Aplonis metallicus, male. Koli Point. May 21, 1943. The colonial starling. Jim had come across a colony of thirty or so pendulous nests hanging from a single tree, like the nests of weaver birds but scruffier. He’d drawn a quick sketch, which Tosca recognizes.
And here, down at the bottom of the pack, something the boy’s never seen before—the skinning set. He extracts each sharp, shiny tool, running his thumb against the blade of the small scalpel to test its sharpness, looking up at Jim with new respect.
“You alsem kastom man?” he asks, wondering if these instruments are for some sort of magic or medical use.
Jim shakes his head.
“Birds,” he says, lifting his hands, looking skyward, not knowing how to explain himself.
That evening, after hours spent tuning the radio, Jim bushwhacks to the middle of the island and shoots a whistler with his .410. The report of the gun is louder than he expected, out here on the lagoon without the muffle of true jungle. Flocks of coconut lorries rise from the trees squawking. A solitary Brahminy kite flaps up on vast wings. He’ll have to be more cautious.
Squatting side by side with Tosca, Jim demonstrates the use of his tools, skinning and stuffing the small whistler in minutes.
Once the boy knows of Jim’s interest, he can’t help showing off. Jim watches the elusive green pygmy parrot scuttling down a coconut palm headfirst like a nuthatch—the boy snares one in a small trap made of reeds. Then shows Jim where the tiny parrots have excavated a nest in a large termite mound on the side of a tree.
After a day spent helping Jim construct a lookout at the top of a tall canarium tree, weaving sago palm and creepers, cleverly concealing footholds inside epiphytes, Tosca takes Jim by the hand, and leads him to the burrow of a boobook owl. There, in a small cavity at the base of a tree, two tiny fledglings with great yellow eyes blink in the unfamiliar light of his torch. Jim switches it off and lets them be.
Later the boy ties ferns under the platform so that no Jap could ever see them.
“Sitting Duck to Marine Headquarters, come in,” Jim says over and over, fiddling with the dials of the radio, twirling them back and forth while Tosca shinnies up a tree to position the antennae. The radio’s bulky, weighing thirty pounds, with an equally heavy battery and generator. They’ve built a waterproof shelter for it, hidden away from their own campsite. If Japs come, it’s the first thing they have to destroy.
Finally, a crackly whine. “Come in, Sitting Duck. Read you loud and clear.”
The call of doves is ever-present on the island, like the wash of the reef, the rustling of palms. The soft coo-oo-coo-who of the red-throated fruit dove. The more guttural roll of the Ptilinopus superbus. Still the fruit doves prove most elusive to track. Jim perches on a fallen trunk, his neck cramping as he looks up. Until Tosca, bare feet tucked under him, cups his hands to his lips to imitate their call. A moment later, a gorgeous dove flaps out, followed by two others. Olive green and scarlet materializing from the thick foliage of a ficus tree.
It’s then Jim decides to have the boy help him collect. Hell, they have a month. Between watching for Jap ships and making their radio reports, they have time to acquire as complete a series as possible of the birds of Layla Island. It’d be a waste not to. The boy’s a natural, snaring or bringing down a bird with a small arrow cut from the midrib of a palm, or a slingshot, as easily as he can spear a fish. So that Jim need hardly use his shotgun.
While patrolling and keeping watch from their tree, Jim explains as much as he can about museum work and the study of ornithology, taxonomy, and labeling. He draws a small map in the sand to explain something of the Wallace line: the sharp division that separates the flora and fauna of Asia from Australia. He tells Tosca about the New York museum’s South Sea Expedition, which sent collectors to these islands, even to the Wanawana.
Then, before it gets dark—the night comes down quickly here—he sends the boy back to their campsite. They take turns sleeping and keeping watch.
In the morning, after he’s made his radio report, before the Jap planes can make it down from Rabaul or Buin, Jim teaches the boy to skin. They swim in the blue shallows.
If he ever gets off this island, he’ll send their skins to the museum and make sure Tosca gets credit for all the birds he’s trapped and prepared. Christ, they might find something new to add to Mann’s study of dispersal and speciation. A new species or subspecies, a new endemic or a bird that hadn’t been found in the Wanawana before.
Radio report: Sitting Duck to Marine Headquarters. Come in. Come in. This is Sitting Duck. June 18, 0700. Cloud and rain at present over the Wanawana. Visibility to Kolombangara and Rendova poor. Looks set to stay that way. Ninety degrees at present and heating up. Surface craft busy throughout the night. Three destroyers sighted heading southeast around Kolombangara. Six cargo ships and two oilers steaming south toward the Blanche Channel. Three troop barges moving eastward toward the west coast of New Georgia. No landings observed last night on Rendova.
Field notes: Zosterops. June 18, 1943. Snared two white-eyes. Both male. Let one go. Forehead and eye black, bill yellow, belly yellow, sides of breast olive, white eye ring. 4½ inches.
Radio report: Sitting Duck to Marine Headquaters. Come in. Come in. This is Sitting Duck. June 22, 1100 hours. A squadron of thirty bombers, twenty-two fighters just passed over heading your way, south-southwest over Munda, toward Guadalcanal.
Field notes: Ptilinopus viridis. June 22, 1943. Red-throated fruit dove. High in ficus tree, SE side of Layla. 8½ inches. Head and chin, dark gray green and olive. Wings and tail, olive green with pale gray shoulder patch and gray spots on the tertials. Lower breast and abdomen deeper green. Under tail-coverts yellow. Throat, crimson. Iris, orange. Bill, yellow. Feet, red. Crop full of fig seeds. Gonads enlarged.
So beautiful you almost regret shooting it.
Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine, July 1973
Jim has a pilot’s map he kept from the war. Elongated, thin, designed to fit in the instrument panel of a Grumman Wildcat or a Douglas bomber. He extracts the paper from a stained, battered envelope and unfolds it along the kitchen counter.
It’s strange for Cadillac to see her home this way—from the bird’s-eye view of a bomber or fighter pilot. The familiar green shapes of her island overlaid with red circles and arcs that spread from Munda airfield like ripples. Fifty miles to Vella Lavella, one hundred fifty to Bougainville, further up the island chain where the Americans went after New Georgia.
There by Jim’s knobbed index finger, she can see her mother’s place. A cluster of huts set back in the shade of pawpaw, and the broad, thick leaves of a mango tree. A platform of woven sago palm between them. The separate hut for cooking. She shuts her eyes and hears the sound of the rain thudding on the thatch roof, thwacking the thick leaves of the mango tree. So heavy it digs red rivulets in the ground that run down toward the sea. Behind her, her brothers argue. She hears her mother chatting with some aunties who’ve stopped by. They chew betel and spit the red juice onto green leaves. Someone’s rolled a cigarette. She can smell the rough smoke of tobacco.
When it stops raining, her mother will call her to go to their garden, where they will hoe neat lines in the dirt and shape small hummocks with their hands for planting taro, yams, and cassava; train tendrils of peanuts onto bamboo sticks; and tend to the small stands of sugarcane and betel. Her mother’s hands and knees red from the earth.
“We live here, at Enogai, near the village of Bairoko.” She points to the place on the map.
Bairoko: a major Jap encampment. The main staging ground and resupply route for reinforcements from Kolombangara. It was one of the marines’ first objectives, a place they hoped to take in a matter of days. But the Japs managed to keep it right through August. Holding the Americans down in the jungle—hungry, injured, sick, pounded by machine guns and mortar fire. Though they
at least managed to capture the two 140-millimeter coastal guns at Enogai.
Jim remembers a vast explosion, July 6, the night after the landings to the north of Enogai. The whole sky over Kohinggo lit up with flames and smoke. Later he learned it was the cruiser Helena, hit by torpedoes; that six hundred men had been rescued at sea, pulled up onto the decks of destroyers slick with oil. While two hundred others, clinging together in a flotilla of life jackets and life rafts, had swept north to the coast of Vella Lavella to be rescued by Coastwatchers.
She stands next to him, the map spread out before them on the table. Jim peers down through half-rimmed reading glasses, which make him look gentler, almost scholarly. She notices that he lets her stand closer than usual, on the left side with the stump. He lays Tosca’s skinned whistler on the windowsill above the sink.
Can he see her mother’s place? The sweet ginger and spicy turmeric planted near the huts to ward off bad spirits? The heady smell of Evodia flowers drifting across from the reef islands? She’d heard the stories of how the saltwater people moved into the bush when the war came, erecting makeshift shelters, moving on when they had to. How they shied away from lighting fires in case they attracted planes, and sent their boys to sneak back to their gardens at night. Cadillac’s own mother had been ten. She’d had to forage in the bush for wild yams and taros, fern hearts, and spinach, wild plants she still calls hunger food.
By the time Jim got there, all coastal villages would have been abandoned. No women would have been working their gardens. No children jumping into the sea.
Cadillac remembers her grandmother twirling her wrinkled hands in the air to describe the swoops of airplanes flying overhead, diving, somersaulting, and plunging into the sea. Blowing out her cheeks to mimic the crashing of planes and bombs. Still astonished, thirty years later, by the strange figures of pilots falling through the air with parachutes. The great gray ships that bombarded the shore. Teasing her sister, who she said had thrown herself on the ground each time a plane flew over.
They were warned and threatened too. If anyone was caught rescuing or aiding the invaders, Donald Kennedy and his boys would strip them, stretch them over a barrel, and whip them with a cane made of rattan. If you neglected to salute, Kennedy would strike you with his walking stick. Once he’d hit a Japanese prisoner across the face with the butt of his rifle. Tosca had been one of Kennedy’s boys. He spoke of these incidents openly, without embarrassment, so Cadillac couldn’t tell if he approved or not.
As a girl, Cadillac swung off the great Japanese guns near her mother’s place, which by then had rusted into place with their long barrels pointing out to sea. She slid down bomb craters in the bush nearby. Swam out to the rusty transport boats that lay on their sides in the bay with great holes ripped through them.
The wreckage of Jim’s war lay all around. They grew up in it. Rolls of barbed wire rusting in the jungle, dented canteens that washed up on the beach, medicine jars still full of antimalarials, knives, bullets.
If they found any of these things, they’d bring them to a man in Munda, who’d give them a piece of chewing gum or candy or a Solomon Islands cent. He had a whole collection and built a big thatched hut to keep it in. American helmets, canteens, eyeglasses, baseball mitts on one side. Japanese swords, knives, sake jugs on the other. Strange as Tosca’s birds.
Inside the wrecked transport boats, reefs grew in the rusted hulls. Cadillac and her brothers could swim out and catch colorful fish gliding in and around the twisted metal. In Jim’s day, the sea around the sunken ships would have been thick with oil and sharks.
Ready to fold up the map and put it away, Jim glances at Cadillac and sees her eyes are closed as if she’s in some trance or clutch of homesickness. Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to remember the war, these islands. He’s not sure it would be at all right to burden the girl with his past, or Tosca’s, for that matter.
She sits cross-legged in the bow of Tosca’s canoe, her brothers just behind, all three of them grinning with anticipation. It’s stopped raining and he paddles out into the blue of the Kula Gulf, south toward the narrow Diamond Passage. He knows the place, and finds it by aligning the canoe precisely between a hut on Kohinggo and a tall palm at Enogai. They peer over the sides to see the unfocused outline of a fighter plane shimmering down some twenty feet underwater.
“The famous Wildcat,” Tosca crows. He watches them leap in, his three children swimming down through the warm blue sea, their bodies becoming wriggly and fishlike the deeper they go.
Down, down, until the shimmery mirage, this ghost wreck, becomes real. Cadillac clutches the metal wing to hold herself down while her brothers silently dare each other to swim into the cockpit, positioning themselves before the rusted control stick. Kicking over to the nose, she runs her fingers along the blades of the propellers, searching for nicks where bullets hit, then runs her hands along the side to the hole where a bullet had pierced the fuel tank.
She stays down as long as she can, holding her breath until she feels her lungs will burst.
Papuan hornbill, Rhyticeros plicatus
The hornbill hops around the cooking hut, braying like a mischievous half-wit.
“Shu, shu.” Her mother waves him away with a wooden spoon, throws a hot stone from the fire. But the pesky bird only flies up to the top of the cooking hut, still deafening her with his loud protests.
“Aie, aie, disfella bird makim ears bilong me sore tumas,” she complains.
“Owee, you lookim alsem devil devil bird,” her brothers scoff, marveling at the bird’s huge horny beak with its serrated casque, the naked pale blue skin around his eyes, his preposterously flirtatious eyelashes.
The bird likes to throw things up in the air. He tosses his food up, catches and swallows it whole, later regurgitating anything he can’t digest, the hard pips of fruit and fish bones. They teach him to catch sticks, rewarding him with a lizard or piece of fish. Like a dog, except he’s cleverer than a dog and soon starts to toss a stick and catch it all by himself. Mistaking their laughter and applause maybe for the croaking of other hornbills. Then pesters and honks boisterously for the food he expects as a reward.
“Shu, shu. Go way ’long bush.” He’s becoming a pest, although to Cadillac a lovable one. Then, the final insult—he starts trying to mate her mother’s shin in a brazen attempt to win her over or to subdue the person who likes him least. And Tosca’s forced to take the bird back to the wild, back to Kohinggo, where he found it. All three of them go with him in the canoe because they love this bird. He’s become another sibling or playmate to them. Cadillac’s brothers sit on either side, chatting away to keep him calm. The hornbill’s feet tied down so he doesn’t fly back.
There are flocks of hornbills on Kohinggo. Cadillac can hear them across the water, braying and grunting. Their own bird grows excited by the noise and begins to flap his huge wings. And when Tosca unties his feet, he flies greedily, unceremoniously away. Up to the top of a tall ficus tree as if he’d never cared for them in the first place.
They’ve come a long way, fifteen miles or so. Tosca paddles to shore to cook some food. After they’ve eaten, he leads them into the bush to show them where he found the fledgling bird. The hornbill nest is in a hollow halfway up the side of a tree, plastered up with a cement made of mud, spit, and feces which has hardened like brick.
The female’s inside, Tosca tells them, walled up in that dark, tight space with only a narrow slit open to the world outside. In there, she will have molted and shed her tail feathers for bedding and to give herself more room to maneuver. And she’ll stay cooped up for a full two months until her eggs hatch and her babies are half-grown. Then smash her way out with her big beak.
They wait huddled together in the bush close enough to get a good view, keep silent and still until the male arrives. Clutching the bark with his feet, using his frayed tail to hold himself in place near
the small hole, he bobs his great head back and forth to bring up his food. Then they see the female—at least her beak—emerging through the slit in the plaster as the male passes her his regurgitated figs. The tips of their huge ungainly beaks meet almost delicately, click tenderly one against the other.
When he mated their mother’s shin, did their hornbill imagine this? That he could thereafter get their mother to climb into a small hole where she would wall herself in and he would feed her regurgitated fruit?
At the bottom of the tree is a small pile of pips and fish bones, a pyramid of guano. It’s what alerted Tosca to the nest in the first place. And now he makes them wait longer until one of the birds inside the tree squirts a small projectile through the narrow slit. A sight that makes her brothers collapse with laughter.
Tosca corrects, explaining that the hornbill in this way is a good housekeeper, not polluting her own nest with pekpek like other birds. “Disfella, he no buggerup house belonghim,” he says.
Hornbills, he tells them, mate for life and, like humans, will go to this extraordinary length to protect their young. It’s what Cadillac’s thought all along, the hornbill like another child, another brother, only a smaller, sillier one.
And their own hornbill does care. He flies out, following the canoe when they leave, but Tosca shoos him off with his paddle, not allowing the bird to land. “Go bek. Go bek. Mi Mari she say you eat tumas.”
“And shit tumas,” her brothers add, waving their arms.
The hornbill croaks forlornly, tries to approach from the other side. Finally, he gives up and turns back with a loud swooshing of wings they can hear for some distance.
“Go now, go ’long home belongyou,” Tosca’s saying.
A week or so later, Cadillac insists her father take her back. Once again, they hear the flock honking, tooting, grunting from across the sea. And she sees her own bird brother there hopping along the shore. She can tell it’s him by the way he turns and eyes her with a huffy nonchalance. Then flicks a lizard into the air and swallows it whole.
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