In the Track of the Trades / The Account of a Fourteen Thousand Mile Yachting Cruise to the Hawaiis, Marquesas, Societies, Samoas and Fijis

by Lewis R. Freeman

It would be churlish, I told myself, to attempt to forbid the ambrosia to any of the tired gladiators when the common herd of the beaters had already been cheering themselves with it. Then—fatal mistake—I nodded my head in acquiescence when an epu was held up for Tavu, my guardian, to quaff, and—but I had already taken a gulp of the liquid fire from a calabash that a bronze, flower-crowned Hebe, with arms that were symphonies of rippling loveliness and eyes that were twin wells of limpid light, had brought and hung about my neck. Another brought a wreath for my brow and a flower for my ear, and thus crowned the king of the Bacchic revel it became all the more difficult to inaugurate a temperance program among my festive subjects. There wasn't enough of the toddy to put them in a cannibalistic mood, I argued; and, anyhow, they were bound to have all they wanted, and at my expense, as soon as they got back to Taio-haie.

At any rate, the "women did offer us of the wine to drink, and we did drink," and it was all a very merry little "hunting breakfast." It is not my purpose to write here of the imp who lurks in the depths of the coco toddy calabash to spring out upon the unwary one who uncovers him, as I shall have more to say of him later on in Tahiti. On this occasion such mischief as was wrought was only indirectly traceable to him, and it is by no means impossible that it might not have occurred anyway.

This was how it came about: From time to time some of the dogs that had strayed would come straggling in, and in nearly every case driving a pig or two ahead of them. As the animals appeared, now one and now another of the natives would jump up, intercept the fugitive in the runway and bring him to earth with that easy, effortless neck-thrust that, to the beholder, was more like a caress than a stab. But because they had drunken of the insidious toddy and there were many spectators, the stickers were more than ordinarily nonchalant in their motions, and—possibly because I, also, had partaken of the toddy—the trick kept looking easier and easier every time it was done. And probably it was because Maro had been stimulating his dazed faculties with the toddy that the recollection of the "double" I had spoiled for him reawakened, and he began to tell the party how it happened. I didn't need to know Marquesan to understand the fluent gestures which pictured me resting comfortably in the tree while the killing was going on, and showed how I didn't even dare to shoot off my pistol at anything but a dead pig; and as for having the courage to stand before one with a knife—the scorn of his "let-me-forget-it" expression was positively effacive.

In my own action I have always told myself that toddy played no part; but that delectable beverage certainly was responsible for the fact that Tavu, who was under the strictest orders from McGrath to keep me out of mischief, only nodded approbatively when I picked up Tebu's big cutlass from the grass and strode out into the runway to "make my honour white." Tebu, with a roar of delight, seized another cutlass and came out to "back up" for me, but I waved him indignantly aside, resolved to do the trick alone. The good fellow stepped aside obediently, but, unluckily for himself, "stood by" against an emergency.

Flower-crowned and sword in hand! I have called up that incongruous picture in memory many times since, and always to caption it with some classic title. Of these, "Bacchus in the Rôle of Ajax Defying the Lightning" has seemed to me rather the most appropriate.

The crowd fell silent as a crashing and the barking of dogs in the bush above told that another fugitive was approaching, for they scented trouble with the Residente in case anything happened to the Beretani who had been put into their charge. (I learned later that the natives hunting with a French official who had been killed trying to shoot a wild bull the year before had been seriously punished.) Thanks again to the toddy, however, no one made a move to interfere.

It was an uncommonly unkind trick of Fate to have held up the only really large boar that appeared in the course of that hunt until I, the greenest of green novices, had set myself so defiantly in the middle of his path that there was no graceful way of getting out of it. Also, it was harshly ordered that, whereas the other animals had come charging down as evenly as though strung on trolleys, this monster, with two dogs nipping his heels, should be plunging and reeling like a ship in a gale.

I had clearly in mind everything that needed to be done, even to kicking the toe-hole for my left foot, and I kept repeating to myself the words of my old 'varsity baseball coach to his batters—"Step out and meet it." These words had been recalled to me repeatedly during the morning as Tebu or Maro delivered his deadly thrust with a quick forward step, and that, with keeping the eye on the vulnerable spot between the neck and shoulder, seemed to me to be the crucial points upon which the turning of the trick depended. I have since been told that this is quite correct. But this procedure was calculated to be followed in the case of the regulation direct-charging boar; what to do in the case of a brute that was tossing his head in spirals, as now this flank, and now that, was nipped by a pursuing dog, I didn't—and I still don't—know just what to do.

Because I felt that I knew just what to do, and just how to do it, I had myself perfectly in hand until, sudden as a lightning flash, came the realization that the spot that I must strike between the neck and the shoulder was not keeping on an even plane. I had experienced some fairly exciting close-in work with grizzly and silver tip on a couple of occasions previous to that morning, and since then I have stopped the charge of a South American jaguar with a revolver and known what it is to see a Bengal tiger clawing the howdah of an elephant I was riding; but never have I known anything to approach the "all gone" feeling which accompanied the realization that I was not going to be able to locate the spot which had to be located if I was to avoid a collision that would make that of Maro's a friendly jostle in comparison.

The instant the message "You can't do it!" was flashed to my brain, the charging pig ceased to be a pig, so far as I was concerned, and became a Car of Juggernaut, a Bolt of Wrath, the incarnation of everything that was Swift, Terrible and Inevitable. Before I knew it I had dropped the useless cutlass, snatched out my automatic pistol and was discharging it wildly at the approaching monster. The rattle of shots was answered by a burst of savage snarls mingled with quick yelps of pain, and then, as the hammer snapped down on unresponding steel after the last cartridge was fired, I sprang blindly to one side and plunged headlong into the brush. That I dove into the unsympathetic depths of some kind of a fishhook thorn bush, which took ample toll for the intrusion when I was dragged out by the heels a minute later, was only an incident in the light of the fact that—thanks to an instinct for preservation that not even coco toddy had drugged to sleep—I had avoided so much as a brush from the charging boar.