Martin Of Nitendi; and The River Of Dreams

by Louis Becke

  III

  Under the shade of the nine cocos we made our camp, and old Sru and thewomen and children at once set to work to build a "house" to protect usin 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 theyfell, were woven into thatch by the deft, eager hands of the women, whowere supervised by Sivi, Nalik's handsome wife, amid much chatter andlaughter, each one trying to outvie the other in speed, and all anxiousto follow Nalik and myself to the river.

  The place was well chosen. For nearly a hundred yards there was a clearstretch of water flowing between low, grassy banks on which were growinga few scattered pandanus-palms--the screw pine. Half a mile distant, ajagged, irregular mountain-peak raised high its emerald-hued head in theclear sunshine, and from every lofty tree on both sides of the streamthere came the continuous call of the gentle wood-doves and the greatgrey pigeons.

  With Nalik and myself there came old Sru and the imp Toka, who at onceset to work and found us some small crayfish for bait. Our rods wereslender bamboos, about twelve feet long, with lines of the same lengthmade of twisted banana fibre as fine as silk, and equally as strong. Myhook was an ordinary flatted Kirby, about half the size of an Englishwhiting hook; Nalik preferred one of his own manufacture, made from astrip of tortoise-shell, barbless and highly polished.

  Taking our stand at a place where the softly-flowing current eddied andcurled around some black boulders of rock whose surfaces were but a fewinches above the clear, crystal stream, we quickly baited our hooks andcast together, the old chief and the boy throwing in some crushed-upcrayfish shells at the same time. Before five seconds had passed mybrown-skinned comrade laughed as his thin line tautened out suddenly,and in another instant he swung out a quivering streak of shining blueand silver, and deftly caught it with his left hand; almost at thesame moment my rod was strained hard by a larger fish, which darted intowards 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--Ilanded a lovely four-pounder on the grass.

  * White man.

  Nalik laughed again, and before I had cleared my hook from the jaw ofmy prize he had taken another and then a third, catching each one in hisleft hand with incredible swiftness and throwing them to the boy. Thewomen and girls on the opposite bank laughed and chaffed me, and urgedme 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 tolet a few minutes go whilst he examined the glistening beauty which layquivering and gasping on the sward. It was nearly eighteen inches inlength, its back from the tip of the upper jaw to the tail a brilliantdark blue flecked with tiny specks of red, the sides a burnished silver,changing, as the belly was reached, to a glistening white. The pectoraland lower fins were a pale blue, flecked with somewhat larger spotsof brighter red than those on the back, and the tail showed the samecolouring. In shape it was much like a grayling, particularly aboutthe head; and altogether a more beautiful fresh-water fish I have neverseen.

  We fished for an hour or more, and caught three or four dozen of thisparticular fish as well as eight or nine dark-scaled, stodgy bream,which haunted the centre of the pool where the water was deep. Then asthe 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 madea ground-oven and prepared some of the fish for cooking. Putting asidethe largest--which was reserved for the old chief and myself--Nalik'skindly, gentle-voiced wife, watched the children roll each fish up ina wrapper of green coconut leaf and lay them carefully upon the glowingbed of stones in the oven, together with some scores of long, slendergreen bananas, to serve as a vegetable in place of taro or yams, whichwould take a much longer time to cook. On the top of all was placed thelargest fish, and then the entire oven was rapidly covered up with wildbanana leaves in the shape of a mound.

  The moment Nalik and I had laid down our rods, and whilst the oven wasbeing prepared, Toka and the two other boys sprang into the water atone end of the pool and began to disturb the bottom with their feet. Theyoung girls and women, each carrying a small finely-meshed scoop-net,joined them, and in a tew minutes they had filled a basket withcrayfish, some of which were ten inches in length, and weighed over apound, their tails especially being very large and fleshy.

  "Shall we boil or bake them?" asked Nalik as the basketful was broughtup to me for examination.

  "Boil them," I replied, for I had brought with me several pounds ofcoarse salt taken from our wrecked ship's harness cask and carefullydried in the sun, and a boiled crayfish or crab is better than onebaked--and spoiled.

  A tall, graceful girl, named Seia, came forward with a large woodenbowl, nearly eighteen inches in diameter at the top, and two feet indepth--no light weight even to lift, for at its rim it was over an inchthick. Placing it on the ground in front of Sru and myself, she motionedto the other girls to bring water. They brought her about two gallonsin buckets made of the looped-up leaves of the taro plant, and poured itinto the vessel; then Nalik and old Sru, with rough tongs formed of themidrib of a coconut branch, whipped up eight or ten large red-hot stonesfrom a fire near by, and dropped them into the vessel, the water inwhich at once began to boil and send up a volume of steam as Seia tippedthe entire basketful of crustacean delicacies into the bowl, togetherwith some handfuls of salt. Then a closely-woven mat was placed over thetop and tied round it so as to keep in the heat--that is the way theyboil food in the South Seas with a wooden pot!

  From time to time during the next quarter of an hour more red-hot stoneswere dropped into the bowl until old Sru pronounced the contents to be_tunua_, _i.e._, well and truly cooked, and then whilst the now brightred crayfish were laid out to cool upon platters of green woven coconutleaf, the first oven of fish and bananas was opened.

  What a delightful meal it was! The fat, luscious fish, cooked in theirown juices, each one deftly ridden of its compact coating of silveryscales by the quick hands of the women, and then turned out hot andsmoking upon a platter of leaf, with half a dozen green, baked bananasfor bread! Such fish, and so cooked, surely fall to the lot of few. YourCity professional diner who loves to instruct us in the daily papersabout "how to dine" cannot know anything about the real enjoyment ofeating. He is _blase_ he regulates his stomach to his costume and tothe season, and he eats as fashion dictates he should eat, and fillshis long-suffering stomach with nickety, tin-pot, poisonous "delicacies"which he believes are excellent because they are expensive and areprepared 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, thelargest 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 agreat smooth-leaved pineapple as big as a big man's head, and showingred and green and yellow, and smelling fresh and sweet with the rain ofthe previous night. Near by where we sat was a pile of freshly-huskedyoung coconuts, which a smiling-faced young girl opened for us as wewanted a drink, carefully pouring out upon the ground all the liquidthat remained after Sru and myself had drank, and then putting the emptyshells, with their delicate lining of alabaster flesh, into the fire tobe consumed, for no one not of chiefly rank must partake even of thatwhich is cast aside by a chief or his guests.

  Our first meal of the day finished, we--that is, Nalik, Sru, andmyself--lay down under the shade or the newly-built thatched roof andsmoked our pipes in content, whilst the women and children, attended bythe dogs, bathed in the deepest part of the pool, shouting, laughing,and splashing and diving till they were tired. The dogs, mongrel as theywere, enjoyed the fun as much as their masters, biting and worrying eachother playfully as they swam round and round, and then crawling out uponthe bank, they ran to and fro upon the grassy sward till they too wereglad to rest under the shade of the clump o
f coco-palms.

  In the afternoon--leaving the rest of our party to amuse themselves bycatching crayfish and to make traps for wild pigs--Sru, Nalik, Toka, andmyself set out towards _the_ pool at the head of the river, where, Iwas assured, we were sure to get a pig or two by nightfall. The dogsevidently were equally as certain of this as Nalik and Sru, for themoment they saw the two men pick up their heavy hunting-spears theysprang to their feet and began howling and yelping in concert till theywere beaten into silence by the women. I brought with me a short Snidercarbine--the best and handiest weapon to stop a wild pig at a shortrange--and a double-barrelled muzzle-loading shot-gun. The latter I gaveto the "devil" to carry, and promised him that he should fire at leastfive shots from it at pigeons or mountain fowl before we returned to thevillage.

  Following a narrow footpath which led along the right bank of thestream, we struck directly into the heart of the mountain forest, and ina few minutes the voices, shouts, and laughter of our companions soundedas if they were miles and miles away. Now and then as we got deeperinto the dark, cool shade caused by the leafed dome above, we heardthe shrill cry of the long-legged mountain cock--a cry which I canonly describe as an attempt at the ordinary barnyard rooster's"cock-a-doodle-do" combined with the scream of a cat when its tail istrodden upon by a heavy-booted foot. Here in these silent, darkenedaisles of the forest it sounded weird and uncanny in the extreme, andaroused an intense desire to knock the creature over; but I forebore tofire, although we once had a view of a fine bird, attended by a hen andchicks, scurrying across the leaf-strewn ground not fifty feet away.Everywhere around us the great grey pigeons were sounding their boomingnotes from the branches overhead, but of these too we took no heed, fora 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 speciesof white cedar, whose branches were literally swarming with doves andpigeons, feeding upon small, sweet-scented berries about the size ofEnglish haws. Here we rested awhile, the dogs behaving splendidly bylying down quietly and scarcely moving as they watched me taking off myboots and putting on a pair of cinnet (coir fibre) sandals. Just beneathus was a deep canyon, at the bottom of which, so Nalik said, was a tinyrivulet 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 thickroots of the _ti_," said Nalik to me in a low voice. "They come hereto root them up at this time of the year, before the wild yams are wellgrown, and the _ti_ both fattens and sweetens. Let us start."

  At a sign from Sru, Nalilc and the boy Toka, followed by the dogs, wentoff towards the head of the canyon, so as to drive down to the old manand myself any pigs which might be feeding above, whilst we slippedquietly down the side of the spur to the bank of the rivulet. Srucarried my gun (which I had loaded with ball) as well as his spear. Ihad my Snider.

  We had not long to wait, for presently we heard the dogs give cry, andthe silence of the forest was broken by the demoniac yells of Nalik andthe "devil," who had started a party of two boars and half a dozensows with their half-grown progeny, which were lying down around thebuttressed sides of a great tika-tree. They (the pigs) came down theside 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 enormoustusks--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 adear little black and yellow striped four-months'-old porker went underto the other barrel with a broken spine. Then in another three or fourminutes we were kicking and "belting" about half of the dogs, who,maddened by the smell of blood from the wounded animals, sprang uponthem and tried to tear them to pieces; the rest of the pack (Heaven savethe term!) had followed the flying swine down the canyon; they turned upat the camp some three or four hours later with bloodied jaws and gorgedto distension.

  The boar which Sru had shot was lean enough in all conscience, butthe young sow and the four-months'-old porker were as round-bodied asbarrels, 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 reachof the dogs, and sent Toka back to the camp to tell the women to comeand carry them away.

  Then, as we had still another hour or two of daylight, and I longed tosee the deep, deep pool at the head of the river, even if it were butfor a few moments, the old chief Nalik and I started off.

  It lay before us with many, many bars of golden sunlight striking downthrough the trees and trying to penetrate its calm, placid bosom withtheir warm, loving rays. Far below the sound of the waterfall sung tothe dying day, and, as we listened, there came to us the dulled, distantmurmur of the combing breakers upon the reef five miles away.

  "'Tis a fair, good place this, is it not?" whispered Nalik, as he satbeside me--"a fair, good place, though it be haunted by the spirits."

  "Aye, a fair, sweet place indeed," I answered, "and this pool aid theriver below shall for ever be in my dreams when I am far away fromhere."