Man Shark

by Knight, Gerald R.

  The Chief had hopped, meanwhile, back onto the outrigger platform, the better to supervise the commoner’s activity. His beak had grown longer than Ḷainjin’s hand over the past eighteen seasons since he was but a white and vulnerable ball of innocent, downy fluff. His beak was slender and light as a feather, like his other bones, but very strong and hooked at the tip. Truth be told, beneath all the feathers, less than a handful of tough, black flesh surrounded these perdurable bones, yet he had become veritably insatiable.

  Ḷainjin carelessly tossed the heart in the Chief’s direction. The always alert bird caught it as it fell, straightened his neck to the sky, and swallowed the bloody lump in one quick motion. Ḷainjin filleted the tuna into small, red strips and discarded the carcass. He and the bird ate nearly half of these. He ate his half with a wedge of jāānkun stored below and placed the remaining strips of flesh on the deck to dry in the sun. Then he reseated the butt end of his mast back down into the stern hatch, recovered his boat with the sail, and eased himself back down through the forward hatch into the narrow hull, into which he barely fit. He unhooked one of several remaining netted and hanging coconut shells filled to their holes with rainwater. Sparingly, he drank half, lay down, and quickly fell back to sleep.

  The Chief watched the minnow feast move from here to there, and finally disappear as quickly as it had appeared. The terns quieted and dispersed. The sunlight poured down mercilessly, unencumbered by a single cloud. The rays reflected off the smooth surface of the cool ocean water and further heated the listless air above, causing it to rise skyward and provide the terns with a faint lift on the island-bound leg of their daily journey.

  The boat slowly rose and fell atop the lazy rolling swells used by Ḷainjin and his ancestors as navigation tools to locate islands beyond the horizon, and the chief of all birds sat perched, satisfied, and ever watchful upon his platform at the center of it all.

  As youths, they had gone to Anbōd, the famous shark-hunting reefs off Jālwōj Atoll, to take teeth. It was on the way back that they had stopped at the great bird island of Kōle. Never had he heard such a din. The birds shattered the silence of the sea. The boys’ revenge for suffering these peace-shattering cries was to feast upon them. Before departing, he realized they had eaten the Chief’s parents. He brought the fluffy chick back to Namorik, where it was to become his ward and constant companion. Yet because of this sequence of random events, the Chief was forever associated in his thoughts with the good luck of that trip, the fortune they had fought for that had promoted all his subsequent adventures. Yes, having to feed the bird’s enormous appetite was a distraction, but he welcomed it. And as he came to learn, a bird can follow a man where no other companion can.

  These relentless doldrums had made Ḷainjin nocturnal. To conserve water and energy, he waited daily for the sun to set and the air to cool before resuming his nightly passage. His shoulders and legs ached from the labor of numerous nights past. Still exhausted and now with a full tummy, he slept soundly through the afternoon. As twilight approached, he awoke and peacefully began to wonder, “Was this their fourth day without wind?” No. He counted five. He recalled that the first rule of drift was to conserve water, food, will, and strength, in that order. But did the order matter? True, he was low on water, but the sky under this moon would bear water sooner than later. Surely, amid all this calm, a rainstorm was forming somewhere close. Ḷainjin was adept at collecting rainwater off his lowered pandanus-leaf sail and funneling it into the mouths of his coconut-shell vessels or if necessary, channeling it into his hull. He still had half of one huge log of jāānkun stored below, and the ocean always offered him something of sustenance. Conserving his will was tricky, and yes, it was more important than strength. Was “will” just the desire to preserve his life and that of any crew? No, “will” required the proper temperament, and it required the confidence that his story would survive and he would one day discover happiness out there somewhere below the horizon.

  If his destination were farther away, he would be tempted to stay hunkered down and rested to preserve strength. The tailwinds from the storm he expected should be enough to land him at his destination. Yet he was confident he felt the faint buñtokrōk, and the even fainter kāleptak, rolling beneath him unmistakably — first one and then the other, from perpendicular directions. His grandfather had told him, “The first rule of navigation is to know your orientation.” That was the easiest part. “A Rālik proa left to drift in the open ocean always ends up pointing roughly north and south.” Understanding why distinguished a navigator from a fisher or a day sailor traveling by outrigger canoe from one islet to another along the necklace of an atoll. Understanding why went to the throat of why the dimensions of the canoe were so precisely what they were. It was why the proportions of the length of the kubaak to its hull were what they were. Everyone understood that the kubaak supports the platform deck and adds to the proa’s stability. Yet only its hull maker or its navigator knew the secrets of why a bigger or longer float, while it might increase stability, was not necessarily better. Everyone knew that an outrigger craft is, by necessity, sailed with its outrigger booms to windward. Yet his grandfather had said, “Only a navigator knows that, without a sail, the proa will still drift on its own with its outrigger booms turned to windward. Only a navigator knows that, even without wind, the proa will still drift with its float facing the direction of the predominant swell.”

  In the open ocean, that predominant swell came from the east — unless, of course, you had approached an atoll from the west and the swell from the east was blocked by the atoll. East was the direction from which the sun and the stars rotated, from whence were generated the incredibly strong salt storms that began at the beginning of the season of añōneañ and churned the ocean into a daily turmoil of wind, waves, mountainous westward-rolling swells, and salt spray. It was because this swell was so strong and had obviously traveled westward for so long, over such an uninterrupted distance, that Ḷainjin assumed the world was mostly water. He also thought of the world as round, like the sun and the moon. For why else would the islands he sought lie below the horizon? Legends and many actual stories were told about the islands to the west from which he now realized his ancestors must have originally come. He had been to those impressive places. They had tattooed their nightmares upon his soul, leaving him damaged inside with no wish to return.

  So Ḷainjin had noticed these swells from both the south and the west growing gradually more pronounced as he had paddled northward, and this could only be so if there was an atoll to the north and east starting to block the much stronger buñtokiōñ from the north, and the always predominant buñtokrear, from the east. As they had taught his mother before him, his maternal grandfathers had shown him how even a rock on the reef bent the current sweeping by, changing the wave patterns surrounding it and making itself distinguishable to anyone trained to feel the changes. His first memories were of his two grandfathers taking turns leading him about in a large jāpe they had made for him. They would take him again and yet again to the immense coral rock called Daij, on the western fringing reef of Namorik Atoll, where he had grown up. As the tide swept in from the ocean — or reversed and swept out from the lagoon — they would push or pull his little boat all about the rock. They taught him to distinguish the difference between waves generated by tidal currents sweeping across the reef — like swells from the quadrants rolling across the ocean — and surface waves generated by the wind coming from whichever direction it happened to blow. They would put a blindfold over his eyes and say, “Point to the rock.” Then they would turn him around again and yet again until the disorientation forced him to feel his position by the rock of the boat amid the convulsion around it. And again they would ask, “Where is Daij now?”

  They would stand waist deep in the tide on the reef, wapepe held high, teaching the lesson that the strong, normally predominant swell from the east, like a tidal current, would bend — or at least cause a sort of curren
t that would fall in phase with and enhance — the much fainter swell from the south. Because the atoll cut off its somewhat stronger counterswell from the north, this swell from the south would naturally grow more distinctive as he approached the yet unseen island. Its northern counterswell would likewise bend or cause a current that would likewise fall into phase to strengthen the swell rolling from the west that, on its own, would be enhanced as the atoll cut off its otherwise predominant counterswell — and so forth around the four quadrants. Ḷainjin had learned a logic that allowed him to determine the direction of an unseeable atoll through a combination of reasoning and feeling that raised his awareness of the ocean environment.

  He had learned these signs from boyhood. Now, in his isolation and amid this vast divide about him, his grandfathers were quietly speaking to him: Where is Daij now? Beyond, he sensed an atoll to the north and east. It was probably a two- or three-night paddle away. It could be Ujae or it could also be Lae. No matter, it was there. He was certain of it. He would stake his life on it. True, its footprint, amid the enormous open ocean of water surrounding him, was very slight, but as he approached, the signs would become clearer. He was confident of that. He had learned these simple rules of this world of islands and water. More importantly, his grandfathers had taught him to feel these four swells depicted in the wapepe rolling from the quadrants under him amid every imaginable weather condition. The currently calm surface of the sea, uncluttered by local wind conditions, made it the easiest to navigate. The old men’s teachings had long ago become more than a theory. He was unblindfolded now, and they had become his very sense of reality.

  The islanders probably called him Ḷōpako because of all the sharks they thought he killed. But those who knew him had given him that nickname when he was a boy because of his constant movement and his patient circling of whatever goal he had in mind. Who has not seen a shark circling? You imagine it is carefully planning an attack. It captures your attention. Then you see it swim away, and you imagine that the shark shrewdly weighed its odds of success and determined they were against it. In truth, the shark was just habitually moving, not thinking. Yet you remain on the lookout for it. You anxiously expect its return because you know that it could be there instantly to snatch the next fish you spear away. Perhaps that was why they called him Pako — because he was tenacious, always ready to seize the moment.

  His trip to Anbōd had been a perfect example. He and his friend Kalbōk — his young yet fearless friend for life — had circled that idea for seasons. It was his friend who crushed the enormous noses of all their catch, usually with one swift blow of his long and heavy hardwood club. Ḷainjin could see him there now, standing with one foot braced on the floorboards of the hull and the other propped up on the outrigger deck, his club held skyward above his head, ready to land a single fearsome blow the instant the thrashing beast’s terrifying mouth, with its rows of crooked teeth, lunged up from below. He could hear the thud of the club as it invariably landed on the very tip of the monster’s nose, driving the soft bone back into its brain and causing it to spasm dangerously to and fro, rendering it unable to muster much of a counterattack. The shark’s lack of forward momentum would result in its death.

  His destination was Wōtto. It was the next atoll along the string north of Lae. That was where his story began, and in a sense, he had set his course there, as a seabird would one day return to the island of its birth. More importantly, he should go there to maintain her myth. He could not remember his mother as she was then although there were many stories about her. Yet he grew up with a melancholy about him — a throat sickness, so to speak — for he was but a baby when she scrambled off in the night and left him there. As a youth, he had visited countless islets up and down the coral atolls of the Rālik and Ratak strings. Everywhere they spoke well of her, and this added to his pang of not knowing her. People told tales of how she had brought a new variety of Bōb from there to here and then from here to there, and brought this to cure that — and how she had introduced every variety of breadfruit to just about everywhere. The upshot was that she had been everywhere, several times, but no one knew what she had been up to! From what he gathered, that was what every irooj had wondered, especially since they all distrusted each other and often sent their workers to battle over seemingly insignificant items of dispute. There were no stories of her being involved in any fight, just stories of her sailing around under this moon to that atoll and under that moon to another, passing around all this stuff to taste and to plant. She rewarded each irooj with what she brought, but they were jealous of what she may have given others and always wanted something else. Surely, most men felt it was a difficult enough task just getting from one atoll to the next. To think that she had led a whole fleet of — no one seems to have counted how many — boats and she had left tales of her adventures on nearly every islet of every atoll of both the Rālik and Ratak strings… Yes, she had left a glorious and widespread story of the name Tarmālu behind her. But to what end? Everybody wondered. Nobody but he knew.

  When he had first tried to find out what happened to her, it quickly got too complicated for him to track it all. Her adventures were widespread, and he became the youngest seafarer any navigator had ever met — and his goal was to meet them all. He lived to listen to their stories and was good at retelling them. He would sit late into the night with the navigators and others, listening and asking questions, and because they knew he was the legendary Tarmālu’s son, he would get accurate answers. She had invented chants to memorialize the various currents, circles of fish, flocks of birds, and seamarks around and between the atolls. He would pick up one here and another there. He would memorize them and then venture out to locate them for himself. Knowledge — rarely shared with those who were unproven, unrelated, or otherwise not respected — was a man’s true fortune. Yet as a youth, he had often wondered if he was perhaps the only one not being told the best parts of her story. Was the sadness in his eyes keeping him from being told dark or sinister parts that might be clues to what had happened to her? One part he knew did not fit; they had all repeated the same proverb: Emejjia wa ilọmeto. How could she have gotten lost if she could always figure out how to get home? And how could she have lost her boat if it was safe out there? This conundrum was what had compelled him to voyage from island to island at a young age and to ask many questions, and everyone had treated him with deference, as though he was an irooj or other high person and not the humble pejpetok that he was in his own eyes.

  At first he had felt obligated to develop his mother’s land on Namorik, for unlike Wōtto and the other northern atolls, his mother’s land, on the more southern atoll, was fertile, devoid of coral rocks, and plentiful with taro and bananas. Yet ultimately, he had left this work to others. He had taken up the gatherer traditions and had no more interest in growing things than his insatiable companion. The old women teased that he had contracted the disease they called ṃōjọliñōr. That fit him perfectly. He was afflicted with it and would take it to his story’s end. He had probably inherited it from his mother. He preferred sleeping under the stars, and when on land, slept under thatch only if it rained. He had lived to watch islands rise from below the horizon, knowing that they were there beforehand. He had decided at an early age what he would have to become if he were ever to unwind the mystery of what had happened to her out there.

  The sun had set, so it was time once again to stow his thoughts, prepare his rigging, and move forward. He instinctively began to transform his floating raft into a spear that was as sharp as possible, to penetrate the atmosphere as easily as possible. He needed to conserve as much water, food, will, and strength as he could. First he raised the butt end of the mast he had lowered into the hull and placed it in its seat between the upward-sloping outrigger booms, where they were lashed at the yoke of the hull. Then he stabilized his forward-sloping mast by tightening its forestay and backstay. And then he began with his sail of woven pandanus leaf, which was no longer needed
to shade and protect him from the sun. He compacted it as tightly around its two booms as he possibly could, until it resembled a fatter version of the leaf-wrapped log of jāānkun stored below. He propped the rolled sail with his second paddle again, this time sheeting it in closer to the hull to reduce wind resistance. Finally, he cleared everything from the deck — except the Chief, of course. He was already in his place as far out on the outrigger booms as possible. As likely as not, he would poop his chalky goo straight into the water. He had long since passed into his nightly trance, and Ḷainjin imagined he was already busy amid his bird dreams.

  Lastly, he sat his fiber-kilted rear on the edge of the stern deck with his legs braced within the hull for advantage, and almost from a standing position, he plunged his oar as deep as possible into the sea. Digging first on the right and then the left, he viewed the bluish-green iridescent bubbles streaming in the wake of his paddle’s blade. There, again he felt it, as he plunged his blade and dug into the seemingly living water beneath him again. He felt kāleptak’s ever so gently slap on the flat side of his hull and watched his kubaak sink as the swell from the west lifted his hull, tilted the outrigger booms down, and then swamped the float and nearly submerged it. “What else could cause that but an atoll to the east?” he asked himself. He would paddle north and watch for kāleptak to grow in prominence as confirmation.

  The stars showed brightly, without flicker in the cloudless sky. It was the night of no moon, the night of the highest tide, when lobsters crawled like ants on the flooded fringing reefs and the reefs’ edges teemed with big-eyed, sharp-toothed predators. For the past nights, even as he had paddled, he had imagined mother turtles searching the beaches from beyond the reef’s edge of the islets where they were born. They would have popped up at dusk from the usual coral caves, where they would have inflated themselves and slept during the day. They would have watched the tide recede from the reef until it became the flat, puddled, and rock-strewn landscape upon which they feared exposing themselves. Then, as the tide turned, they would have carefully bobbed their way landward as it ever so gradually reflooded the reef to the sandy shore. There they would have climbed up under the brush at the islet’s edge, dug their nests, laid their eggs, covered them with sand, and returned to the still-flooded reef before the receding tide could leave them stranded and vulnerable in the morning sun.