His surgical knowledge was excellent; he knew the location of the vital organs quite accurately from frequent cutting up of bodies for eating. He had treated successfully broken bones, spear-wounds through the body, holes knocked in skulls by the vicious, egg-sized sling-stones. If the skull was merely cracked, with no smashing of the bone, he drilled holes at the end of each crack to prevent further cleavage and, replacing the skin he had folded back, bound the head with cooling leaves and left nature to cure the break. If there was pressure on the brain or a part of the skull was in bits, his custom was to remove all these and, trimming the edges of the hole in the brainpan, to fit over it a neat disk of cocoanut-shell, return the scalp, and nurse the patient to health.
He had known of cases when injured brain matter was replaced with pig-brains, but admitted that the patient in such cases became first violently angry and then died. Lancing boils and abscesses with thorns had been his former habit, but he favored a nail for the purpose nowadays.
Fearing lest fever should attack Red Chicken, he had prepared a decoction from the hollow joints of the bamboo, which he administered in frequent doses from a cocoanut-shell. It was milk-white, and became translucent in water, like that beautiful variety of opal, the hydrophane. There was a legend, said the tatihi, that the knowledge of this medicine had been gleaned from a dark man who had come on a ship many years before, and with this clue I recognized it as tabasheer, a febrifuge long known in India.
A fire had been built outside the straw hovel in which Red Chicken lay, and stones were heating in it, so that if milder medicine did not avail the patient might be laid on a pile of blazing stones covered with protecting leaves, and swathed in cloths until perspiration conquered fever. The patient would then be rushed to the sea or river and plunged into cold water.
But this procedure was not necessary. Red Chicken got well rapidly, and in a few days was walking about as usual, though with a thoughtful look in his eye that promised a soul-struggle with Père Olivier, whose new gods had not protected the fisherman against the gods of the sea.
CHAPTER XXXII
A journey over the roof of the world to Oomoa; an encounter with a wild woman of the hills.
Père Olivier tried to dissuade me from walking back to Oomoa, and offered me his horse, but I determined to go afoot and let Orivie, a native youth, be my mounted guide. Orivie is named for Père Olivier; there being no “l” in the Marquesan language, the good priest's name is pronounced as if spelled in English Oreeveeay.
The horse, the usual small, tough mountain-pony, was caught, and upon him we strapped the saddle with cow-skin stirrups, hairy and big, and a rope bridle. Orivie, handsomely dressed in wrinkled denim trousers, a yellow pareu and an aged straw hat, mounted the beast, and bidding farewell to the friends I had made, we began to climb the trail through the village.
At each of the dozen houses we passed I had to stop and say Kaoha to the occupants. In these islands there is none of that coldness toward the casual passer-by which is common in America, where one may walk through the tiniest village and receive no salutation unless the village constable sees a fee in arresting the wayfarer for not having money or a job. All the elders were tattooed, and as every island and even every valley differed in its style of skin decoration, these people had new patterns and pictures of interest to me. I made it a point to linger a little before each house, praising the appearance of these tattooed old people, both because it pleased them and because it is a pity that this national art expression should die out at the whim of whites who substitute nothing for it. By this deprivation, as by a dozen others, the Marquesans have been robbed of racial pride and clan distinction, and their social life destroyed.