WARNING: this is the story of a goat hunt so if this bothers you please don't watch.
We had a rather unexpected adventure while working on a story in Nuku Hiva, Marquesas. What we believed to be a regular scenic horseback trail ride quickly became a rather amazing local immersion. I initially noticed that our guide had a rifle strapped to his horse which I noted to myself as unusual since there are no predators on the island, but I thought it might be for security nonetheless. The ride started off like any other following a trail through some beautiful scenery but quickly became a little more immersive when the horses started climbing steep rocky ledges and following what was no longer a trail but a razor thin path on the crests of mountains. We commented to ourselves, not being able to communicate with our guide since we speak neither French nor Marquesan, that this isn’t something the average person would be comfortable with, but we were absolutely loving it. The moment we realized we were absolutely not on a standard, boring tour was when our guide jumped off his horse, grabbed his shotgun, ran towards some goats and squatted down to take aim. Our three horses stood nose to tail on a trail the width of half a yoga mat with rather steep and slippery slopes leading towards cliffs on either side. I instinct was that these horses must be accustomed to hunting but I didn’t know them well enough to assume they wouldn’t bolt with the gunfire. The main concern was keeping them from panicking on this sliver of a trail. As expected the horses spooked with nowhere to go but forward and backward but we were able to control them. At this point we exchanged a glance and knew that we were part of it now so we joined the chase. The goat fell from a cliff and we proceeded to descend down to a ledge to collect it. It’s difficult to see in the video how steep that cliff is, covered with loose soil and dead branches so you had to be extremely careful what you put your weight on because the momentum of a slip would easily take you off the next ledge which was several hundred feet of cliff. I have a massive fear of heights but this was too intriguing to pass up so I avoided looking at the drop and followed. On that small plateau our guide gutted and beheaded the goat then strapped it to his back and carried it back up… all in flip-flops. Back at our horses he finished cleaning it, expertly skinned and quartered it, put it in sacks and strapped it to the horses. And on we went…sitting on goat. On another rocky ledge he spotted another herd of goats and the situation repeated itself but this time the goat plunged from a massive cliff. We scramble down the ledges and searched but could not locate it. I was truly sad for our guide because this is how he and his family eat and he also considers it an extreme waste to lose an animal. At this point we were on top of the ridgeline and the rain started again making the trails very slick. So several times on our descent he would yell and we would jump off of our horses as their back legs slid off the trail and towards the cliffs. Part of the way we led our horses and part we rode descending down rocky inclines and muddy hillsides where the horses would sled down in a squat with us hanging on. A lot of the more extreme parts of the trail we didn’t film because our hands were preoccupied hanging on. When we finally got to the bottom and met the hostess of our Airbnb we asked her to speak to our guide and ask him how he knew that we would be able to handle this adventure and that we would be OK with it. She said that he just knew and that they had specifically put us on a goat hunt because they wanted us to see the real Marquesas. Turns out he is not a guide but a local hunter who hunts like this every week to feed his family. She told us later that this man had buried his wife the day before and that she had also asked him to hunt goat in honor of a 20 year celebration of her own lost husband. We were extremely honored to have been along on this journey. For him it was just an average Thursday.
His name is Teiki Paatai.