White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

With difficulty I made my escape, but my success pursued me. “Menike haka!” came the cry from each house I passed, for the news had been called over the distance, and to the farthest reaches of the valley it was known that an American, the American who had come on the Roberta, with a box that wrote, was dancing along the route.

As in the old days of war or other crisis, the cry had been raised, and was echoed from all directions, and from hut to cocoanut-tree to crag the call was heard, growing fainter and more feeble, dying gradually from point to point, echoing farther and yet farther in the distance. This was the ancient telegraph-system of the islanders, by which an item of information sped in a moment to the most remote edges of the valley. Unwittingly, in my gratitude, I had raised it, and now I pursued my way in the glare of a pitiless publicity.

I was met almost immediately by a score of men and women who had left the gathering of fruit or the duties of the household to greet me. Fafo, the leader, besought me earnestly to accompany them to a neighboring paepae and dance for them.

He had the finest eyes I have ever seen in a man's head, dark brown, almond-shaped, large and lustrous, wells of melancholy. There was something exquisite about the young man, his lemon-colored skin, his delicate hands and feet, his slender, though strong, body, and his regular, brilliant teeth. Some Spanish don had bred him, or some moody Italian with music in his soul, for he was a Latin in face and figure. His eyes had that wistfulness as they sought mine which the Tahitians have put well in one of their picture-words, ano-ano'uri, “the yearning, sorrowful gaze of a dog watching his master at dinner.”

A belated shrinking from renown, however, made me reject his pleas, and perceiving a pool near at hand, I softened refusal by a suggestion that we bathe. The pool, I learned, was famous in the valley, for one could swim forty feet in it, and on the other side the hill rose straight, with banana-trees overhanging the water forty feet above. We climbed this rocky face and dived into the water again and again, rejoicing in its coolness and in that sheer pagan delight of the dive, when in the air man becomes all animal, freed from every restraint and denied every safeguard save the strength of his own muscle and nerve.

We saw at last, on the edge of the bank, one of Grelet's dogs, whining for attention. He was badly wounded in two places, blood dripped on the rocks from open cuts three inches long, and one paw hung helpless, while with eager cries and beseeching looks he urged us to avenge him in his private feud with a boar. Assured of our interest, he stayed not to be comforted or cured, but hobbled eagerly up the trail, begging us with whines to accompany him.

Five men and several other dogs followed the wounded hound, and I went with them. The Marquesans had war-clubs and long knives like undersized machetes. Every Islander carries such a knife for cutting underbrush or cocoanut-stems, and usually it is his only tool for building native houses, so that he becomes very expert with it, as the Filipino with his bolo or the Cuban with his machete.

For several hours we climbed the slopes, until we came upon a narrow trail cut in the side of a cliff, a path perhaps two feet wide, with sheer wall of rock above and abrupt precipice below. On this the chief hunter stationed himself and two men while the others scouted below. This leader was a man of sixty, tattooed from toes to scalp on one side only, so that he was queerly parti-colored, and capping this odd figure, he wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. He motioned to me to take my place in a niche of the cliff, where I could stand and sweep the trail with my eyes, secure from assault. He had given directions to the others and intended to provide for me a rare sight, and to gain for himself a trifle of the glory that had been his as a young man in wars against neighboring valleys.

For an hour we waited and smoked, hearing from time to time the clamor of men and dogs in the thickets below. The common way of hunting boars, said the chief, was to chase them through the woods and kill them by throwing tomahawks at them. This method allows the hunter to have a tree always within a short run, and about these trees he dodges when pursued, or if too closely pressed, climbs one. It is dangerous sport, as only a cool and experienced man can drive a knife into a vital part of a boar in full career, and no wound in non-vital parts will cause the desperate beast even to falter.

Gradually the cries of the men and the barking of the dogs grew nearer, and suddenly, bursting from the bushes some distance down the trail, we saw ten bristling hogs. They had been driven upward until they reached the artificial shelf, and behind them hounds and hunters cut off all escape.