“McHenry,” I interrogated, “do you never consider the other fellow? Aren’t these poor people better off chanting hymns and praying than getting drunk and dancing the hula, just to make you money.”
He regarded me with contemptuous malice.
“I knew after all you were a bloody missionary,” he said, acridly. “I been on to you. You’ll be in that straw shed to-night singin’ ‘Come to Jesus.’ You’d better look out after your cuts! You’ll be sore’n a boil to-morrow when they get stiff. Let’s go back to the schooner and get drunk!”
I was tempted to return to the Marara to ease my misery, and only the promise of Elder Kidd to assuage it with liniment, and an ardent desire to attend the Josephite services that night, detained me in the heat of the atoll. McHenry persisting in his decision to cool his coppers in rum, and I to see everything of Kaukura, I joined with a friendly native for a stroll. The Josephite temple was a small coral edifice, washed white with coral lime. An old and uncared-for Catholic church was near-by. Most of the residences were thatched huts, or shacks made of pieces of boxes and tin and corrugated iron, with a few formal wooden cottages, painted red, white, and blue. They were very poor, these Kaukurans, from our point of view, earning barely enough to sustain them in strength, and with few comforts in their huts, except the universal sewing-machine. Everywhere that was the first ambition of the uncivilized woman roused to modern vanities, as of the poor woman in all countries.
Walking along the beach I narrowly escaped a more serious accident than the disaster of the reef, for only the warning of my companion stayed me from treading upon a nohu, the deadliest underfoot danger of the Paumotus. It was a fish peculiarly hateful to humans, yet gifted by nature with both defensive disguise and offensive weapons, a remnant of the fierce struggle for survival in which so many forms of life had disappeared or altered in changing environment. The nohu lay on the coral strand where the tide lapped it, looking the twin of a battered, mossy rock, so deceiving that one must have the sight of the aborigine to avoid stepping upon it, if in one’s way. Put a foot on it, and before one could move, the nohu raised the bony spines of its dorsal fin and pierced one’s flesh as would a row of hatpins; not only pierced, but simultaneously injected through its spines a virulent poison that lay at the base of a malevolent gland. The nohu possessed a protective coloring and shape more deluding than any other noxious creature I know, and kept its mouth shut except when it swallowed the prey for which it lay in wait. Its mouth is very large, and a brilliant lemon-color inside, so that if it parts its lips it betrays itself. Brother to the nohu in evil purpose is the tataraihau. But what a trickster is nature! The nohu is as ugly as a squid, and the tataraihau beautiful as a piece of the sunset, a brilliant red, with transverse bands of chocolate, bordered with ebony.
“If you can spit on the nohu before he sticks his taetae into you, it will not poison you,” sagely said my savior, as he stabbed the wretch with his knife.
Pliny, as translated by Holland, said:
All men carry about them that which is poyson to serpents: for if it be true that is reported, they will no better abide the touching with man’s spittle than scalding water cast upon them: but if it happen to light within their chawes or mouth, especially if it comes from a man that is fasting, it is present death.
Pliny in his day may have known of quick-witted people who, when assailed by a snake, had presence of mind to expectorate in his chawes, but the most hungry, salivary man could hardly avail himself of this prophylactic unless he recognized the nohu before treading upon him. The Paumotuans employ the mape, the native chestnut, the atae, ape, and rea moeruru. These are all “yarb” remedies, and the first, the juice of the chestnut, squeezed on the head and neck, they swear by. The French doctors advise morphine injection or laudanum externally, or to suck the wound and cup it. Coagulating the poison in situ by alcohol, acids, or caustic alkali, or the use of turpentine, is also recommended. If the venom is not speedily drawn out or nullified, the feet of the victim turn black and coma ensues. The French called the nohu, La Mort, The Death.
My Paumotuan friend and Elder Kidd together gave me this information, and when we brought the nohu to the house in which he lived the clergyman said we would eat it. The native heated an old iron pipe and, after flaying the skin off the fish, boiled it. The flesh was remarkably sweet and tender.