Man Shark

by Knight, Gerald R.

  Had they seen fires, they would have swum along the atoll necklace to what they perceived as safer environs. “The pathetic things did not know that we knew they were looking for us,” he chuckled. The islanders knew the exact nights of the moon’s cycle that the mother turtles would be watching, and so they avoided using fire those nights. Did the turtles think the islanders would not observe their distinctive tracks in the sand, which clearly led shoreward into the brush above the high-tide mark? The islanders even knew not to disturb their nests for two more nights, because they knew the turtles always came back thrice to unload all the eggs in their bellies. They also did not know that the islanders cherished the mother turtles, ate only a small number of their eggs, and could turn them on their backs only during the most festive or hungriest of times — and only after the irooj gave permission.

  All the other creatures of the ocean required the islanders to study their habits, create schemes to hunt them down, and sometimes exert massive amounts of energy to catch them. Only the extremely cautious mother turtles walked ashore, stood at their feet, shed their sad tears, and practically begged the islanders to eat them. “It took a certain type of man,” he thought, “to turn one of them over and cut off its breastplate, to look at that kindly thing with tears in its eyes and cut its guts apart." He had never done that, and he knew he could do that only once — and only if he used up a powerful inducement, or “fire starter” as he called it. He learned to think of every fearful or difficult thing he was likely to encounter and to have a fire starter ready to launch himself into action. To be positively certain the fire starter would successfully motivate him, however, he must promise himself to use it only once. He had a good source of inspiration for such a task, but he certainly did not want to use it up. It was the memory of a drowned boyhood friend.

  His name was Jiañ and, strangely, he looked a bit like a turtle himself. He was so stocky that his arms and legs looked short. He could hardly swim a boat’s length above water, but he loved to dive and was better at it than everyone else was. He saw well under the water, and when he exhaled, he could sink like a stone and stay under longer than anyone thought was possible. He would cut clams, spear fish, grab lobsters from their crevices, and coax octopuses from their holes on the bottom when most others would have to give up for lack of air, and he loved to wrestle papa turtles from their coral caves.

  They would be out diving on the reef’s edge burning pāle, and if he spotted one while hunting other things, he would come up immediately to warn the others on the boat to be ready. Then down again he would go. Eventually, he would surface with the thing next to him, one flipper immobilized over his broad shoulder, his arm over the turtle’s back, and his stubby but powerful fingers clutched onto the turtle’s other flipper, if not the outer edge of its shell, turning it away from himself for all he was worth to keep its beak away from his face. The turtles, on their part, always tried to exhale and scull their tail flippers to prevent themselves from rising to the surface, but that is not what killed his friend. One such night, Jiañ grabbed onto a great-grandfather of countless turtles. He must have been in the process of guiding the monster around toward the mouth of its cave and must have grabbed onto its shell at the nape of its neck. That proved to be a fatal mistake. When the old boy retracted its neck, Jiañ’s thick fingers must have been trapped between its bony, stubborn skull and its hard, perhaps even coral-encrusted, shell. The last they saw of him, Jiañ was dangling helplessly, looking back toward the light from the turtle’s immense back, being dragged down deeper and deeper into the black abyss below. They lit one torch after another till, finally, they spent the last of them, and they never saw him again.

  Ḷainjin shuddered at the thought and dug his oar hard into the water to distract himself from these abhorrent thoughts. Like many others that came tapping from time to time, they lingered over his shoulder. Looking up at the sky, he resolved to identify a star and name it after his stocky friend. His eyes searched for Liṃanṃan as he paddled. He was trying to keep her left of his course. The immensity of the uncountable, unnameable points of light above astounded him. There, pointing in her direction, was the great Jāpe. That was the perfect group of stars to name after his friend because he was always looking there for direction and could watch them as they rotated above and then gradually disappeared below the horizon. There, trailing and dangling forever from the intrepid turtle, was Jiañ’s arm. What a tremendous thought, to name these stars to commemorate his friend. He felt Jiañ’s spirit emerge from the ocean and engulf him. Shivers climbed the nape of his neck. He promised himself that he would teach his future son to watch the pointy turtle slowly sink into the sea, dragging Jiañ’s arm with it. He would explain his fatal mistake. His son would pass on the story of Jiañ, and people would tell the story generations hence. The swells continued to roll and rock his craft methodically as he paddled, keeping Liṃanṃan to his left. The stars continued to rotate. He continued to imagine the mother turtles playing their serious game of hide-and-seek among the atolls. Feeling contented and not quite as alone as before, his mind wandered over it all, and he dug in his oar again and yet again.

  By this point, Ḷainjin had gotten himself into a rhythm, and his proa was cutting through the water with good momentum. He had worked the pains in his shoulders and arms from the previous nights’ exertions down to a dull soreness that he would be careful to preserve by not overresting. He would stop only briefly to snack or drink before the dawning of the fresh day. As he paddled, he searched for Tūṃur, and there he was in the western sky, where he would set and be out of sight long before dawn. “It is true,” Ḷainjin confirmed again as he had before. “He would never see his youngest brother, Jebrọ, who would rise in the east that morning, just before first light.

  “Ñaijuwe!” he cried out across the rolling, gleaming vastness surrounding him.

  He was imitating Tūṃur’s mother, Lōktañūr, who — as the story went — cried out to her eldest son from ashore. The story told of a great race between the opposite islets of Aelōñḷapḷap Atoll. The first of her sons to reach the easternmost islet, Je, would become chief. They were all to paddle, because this was supposedly during the time before they knew about sailing.

  “But if they didn’t know how to sail,” he asked himself, “how did the ancestors get to the islands of Rālik and Ratak in the first place? Paddle?

  “Not likely,” he answered himself. “This was probably just another story to teach the children about sailing.”

  So Lōktañūr had woven the first mat-like sail, but when Tūṃur looked at it on shore, it looked to him like a heavy bundle of wind resistance. “Etal ippān Mejdikdik,” he cried back. Mejdikdik was the name of the next eldest brother, who was busy paddling to catch up. He in turn told her to go with the next eldest. It went on like that until Jebrọ, the youngest, approached. Being the last of twelve brothers, he had no choice but to obey.

  “So that was probably the moral of the story,” he thought, “that everybody should respect his mother’s call.”

  Still, there was more. The descriptive, instructive part for the children to sleep on came next. Jebrọ beached his canoe and watched as Lōktañūr rigged her mast and triangular lateen sail with its upright yard attached to the forward-slanting mast and a sheet attached to its boom. The mast, rigged with a forestay, a backstay, and a stay to the outrigger, had as its main support the upright yard that attached to it. The weight of the woven pandanus-leaf sail stabilized the fourth quadrant. It luffed in the wind and held the whole contraption in balance unless the sail became back winded. When that happened, the whole setup fell with a crash, causing onlookers to laugh.

  That was the perfect point in the story when Ḷainjin — or better yet, another listener — would feign stupidly and knock something over, causing the children to giggle.

  Jebrọ, the story went, was skeptical at first, especially since they could not sail directly eastward into the wind but had to sail off at an ang
le toward the islets on the northeast edge of the necklace. Once there, Lōktañūr cried, “Diak!” She loosened the sheet until the sail began to luff, unlashed the sail’s clew where its yard and boom joined, loosened the forestay, and began walking the clew to the opposite end of the canoe. That caused the mast, attached to and suspending the vertical sail boom, to change its arc as she brought the sail forward and lashed it in place at the other end. During the process, the kubaak stayed to windward and the sail continued to luff until she resecured the backstay and cried, “Ṇatọọn!” At which point she sheeted in and the boat moved swiftly toward the southeast.

  As a boy, Ḷainjin had heard this story repeated so many times that he and most other children had involuntarily memorized it. He remembered wanting to be one or another part of the canoe that he had to act out as the shunting was repeated, and the various parts switched among the children as the story continued. They would all mimic Lōktañūr when the time came to shout “diak!” and “ṇatọọn!” Did he believe, as he looked up at Tūṃur’s stars, that they were once a man who became a group of stars in the sky? No, although whoever told the story would make him wonder, when they’d point to the stars and say, “And there he is tonight, and he will set in the west and not see his brother Jebrọ rise in the east, and that’s proof the story is true!” That’s proof, he thought, that the stars don’t cause the weather to change as the story would have them believe but instead mark the moon’s thirteen cycles — and by memorizing the weather of these cycles, the children would be better prepared to survive the weather they foretell. Because of Jiañ, he was unlikely to get his hand stuck between the nape of an old turtle’s neck and its shell. Likewise, because of Tūṃur’s story, he was unlikely to find himself caught adrift in the dry and sunny salt storms that come under the first moon of añōneañ season, when he rises just before dawn.

  “Elladikdik iuṃwin Tūṃur ekūtañtañin eṃṃaan!” He chanted loudly.

  As the story went, Jebrọ sailed by each of his eleven brothers as he shunted back and forth on his way eastward to Je, and each brother he passed wished he had hearkened to his mother’s call. Finally, he passed Tūṃur, who, being the eldest, became so ashamed he turned around and paddled back westward, followed in order by each brother. There they are, lined up in a row across the middle of the sky from west to east, the story’s authenticity proved repeatedly as each brother causes some sort of mischief with the weather when his stars rise just before dawn. When Jebrọ rises under the first moon of the season of añōnrak, he brings calm waters, prosperity, and peace. “Ej kōkōṃanṃan eoon aejet. Eeọkwe armej,” chanted Ḷainjin, as he took another mammoth stroke. He felt a pang of guilt that he had rushed through the story. He needed to learn to speak or think slowly through the story and to take more pride in his storytelling. Had there been children around him, he would have gone into detail about the parts of the boat and the various sailing techniques Lōktañūr deployed to win the race.

  Then came the remainder of the story’s weather-related details that he liked the best. These details related to the characteristics under each moon of each of the two seasons. He knew that survival conditions among the low sandy islets of Rālik and Ratak were more difficult than on the more fertile islands with mountains that lay to the west, so his ancestors must have created these stories to warn their descendants what to expect. Tūṃur’s rising was always the most dramatic and always occurred at the very beginning of añōneañ, when the sun rose in the morning and set in the evening at its most southern arc, rising south of east and setting south of west. The Rālik Islanders called this añōneañ (call of the north) because the winds blew from more north of east, and they blew very hard and very consistently but without rain. They blew every night and every day until the ocean churned into mountainous rolling swells. The sky would turn hazy with salt from evaporated droplets whisked off the powerful waves that crashed in a constant, thunderous roar upon the islands’ fringing reefs and salt coated the tattered leaves of all the plants and trees, turning the islands amber and then a haggard brown.

  Under the next moon came a brief reprieve from the second-eldest son, Mejdikdik. Sometimes he brought a little rain and a few days of lighter winds, but then the salt storms resumed in full force. There was no rain, no breadfruit, and no pandanus, and they would be a long time coming. Then, when Mājlep arose, life became even harder. There was no rainwater to drink, and the only food was starch from the ṃakṃōk root. This was a pleasure to eat but difficult to dig and time-consuming to make. There would be water from wells on the big primary islets of the atolls but none on the small islets that ring the periphery. Freshwater floated on top of the seawater at the bottom of the wells, and as añōneañ wore on, that freshwater layer would get thinner by the day. At that point, migrations from northern to southern atolls — and often fighting — could ensue. Jāpe was the last star of añōneañ, just before Jebrọ, the first star of añōnrak, arose to bless the waters. However, the treacherous storm kapiḷak would sometimes appear before him. Although kapiḷak brought a violent but welcome rainstorm, the gale that often preceded it could appear so suddenly that uninformed sailors risked their lives — their masts broken, their sails torn, or worse, their outrigger canoes flipped and set adrift. However, the storm rarely coincided exactly with the first rising of the star, and on rare occasions, it fell after Jebrọ had also appeared. So the fisher must watch other weather signs carefully during this period, and that was now!

  Ḷainjin’s mind wandered over these things and others as he powered his proa forward along the endless bulging and ebbing swells from his right. His boat’s length was longer than three ñeñe. They had warned it was too long and too deep for one man to paddle comfortably. His oar was too large and heavy for paddling yet he toiled on, paddling without resting, methodically and deftly penetrating the shimmering water with his blade without a splash. He moved through the water with the endurance of a shark, pivoting his paddle one-quarter turn, pushing the stern of his boat opposite the direction he had just thrust its prow, and finally, raising his blade parallel to the water and swaying it forward for another plunge.

  From youth, he was never allowed to choose his own oar. One by one, his maternal grandfathers selected them for him, and the oars were always purposefully too big to comfortably fit into his hands, let alone light enough with which to paddle. Season after season, as he grew, they would make him even larger oars, until his arms and shoulders bulged and his hands gripped with the strength of an eel’s clutch.

  They built his proa for the four of them — one to steer with the oar; one to secure the sheet attached to the yard; one to ṇatọọn, set the course, trim the sail, and bail if necessary; and the fourth as ballast, to move weight out onto the outrigger booms as far as necessary for stability in strong winds. They rotated positions often so monotony would not dull their concentration. Extra hands at the prow and stern came in handy when it came time to diak. Often he would look about him at the crew members who were no longer there. With a pang in his throat, he would ask for and listen with his imagination to their confident advice. And always he would remember their personalities — and their adventures — as sharply as though they were yesterday’s.

  They were boyhood friends and competitors — from Namorik all. As they grew, each of his four friends became a ri-katak under his father’s lineage, and each made himself and his family proud by outcompeting the others at his skill. Ḷainjin, fatherless and unadopted, would otherwise have gone untrained were it not for his maternal grandfather and his grandfather’s brother, who were master navigators. Kalbōk contracted the ṃōjọliñōr early in his boyhood. He fished night and day and never slept inside. He caught more fish than anyone knew because he was always giving his catch away to girls on the ocean side before returning home.

  Kalbōk, he remembered, liked to fish in the middle of a rainstorm. Well, he liked to fish anytime, but particularly if it caused him to stand out among the other yo
ung men, who, during a rainstorm, usually huddled around a fire in their grandmother’s cookhouse or curled up in their sleeping mats. He had trained with the relatives on his father’s side to grind hooks and lures of kapwōr and fishing spears of the hardwood kōñe. Kalbōk’s fishing spears were very thin and no good for battle, but when he would scrape one on the reef as he ran, it would vibrate and cause terror in the fish he was attempting to encircle. He had divulged this secret to Ḷainjin but to no other man. Most just thought he was faster or luckier than they were.

  He would prepare his boat in the middle of a storm during a half-moon tide like this one, which would never reach an extreme. He would set sail in whatever gusts the storm brought or paddle in the rain if it brought none. Off he would go, slowly disappearing into the dim gray haze, and his course was always the same — to the me across the lagoon on the northern fringing reef of the atoll that the ancestors of his clan had built and maintained for generations before them. Word of his departure would travel like lightning from the young women of his family to those of their neighbors and to those of others up and down the village, and all the young women would begin a guessing game of which among them he would choose to feed with his delicious catch when he returned.

  On such an occasion, Ḷainjin would quietly slip away and set sail, knowing where he would find Kalbōk, and though he had no rights to fish with these traps, his friend for life would be happy for his companionship and would gladly share his catch with him. He would stand silently outside the apex of the funnel-shaped barrier of rocks the ancestors had gathered, laid out, and piled into shallow walls, for perhaps thirty ñeñe on the lagoon side of the reef flat. The funnel-shaped, knee-high blockade ended in a circular wall a mere two ñeñe wide that formed a pool with an entrance but no other exit. Ḷainjin’s part was to stand motionless in the rain, bearing whatever cold breezes the storm imparted. Then, with the tide constant at his knees and the roar of the ocean breaking on the reef’s edge in the murky distance echoing beneath the low gray clouds, he would silently watch as Kalbōk searched out a circle of ellōk that had meandered up from the lagoon to graze upon the reef flat. Using his spear, his swiftness, and his angler’s instincts, he would herd them toward Ḷainjin as he stood motionless. Ellōk had a peculiar habit of grouping, one after the other in a straight line, and Ḷainjin would watch as they passed one by one through the narrow channel at the apex of the funnel. Then he would fill the channel with two or three boulders, and the fish would be trapped, confused, and ready to be speared. The vibrations of Kalbōk’s spear as it scraped the reef frightened the fish, and he claimed he used the rain to his advantage, preventing the fish from spotting him and defeating his maneuvers to flank them. Yet Ḷainjin had seen him do just as well during these half-moon tides on sunny days. This fish’s long dorsal spines were sharp and filled with a mild poison, so they had to be careful, once they had speared one, to grab it securely by the eye sockets. They strung them through their gills and unusually small mouths with the midriff of a young coconut-tree leaf, being careful not allow the fish to lik them back. This fish had no scales, only a smooth skin that the girls peeled back with their teeth before devouring the fish raw.