Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  Edmundo had come to document the tikis. He would measure them and photograph them; he would preserve what he could, and in a way, the culture of the Men would live through Edmundo. Many Marquesans advise travelers to avoid the tikis: They speak of a malevolent power. There were at least twenty-five of them in the Puamau Valley. I was supposed to meet Edmundo there for a bit of exploration. And now he was dead.

  I was, frankly, spooked. The air was heavy with the scent of mangoes and the sun was heavy on my back, but I found myself shivering in a gentle sea breeze. In the distance I could see the mayor's son galloping again along the beach in my direction. He pulled his horse to a halt beside me and shouted, "Edmundo is alive!"

  As I pieced the story together, Edmundo hadn't been able to get to Puamau. He had a mild flu, and decided to put the trip off for a few days. He didn't want anyone to worry about him, so he'd called on the radio. In Marquesan, however, the word for sick is very similar to the one for dead. There had been some static on the radio. A mistake was made.

  But now that Edmundo was alive, we would feast this night. There was pork for roasting, there was chicken and passion fruit, fish from the sea, bottles of wine from France.

  In the Marquesas, hand gestures, body movements, and facial expressions often carry the weight of words, which are faulty in that they can sometimes kill living archeologists and bring them back to life in a matter of hours. Marquesans can talk to one another for minutes on end without even opening their mouths. Watch these two Marquesan fishermen coming into port in their boats, a pair of wheezing thirty-foot craft running diesel engines that routinely belch smoke. It is hot and the men waste no energy on conversation. They lift their chins to one another in greeting. One holds the position slightly longer. He is asking, "Did you catch any fish?"

  The second man smiles. He spreads the fingers of both hands and brings them together in front of his chest. "I caught a lot of fish." The first man cocks his head again. "Any big ones?" The second stretches his right arm straight out to the side. With his left hand he mimes flicking a fly off his right wrist. "I caught one so big," this gesture says, "that my arm isn't long enough to encompass its length."

  The two men regard one another gravely, then the successful fisherman cocks his head to ask, "How'd you do?" The first man replies with an abrupt masturbatory gesture. "Nothing," he means to say. "I was just wasting my time out there."

  Marquesan gestures have little of the anger or contempt implicit in the hand gestures of certain other cultures (various southern European countries spring to mind). People who have studied the Marquesans believe these gestured conversations are simply a way of conserving energy in a hot land. I don't know about that: It seems to me that a brief kahua (hello) wouldn't wear a guy down any more than a nod of the head.

  I like to think the tradition arises out of the physical beauty of the Marquesan people, that the simple grace of these gestures is the unspoken poetry of the islands.

  The Marquesas have never attracted tourists, a fact that has attracted artists. Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville both spent time on the northern island of Nuku Hiva. The Belgian-born songwriter Jacques Brel died on Hiva Oa. In 1900 the

  French artist Paul Gauguin came to Atuona, on Hiva Oa, looking for inspiration in "unspoiled savagery." There was some tension between the artist and the local bishop regarding Gauguin's relations with various island women. Gauguin nailed obscene pictures to his door and called his place the House of Pleasure, using a word that, in French, has a sexual connotation. There were legal problems fueled by the bishop's rage. Gauguin died in 1903, and he is buried in a small graveyard above Atuona. His grave is neatly tended and much photographed. The bishop is buried there as well. You have to clear away the weeds to see his stone. On the spot where the House of Pleasure stood, there is a new wood-and-concrete bungalow erected by the mayor of Atuona where tourists may stay. Commercial hotels are rare in the Marquesas. The islands are so remote, so little visited, that one simply seeks out the mayor of the village, who makes it his business to provide lodging, usually in his own house. The mayor of Atuona, a rich man by Marquesan standards, had built three bungalows for such travelers. I was staying in the bungalow built on the site of the House of Pleasure. Alone.

  I stayed with the mayor and his wife in the village of Puamau. One day, not long after Edmundo's resurrection, I was walking back from the beach when I heard people laughing from some distance away. The mayor's wife and a dozen other women were sitting on the covered patio with the poured-cement floor that was such a luxury people gathered there nearly every afternoon. (Many Marquesans live in thatched-roofed huts with dirt floors.) The television set was on, as it is for two hours a day. The programs are beamed down to the villages by transmitters located on the high peaks of the islands. One French official told me that the government provides TV for the people because they love it. They love it so much that it is feared many might move to Tahiti just to watch Dynasty. But Tahiti is already crowded, employment is scarce, and the government figures it is cheaper to provide the Marquesans with TVs at home than with subsidized housing in Tahiti or Bora Bora. The mayor's TV was the village TV, and it had been provided by the government.

  The women were watching The Towering Inferno, which had

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  been clubbed in French. Nobody was looking at the set, except when the building was shown in flame. Then the women were intent on the special effects, and no one spoke.

  The love scenes, on the other hand, set everyone off at once, talking and laughing in a merry cadence. I came to understand that the women of Puamau thought Paul Newman's kisses were the funniest part of the movie.

  The patio was open on three sides. An old man hobbled up to the women and said a few words. The mayor's wife said a single word in Marquesan and began laughing, as did the old man, and all the rest of the women. On the TV, someone started kissing someone else. It was all too much. The women laughed until tears formed in their eyes. First the quip about the elderly fellow with the bad legs and now all this hilarious kissing.

  The next morning, at breakfast, I asked the mayor's wife what she had said to the old man. "Parachute," she told me. Just the thought of it got her giggling, and her husband had to tell me the story. About thirty years ago, he said, the man with the bad legs had been about sixty feet up a tree, shaking coconuts loose. He lost his grip and fell, but not before tearing off a palm frond, which he tried to use as a parachute. The man had broken both his legs. The mayor, his wife, and their three sons and two daughters were rocking back and forth with laughter. Now, the mayor said, hardly able to continue, whenever anyone saw the fellow limping along a path, they thought of the failed green parachute. It was a joke that had kept everyone in Puamau laughing for thirty years.

  The French brought horses to the Marquesas, and like the goats and pigs and breadfruit trees, the horses multiplied beyond counting on the provident land. There are more horses in the Marquesas than anywhere else in the South Seas. Wild horses have to be cleared off airstrips before planes can land. Horses run free in the steep, sloping jungles, in the thick grasses on the plains at three thousand feet. They can be seen drinking from rivers, a waterfall in the background, orchid petals or plumerias on their backs where they brushed against the vegetation.

  The horses—you can tell from the configuration of the heads— are a mix of Arabians, thoroughbreds, and the original Chilean horses brought by the French. They have adapted to the steep jungles of the Marquesas, bred themselves down, suffered some degree of island dwarfism. Smaller than American mustangs, they are strong climbers and eager runners.

  The horses are so plentiful that Marquesans in need of transportation simply take a mare in heat out to the jungle. The strongest stallion to approach is roped and wrestled to the ground by hand. Marquesans ride the horses belly-deep through the surf to break them. It is not unusual to look out to sea and watch a horse lifted up and carried toward the beach by a large wave.
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  The thought of riding along the black volcanic sand beaches with the surf pounding in was wonderfully romantic, though the reality chafed a bit. Marquesans ride on hand-carved wooden saddles. Stirrups are bits of twisted wire tied to the saddle with old rope. The fact that there are stallions in the jungle or roped to trees along the trails makes riding another stallion an exciting process of rearing, chasing, biting. During these fights and near fights stirrups break, cinch straps snap, and the wooden saddle raises nasty sores on the rider. It is better to ride bareback.

  One day I borrowed a horse and rode to the deserted beach at Taaoa, near Atuona. I rode bareback, like the people in Gauguin's paintings, and the mountains above caught the drifting South Pacific clouds that turned the high peaks slate-blue with distant rain. Gauguin had painted the mountains this blue—it had been a matter of much hilarity in Paris.

  Later, I visited the basalt god that squatted on the stone terraces above Taaoa. There was something indelibly Marquesan about the idol. The people are professed Catholics on these islands, they watch TV, the children go to schools, yet few will consent to visit the tikis at night. The old gods still have some power. I wanted to talk about this power with Edmundo, the formerly dead archeologist, over dinner that night.

  I placed a gold-colored Central Pacific franc at the feet of the tiki, as is the custom, and rode out of the shadowed forest until I could see the sun and sea at the end of the trail below. When I

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 48

  judged I was far enough away, I shouted, "Edmundo is alive!" The horse spooked, but I brought him under control and sat looking back into the darkness. I felt like a child throwing rocks at a haunted house. "Alive!" I shouted, and kicked the horse so that we galloped into the light.

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  next, and the first order of mutilation will be the MALE'S PHALLIC ORGAN OF REPRODUCTION!"

  There were those writers who dismissed UFOs out of hand: Castrators from Outer Space indeed. The mutilations were clearly the work of some perverse cult of blood-drunk Satanists. To explain the usual lack of footprints around the tortured cattle, one writer suggested blood-drunk Satanists in helicopters.

  Another letter proposed an intriguing conspiracy. Noting that several mutilations had occurred near a large military installation in Colorado, the writer suggested that agents of the U.S. government were skulking about the fields on moonless nights, scalpels in hand. Their job: horribly mutilate the cattle in brutal and inexplicable ways so as to cause terror in the souls of the local ranchers who would then sell their land to the military at cut-rate prices.

  The most intricate explanation came from a certain F. Smith, of Colorado. In a striking booklet entitled Cattle Mutilation: The Unspeakable Truth, Smith works hard to demolish the arguments of conventional UFO theorists, of those who favor Satanists in choppers, and, most especially, of those scientists who see the mutilations as the work of such predators as foxes and flies.

  Smith starts by setting the record straight on certain important cosmic matters. First of all, no planet can remain habitable forever, and this prevents the universe from "going to seed and becoming inbred." The time when humans must leave Earth is called Judgment Day. At that time we will join the great cosmic community of humans beyond the solar system. We refer to that community as "heaven."

  It follows, then, that extraterrestrials are not merely aliens, but angels. These angels are pretty rough customers. Smith states that they are not "neutered individuals" or "chubby infants," but are, instead, the mighty soldiers of scripture, "ENEMY soldiers" whose duty is to prevent us from traveling beyond the solar system until the Day of Judgment, a day that is rapidly approaching. Smith sees evidence of the Apocalypse in the population explosion itself. "An explosion can be described as an extremely rapid

  release and degradation of energy. It booms, then busts . . ." The bust, the Day of Judgment, will come when we can no longer reproduce.

  Smith's enemy angels apparently consider earth a dull duty. They are getting restless and impatient down here, waiting for the moment when we all become sterile. These antsy angels are handcuffed by an immutable law of the cosmos that states that human beings, created in the likeness of God, may not be dissected for scientific purposes. Cattle, however, live in close proximity to man, and the angels know well that mutagenic agents, such as plutonium, migrate to the gonads in both cattle and man. If your prize bull's balls are full of plutonium, so are yours. The extraterrestrials, these warriors from heaven beyond the solar system, spend a lot of time mutilating cows and studying bovine genitals in order to figure out just how much longer they are going to have to wait until Judgment Day. And that is the Unspeakable Truth.

  People like Smith, "mutologists," save their harshest comments for conventional scientists and men like Kenneth Rommel, a former FBI agent who headed up a fifty-thousand-dollar government study of the phenomenon. "If surgeons are doing it, they're doing it with their teeth," Rommel said at a news conference, and he backed up his contention with a series of color slides showing predators such as coyotes and wild dogs gnawing away at the soft parts of down cows. The precision-surgery effect, Rommel explained, is caused by shrinkage and desiccation of the tissues. Crows or magpies take the eye, flies mass in the resultant pulpy mess, sun and wind dry the tissue, which then shrinks away from the wound in a perfectly rounded circle. A coyote may start his meal with soft and accessible delicacies like the genitals. Every one of the twenty-four New Mexico mutilations Rommel investigated was caused by natural predators: coyotes, wild and domestic dogs, eagles, crows, vultures, and flies.

  The predator theory—disappointing and anticlimactic as it is— seems the most convincing to me. Still—gory close-up photos notwithstanding—blowflies lack the pizzazz of enemy angels in UFOs, and this, I think, partially explains the persistence of con-

  voluted theories about the mutilations. I mean, really, isn't it more fun like this:

  The ship sits on an alfalfa field near the pond on Poison Creek. It is no saucer, but a quivering, jelly like cell, and it glows from within with a color out of space, a color out of time: a blue and strangely hypnotic incandescence in the long shadows at the end of a long Montana summer day.

  The cattle scatter in panic. One yearling, slower than the rest, is seized from behind, and it bellows in lusty protest. The Mutilators gibber and click, then set up a gurgling dirge as laser scalpels flash into readiness. The genitals first, then the anus — oh so carefully now — and eyeballs and lips and tongue. The yearling's bellows rise in pitch, then subside into hopeless sheeplike bleats and end in a single, strangled, tongue less croak.

  The tentacles of the Mutilators drip with certain fluids of delight, and the cell of the ship pulses with a deeper incandescence. The cattle are bunched in dumb horror in a corner of the fence line, and the Mutilators from Outer Space lurch toward them in cold reptilian glee.

  Ah, but here come the boys, the cowboys, protectors of the cattle, human beings. They are bouncing over the field in an old Jeep, and they are clutching shotguns and gleaming hunting knives, fury spinning like fire in their eyes. The ship keens out a warning and pulses red, a burning red, like molten steel. The Mutilators cower in terror. Their tentacles are dry as parchment, and they recoil before the rough and thunderous rage of the boys. Now there is brutal carnage in the alfalfa field. The boys have fired all their shells, and they are hacking about with the razored hunting knives. Green reptilian blood erupts out of jagged wounds: cold green blood, thick as vomit. The boys are whirling, thrusting, piercing, ripping. It is like some sick, Martian samurai movie out there in the alfalfa field. . . .

  Alas.

  And so I had arranged to spend several days in the mountains, alone, with no particular goal and nothing to do. No Walkman, no book. Just me and my journal.

  The first day, as always, was the worst. I worried about the phone calls I was missing, about the work I had to do, about the book and the outline. I slept badly. By
the second day, however, my body began to fall into the desultory rhythms of camp life, and it dragged my mind along with it, so that I was thinking, rather lazily, not about outlines or commitments, but about moving to a new site, on a windy ridge. The idea was that the wind would scatter the deerflies. Still, sitting there on the ridge, being battered by a ceaseless wind for a couple of days, didn't sound like all that much fun, either. Which is when I hit on the perfectly obvious idea of moving up above the flies the way the elk do.

  It was a reasonably challenging climb. I set up my tent and lay back in the bright afternoon sun, thinking about how much fun it was not thinking. My mind was puttering about, cleaning up minor details it had recently ignored. Every once in a while, I made a little note in my journal.

  If I had been sentenced to sit in my chair at home, to empty my mind and think about nothing and everything all at once, I couldn't have done it. The phone would ring, and someone would say, "You are twenty days overdue on your mortgage payment, and a late fee has been charged to your account." The doorbell would ring, and a pleasant, older woman would ask me if I knew that "Satan rules the world," and then she'd try to sell me a Watchtower magazine, which would explain everything.

  Even without these interruptions, I'd have found several hours of emptiness oppressive. Who sits for three hours without picking up a book, listening to music, watching TV, drinking?

  What happens in the woods is this: The mind is forced to deal with certain niggling but elemental details. Those things we take for granted—shelter, food, basic conveniences, comfort, brute survival—require all our attention and must be attended to. When a storm is blowing in and the tent isn't set up, worrying about mortgages and outlines is a luxury. Later, such concerns