night all about hunting

One of the villages in Kovol, and in particular, one family, is extremely eager for us to be here. Even after four and a half years of our being here, they are very willing to teach us and often make the 1.5-hour hike to come see us. When we first got here, Mongongam had told me she would teach me all about how the ladies hunt. We would go hunting rats, frogs, and all kinds. I had always said, “I will at some point.”

Now that Alice and Millie are bigger, it’s doable for Steve if I go away for a night. Also, summer break from school means I have more time for language and culture learning. So I planned with Mongongam to finally make this long-awaited trip to their place so they could teach me all about how ladies hunt.

Mongongam came on Wednesday evening and stayed here in our village so we could head out on Thursday morning. Wednesday afternoon is when we have designated time for sick people to come see us if they want help. This Wednesday was very busy, and it took Steve, Rhett, and me most of the afternoon to wash wounds, take temperatures, and write to our doctor for advice. That meant I didn’t have the time I had planned to get ready for my hunting trip, and I was pretty tired already!

So Thursday morning, I gathered a blanket, clean socks, my notebook, and recorder, and headed out with Mongongam. I am very thankful our summer break is during the dry season, which means no slippery trails and everything gets less dirty. On the way, I received explanations about different trees and what they are used for, and learned phrases like ‘this one is ready to cut down.’ I probably heard most of those things before, but now, being more familiar with the jungle and some of its plants, and having seen people use them, I think it sticks better. That’s a big part of our culture and language learning process—you revisit topics and areas multiple times because you can’t learn everything at once.

We made the trip in two hours, and by then it was almost lunchtime. Mongongam had arranged for a meal to be ready for us so we could eat and head out to go hunting straight away. Kovol people don’t eat at certain times like we do; they just eat when they are hungry, and most of the time only twice a day. She just knew I would want to eat something around lunchtime, so I had a nice Kovol soup to fill my belly 🙂

We didn’t hike very far to get to the ‘hunting ground’. I guess rats are everywhere. The rats find a spot and dig many tunnels—many entrances—and make a bed out of leaves. So when you find a rat hole, you have to look around and find all the other entrances too. It’s good to have multiple people to guard the exits! Then you start digging with your knife and hands. When you get to the ‘bed’ of the rat, you can smell and feel on the leaves whether the rat is living there currently or whether it’s an old house, or when there is no ‘bed’, it might be a house still under construction. As you grab some dirt from the tunnels, you can also check the dirt for paw marks. I think it is pretty amazing that the Kovol ladies can find these holes in the first place and can distinguish them from holes other animals make, and know all these ‘tricks’ to determine whether there is a rat in the hole currently. The atmosphere around the group gets pretty excited when an occupied house is found; it’s like they are digging for a chocolate cake with legs! We had a couple of them escape, which led to all those excited hunters running after them through the thick jungle, shouting excitedly. I guess I would too, if a chocolate cake were running away from me!

I had a go at digging too, but I just don’t feel too comfortable sticking my hand into a hole that had a little biter in it! My fear wasn’t exaggerated because the one rat we did catch that afternoon actually bit the lady who had caught it.

As we kept making our way through the undergrowth of the jungle in search of more rat habitats, suddenly a bigger type of rat ran away from its little burrow. ‘Sinnol, sinnol!’ we suddenly heard one of the ladies shouting (sinnol=meat). Everyone ran after it—I seriously don’t know how they can run through the bushes like that, and downhill too; I constantly get stuck or trip over just walking! I don’t know how they did it, but they caught the sinnol. Now there was definitely a party atmosphere, not like being happy for a chocolate cake, but more like being happy for a free 5-star meal. Mongongam was really sad they hadn’t seen this great meal and it had just run away from them, but as soon as we heard ‘I am holding it’, there was great joy.

They kept it alive to give me the opportunity to kill it so I could learn that.They asked me to break the rat’s neck 🙁

Anyway, with such a good catch, we decided to head home and cook our feast. I was shown how to first put the rat on the fire to scorch the hair and then scrape it off. Next, the animal gets cut up and pieces are sorted into groups: to cook in a pot, to cook in bamboo, or just straight on the fire. The insides are removed, but a lot of the organs are eaten. The smell of the burning hair just stays on the skin of the animal and is not pleasant, to put it nicely.

That smell just gets into everything that they cook with the meat. Actually, the meat itself doesn’t taste too bad. I don’t like the rat meat, but the other bigger rat-like animal we caught wasn’t too bad.

Steve had told Mongongam (half as a joke, but she took it really seriously) to force me to try everything they eat because I needed to learn their culture. Great, thanks Steve 😉

After the meal, I was pretty tuckered out, and from my last overnight trip away, I knew I would not be able to get much out of the rest of my time if I didn’t take a break, so I had a little lie down and rested. As I emerged from my ‘room’, the family was cooking again. The rest of the village had gone home because so many people had joined our feast, there wasn’t enough food, and everyone was still hungry.

So an hour or so later, I had my third Kovol soup of the day. My rest had really helped, and I was ready to talk and try to learn some language. I tried telling a story of what we did that afternoon, and it went quite well.

Then at 8 o’clock, we all headed out so I could experience hunting at night. Lots of bamboo had been cut in the afternoon and gathered and were now lit to function as our torches. They are basically like huge matchsticks. If you hold them up, the flame will die; if you hold them down, it will help them stay on, but they might get hot. The light these bamboo torches gave was quite good, but with all the smoke that comes with it and the light shining in your eyes, it wasn’t easy to walk down the trail to the little stream where we were going frog hunting. Actually, once we got there, it was quite cool. Catching frogs is so much easier than catching rats. They sit on a particular bush and don’t jump away when you get close; you just grab them with your hand. The tricky part is killing them, which you do by holding their back legs and putting them on your burning torch until they stop spasming around. Kovol people’s hands are amazing at holding hot things and touching fire. I felt like such a wuss.

We got home again around half-past 9; Mongongam made sure it was a short experience for me, not a full trip like they usually do. Some of the young girls, though, stayed behind to do some more hunting. So we got a little sleep and then got up again at 11 to tie up all the frogs and hang them up to dry over the fire. I also had to try some other things that were cooked straight away: a praying mantis, a little piece of bird meat, frog eggs (they were pretty good actually, but I don’t think I would want to be woken up for it again ;)).

Then it was time to sleep properly. Sleeping on a hard bamboo floor with insects crawling around that you hear but can’t see (and I didn’t want to turn a light on to check them out) is harder than at home in my cozy bed, but it wasn’t too bad. I actually felt pretty rested come morning.

Since we had eaten so much the day before, Mongongam had to go out to her garden to get some more roots to make breakfast (another meat feast just like the afternoon before), so as we waited for her to return, we sat and I got my notebook out (I was surprised I had the brainpower to do language study, but it went quite well).

Then came the hardest part of my trip, I think. I felt like I had done quite well, trying all those meats that we would never think of eating in the West. Some of the boys had also gone out hunting that night and had caught some more rats, some sugar gliders and even a baby tree kangaroo. So there was quite a lot of meat (including all those frogs too) to get ready. I tell you, having had a dead rat put in your hands together with a knife and being told to cut its belly open to remove its insides, along with the smell of the burned hair on an empty stomach, isn’t something I appreciate very much. But we got everything prepped and cooking. We had our breakfast (soup number 4), and then it was time for me to leave.

Maybe I have made this trip sound like a horrible experience. Parts of it I didn’t like, that’s true, but I actually am so glad I was able to go and see to what lengths the people here have to go to get some meat in their bellies. I am also amazed at the big kids and teenagers who work probably the hardest of everyone; they are always sent to fetch water, they are the ones carrying my bag for me, and they go hunting the longest. They don’t seem to be unwilling or lazy.

So going out on trips like these isn’t comfortable, and I am looking forward to being home in my clean house, being able to wash my hands properly, and not sitting in smoke constantly, but they give such good insight into how people here live, and that is what my work right now is all about. So I think it was a pretty good use of my time 🙂