Under the shade of the nine cocos we made our camp, and old Sru and the
women and children at once set to work to build a “house” to protect us
in case it rained during the nights. Very quickly was the house built.
The “devil” was sent up the cocos to lop off branches, which, as they
fell, were woven into thatch by the deft, eager hands of the women, who
were supervised by Sivi, Nalik's handsome wife, amid much chatter and
laughter, each one trying to outvie the other in speed, and all anxious
to follow Nalik and myself to the river.
The place was well chosen. For nearly a hundred yards there was a clear
stretch of water flowing between low, grassy banks on which were growing
a few scattered pandanus-palms--the screw pine. Half a mile distant, a
jagged, irregular mountain-peak raised high its emerald-hued head in the
clear sunshine, and from every lofty tree on both sides of the stream
there came the continuous call of the gentle wood-doves and the great
grey pigeons.
With Nalik and myself there came old Sru and the imp Toka, who at once
set to work and found us some small crayfish for bait. Our rods were
slender bamboos, about twelve feet long, with lines of the same length
made of twisted banana fibre as fine as silk, and equally as strong. My
hook was an ordinary flatted Kirby, about half the size of an English
whiting hook; Nalik preferred one of his own manufacture, made from a
strip of tortoise-shell, barbless and highly polished.
Taking our stand at a place where the softly-flowing current eddied and
curled around some black boulders of rock whose surfaces were but a few
inches above the clear, crystal stream, we quickly baited our hooks and
cast together, the old chief and the boy throwing in some crushed-up
crayfish shells at the same time. Before five seconds had passed my
brown-skinned comrade laughed as his thin line tautened out suddenly,
and in another instant he swung out a quivering streak of shining blue
and silver, and deftly caught it with his left hand; almost at the
same moment my rod was strained hard by a larger fish, which darted in
towards the bank.
“First to thee, Nalik; but biggest to the _rebelli_“* cried old Sru,
as with some difficulty--for my rod was too slight for such a fish--I
landed a lovely four-pounder on the grass.
* White man.
Nalik laughed again, and before I had cleared my hook from the jaw of
my prize he had taken another and then a third, catching each one in his
left hand with incredible swiftness and throwing them to the boy. The
women and girls on the opposite bank laughed and chaffed me, and urged
me to hasten, or Nalik would catch five ere I landed another. But the
_rebelli_ took no heed of their merriment, for he was quite content to
let a few minutes go whilst he examined the glistening beauty which lay
quivering and gasping on the sward. It was nearly eighteen inches in
length, its back from the tip of the upper jaw to the tail a brilliant
dark blue flecked with tiny specks of red, the sides a burnished silver,
changing, as the belly was reached, to a glistening white. The pectoral
and lower fins were a pale blue, flecked with somewhat larger spots
of brighter red than those on the back, and the tail showed the same
colouring. In shape it was much like a grayling, particularly about
the head; and altogether a more beautiful fresh-water fish I have never
seen.
We fished for an hour or more, and caught three or four dozen of this
particular fish as well as eight or nine dark-scaled, stodgy bream,
which haunted the centre of the pool where the water was deep. Then as
the sun grew fiercer they ceased to bite, and we ceased to tempt them;
so we lay down and rested and smoked, whilst the women and children made
a ground-oven and prepared some of the fish for cooking. Putting aside
the largest--which was reserved for the old chief and myself--Nalik's
kindly, gentle-voiced wife, watched the children roll each fish up in
a wrapper of green coconut leaf and lay them carefully upon the glowing
bed of stones in the oven, together with some scores of long, slender
green bananas, to serve as a vegetable in place of taro or yams, which
would take a much longer time to cook. On the top of all was placed the
largest fish, and then the entire oven was rapidly covered up with wild
banana leaves in the shape of a mound.
The moment Nalik and I had laid down our rods, and whilst the oven was
being prepared, Toka and the two other boys sprang into the water at
one end of the pool and began to disturb the bottom with their feet. The
young girls and women, each carrying a small finely-meshed scoop-net,
joined them, and in a tew minutes they had filled a basket with
crayfish, some of which were ten inches in length, and weighed over a
pound, their tails especially being very large and fleshy.
“Shall we boil or bake them?” asked Nalik as the basketful was brought
up to me for examination.
“Boil them,” I replied, for I had brought with me several pounds of
coarse salt taken from our wrecked ship's harness cask and carefully
dried in the sun, and a boiled crayfish or crab is better than one
baked--and spoiled.
A tall, graceful girl, named Seia, came forward with a large wooden
bowl, nearly eighteen inches in diameter at the top, and two feet in
depth--no light weight even to lift, for at its rim it was over an inch
thick. Placing it on the ground in front of Sru and myself, she motioned
to the other girls to bring water. They brought her about two gallons
in buckets made of the looped-up leaves of the taro plant, and poured it
into the vessel; then Nalik and old Sru, with rough tongs formed of the
midrib of a coconut branch, whipped up eight or ten large red-hot stones
from a fire near by, and dropped them into the vessel, the water in
which at once began to boil and send up a volume of steam as Seia tipped
the entire basketful of crustacean delicacies into the bowl, together
with some handfuls of salt. Then a closely-woven mat was placed over the
top and tied round it so as to keep in the heat--that is the way they
boil food in the South Seas with a wooden pot!
From time to time during the next quarter of an hour more red-hot stones
were dropped into the bowl until old Sru pronounced the contents to be
_tunua_, _i.e._, well and truly cooked, and then whilst the now bright
red crayfish were laid out to cool upon platters of green woven coconut
leaf, the first oven of fish and bananas was opened.
What a delightful meal it was! The fat, luscious fish, cooked in their
own juices, each one deftly ridden of its compact coating of silvery
scales by the quick hands of the women, and then turned out hot and
smoking upon a platter of leaf, with half a dozen green, baked bananas
for bread! Such fish, and so cooked, surely fall to the lot of few. Your
City professional diner who loves to instruct us in the daily papers
about “how to dine” cannot know anything about the real enjoyment of
eating. He is _blasé_ he regulates his stomach to his costume and to
the season, and he eats as fashion dictates he should eat, and fills
his long-suffering stomach with nickety, tin-pot, poisonous “delicacies”
which he believes are excellent because they are expensive and are
prepared by a _chef_ whose income is ten times as much as his own.
So we ate our fish and bananas, and then followed on with the crayfish,
the women and children shelling them for us as fast as we could eat, the
largest and fittest being placed before the old chief and the white man.
And then for dessert we had a basket of red-ripe wild mangoes, with a
great smooth-leaved pineapple as big as a big man's head, and showing
red and green and yellow, and smelling fresh and sweet with the rain of
the previous night. Near by where we sat was a pile of freshly-husked
young coconuts, which a smiling-faced young girl opened for us as we
wanted a drink, carefully pouring out upon the ground all the liquid
that remained after Sru and myself had drank, and then putting the empty
shells, with their delicate lining of alabaster flesh, into the fire to
be consumed, for no one not of chiefly rank must partake even of that
which is cast aside by a chief or his guests.
Our first meal of the day finished, we--that is, Nalik, Sru, and
myself--lay down under the shade or the newly-built thatched roof and
smoked our pipes in content, whilst the women and children, attended by
the dogs, bathed in the deepest part of the pool, shouting, laughing,
and splashing and diving till they were tired. The dogs, mongrel as they
were, enjoyed the fun as much as their masters, biting and worrying each
other playfully as they swam round and round, and then crawling out upon
the bank, they ran to and fro upon the grassy sward till they too were
glad to rest under the shade of the clump of coco-palms.
In the afternoon--leaving the rest of our party to amuse themselves by
catching crayfish and to make traps for wild pigs--Sru, Nalik, Toka, and
myself set out towards _the_ pool at the head of the river, where, I
was assured, we were sure to get a pig or two by nightfall. The dogs
evidently were equally as certain of this as Nalik and Sru, for the
moment they saw the two men pick up their heavy hunting-spears they
sprang to their feet and began howling and yelping in concert till they
were beaten into silence by the women. I brought with me a short Snider
carbine--the best and handiest weapon to stop a wild pig at a short
range--and a double-barrelled muzzle-loading shot-gun. The latter I gave
to the “devil” to carry, and promised him that he should fire at least
five shots from it at pigeons or mountain fowl before we returned to the
village.
Following a narrow footpath which led along the right bank of the
stream, we struck directly into the heart of the mountain forest, and in
a few minutes the voices, shouts, and laughter of our companions sounded
as if they were miles and miles away. Now and then as we got deeper
into the dark, cool shade caused by the leafed dome above, we heard
the shrill cry of the long-legged mountain cock--a cry which I can
only describe as an attempt at the ordinary barnyard rooster's
“cock-a-doodle-do” combined with the scream of a cat when its tail is
trodden upon by a heavy-booted foot. Here in these silent, darkened
aisles of the forest it sounded weird and uncanny in the extreme, and
aroused an intense desire to knock the creature over; but I forebore to
fire, although we once had a view of a fine bird, attended by a hen and
chicks, scurrying across the leaf-strewn ground not fifty feet away.
Everywhere around us the great grey pigeons were sounding their booming
notes from the branches overhead, but of these too we took no heed, for
a shot would have alarmed every wild pig within a mile of us.
An hour's march brought us to the crest of a spur covered with a species
of white cedar, whose branches were literally swarming with doves and
pigeons, feeding upon small, sweet-scented berries about the size of
English haws. Here we rested awhile, the dogs behaving splendidly by
lying down quietly and scarcely moving as they watched me taking off my
boots and putting on a pair of cinnet (coir fibre) sandals. Just beneath
us was a deep canyon, at the bottom of which, so Nalik said, was a tiny
rivulet which ran through banks covered with wild yams and _ti_ plants.
“There be nothing so sweet to the mouth of the mountain pig as the thick
roots of the _ti_,” said Nalik to me in a low voice. “They come here
to root them up at this time of the year, before the wild yams are well
grown, and the _ti_ both fattens and sweetens. Let us start.”
At a sign from Sru, Nalilc and the boy Toka, followed by the dogs, went
off towards the head of the canyon, so as to drive down to the old man
and myself any pigs which might be feeding above, whilst we slipped
quietly down the side of the spur to the bank of the rivulet. Sru
carried my gun (which I had loaded with ball) as well as his spear. I
had my Snider.
We had not long to wait, for presently we heard the dogs give cry, and
the silence of the forest was broken by the demoniac yells of Nalik and
the “devil,” who had started a party of two boars and half a dozen
sows with their half-grown progeny, which were lying down around the
buttressed sides of a great tika-tree. They (the pigs) came down the
side of the rivulet with a tremendous rush, right on top of us in fact.
I fired at the leader--a great yellow, razorbacked boar with enormous
tusks--missed him, but hit a young sow who was running on his port side.
Sru, with truer aim, fired both barrels of his gun in quick succession,
and the second boar dropped with a bullet through both shoulders, and a
dear little black and yellow striped four-months'-old porker went under
to the other barrel with a broken spine. Then in another three or four
minutes we were kicking and “belting” about half of the dogs, who,
maddened by the smell of blood from the wounded animals, sprang upon
them and tried to tear them to pieces; the rest of the pack (Heaven save
the term!) had followed the flying swine down the canyon; they turned up
at the camp some three or four hours later with bloodied jaws and gorged
to distension.
The boar which Sru had shot was lean enough in all conscience, but
the young sow and the four-months'-old porker were as round-bodied as
barrels, and as fat as only pigs can be fat. After disembowelling them,
we hoisted the carcasses up under the branch of a tree out of the reach
of the dogs, and sent Toka back to the camp to tell the women to come
and carry them away.
Then, as we had still another hour or two of daylight, and I longed to
see the deep, deep pool at the head of the river, even if it were but
for a few moments, the old chief Nalik and I started off.
It lay before us with many, many bars of golden sunlight striking down
through the trees and trying to penetrate its calm, placid bosom with
their warm, loving rays. Far below the sound of the waterfall sung to
the dying day, and, as we listened, there came to us the dulled, distant
murmur of the combing breakers upon the reef five miles away.
“'Tis a fair, good place this, is it not?” whispered Nalik, as he sat
beside me--“a fair, good place, though it be haunted by the spirits.”
“Aye, a fair, sweet place indeed,” I answered, “and this pool aid the
river below shall for ever be in my dreams when I am far away from
here.”