To Run Across the Sea (25 page)

The evening wore on. The children were growing tired and began to quarrel; a fox escaped; an angry man drew a pistol and fired it into the air, was pacified and led away. Thais are encouraged to throw water at each other on this day, and a party of embarrassed, giggling girls, fearing that we might feel left out, presented themselves with a bowl to give us a wetting. A meal was served. This, too, was a matter of ritual and routine. Nobody wanted the ants’ eggs but some pretence of eating them had to be made. Few diners in all probability enjoyed the baked honeycomb with young bees cooked in their waxen cells. Like our neighbours we helped ourselves to a token spoonful apiece, and like them we made hardly more than a polite effort with the earth-coloured, glutinous rice.

With the sun low in the sky, Surin was becoming nervous at the guide’s non-appearance. Then the news came through that the Bangkok road was blocked following a multiple car-crash, with an ensuing tail-back all the way to Lampang. The belief was that mobile cranes would have to be brought down from Chiang Mai—a possibility that was accepted with huge philosophy. Among excited cries from the children, revived by the emergency, families prepared to settle in their cars for the night. Those free from family obligations called for more
mekong
to be brought, and about a hundred people were now dancing the
Ramwong
. Surin gave up all hope of the guide’s arrival, but explained that there was too much at stake for him to abandon the night hunt, saying we would have to do the best we could without the guide. There was nothing for it but to agree.

The light was already failing by the time we disentangled the mini-van from the cars left at the roadside. A mile back in the direction of Chiang Mai we turned into a dirt track wandering through low hills in the direction—as Surin thought—of the National Park. After a while the peak of Doi Khun Tan appeared as a dark triangle separated from its base by a sash of mist, and afloat in the green aftermath of the vanished sun. The track branched and then branched again. This was a journey without maps and all we could do was to take the fork that appeared to lead towards the mountain. We stopped for directions at the village where the lamps were already out, and dogs raised a hideous clamour. Surin got a villager out of bed, who seemed not only annoyed at the disturbance but evasive. When questioned as to the precise lay-out of the park he replied in a threatening fashion that we were already in it and that a full-time warden lived just down the road. Villagers with lighted lamps were beginning to appear in doorways and, according to Surin, the man, turning his back, said, ‘Go now, and leave us in peace.’ We started off again and Surin said, ‘They should offer water with their blessing for the New Year. This they did not do. They were not polite.’

The track narrowed. Surin switched on the headlights and the jungle turned to white plaster, the trees appearing very close. After a while, we reached a clearing. I thought of the angry villagers and the full-time warden with his gun somewhere down the road, and told Surin we should turn round and go back. This he refused to do, shaking his head with furious vehemence. ‘There are deer,’ he said. ‘Now, one hour after sunset is the best time. To shoot one deer is no risk. One only we shoot, then we go back. After that we will have a good year.’

The car creaked and crunched its way softly down into a tunnel among the trees. Leaves like a million small mirrors caught and held the glare of the headlights. Winged insects swam towards us like shoals of fish through the beams. Small, yellow lamps hung in the whitened branches above us. Surin whispered that they were the eyes of owls. Points of light pricking from the embowered shadows betrayed the presence of alerted animals; red light was flashed back by cats and rodents of many kinds; white light by boars and deer.

Surin pulled up. ‘Now we shall walk,’ he said. We climbed down and he went to the back of the van to reach in for the equipment; a battery haversack feeding the latest Japanese jack-light on a headband with a three-position switch giving a 5,000-candle-power maximum beam throw, effective at up to 150 metres. ‘I have one for you, too,’ he said. I shook my head. He fixed the haversack in position and slipped the padded headband over his forehead, and I helped with the straps. He had a small calibre rifle of the kind favoured by poachers in a rack behind his seat. ‘Here is another gun,’ he said. ‘Why you don’t try?’

I told him I couldn’t shoot straight and didn’t want to spoil his sport. He shook his head, disappointed, stuck a torch into my hand, and told me to walk behind him. I had to shake the torch to make it come on. ‘Sometimes there are little snakes,’ he explained. ‘Not many.’ We started out, Surin about 10 yards ahead, showing like a black cut-out against the light as he trudged towards the incandescent tree-trunks and under the lianas hanging like stalactites in a cave. There was nothing under my feet but blackness and the soft squelch of vegetable decay. The pin-point eyes of rodents shone back as before, and once an owl went over like a puff of white smoke. The repetition of night shapes, no more than a plaster effigy of the jungle by day, became monotonous, then soporific. I was half-asleep on my feet, when the light stopped jogging through the trees and I saw Surin raise his gun and take aim, then heard the small, coughing reports, instantly smothered in the leaves.

I was relieved that it had been such a quiet affair; an explosion hardly louder than a burst paper bag—unlikely to rouse the sleeping warden and bring him in hot pursuit, wherever he might be. Surin had dimmed the light and was hauling himself through the fronds and bamboo towards a twisting animal shape. He dragged it into view as I reached him and saw long thrashing legs and black blood dripping from fur. He let it drop and showed a sad face. ‘Now I shall not hunt for this year,’ he said. He had shot a hare. It was the biggest hare I had ever seen, bigger than the smallest deer, but still a hare. An animal, as Surin said, that carried no luck.

With an obvious effort he accepted the sentence of fortune and smiled again. ‘When I do not hunt,’ he said, ‘slowly my luck will come back. This is like money left in a bank. You don’t touch it and it becomes more. We have seen many animals in this place. Now we will go to the car. Next year I will come back here again.’

S
EEN FROM THE AIR
, Raiatea in its lagoon appears to be menaced by cavorting dragons. These are sprawls of underwater coral, contoured by the intense ultramarine of ocean currents. The island is packed tightly with trees, delicate at a distance as asparagus fern. From these project the pinnacles of two ancient volcanoes, each wearing a small turban of mist. A white thread of reef encircles the lagoon with its nucleus of land. Opposite the Te Ava Moa pass in the reef, and clearly visible, are the ruins by the shore of the great temple of Taputaputea, second only to the Easter Island figures as a monument to a forgotten Pacific civilisation.

Raiatea turned out to be a quiet, slow-moving place, charged with the aroma of the past, and resembling, according to old photographs, the Tahiti of 50 years ago. I was there to meet a Dr Collins, regarded, although eccentric, as the authority in all island matters, and I had ridden a bicycle with only roughly circular wheels and without brakes from the hotel down to Uturoa, the capital, for the encounter. The doctor was waiting for me, his huge bulk overflowing his chair, shirt open down to the navel, outside a café overlooking the sea. There was no money in Uturoa and therefore it was marvellously preserved with scenes from Gauguin on every side. Coats of paint flaked everywhere from its surfaces to reveal palimpsests of sublimely weary colour. Boats were unloading copra among half-buried anchors on the front, and a string of beachcombers mooched like explorers in a blizzard, through fallen blossom scuffled up by the breeze. This was Sunday, 10 a.m., and the Protestant church down the road was crammed for Tahitian a cappella singing: a roaring of hymns sounding like war chants (and that, said the doctor—apart from the substitution of Noah for the names of the Polynesian sea-raiders of old—was what they were). Once, quite carried away, and hoisting himself like a sumo wrestler to his feet, he added a melodious bellow to the distant chorus. We should have gone to church, he said, but it was so crowded you practically had to fight your way in.

A waitress with an introspective
Girl with a Fan
face brought Root Cola and a saucer of crudités among which a small starfish concealed itself with a discreet movement. Cats striped like tigers lay in wait near by ready to pounce on any land crabs that moved too far from one of their innumerable holes. The doctor explained the mystery of his name—which, in view of his unmistakably Polynesian appearance, had seemed puzzling at first. It was one of a dozen or so, he said, handed out by the missionaries at the beginning of the last century at the time of the island’s incorporation into the kingdom of the London Missionary Society. ‘I use the original name on what I call tribal occasions,’ he said. ‘In our language it means shark. It was a shark, as you know, that led our seafaring ancestors to Raiatea. Many of us have a totemic relationship with this fish. I am supposed to have inherited the power to summon one up from the depths—a feat which I once performed in public, although it was generally regarded as a coincidence.’

There was no argument, the doctor said, about his ability to tame sharks, which, if approached in the right way, were the friendliest and most co-operative of fish. He suggested that I might like to meet one, which followed him about like a dog and allowed its fins to be tweaked, and I readily agreed to subject myself to this experience. The shark, he said, frequented an area in the lagoon in which fishing had been debarred by an ancient taboo, and where many singular fish had taken refuge. The chieftains of old had placed taboos on certain rivers and lagoons at spawning times, and for one reason or another this taboo had never been lifted. He instanced the case of the stream on the neighbouring island of Huahine, full of monstrous, sluggish eels that survived only by the charity of the local villagers. Rare flowers were also under a taboo, and I remembered the newspaper story of a development company that had brought a prime coastal site, only to learn that its use was restricted to the grazing of pigs.

Behind its front of run-down normality, everything about Raiatea was extraordinary, including the specialised canoe in which our trip to the off-limits area was to be made. This craft, an outrigger of the local kind, was notable for its possession of
mana
, a kind of spiritual radiation infused by the insertion into its hull of a sliver of timber from a war-canoe excavated from one of the ancient sites. It was the common property of several families, and much in demand for Sunday outings, due to the belief that the
mana
flowed into the bodies of those whose rumps came into contact with the seats and so set them up for the week. It had been out for most of the morning, and as soon as it came back to the jetty, the doctor grabbed me up, we made a rush for it, and jumped in. It now turned out that in addition to the area of the lagoon where an absolute taboo on fishing was in force, there was at least one zone where a kind of semi-taboo persisted. Puttering towards the distant reef we passed a number of women, bedecked as usual with flowers and in dresses hitched up to the knees, who were fishing in the shallows. A few minuscule fish dangled from their waists. Women—seen as inefficient anglers—were permitted here, the doctor explained, but men were not.

Seagulls hung like white ideograms in the purplish haze over our target area. Dr Collins put down the anchor, fixed his mask in position, and lowered himself into the waves. I followed him, finding myself in 20 feet of water over a bed of shimmering coral sand, in which had been placed, as if with premeditation, a single enormous rock honeycombed with caves. From this base, the fish drifted to form slow interlacing processions and stunning weaves of colour. Individually they were magnificent, often strange, sometimes startling. What instantly caught the eye was abstract decoration; an Arabic scrawl, a mathematical sign, an inky blot. Transparent fish with a barely visible outline showed little more than eyes and a digestive tract. Enormous sea horses went bobbing by, pipefish unrolled from crevices, and lion-fish scowled through their poisoned plumes. There were fish that switched colour to match the garish sea anemones against which they nestled; fish like Disneyland parodies of fish; fish that spun or tumbled about us like demented birds. Occasionally one turned aside in passing to search my face with flat, dejected eyes, but on the whole they showed indifference to our presence. Big stingrays shuffled uneasily under their coverlet of sand as we dived to swim close to them. A single small shark took shape in the milky distance, but as soon as it spotted us it dodged out of view behind the rock.

The doctor broke surface and pulled back his mask to comment on the shark’s strange behaviour. He was worried by the absence of the confiding ten-footer we had come to see. A rumour had reached him of the presence on the reef of a party of spear fishermen from the Club Méditerranée on nearby Bora Bora. Sharks were highly strung, instinctive, exceptionally nervous creatures, he said, and if the report were true he had no doubt that fear had spread its contagion among them.

Half an hour later we were back in the port café. The outcry of Pacific starlings flocking in the trees broke for a moment into the chorus of ‘Soldiers of Christ Arise’. ‘Bligh of the Bounty’s gone into that one,’ the doctor said. ‘He’s been turned into an honorary ancestor since they showed the film.’

The singing stopped, the church door burst open and the worshippers poured out, all the men in their stiff Sunday suits with sprigs of frangipani behind the ears; some of the women wearing leafy crowns. They made for the line-up of veteran taxis, crowding as many as nine people into one for the ritual Sunday ride of a couple of hundred yards before the midday meal. A dishevelled, time-whitened old man, the last to leave the church, limped into sight. ‘That’s our
tatuna
. Witch doctors I believe you call them,’ the doctor said.