This was almost too ghastly for me to envisage. How long would it take for a head to snap off? A month? Two? What about the flies? Did anyone trip over the heads? That first skull looked a little battered.
We moseyed on. The village, what remained of it, was densely overgrown. Was it always so? I asked.
“No,” Chief Jamino said. “This was all cleared. The village was abandoned because it was too far from the water source. But we keep it overgrown because we don’t want other tribes to find it. They will disturb it.”
“You mean the Big Nambas?”
“Yes, the Big Nambas.”
Then he related an interesting tale. A few months earlier, the chief of a Big Namba village asked Chief Jamino for a curious favor. His village, the Big Namba chief said, was disturbed. The spirits were unhappy. Ghosts were tormenting the people. The villagers were suffering one misfortune after another. Could they please have some of their bones back? he asked. The chief felt this would appease the spirits. “So we gave him some bones, and now the village is peaceful again.”
“And do you keep many bones here?” I asked.
“Yes, there are many bones. You will see.”
We walked on to what was once the village chief’s throne, a stone-slab easy chair that rested on a rise. “The chief sit here, and the assistant chief stand there,” Chief Jamino said, gesturing. “Like in a parliament.”
Below, in a clearing surrounded by enormous banyan trees, was where the village ceremonies occurred. “This is where the captured men were brought,” Chief Jamino informed me. “We give them kava. And then they were made to dance.”
Dance?
“And then we kill them.”
“How?” I asked.
“With clubs,” Chief Jamino replied.
“And then what?”
“And then we eat them.”
Well, I thought, here was my chance to get the nitty-gritty details of cannibalism. I asked the chief how they prepared the men they were about to eat. How was the flesh cooked?
“We cut the man into small pieces and put it inside the bamboo. And then we roast it over the fire.”
“Did you use any seasoning?” Well, I was curious.
“No, only the meat.”
“Were there any parts of the man you didn’t eat?” I asked. If I were a cannibal, I figured, there would certainly be a few parts I wouldn’t touch.
“No,” the chief said. “We eat the whole man.” I absorbed this. Then Chief Jamino added: “But not the woman. We don’t eat the woman, and the woman don’t eat the man. The woman was used as a messenger from village to village.”
Well, I thought. There’s at least one upside to being a woman in Vanuatu.
Chief Jamino led me to a large pile of what I took to be stones. “This is where we put the bones,” the chief said. And so they were. The bones stretched the length of a school bus, stacked waist high. These were the remains of the Big Nambas that the Small Nambas had devoured. “This is a thigh bone,” the chief said, plucking out a calcified limb.
Finally, I asked Chief Jamino what I had come all this way for. “Why did you eat people? Was it a ritual, where you had to destroy an enemy completely so that he doesn’t attack you in the spirit world?”
“No,” he said. “In former times before the whiteman come, there were many men but not much meat. And so we kill the men for eating.”
And that’s all I really wanted to know.
IHAD ALWAYS BEEN FOND OF NATURE. PROVOCATIVE AND outlandish as that might seem, it’s true. That fondness, however, didn’t mean I had any great desire to climb a twenty-five-thousand-foot mountain—where’s the fun in oxygen depletion?—or dogsled across the frozen tundra. I just liked knowing that nature was there, out there, somewhere. Sitting in a heated living room, watching the nature channel on television, I’d find myself hoping that the animals of the world were all as comfortable as I was. If there was anything I could do for them, I’d be happy to send a check.
In Vanuatu, however, it doesn’t take one long to realize that nature might not be so benign. There are no koala bears on these islands. There are, however, sharks. And moray eels too. One day, we had been snorkeling above a coral reef in Mele Bay. I had finally mastered the skill of diving ten feet or so below the surface without inhaling copious amounts of water, and as I plunged to get a closer look at the angelfish clustered in the coral I was startled to find myself face-to-face with a moray eel. If there is a more frightening-looking beast in the world, I hope never to encounter it. This was five feet of electrically charged muscle attached to a face not even a mother could love. Immediately I swallowed a gallon of seawater.
“Moray eel,” I sputtered once I had reached the surface.
“Did you see the jellyfish?” Sylvia asked. I had seen it, a translucent blob of poison riding the current. A few moments later, as we swam back to shore, we found ourselves giving a wide berth to a brightly banded venomous sea snake.
It was the centipedes in Vanuatu, however, that had me rethinking my affinity for nature. These creatures—insect is such an inadequate word—terrified me. It was the cat who had noticed the first one. He had been given to us by our friend Adam, who had called one day and said, “I know just what you need.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do. What you need is a kitten.”
“Adam,” I said, “I do not want a kitten.”
“Excellent. I’ll be right over.”
“No, Adam, seriously. I do not want a kitten. I am a kitten hater.”
“Fantastic. You’re going to love this kitten.”
“Please don’t do this to me. Just because you have been grossly negligent with your cat…what’s her name again?”
“Ms. Muggles.”
“Just because you have allowed Ms. Muggles to become a shameless fornicator—”
“Hey, that’s Ms. Muggles you’re talking about.”
“Adam, please, no kittens.”
“Great. I’ll be right over.”
We called him Pip. Or, rather, I called him Pip. Sylvia called him Your Cat, as in Your Cat just shit on the floor again. In Kiribati, dogs and cats had intuited that, unlike the I-Kiribati, we were unlikely to kill them, and so eventually we had found ourselves hosting a cat and a half-dozen dogs. Sylvia did not want to repeat the experience. Port Vila too had its share of wild dogs and cats. Sylvia sensed—perhaps correctly—that word would get around in the animal community that we were pushovers and soon we’d be feeding and cleaning up after a dozen strays.
Like most kittens, Pip was spirited and affectionate. I daresay he may have even been cute. A black and white ball of fur, he was particularly talkative. While I worked on my book, he’d spend his time mewing at the various lizards and spiders that periodically stopped by for a visit. Now and then, to amuse myself, I’d lift Pip up to the ceiling where the lizards had crawled out of the reach of his claws. He’d get a good sniff of lizard, and then I’d set him down and watch him scamper up furniture and make spectacular, though futile, leaps into the air, straining to reach the reptiles. You had no idea, did you, that the writing life could be so exciting.
One morning, however, I was gamely trying to ignore the cat. As was his habit, he leapt up onto the dining table where I worked on my laptop. Typically, Pip enjoyed walking on the keyboard and leaving his print on my manuscript—gtyhjb was a favorite contribution. I went to shove him off and, unusually for him, he drew his claws, embedding them in the wooden table.
“No, Pip,” I admonished. “You can’t do that. We’re renters.”
Meeeooowww, he howled. He curled his back. His fur stood straight up, as if he had been playing with the electric socket.
“Off, Pip.” I picked him up, intending to set him down, and that’s when I saw it. A centipede.
Until I saw this particular critter, I had always thought that all centipedes were like those small hundred-legged insects one periodically encounters in North America. On a nuisance scale, a cen
tipede, at least in my experience, ranked far below a mouse, perhaps just a fraction higher than a cricket. A Vanuatu centipede, however, is a different beast altogether. On the nuisance scale, I’d put it up there with a rattlesnake. A Vanuatu centipede is, to begin with, a carnivore. Yes, that’s right. Vanuatu centipedes eat meat. Now, I’m no entomologist, but you’d think that fact alone would be enough to bump it out of the insect classification. Second, they are venomous. They kill their prey by injecting it with venom, and have two pincers near their head designed for this very purpose. And then there’s this: Their legs are venomous too. Centipedes can have upwards of three hundred legs. Ponder that, if you will. Now, three hundred legs, of course, need to be connected to something—something large enough to carry three hundred legs. You might conclude, then, and rightly so, that Vanuatu centipedes are big, very big. They can grow to be more than a foot long. And they are nearly indestructible. You may think that you’ve solved the problem by chopping a centipede in two, but in fact, what you have just done is create two angry, scurrying missiles of poison.
And, as I was now discovering, the centipedes in Vanuatu are hideous to behold. I had leapt on top of the table and joined Pip in contemplating the horror that was scampering across the floor. This particular centipede was nearly a foot long. Even a ladybug of those dimensions would have sent me scooting toward high ground. A Vanuatu centipede, however, does not have pretty coloring. It looks remarkably like the Darth Vader of the insect world, armored and menacing, exuding malice. This, I agreed with Pip, was trouble.
Just then the telephone rang. “Why don’t you get it, Pip?”
The cat wasn’t leaving the table. He stalked and paced with an upturned tail, mewing and moaning, and it was clear that he expected me to deal with the bug. Here, I thought, was a perfectly fine opportunity for the cat to finally capture an animal, but Pip, alas, had been seized by a primal fear. “It’s actually a lizard,” I told him, but he paid me no mind.
The telephone kept ringing. Hang up already, I thought. I’ve got a little problem slithering between me and the phone. The centipede was in no hurry. Its innumerable legs moved it a few feet in one direction, where it would pause and rise up, sensors sensing, and then it would amble a few feet in another direction. It was like watching the world’s scariest Slinky. But this Slinky could move, if it so chose. There’s a lot of propulsion available when you have a hundred-plus legs.
Still the telephone rang.
I descended from the table. It had been creaking ominously. I tiptoed around the room, hugging the walls, maintaining eye contact with the loathsome critter at all times.
“Hello!” I yelped.
“You’re not going to believe what’s coming,” Sylvia began, then stopped. “Are you all right? You sound funny.”
“Yeah…well…I’m being stared down by a centipede.”
“So kill it,” she said.
“No, you don’t understand,” I said, climbing on top of the couch. “It’s a very large centipede.”
“Just grab a paper towel,” Sylvia advised.
“Paper towel?” I bleated. “I’ll call you back later.”
I hung up the phone, bounded into the bedroom, and shut the door. Could the centipede get under the door? I wondered. It was, I estimated, about two inches thick. Yes, probably. I dashed into the closet and grabbed my jeans, as yet unworn in the tropics. I quickly put them on. Then I reached for socks, also unworn. I tucked the jeans into the socks. Then I put on the heavy work boots I had brought to Vanuatu for reasons I could no longer remember. So attired, I reemerged into the tiled living room, the kill zone. The hunted would become the hunter.
The phone rang.
“What?” I barked.
“Be really, really careful with that centipede,” Sylvia said. “I mentioned it to the people at work. Did you know that they’re poisonous? One bite, they said, is enough to kill a child.”
“Paper towel, then?”
“No! Don’t use a paper towel.”
“I’ll call you back.” I hung up the phone.
I tentatively approached the centipede. It stopped ambling. It seemed to sense that something was amiss. I raised my foot. Suddenly, it dashed. I squealed pathetically and jumped on top of the couch.
The phone rang.
“Did you kill it?” Sylvia asked.
“No. I haven’t had a chance. I’ve been on the phone.”
“You have to crush all of it,” she informed me. “If you only smash half of it, the other half lives on.”
I hung up.
Once again, I stalked the centipede. It had stopped in the middle of the room. I moved along the walls until I was behind the beast. The cat, still on the table, wailed. Inching forward, I raised my boot. I stomped it down just as the centipede bolted. I crushed its tail with a sickening splat. The rest of the centipede scurried on, now panicked and in a bad temper. I brought my other foot down. The centipede splattered with a grotesque crack, spewing copious amounts of centipede innards. And then I kept stomping. Splat! Splat! Splat!
It was probably dead, I thought. To make sure, I flattened it some more. Splat! It stank horribly. I had never smelled anything so noxious. Not even the cat would approach it.
“A lot of help you were.”
The phone rang.
“Did you kill it?” Sylvia asked.
“Yes. I have defended the hearth.”
I spent a moment recounting the adventure.
“Do you think there are more?” Sylvia wondered.
This was not a thought I wanted to linger on. Was this centipede a lone wolf among his kind, a distant wanderer, lost from his companions? Or were we living with a den of centipedes? Quite likely it was the latter. The splattered centipede was certainly an anomaly in one way. Centipedes are nocturnal creatures, preferring the darkness. Were there in reality dozens of centipedes wandering about while we slept, doing scary centipede things? Could I ever sleep again?
“Well, the reason I called the first time,” Sylvia continued, “was to let you know that there’s a cyclone forming just north of the Torres Islands.”
So much excitement already, and it wasn’t even ten in the morning. I looked outside. It was sunny and calm, though oppressively hot. I have, I confess, a slight weather fetish. Few things make me happier than a blizzard or a spectacular thunderstorm. I had once even contemplated spending a summer chasing tornadoes. In Washington, whenever there was a hurricane pummeling Florida, I’d eagerly watch the news, envying the brave, brave TV correspondents, reporting that the wind was picking up and any moment now their umbrellas were sure to fail. There was always a shot of people merrily goofing around on the beach in Key West, people who had ignored the evacuation orders and were carelessly enjoying the scene as the winds increased from gale to hurricane strength. Drunken idiots is what most people called them. I saw them as fellow travelers.
Cyclones are hurricanes, and just as hurricanes in the Atlantic are named, so too are cyclones in the South Pacific. Ours was to be called Paula, and as it gathered strength in the Coral Sea northwest of Vanuatu, I followed its progress with a perverse sense of anticipation. Though Vanuatu averages two or three cyclones a year, there had been an unusual dearth of them in the region recently. The Ni-Vanuatu I spoke with, not unreasonably, thought that this was a good thing. Everyone spoke of Cyclone Uma, which had walloped Vanuatu in 1987, causing considerable damage. Scores of boats had been lost in Vila Harbor. The metal lampposts, I was confidently informed, had been bent in half. Many of the downtown roofs had been shorn off. The villages, of course, suffered even more cruelly. The people on the outer islands had taken shelter under the massive roots of banyan trees, the age-old cyclone shelter, only to return to find that their villages of thatch no longer existed. Shelter, however, was easily replaced. It doesn’t take long to build a traditional home using locally available materials. More difficult, however, was replacing the fruit trees that had been lost, and upon which a good deal of the country’s p
opulation depended for sustenance.
I certainly didn’t wish for a repeat of Cyclone Uma. I was hoping for a middling cyclone, the kind that would offer optimum weather drama while producing, ideally, no damage whatsoever. I wasn’t sure if such a cyclone existed, but if it did, I wanted to experience it.
Over the next few days, the weather became unbearably sticky and humid, a sure precursor to a storm. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere, and yet everything was damp and soppy. The heat and humidity were such that we even considered turning on the window unit air conditioner in our bedroom. This required considerable fortitude on our part. Since our arrival, three geckoes had somehow managed to die deep within its bowels. I had disassembled as much of the unit as I dared and scraped out what I could of the lizards’ carcasses. But much remained, slowly, ever so slowly, decomposing beside our bed.
“I can’t take this heat anymore,” Sylvia said one night as we lay side by side, sweating in the darkness. “Let’s turn on the air conditioner.”
I closed the windows, sealing the room, and turned the unit on. It clanked and thudded and groaned and eventually began to whir, suffusing the room with a cool, humid air that stank of dead reptiles.
“I can’t take this smell,” I declared a half hour later. “Let’s open the windows.”
So we opened the windows and the odor slowly melted away, along with the hard-won coolness. Again we sweated miserably.
After a few nights of this, even Sylvia was looking forward to a cyclone, anything that would end the sweltering misery. I believed most of the town was of a similar line of thinking. Nothing, I felt, burdens a person’s disposition more thoroughly than unrelenting heat and humidity. Vila was generally a friendly town. But now, as people stood fanning themselves in the shade, quietly suffering through the cruel stillness and the enervating stickiness, tempers began to flare, sudden bursts of frustration that broke through the unhappy listlessness.
And then, one morning, Radio Vanuatu announced, in three languages, that the arrival of Cyclone Paula was imminent. All precautions should be made. Those living in low-lying areas should move to higher ground. Homes should be secured, shutters installed. Bulletins would be announced every hour, updating listeners on the cyclone’s progress. It would hit that evening.
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