Men looking at mountain
In this connection it was my good fortune to meet a retired police officer who probably had more to do with the suppression of "witchery" in the Islands than any man living.
"It mostly began with long-pig," he told me. "Long-pig? Well, you know the Kanaka fashion of rolling bush pig in banana leaves and cooking it in the ground. Long-pig doesn't happen to be pig, that's all.
"And long-pig was enough for us. We broke up the party by marching the diners off in irons. But there were other things that had us beat. I've lain on my belly of a night, looking through a rat-hole in a native grass house, and seen some queer things: a war club stand on end, and dance on its own over the mats the length of the house. I'm no fool, but I'm darned if I could see how it was done. There was no harm in it, any more than there is in these new-fangled séances where spooks blow trumpets and rattle tambourines; but with Kanakas it may lead to long-pig, and that's what we were after.
"Then again, we watched one place for close on a month, and at the end of it found nothing we could lay hands on, but something I sha'n't forget.
"There must have been close on a hundred Kanakas squatting round the walls of the house in stony silence, when a wind sprang up that nearly blew the roof off and yet never so much as stirred the leaves on the palms twenty yards away. It was still blowing when something dropped through the roof, and squatted on the mats in the middle of the house.
"There wasn't much light—there never is at these chivarees, but there was enough for me to see that whatever it was it was a leper. It wasn't all there. It wasn't the right shape, or colour, but it boomed out answers to questions that the others put to it, and, knowing the lingo, I listened. It was the usual business: So-and-so's father was all right, but hoped that his son would join him before long as he was a trifle lonely. And somebody else's brother was having the time of his life with a brand-new sailing canoe that was the fastest thing yet. And somebody else was going to die soon....
"Now, you can arrest a leper on suspicion, and I did my best, but I never got that one. He just went, and so did the others, though they made more of a fuss about it; and all the time that wind was blowing the hair of my head this way and that.
"Fake? Of course it was a fake, but clever at that. I never got the leper, and that 'somebody else' died all right, because I saw him. But then Kanakas are like that: they die to order...."