We made our own way through the tall grass and tangles of flowering shrubs, for there were no trails save those made by the great herds of wild cattle that wandered across the plain. Three thousand head at least I saw grazing on the luxuriant herbage, or pausing with lifted heads before they fled at our approach.
“They are descendants of a few left by shipmasters decades ago,” said Le Brunnec. “Twenty years ago they roamed in immense herds all over the islands. I have chased them out of the trail to Hanamenu with a stick. Like the goats left by the American captain, Porter, on Nuka-hiva, they thrived and multiplied, but like the goats they are being massacred.
“Both cattle and goats were past reckoning when, with peace fully established and the population dwindling, the French permitted the Marquesans to buy guns. The natives hunt in gangs. Fifteen or twenty men, each with rifle or shot-gun, go on horseback to the grazing grounds. The beasts at the sound of the explosions rush to the highest point of the hills. Knowing their habits, the natives post themselves along the ridges and kill all they can. They eat or take away three or four, but they kill thirty or forty. They die in the brush, and their bones strew the ground.”
I told him of the buffalo, antelope, and deer that formerly filled our woods and covered our prairies; of Alexander Wilson, who in Kentucky in 1811 estimated one flight of wild carrier pigeons as two thousand millions, and of there being not one of those birds now left in the world so far as is known.
Le Brunnec sighed, for he was a true sportsman, and would not kill even a pig if he could not consume most of its carcass. Often he half-lifted the shot-gun that lay across the pommel, but let it drop again, saying, “We will have a wild bird for supper.”
We pitched our tent as the moon hung her lantern over the brow of the hill. Never was tent raised in a spot lonelier or lovelier. We chose for our camp the shelter of a moto tree, one of the most lordly of all the growths of these islands. Not ten of them were left in all the Marquesas, said Le Brunnec as I admired its towering column and magnificent spread of foliage. “The whites who used the axe in these isles would have made firewood of the ark of the covenant.”
We made a fire before our tent and cooked a wild chicken he had shot, which, with pilot-biscuit and Bordeaux wine, made an excellent dinner. Darkness closed around us while we ate, the wide plateau stretched about us, mysterious in the light of the moon, and the night was cool and pleasant. We lay in lazy comfort, enjoying the fresh light air of that altitude and smoking “John's” mixture from Los Angeles, till sleepiness spilled the tobacco. Our numbed senses scarcely let us drag our mats into the tent before unconsciousness claimed us.
I was wakened by the blood-chilling howls of a wolf-pack in full cry, and a shout from Le Brunnec, “The dogs!”
He stood by the open flap of the tent, a black silhouette of man and gun. When I had clutched my own rifle and reached his side I saw in the moonlight a score of huge white beasts, some tangled in a snarling heap over the remains of our supper, others crouching on their haunches in a ring, facing us. One of them sprang as Le Brunnec fired, and its hot breath fanned my face before my own finger pressed the trigger.
The two wounded brutes struggled on the ground until a second shot finished them, and the rest made off to a little distance, where Le Brunnec kept them with an occasional shot while I brought up the terrified ponies, snorting and plunging. More wood thrown on the coals spread a circle of firelight about us, and Le Brunnec and I took turns in standing guard until morning, while the white dogs sat like sheeted ghosts around us and made the night hideous with howls. One or the other of us must have dozed, for during the night the beasts dragged away the two dead and picked their bones.