I came to call it The Book of the Mountain, what I read into and out of it from saddle and from lanai at PuuOO. From dawn to dusk the pages were always turning. Sometimes twilight came short hours after high noon, with an infloat of cloud between earth and sun that seemed to rob one of weight and all relation to every-day sensations, giving great area to the imagination. Then would show the sudden etching, against thinning vapor, of the writhen, ghostly skeleton of a dead koa tree, or the large grace of a living lehua. But for the most part the satin-gray doorway framed a happy foreground of green touched with sun-gold.
What held me most in thrall was the breathtaking lap of earth between the two great mountains. For the first time I realized, only possible from such vantage, what a whale of a mountain is Mauna Loa, and why the ancients named it Loa, Long. It is that long, gradual slope to the sea. Upon its side, from the summit, miles upon miles of lava that had flowed from Mokuaweoweo in the early ’fifties and as late as 1880, glisten under the brassy sun like streaming fields of mica, hardly distinguishable from snow or ice.
Sometimes, at PuuOO, I seemed to be in a balcony looking upon a gigantic stage. The cloud-drop of tarnished silver rose and lowered upon the bright scene of flowing leagues of seaward-declining valley, with showers of sun-javelins falling inside the curtain. I wondered why the very vastness of it did not speak monotony. Perhaps the vastness was the answer. Movement depended upon sunshine and cloud-shadow, except when one picked out upon the colossal map a gliding herd of cattle, or a pack-train of mules crawling con moto over the gray and fawn of lichened lava. What I do know is that never was the unearthly sweep of valley twice alike; always the vision was renewed with a difference; and never did it seem a tangible reality.
One day we spent following the pig-hunters. There was lacking the famed excitement of boar-sticking, for the boars were stunted and spiritless from the prolonged drouth. This sport is all in the day’s work for Otji and Muranka, immovable as sacks of meal in their saddles—efficient Japanese vaqueros, but far from graceful. They and their ponies are of a sort in appearance, stocky, short-legged, homely, with sagacious eyes. Good little philosophers, both, and kindly.
Exhilarating was the dash down the hummocky, slanting champaign, hoofs displacing dust only lightly laid by cloud-mist. Fear of monotony is dispelled in the first mile of closer acquaintance with the range. Quite suddenly the soft pasture-soil gives place to harder ground of half-decomposed lava forested in koa, standing and fallen. Then we come quite unexpectedly upon a large river between steep banks; but it is of long-arrested lava. Halting on the brink, we watch the hunters scrambling below after a boar, the collies stringing out eagerly in pursuit, bearing their plumed tails like kahilis, proudly.
I rein down into the channel, and negotiate the stream of stone and the farther bank, marveling upon the puissance of my square and honest pony. On over a descent of rough lava country, with clinking shoes the horses leap like goats, landing bunched from mound to mound with perfect precision, or scampering like rabbits in the wider spaces. We stop where a stout plain-wire boundary is reached, by which the government protects the young koa forestage, rooted in large bracken and tree ferns. From among this undergrowth the collies’ smiling faces, bright-eyed, point up at us, where they have come upon the quarry accounted for by the first shot. A cowboy swings from his horned saddle, and dexterously, without a waste movement, skins the bristly beast, whose lips in death snarl away from yellowed tusks. The butchering is unpleasant and malodorous, but interesting. The knife releases the entrails, and a small rough boot is planted conveniently midmost of the smoking ruins that seem to shrink from contact with an inimical outer world. All of the once vicious wild-pig is left on the ground save the four quarters, except in case of especially fine ribs. When the boys are out for longer periods, they roast the meat, wrapped in koa leaves, in a bed of hot stones lined with koa branches. The meat remains all day in this primitive tireless cooker.
Sometimes we trailed after the hunters into deep gulches, crowded with ferns, where the victims were brought to bay and dispatched in places from which it was difficult to retrieve their bodies.
Caroline and I turned homeward by way of an obscure trail she knew upon the long acclivity. Part of the distance was over pahoehoe lavas of antiquity, patterned in grey-green lichen and a rich, tawny-tiger moss deep and yielding as Wilton carpet. The sky was wonderful as the earth—a satsuma sky of blue and white, the fleck of clouds giving the effect of delicate cracked surfaces.
A roaring fireplace greeted our return. The smiling Ondera bustled about like an old nurse making us comfortable, and set upon the koa table, already holding his vase of dewy blue violets, a steaming roast of ranch beef, and steaming vegetables from his garden. Later, while we read cozily in the warmth, out of the windy night we heard the hunters and pack animals coming in with the slain porkers; and presently their laconic expressions of satisfaction as they sat to meat in Ondera’s domain.
Under a tortoise sky this time, a dome of large close patches of lead and white, we swung down-mountain to move into certain paddocks a drove of cattle which had come all the way from Keaau by the sea. To an American, the word paddock sounds so futile to designate the seemingly immeasurable acres between fences or gates. Moment by moment I marveled at the variety of that sage-green obliquity. Large areas are so rich and friable that it must have puzzled the owner where, in some practically desirable spot, as PuuOO, to find a place firm enough to bear a house.