The Imu are the wild animal-spirits of the Piaroa forest, above all the ancestral peccary herds, made present among the living in the masked dances of the Warime festival. Personifying the untamed forces of the wild and the game on which the hunt depends, they belong to the beings of the creation-time and are drawn into the settled world through the ceremony's flutes, trumpets and painted masks, whose display renews the fertility of the animals. They stand in Piaroa thought for the perilous vitality of the forest that human life must at once draw upon and hold at a careful distance.