"The hall was lighted with torches of kukui nuts, the sooty stains of which on the walls the seepages of years have not entirely effaced. Fantastic indeed must have been the barbaric assemblage as revealed in their flickering light: the hideously tattooed dancers in head-dresses fashioned in imitation of the forms of birds and animals and fishes; the musicians drumming on the hollow trunks of burao and hau, shaking shell and bone rattles, tooting conches and blowing shrill cane whistles; the packed ranks of the spectators, shouting and clapping encouragement and tossing off epu after epu of the fiery coconut wine. Hour after hour the dancers reeled in the delirious abandon of the Marquesan hula; now gliding, with a sinuous, snaky motion, their oil-glistening bodies bent almost to the floor; now leaping wildly into the air, with shouts and shrill screams, lunging with their war clubs at imaginary foes; now seated on long woven mats of pandanus fibre before the dais where royalty reclined, bending and swaying their supple forms in a series of graceful, rhythmic motions, accompanied only by a song, the clappings of hands or the beating of the wooden drums. The boom of the drums, the shrilling of the whistles, the shouts of the spectators, the shrieks of the dancers and the swishings of their bare feet upon the floor—how it all must have stirred and amazed even those roistering old pirate and whaling captains when it struck upon their ears for the first time!"
[CHAPTER IV]
HUNTING IN THE MARQUESAS
The French have never actually prohibited the carrying of arms in the Marquesas, as have the British in the Solomons; but the possession and use of guns has been so hedged about with restrictions as practically to accomplish the same purpose. This is about the way it goes: Coming to the islands with a gun, a permit must first be secured before it may be landed. This allows you to take it to your domicile but not to take it out again. If you would carry it with you on the street, a "Port des Armes" is required, which allows you, however, to fire it only in your own backyard, and when that sanctum is enclosed with a metre-high stone wall. If you desire to fire it anywhere else, a "Permit de Chasse" must be obtained. Finally, if you come to the conclusion that the possession of a gun in the Marquesas imposes too many burdens, and decide to dispose of it, a permit to sell is required; and if, later, you regret your action and want to get it back again, a permit to purchase will have to be taken out before the deal can be consummated. Each of these permits costs a good, stiff fee, and it is largely this which is responsible for the fact that the Marquesan native hunts today much after the fashion of ancient times—with his wits and his hands. A hunt of this kind comes nearer being real sport—that is, of giving the quarry as good a chance to take the hunter's life as the latter has to take that of the quarry—than any form of the chase since the days of the troglodytes, and lucky indeed may the white man esteem himself who is allowed to join one of them. I eliminated a good deal of the sporting element on both the occasions on which I went out by carrying, and using, a rifle or revolver, but as neither of these weapons—through no fault of mine, however—figured seriously in the final dénouements, I shall always tell myself that for once in my life at least, I have seen real hunting—hunting in which the hunter has a legitimate right to be proud of the game he brings to earth. But first something of a form of Marquesan hunting which—largely because the white man with his modern weapons enters into it—is as shameless as the old native "cave-man" method is admirable.
One may hunt wild cattle, wild boar and wild goats in the Marquesas, but the pursuit of the latter, however one goes at it, is not worthy of the name of sport. Unlike the mountain goat of the Cascades and the Canadian Rockies, the Marquesan animal of that name is neither hard to find nor hard to kill; so that if one goes out after him with an intelligent guide it is usually a matter of doing a lot of shooting at easy range and letting the natives gather up and bring in the meat. It is about comparable on the score of excitement to shooting seals in their rookeries or starving cariboo in the Arctic. Goat-hunting with beaters, as it is done in Nukahiva, cannot be complained of on the score of lacking excitement, but, on account of the unspeakable barbarity of its inevitable sequel, is not to be contemplated without a shudder, even when the drive is undertaken—as it often is—to exterminate animals that have been ravaging the village gardens.
I had heard in Hawaii that a goat-drive, next to a cannibal feast, was the greatest attraction the Marquesas had to offer, and one of the first inquiries I made after my "battery" had run the gauntlet of French officialdom was regarding the chances for arranging one. The Residente promised at once to lend aid in the form of all the prisoners in the island jail to act as beaters, saying that the goats had become very numerous and troublesome since the last drive and that he would be glad indeed of a chance to get rid of a few of them; but when I broached the subject to the trader, McGrath, who had already become our court of first and last instance in the filling up of the program for our Marquesan stay, he frowned and shook his head dubiously.
"If you're half the sportsman I take you for you would be sorry for it," he said. "You wouldn't engage in one of your California rabbit drives for sport, would you? No. Well, a Marquesan goat drive is just about like one of those—and then some. I'll have to tell you about the first one I took part in, I think, and then if you still feel that you want to go ahead we will see what can be done."
We drew out a couple of canvas deck chairs to a breeze-swept corner of the front veranda of Cramer's trading store, where McGrath, sipping now and then at the long glass of absinthe and water which is the approved drink in that corner of the Pacific, told his story.