The First Hunt

The First Hunt is the official name, but no one calls it that. The Longrass are the ones with whom I'm most familiar, but they were villagers and they did it 'wrong'. It was rarely anyone's first actual hunt, but it was the one that was supposed to mark yourself an adult that could take care of themselves and others.


The Old Ways would have you going out naked on your sixteenth year, unarmed. The rules are that one must kill something dangerous or predatory without the help of anyone else. Hand-made self-made weapons out of whatever you could find, wearing clothes you made yourself, hunting it yourself and killing it yourself. It was a test in the old days, but the village made it more of a rite to keep the tradition going. The First Knife was to be made from the coming of age kill. Carefully selected parts of the beast would be sharpened and wrapped to make a hunting knife.


The Longrass way often involved other villagers, usually of your own hunting pack (friends and family, usually just friends about the same age), and they usually got simple clothes and sometimes weapons, if they'd made those weapons themselves already. (Main reason was population density. So many kids born within so close to one another, you can hardly ask they all go hunt down a bear within six months of each other)


However, to make up for the easy mode way of things, the prey had to be worthy, too. Bigger, more dangerous, poisonous, somehow representative of the family or tribe or individual. Faerie monsters and magical beasts are 'worthy'. The tools made from the carcasses remain special and are treated with reverence. Many will keep a trophy as well as the parts from which they made their knife, skulls or pieces of exoskeleton. 


It's not uncommon for parents to get gifts from the kill, claws or fangs as jewelry.