by Tim Cahill
“Ahh, he was drunk,” Brian said.
“Yeah. He couldn’t have been serious.”
“Right.”
But the sac had been ripped open, and the poison was festering. They were different, not like us, inscrutable. You had to look behind the smiles, because there was a dreadful darkness there.
There was a compromise reached during the night. Manny demanded money: roughly ten times his agreed-upon fee. And because Richard had to borrow from his crew, Manny felt that the money bought back his honor.
I had seen him late that evening, made a special effort to seek him out and perhaps smooth things over—or at least clarify the threat. I was haunted by a local peculiarity, the Filipinos’ need for something sociologists label S.I.R.: Smooth Interpersonal Relationships. Fillipinos do not care for confrontation. Even when the content of what must be said is unpleasant, it is expected that everyone concerned will be polite, will smile. The corollary is frightening: When a Filipino becomes angry, the fury is unmoderated and can be deadly.
“Manny,” I had said that night, “what exactly do you mean? It sounds”—and here I laughed a bit to show the absurdity of it—“it sounds like you’re saying we’ll all be killed if we go to Gato.”
“These are my people. This is my beloved barangay [village]. Imagine, going to Gato Island without me.”
“Are you saying we’ll be killed?”
“You will not, I assure you, return from Gato Island.”
I wasn’t sure then that any amount of money could buy back the honor Manny obviously felt he had lost. But no, the problem had been worked out. Still, that morning as we launched the boats, as I joked with the children and looked into their faces, even then the venom was pumping along with the blood, so that I looked at each face differently.
“Goodbye, Joe,” one of the kids called. “Goodbye.”
If you were looking for it, if you had spent a bad night, you could see something conspiratorial, something sinister in each smile.
“Goodbye, Joe. Goodbye.”
Manny went out to Gato with us that morning, as if nothing had happened. We shot until dusk and started back in the inflatables long after the divers had left in their bancas. Our outboards were experimental models that ran on gasoline at low rpm and diesel when the engine was running hard. In theory this was a money-saving feature. The problem was that the seas were too high. Every time we ran in diesel range, the boats swamped. We had to run on gas, at low rpm, and each of the inflatables carried only a small can of gas. All the diesel fuel in the big tank was useless.
When the biggest inflatable ran out of gas, we had to tow it with the smaller one. It was dark now, and there were some lights on the horizon that might have been coming from shore or might have been coming from fishing vessels. I don’t want to overdramatize this—Mike Stewart, Brian, and Manny felt they knew where we were—but as far as I was concerned, we were lost at sea. Worse, it seemed to me that we would run out of gas soon. When that happened, there was no telling where the current might take us. It was a big, empty ocean out there.
At first I thought the fire I felt was sunburn, but when I found myself chilled, shivering uncontrollably, and sweating at the same time, I knew that I was suffering from heat exhaustion. I lay on my back, legs draped over a sack of snakes we were bringing back for the fishermen. They felt cool under my thighs, and when they moved, they were slow and deliberate, as if rearranging themselves in sleep.
The moon above was a sliver, but you could see the ball of it, faintly. It laid a path out across the water. There were clouds in the distance—great, swollen tropical towers—and they hung dark below the stars. There was lightning in the clouds, and it rumbled across the sky in immense, white-hot sheets.
The boat stirred up a phosphorescence, and our wake was a glowing, living thing. All around us, on all sides, the sea was deep and dark and warm as blood. I drifted off—the moment of sleep felt like surrender—and my body jerked me awake. A star fell from the sky. It streaked across our bow, miles above, then dropped slowly, and more slowly still, so that it seemed to fall throughout time. There was a shower of red, and the star grew in size. It was immense in my vision, an ominous wonder that hung motionless, as in a fever dream. Slowly the redness faded to green, and it shrank and fell until it was only a thin green ray that disappeared into the dark Visayan Sea.
I thought: So here we are in a small boat lost at sea. I have been working all day under the tropical sun, and now I am shivering with the heat. Such fevers often produce a special clarity. I thought: If all this happened in the United States, there would have been no fear, and this … distortion … arose out of that difference. But it was not the United States, and we were in a small boat lost at sea. That thought came back to me, fever bright, and there was a crystalline ringing in my ears.
We were several hours overdue. In the United States, my friends would have been looking for me. There would have been lights on the beach.…
We saw the lights an hour away. There were dozens of them—the people of Tapilon—standing on the beach, carrying kerosene lanterns. When I stepped out of the boat, my knees buckled. A man I had never seen before helped me to my feet.
We are all in a small boat lost at sea.
Rime of the Ancient Porcupine
This is a tale of murder most foul, of a crime against nature and man, of instant retribution. It is a tale for those who would believe that there are more things invisible than visible in the universe, and nonetheless true for the fact that it happened in the ancient times, which is to say, about 1939. It is a tale of storm blast and wondrous cold, and ice as green as emerald, a tale, in short, of a bad winter in the north country. The ice then, we might conjecture, was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around. It cracked and growled and roared and howled, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge would have it, like noises in a swound—which is a swoon—something unconscious, a frigid, brittle dream. However, this tale is no dream, but a true and locally well-known story. In the bad winter of 1939, the unholy deed was done. It happened no more than three miles from my house, tucked away in a pocketed groin of the Absaroka Mountains.
To understand the nature of the crime, however, it is first necessary to know a bit about the porcupines of the northern Rockies. They can be pestiferous animals. Sometimes called quill pigs, porcupines are actually large rodents. Vegetarians all, they enjoy the tender layer of tissue beneath the bark of living trees. When especially hungry, or perhaps in a destructive mood, porcupines may completely girdle and kill a tree. They have been known to splinter used ax handles and canoe paddles for the salt and oil they contain.
Porcupines also relish rubber. A friend of mine once parked his car at a mountain trail-head. When he returned after a week of backpacking, he found that the car wouldn’t start. Some animal had gnawed through the rubber on his generator coil, shorting it out. My friend decided to wait until morning to walk the ten miles down the old logging road to the main highway and hitchhike ten more miles into town for a replacement. That night, camped by the car, he heard a satisfied scratching and a moist munching under the hood. It was, of course, a porcupine, and the beast regarded him balefully, his large nocturnal eyes glinting in the glare of the flashlight. My friend levered the porcupine off his engine block with a long branch he was saving for his fire. He might have hammered the animal to death with the same branch, but that is not done, not here in the northern Rockies.
It took a full day to get back with the part he needed. He replaced the coil, and since he was already a day late for work, he drove the car hard down the logging road. About three miles from the main highway, the temperature gauge pegged at high and steam began spurting out from under the hood. My friend was more than a little irritated to discover that in his absence the porcupine had returned and eaten a hole through the underside of his bottom radiator hose.
We have more than our share of porcupines out here at the Poison Creek Ranch. About once every six months, one of my dogs, to its
detriment, tries to eat a porcupine. The dogs kill skunks with great regularity, and they return to the house with their heads held high, proud and malodorous. But when they’ve been quilled by a porcupine, they skulk about outside the front door, afraid and ashamed to come in for the doctoring they need.
The porcupine does not run from a dog. He will, instead, present his backside. My dogs, like a man who continually burns his mouth on the first piece of pizza, do not learn from history. They suppose an animal’s arsenal is invariably located about the head, since that is so in their own species. The porcupine does not throw his quills but drives his powerful tail into the dog’s mouth, leaving dozens of barbed and needlelike quills in the dog’s tongue, and in the roof and bottom of its mouth.
The quills, which are modified hairs, range in size from half an inch to three inches. Since they are barbed, the quills will, with time, work their way into the dog, eventually reaching the brain and killing it. For that reason, every quill must be quickly and carefully removed. I do this with needle-nose pliers I bought especially for the operation. You want to roll the dog onto its back, under a bright light, get its mouth open, and pull out the quills. The dogs are never enthusiastic about this operation, and one of them once blackened my eye with a front paw trying to push me away. These days, I put a quilled dog into a large burlap sack, which I tie around his neck. It takes half an hour of intense and sweaty struggle to stuff a pain-crazed eighty-pound dog in a gunny sack.
I could, I suppose, wait for a fresh snow, track the porcupines, and blast them into eternity with the 12-gauge, but, as I say, that is not done in the northern Rockies. Since the days of the mountain men here, porcupines have been sacrosanct. Like the albatross in the old poem, a porcupine is considered a pious beast of good fortune, and for very practical reasons. A man or woman lost in the mountains hereabouts can usually find and kill a porcupine. In winter, especially, they show up as dark lumps in the crotches of bare trees. They do not run from man and may be killed with a branch or even a stone. The flesh, especially that of the tail, is rich and fatty, and the calories it contains may sustain a man for days. Of course, rabbits may be easily trapped, but their flesh is lean, its calories quickly burned away. There are documented tales of men who have eaten several rabbits a day while lost, men who died of what is known as “rabbit starvation.”
So porcupines are slow-moving, ambulatory sources of food for the lost and injured, and that is why the killing of such a beast in any but the most dire circumstances is considered a dangerous and wanton act capable of generating the worst of luck. And in the bad winter of 1939, in the dismal sheen of the snowy cliffs, no more than three miles from my house, a man committed that very crime; and like the albatross in the old poem, the porcupine was avenged and death fires danced at night.
The man had built a wooden frame house, and he set it up on blocks so that he would not have to dig a foundation. As the long white mountain winter set in, the man discovered a major flaw in the design. Various small animals took to living under the house for shelter and warmth. Every night there was a commotion of yips and squeaks and howls. Every night, the sickly sweet fragrance of skunk drifted up into his kitchen. The fellow was having trouble sleeping and eating, and as the drifts piled up over his windows and darkened the rooms, as the terrible psychic weight of cabin fever descended upon him, he developed a fanatical hatred for the squabbling things that lived under his house.
And so it happened that this man found a huge porcupine one dreary winter day. He was sitting on the lowest branch of a bare and icy tree, and the man who built his house on blocks looked upon that particular porcupine as the disturber of his sleep and the despoiler of his appetite. Perhaps he chuckled as he dug out the kerosene and matches. Quickly, he doused the porcupine, struck a match, and tossed it onto the animal, which erupted into a colorless flame. In his agony of fire, the porcupine ran to where he lived, ran to the area under the house. The flaming porcupine, this dying animal, set the wooden house aflame. It burned to the ground in a matter of hours.
The tale is true and can be verified. In my mind’s eye I see that man, standing there thigh-deep in a drift, shivering in an icy wind and looking mournfully at the last glowing, gloating embers smoldering away in the ashy puddle where his house used to be. It was a long and bitter trek to the nearest shelter, and I like to think that this man, who set a porcupine afire, walked like one that hath been stunned and is of sense forlorn. A sadder and a wiser man, I imagine, he rose the morrow morn.
Life and Love
in Gorilla Country
The most imperial creatures in the Garden were easily twice my size, and had they been so inclined, they could have batted the life out of my body with a casual backhand slap. I was a guest, not entirely welcome but tolerated because I abided by the rules. I stayed low and still, in a proper worshipful attitude. When I came upon a family of them on my last day in the Garden, Ndume, the one I knew best, the leader and patriarch, sighed as if to say, “You again?” He didn’t exactly frown—nothing that intense—but he compressed his lips slightly, and a small vertical ridge formed in the shiny black skin just above his nose. It was an expression of mild annoyance.
I thought I read some small curiosity there as well, so I crawled forward a bit. Ndume’s expression softened, and I grunted twice, a polite custom among his kind. He returned the greeting, a deep, double guttural rasp. Neither of us moved for quite some time. He sat, and I lay, in a deep green tangle of luxuriant vegetation. A drifting mountain mist cooled and dampened our faces. It was not polite to stare, so we both shifted our eyes frequently, A residue of morning rain glittered on the leaves. When I looked again, Ndume was holding his chin in the palm of his hand. He seemed to be in a contemplative mood. I smiled at him, careful not to show my teeth, for this is an aggressive and impolite thing to do. Ndume smiled back, grunted courteously, and rose up onto all fours. He moved toward me, smiling vaguely and shifting his gaze in a well-bred manner. Despite the gleaming pelt of shiny black fur, I could see muscles the size of melons rolling in his upper arms. Ndume is a “silverback,” so called because of the saddle of silver hair—a sign of sexual maturity—across his broad back.
His odor was sharp: musky and sweet with a faint sour tang. He could have reached out and touched me. Instead he cocked his head slightly, like a man trying to solve a tricky but trivial puzzle. There was a rolling, cloudlike fog in the Garden now, and we regarded each other, man and gorilla, through a swirl of dreamlike mist. His eyes were a deep golden brown under the heavy black ridges of his brow. I felt unreal, strangely insubstantial, out of time, as though the mist between us was the stuff of millennia.
The Garden is Volcano National Park, which stretches forty-six square miles across the upper slopes of a chain of volcanoes known as the Virungas. The dense cloud forests there are the last refuge of Ndume, of Mrithi and Peanuts, of Mtoto and Picasso and Brutus: of an estimated two hundred mountain gorillas. These are the highest-ranging gorillas in the world and are generally thought to be the most magnificent of their species.
I had come to the tiny central African country of Rwanda braced and equipped for the Virungas, which rise to almost fifteen thousand feet, and I spent most of my time tracking and watching gorillas at an average altitude of ten thousand feet. The fact that the volcanoes are only a few miles south of the equator has no bearing on the weather. At ten thousand feet in the Virungas, “equatorial” often means cold and wet. The best new rain gear couldn’t stand up to the constant and torrential downpours. It was like working in a meat locker under the spray of a fire hose.
The gorillas themselves don’t much care for rain, and their day is designed to take maximum advantage of the sun. After a good thirteen hours or so in their night nests—curious-looking, carefully bordered piles of matted vegetation—the great beasts rise, feed for a few hours, drowse for an hour or two during the warmest part of the day, then feed for another four or five hours so that they will have enough energy to put in anothe
r thirteen hours of nest time. Food is abundant, and the gorillas are perfectly adapted to the forest; all they really seem to crave is the occasional sunny day.
Ndume strode off into the forest just as the sun broke through the clouds and began to burn off the mist. We were on the lower slopes of a volcano called Visoke, just above Lake Ngezi. The temperature rose to seventy degrees, and the eleven gorillas of Ndume’s family were settling down for their afternoon siesta. Two infants, both less than two years old, and two juveniles, both about four, lay together in a furry heap. One of the juveniles stripped the leaves off a vine and stuffed them into his mouth. An infant reached up, grabbed the juvenile, and pulled him backward. The juvenile’s mouth was open, and his face shone with a kind of idiot joy. His play chuckle, a heh-heh-heh sound, was barely audible. It resembled the sound a child might make laughing helplessly in church.
The largest juvenile, a six-year-old female named Picasso, climbed a small tree and stared down at me. Slowly the tree began to topple, bending until the trunk broke with a sharp crack and Picasso rolled into the dense vegetation on the forest floor. I was never able to decide whether gorillas are extraordinarily bad judges of which trees will hold them or whether they simply regard riding a breaking branch as an exciting and efficient way to get down to the ground.
Ndume clambered up the thick trunk of a huge hagenia. These are immense, gracefully expansive trees about forty feet high. The crotch formed by the trunk and the great lower branches is often large enough to accommodate several adult gorillas. Ndume found one such platform, rolled over heavily onto his back, one long arm dangling, and let the warm sun bake his chest and legs. One of the juveniles climbed up to be with Ndume, settling carefully into the big male’s armpit. An infant found a soft spot to sleep in the middle of Ndume’s huge belly.