by Tim Cahill
Lahsa came in and snuffled at Trezise’s leg. “Did I tell you that I did the dingo ritual?”
“Show me,” I said.
“Well, it’s simple, really.” He stood, then walked forward, bouncing twice on each leg, occasionally lifting the right like a dingo marking his scent. There was a rhythmic chant that went along with the dance, and the sacred name of Dingo Dreaming was contained in the chant.
We walked down to the Little Laura River, Lahsa running ahead, then looking back to be sure we were following. She led us to the exposed root system of a tree that had been overturned during a flood in the last wet season. I heard some welcoming yelps. Trezise reached into a hole dug in the dirt amid the roots and pulled out a dead flying fox. There was a fat dingo pup attached to the far wing.
“Tangible results of the dingo ritual,” I said.
“Yeah.” Trezise handed me the pup. It squirmed comfortably and licked at my hand. “You know,” he said, “one of the old men told me that when people stopped doing the ritual, all the animals would die.” He reached over and scratched the pup behind the ears. “It’s happening,” he said.
Coming Back from Gato Island
The false dawn was gray, like ancient, tarnished silver, but in an hour the tropical sun would hang like an immense, burning weight over the remote jungle village of Tapilon. In another hour it would set the surrounding Visayan Sea aflame. All the roosters in all the Philippines—or so it seemed—were battling one another in an effort to squawk and scream that scalding sun into the sky.
The first full minute of counting, I got an incredible fifty-two cock-a-doodle-doos. Nearly one a second. Forty-three the next minute. Fifty the third.
This is a true statistic, personally compiled over two weeks’ time: In the Philippine village of Tapilon, near the northern tip of the island known as Cebu, there are, on the average, forty-eight distinct cock-a-goddamn-doodle-doos per minute between the hours of five and six in the morning.
Cockfighting is a national sport in the Philippines, and any red-blooded Filipino with the space owns a couple of game roosters. There were half a dozen living just under the window in the house where I was staying. They set up their various and raucous squawks, and others would answer them on all sides, and others, farther away, would answer them, so that the sound assaulted the ear as a receding circular wave. The auditory effect, were it charted, would look much like the ripples made by a stone dropped into a calm pool. And a stone was dropping every minute.
One can stay in bed only so long when the cocks are disrupting the dawn at the rate of forty-eight times a minute. Consequently, this first day in the village, I rose about four hours earlier than I had planned.
I know our Philippine hosts—Anders Taneo and his family—were only trying to help, but I wasn’t really ready for three sacks full of giant, poisonous sea snakes at 5:30 in the morning.
Mr. Taneo, a large, round man, more muscular than the average Filipino, had been down to the beach and had purchased the snakes from various fishermen for the edification of the film crew I was working with. He opened a sack and dumped three of them at my feet. They were about four feet long and as big around as my forearm. They writhed about on the clean wooden floor, and I stepped away from them as they made for my bare feet. All had alternating grayish stripes, though some were blue and others were black in the interstices. Anders dumped out another sack. There were eight of them now, all tangled together and slithering about in such a way that you really couldn’t keep your eye on all of them. I was in a small, confined room, and there were nearly a dozen venomous snakes sliding about, and I hadn’t had any coffee.
“If you want to make a film about our snakes,” Anders said, “you must learn how to handle them.” He grabbed one behind the neck with the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand, Anders held the snake to his face. The animal’s little tongue flicked out at him.
Anders motioned that it was my turn to pick one up. He did this by waving his snake at me.
It was easier than it looked. The snakes were slow on land, and there was a knucklelike swelling just behind the head where you grabbed them. They felt dry to the touch.
“No,” Taneo said, “don’t squeeze them so hard. You hurt them.”
After a short time, I found I could grab them at will, hold them gently, and wear them around my neck, which was the easiest way to carry them. They were poisonous, of course—all sea snakes are venomous—but they seemed passive animals, and I had the impression that I would have to mistreat them severely before they would strike. They were, I thought, quite beautiful, in a dark way, and they were fascinating, as all dangerous things are.
People, too, can be venomous, and they can strike out in murderous ways. But there is another human venom, something a man holds within himself, a venom that can poison the mind.
I had come to Tapilon to learn about the snakes. I ended up relearning a lesson about people, and myself.
I don’t know why they call me on these things. I don’t even know where Richard Stewart got my name. But late one winter afternoon he called and said he needed a writer for a project in the Philippines. Something about the only sea-snake industry in the world and the divers who catch the slimy beasts with their bare hands. Richard was president of a company called Ocean Realm Productions, and he seemed to be juggling about fifteen projects at once. He was going to shoot a documentary about sea snakes and sell it to ABC and use another part for a video magazine he was working on, and he’d be using a special video camera Sony had given him to test in the field, and his company had built an underwater housing for the camera, and maybe Sony would use part of the film to promote its camera. Richard said he had his entire crew together and all he needed was a writer.
I looked out the window. It was twenty below zero, and snowdrifts were piled up around the house. My dogs had refused to step outside in the morning. They stared angrily at me, determined to hold it until spring. I had never been to the Philippines, but I understood it was warm there.
“Sure,” I said, “I’ll go.”
Looking back over my notes on that call—there were a series of calls, actually—I see that Richard never really said he wanted me to work in front of the cameras. “Maybe you can do a few on-camera interviews” is what he said. I just assumed that when he saw what a handsome, articulate fellow I am he’d be obliged to get me in every shot.
It was a mistaken impression. Manny Punay made much the same mistake, and that’s what led to the threats of piracy and murder on the high seas.
Emmanuel Y. Punay, of Cebu, was a thin, excitable fellow who wore one of those narrow, neat, dark mustaches you associate with cardsharps and door-to-door aluminum-siding salesmen. He was an authority on Fasciata semifasciata, the snakes we had come to film. He has written an article on the Gato Island variety for a book about the biology of sea snakes. One look at the book—Manny usually carried a copy or two with him—was sufficient to see that he had invested a good deal of ego in Fasciata semifasciata. The very first sentence in Emmanuel Y, Punay’s article was an authoritative quotation attributed to Emmanuel Y. Punay.
The book also contained a picture of Manny holding one of his beloved snakes at a press conference in Hong Kong. Manny was wearing snakeskin shoes, a snakeskin jacket, and a snakeskin bow tie. He was smiling in a silly, sinister manner that suggested he really loved having his picture taken with sea snakes.
Manny met us at the Cebu airport and immediately produced a week-old newspaper column. It said that an American film crew was coming to Cebu, that everyone should cooperate with us, and that the resultant film would star Emmanuel Y. Punay.
In reality, the agreement between Richard Stewart and Manny Punay, as I understand it, was that Manny would be paid a certain daily fee to arrange for transportation and provide liaison with the village. Since Manny was a recognized authority on sea snakes, Richard probably promised that he’d appear in the film. He might even have said it would be a very important part of the fil
m. Manny took it from there. He was a handsome, articulate fellow, and he was going to be a television star.
It was dark before we loaded the fifty boxes of gear onto the bus for the five-hour drive through the jungle to Tapilon, where men caught poison sea snakes with their bare hands. There were nine of us: Richard Stewart; his brother Mike, who would provide underwater camera assistance; Brian Friedman, still photographer and boat captain; Mike Van Roy, technician; Tim Cathren, associate producer; Iggy Tan and Tony Perez, Stewart’s Philippine business partners; Tim Cahill, writer; and Manny Punay, world-renowned authority on sea snakes.
Manny livened up the tiring ride with jokes.
“A customer says to a waiter, ‘Give me a sandwich,’ and the waiter says, ‘With pleasure,’ and the man says, ‘No, with catsup.’ ”
“That’s a good one, Manny.”
“I know another one.…”
Even though Manny was a soon-to-be star, he wanted us to like him, and he was trying to be one of the boys on the bus.
We arrived in Tapilon on the stroke of midnight. It was Independence Day in the Philippines, and there was a celebration in progress on the concrete playground near the school. We clambered out of the sweaty confines of the bus—a horde of children gaped at us as if we were benign extraterrestrials—and two distinguished older gentlemen escorted us to a series of chairs set just below the stage. Another man made an eloquent speech of welcome. He talked about peace and harmony, about mutual respect and the brotherhood of men. The assembled citizens—the entire village of Tapilon—gave us a standing ovation. There was no hint of fawning. The hospitality was genuine, from the heart.
Brian whispered, “Do you feel it?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus,” he said, “I’ve never felt so honored in my whole goddamn life.”
After the speeches of welcome, the celebration continued. A series of young girls, in singles and pairs, came out before the village to dance. A group of older women floated onto the concrete and danced slowly, in tandem, moving their arms sinuously, like Thai dancers. Young boys tumbled. Everyone, it seemed, had his or her moment alone before the village.
My favorite dance featured an older couple. He was tall, skinny, with a sour expression. She was short and round and jolly. They started in with a stiff fox trot, moving in the practiced, routine steps of a couple that has been together over the years. Gradually the woman seemed to become aroused. She caressed the man. He drew back, shocked. She began to run her hands over his back, buck her hips against his. He dropped her arm and broke into a stylized run, still moving to the music, a look of sour terror on his face. She kicked off her sandals and chased him. It was a funny, bawdy dance and everyone, American and Filipinos, laughed aloud.
Later, one of the village elders took us to the home of Anders Taneo, where we would sleep.
“I can’t get over it,” Brian said.
“What?”
“I think I love these people.”
In the morning, the rooster hit forty-three crows a minute and Anders Taneo dumped the snakes on us.
There are only a dozen or so men in and around Tapilon who dive for snakes. It is a small industry, the only one of its type in the world, and the snakes seem to be in no danger of extinction or serious depletion. The day’s catch is skinned on the beach, and the innards are fed to local hogs. The skins are shipped to factories in Manila, where they are processed and made into such items as ladies’ handbags.
We followed the divers out to Gato Island the second day we were in Tapilon. They rode in bancas—big, dug-out outriggers powered by 18-horsepower Briggs & Stratton engines, which easily outdistanced our outboard-powered inflatables. It took an hour to cover the twelve miles of choppy sea, and the island loomed on the horizon like the sleeping cat it is named for. It was a little over an acre in area: an uninhabited volcanic peak, capped with a tangle of jungle. Sheer rock walls rose some sixty to eighty feet, then gave way to the inward slope and the jungle. There were caves set into the rock walls at the level of the sea. The water inside the caves was an impossible, fluorescent shade of blue.
The snakes, Fasciata semifasciata, lived and mate inside the caves. They trap small fish in crevasses with the coils of their bodies, paralyze them with a bite, and feed on them. They lay their eggs in various nooks and crannies. The best hunting, the divers say, is at night, when they sometimes find themselves in a great tangle of mating snakes, a sensuous, frightening serpentine ballet.
The divers sat in their bancas and finished off the bottles of anise-flavored wine they carried with them. The men of Tapilon believe that alcohol, taken internally and in sufficient quantity, thins the blood and renders a sea-snake bite less toxic. It seems to be a delicate process: drinking enough to thin the blood in case of a bite, but not so much that the diver becomes clumsy and gets bitten.
In recent years, one diver has died from a bite. Most merely feel sick and numb, and the bitten appendage swells for a day or two.
Judging themselves sufficiently inebriated, the divers donned rubber wrist bracelets made from inner tubes, and their homemade wooden goggles with the glass glued to the frame. I followed them into the cave, which was about forty feet in diameter, with a domed ceiling another forty feet high. An improbable number of tiny birds—about thirty million at a guess—were roosting in the cave, and they did not take our entry lightly. They began whirling around above, building up momentum for the swift, swooping dives they made at our exposed heads. The birds emitted high-pitched, batlike shrieks, and the cave echoed with their fury.
A diver hung in the water above one of the larger crevasses. A snake appeared, moving languidly. The diver sank toward it, swimming to a spot directly above the animal. The snake flipped its flattened tail, but the diver seized it behind the neck. He put the snake’s head under the bracelet he wore on his left wrist and hung there, underwater, for a full minute and a half. He got the second snake with one lightning movement of his right hand. With two snakes in the bracelet on his left wrist, he swam out to the banca and passed the unfortunate beasts to a man who put them in a sack.
Stewart got it all on tape, and for the moment, the shoot seemed to be going, well, swimmingly.
I can pinpoint the exact moment when Manny Punay stopped wanting to be one of the boys. We had interviewed some divers in the morning. I was asking the questions and wasn’t doing very well.
“Tell us how you catch the snakes.”
“I grab them.”
This was no good. My question would be edited out—no on-camera interview for me, handsome and articulate as I am—and the tape would show only a man describing his rather unique occupation to the camera. Manny said he thought the man was frightened by the crowd that had gathered around us, and especially by my interview technique. “He will talk to me,” Manny said, and he proceeded to speak for two minutes, telling the man exactly how he caught poison sea snakes with his bare hands. The diver nodded happily, relieved that he didn’t have to do any of the work.
Manny didn’t seem to realize that the format called for his question to be edited out, and that a smiling man nodding on the screen wasn’t going to tell the audience very much. Still, none of us wanted to cut the interview short and make Manny look foolish in front of his friends and relatives.
That night we set up a monitor and reviewed the day’s footage. As usual, there were fifty or sixty villagers in attendance. When Richard got to Manny’s interview, he skipped over it in fast motion so that colors smeared themselves across the screen and the voices squeaked comically. The audience laughed.
Manny was sitting beside me. “They cut me out?”
“Not you, Manny. The diver wasn’t any good.”
Manny’s face hardened. “They cut me out,” he said bitterly. “This is my village. These are my relatives. Here my honor is paramount. They want the people to laugh at me.” Manny was silent for some minutes. “Do you know,” he said finally, “when a Japanese wife is raped, she commits hara-kiri. W
hen her honor is gone, you see, she can no longer face her husband.”
I got the idea that Manny had taken the incident for a mortal insult.
That night we had dinner at Anders Taneo’s house. Manny was sitting next to Richard, and he was drinking more than his share of rum and beer.
“No,” he screamed suddenly. “This is my village. You cannot speak to me like that. My honor is at stake.”
“Okay, Manny,” Richard said.
“I call the shots now.”
“Okay, but I call the shoot.”
Manny stared at Richard. He was smiling, but the smile seemed born of some deep pain, and it wavered on his face in a frightening and grotesque manner. “You have your boats,” he said, “and you can go to Gato Island. But I assure you, you will not return from Gato Island. You will not return from Gato Island.”
There was a stunned silence at the table, and we adjourned soon after. We all knew that there were pirates in the Visayan Sea. You could read about them in the paper: how they board fishing boats, kill the crew, and steal the catch and the boat. It seemed to me that Manny had threatened our lives.
A man thinks that because he travels and has friends of many different colors in many different countries, the venom isn’t in him. Then a disappointed fellow with too much rum in him ruptures the poison sac with the tiniest pinprick of fear.
“It’s scary as hell,” Mike Stewart said. “I mean, they’re always smiling at us. They seem to like us. Can he really turn them all against us?”
“I like these people,” Brian said. “I want to come back here. I don’t believe this.”
“All he’d need is one banca,” I said. “Any banca can outrun our inflatables. One banca, one man, one rifle.”