Call It Courage

by Armstrong Sperry

  A strange picture on that lonely beach under the palms: a pig roasting on a fire; a boy lean and brown and whip-strong, making a boar’s-tooth necklace; a prancing yellow dog; a calm, wide-winged albatross pecking at a coconut.

  Mafatu slipped the necklace about his throat, and he could fairly feel its magic charging him with strength! He pulled the oven stones away from the umu, and there lay the pig, golden, glowing, done to a turn. Rich juices ran in little rivulets down its sides. And as Mafatu ate, one thought alone filled his mind, overshadowing even his enjoyment of this rare feast: soon, soon now he would be ready. He had killed the ma’o. The puaa, too. His canoe would soon be completed. And then—then he would return to Hikueru!

  The canoe was finished.

  Mafatu lashed the tough purau outrigger into place with hands that trembled. The woven sail was complete and ready; the rigging strong as wire. There—it was all over! The boy could hardly wait to get his craft into water.

  Placing logs under the curving stem, he gave a shove and a push. The canoe stirred, moved forward, quick with life. Another shove and the craft slid into the lagoon. And there it floated lightly, easily as a gull poised for flight. Mafatu stood back and surveyed it with shining eyes. He could hardly believe that all these weeks of labor were at an end. Suddenly he was quiet. With lifted head he offered up the prayer with which all ships were launched at Hikueru:

  “Taaroa, Mighty One!

  My thanks to you

  In this task completed.

  Guide it on your back

  To safe harbor.

  Taaroa, e!”

  The boy leaped into the stern, picked up the paddle, and ran up the sail. Uri sprang into the bow, yelping for very joy. Kivi sailed far overhead on widespread wings. The breeze caught the sail, swelled it to a golden curve. The outrigger leaned at a sharp angle and sped ahead toward the distant reef. Spray flew back from the prow and Mafatu’s heart beat high. He let out the sheet, wrapped the sennit rope around his foot, and gripped the steering paddle with both hands. He was filled with pride in his canoe. Never had he been as happy as in this moment.

  Out toward the black reef, closer and closer the canoe skimmed on a wide arc of speed. It was late afternoon and the sun was setting in a blaze of glory, but the boy was reluctant to turn back. He knew that he should have climbed to the lookout that morning. This was the first day he had neglected that duty. But the temptation to complete his canoe had been too great. Tomorrow at daybreak he would climb the plateau for the last time. And then—and then Hikueru!

  As the little craft skimmed out toward the barrier reef, the thunder of the surf increased in volume to an overwhelming sound. Waves, born far south in the Antarctic ice fields—the home of all waves—broke their backs upon this coral rampart. Gathering far out, they charged the reef: sea horses with flinging manes of foam. The surf shot skyward and above its mist sea gulls swooped and darted. The reef thunder no longer filled Mafatu with unease. He had lived too close to it these past weeks. Out here, half a mile from shore, detached from all security of the land, he had come to believe that at last he had established a truce with Moana, the Sea God. His skill against the ocean’s might.

  The boy skirted along the edge of the reef, lowered his sail, and dropped overboard the lump of coral which served as anchor. Then he took out his fishline and baited the hook with a piece of crab meat. He wanted to enjoy to the full this new sensation of confidence in himself, this freedom from the sea’s threat. He looked back at the land fondly, but without longing. The high peak, purple in the waning light, stood somber against the sky. The valleys were shadowed with mystery. All these weeks he had lived close to this island and been greateful for its bounty. But he had been born on an atoll—a low island—and all his life had been spent in the spaciousness of open sea and windswept palms. There was something gloomy and oppressive in this high island. The reef—this was a part of his heritage. The sea, at last, was as much his element as the land.

  The realization flooded through him in a warm tide of content. He lowered his fishline, fastened it to the mid-thwart, and looked deep down into the clear water. He saw a scarlet rock-cod materialize, hang in the shadow of the canoe, motionless save for the slight movement of its gills. With a sudden flip of the tail it vanished.

  How fantastic was that undersea world! The boy saw branching staghorn corals, as large as trees, through which jellyfishes floated like a film of fog. He saw shoals of tiny mullet, miniature arrowheads—the whole school scarcely larger than a child’s hand. A conger eel drew its ugly head back within a shadowy cavern.

  Here beside the wall of reef Mafatu’s bamboo fish trap hung suspended; before he returned to shore he would empty the trap. It had been undisturbed since the hammerhead was killed, and each day had yielded up a good supply of mullet or crayfish or lobsters. Here the wall of living coral descended to the lagoon floor. Its sides were pierced with caves of darkness whose mystery the boy felt no desire to explore. Far below, perhaps forty feet, the sandy floor of the lagoon was clear and green in the dappled light. A parrot fish emerged from the gloom, nibbled at Mafatu’s bait, then vanished.

  “Aué! These fish must be well fed. My piece of crab meat does not tempt them.”

  The boy decided to give it up and content himself with the fish in the bamboo trap. He leaned over the gunwale and pulled it up out of water. Through the openings in the cage he could see three lobsters, blue-green and fat. What luck! But as he dragged the heavy, wet trap over the gunwale, the fiber cord that fastened his knife about his neck caught on an end of bamboo. The trap slipped. The cord snapped. The knife fell into the water.

  With dismay the boy watched it descend. It spiraled rapidly, catching the sunlight as it dropped down, down to the sandy bottom. And there it lay, just under the edge of a branching staghorn. Mafatu eyed it uncertainly. His knife—the knife he had labored so hard to shape. … He knew what he ought to do: he should dive and retrieve it. To make another knife so fine would take days. Without it he was seriously handicapped. He must get his knife! But. …

  The reef wall looked dark and forbidding in the fading light. Its black holes were the home of the giant feké—the octopus. … The boy drew back in sudden panic. He had never dived as deep as this. It might be even deeper than he thought, for the clarity of the water confused all scale of distance. The knife looked so very near, and yet. … There it lay, gleaming palely.

  The boy gazed down at it with longing. He remembered the morning he had found the whale’s skeleton; the first one he had ever seen. Surely Maui, God of the Fishermen, had sent the whale there to die for Mafatu’s use! The long hours that had gone into the making of the knife. … It had saved Uri’s life, too. And now Uri, in the bow of the canoe, was looking at his master with eyes so puzzled and true.

  Mafatu drew a deep breath. How could he abandon his knife? Would Maui (the thought chilled him) think him a coward? Was he still Mafatu, the Boy Who Was Afraid?

  He leaped to his feet, gave a brave hitch to his pareu. Then he was overside in the water. He clung for a moment to the gunwale, breathing deeply. Inhaling, then releasing the air in a long-drawn whistle, he prepared his lungs for the pressure of the depths. Many times he had seen the pearl divers do it. In the canoe lay a coral weight fastened to a length of sennit. Mafatu took this weight and held the cord in his toes. With a final deep breath he descended feet-first, allowing the weight to pull him downward. At about twenty feet he released the weight, turned over, and swam for the bottom.

  Here the water was cool and green. The sunlight filtered from above in long, oblique bands. Painted fishes fled before him. He saw a giant pahua, a clam shell, five feet across and taller than he: its open lips waiting to snap shut upon fish or man. Green fronds waved gently as if in some submarine wind. A shadow moved above the boy’s head and he glanced upward in alarm: only a sand shark cruising harmlessly. … An eel, like a cold waving ribbon, touched his leg and was gone.

  The knife—there it lay. How shar
p and bright it looked. Now the boy’s hands were upon it. He seized it and sprang upward toward the light.

  In that second a whiplash shot out from a cavern at his back: a lash like a length of rubber hose. The boy caught the flash of vacuum cups that lined its under surface. Panic stabbed him. The feké—the octopus! Another lash whipped forth and encircled his waist. It drew taut. Then the octopus came forth from its den to face and kill its prey.

  Mafatu saw a purplish globe of body, eyes baleful and fixed as fate; a parrot-mouth, cruel and beaked, that worked and wabbled. … . Another whiplash encircled the boy’s leg. The knife— Desperately Mafatu stabbed for one of the eyes. Then darkness clouded the water as the octopus siphoned out his venom. There in submarine gloom a boy fought for his life with the most dreaded monster of the deep. He could feel the sucking pressure of those terrible tentacles. … His wind was almost gone.

  Blindly Mafatu stabbed again, this time for the other eye. The blow, so wildly driven, went true. The terrible grip relaxed, slacked. The tentacles grew limp. Then Mafatu was springing upward, upward, drawn up toward light and air and life.

  When he reached the canoe he had hardly enough strength to cling to the gunwale. But cling he did, his breath coming in tearing gasps. Uri, beside himself, dashed from one end of the canoe to the other, crying piteously. Slowly strength returned to the boy’s limbs, warmth to his chilled soul. He dragged himself into the canoe and collapsed on the floor. He lay there, as in a trance, for what seemed an eternity.

  The sun had set. Dusk was rising from the surface of the sea. Mafatu struggled upright and peered cautiously over the side of the canoe. The inky water had cleared. Down there, forty feet below, the octopus lay like a broken shadow. The white cups of its tentacles gleamed dully in the watery gloom. With sharkline and hook the boy fished up the feké’s body. As he dragged it into the canoe one of the tenacles brushed his ankle. Its touch was clammy and of a deathly chill. Mafatu shuddered and shrank away. He had eaten squid and small octopi ever since he was born, but he knew that he could not have touched a mouthful of this monster. He raised his spear and plunged it again and again into the body of his foe, shouting aloud a savage paean of triumph. A thousand years of warrior-heritage sounded in his cry.

  Once more Maui had protected him! What to do with the feké? The boy decided that he would cut off the tentacles; they would dry and shrink, but they would be still of prodigious size, and the people of Hikueru would say: “See, Mafatu killed the feké single-handed, Aué te aué!”

  Dusk, almost in an instant, deepened into night. As Mafatu turned the nose of his canoe toward shore, the first stars were appearing, bright and close and friendly. There was the Southern Cross, pointing toward the end of the world. … The lagoon was a black mirror dusted with star-shine. Far below in the dark waters, illuminated fishes moved and had their being: meteors, gallaxies, constellations under the sea. The boy saw a line of light, narrow as a blade, as the rare pala flashed away in its everlasting quest. A sand shark, phosphorescent ghost, darted after the pala—seized it in a swirl of luminous mist. The mist faded slowly. It was blood. Mysterious life forces were completing their cycle in those dark depths, even as on the earth and in the air above. This sea—no more to be feared than earth or air: only another element for man to conquer. And he, Mafatu, had killed the feké. Aué te aué!

  As he dipped his paddle with a swinging rhythm, the rhythm of his thoughts swung in unison: “Tomorrow I shall start home! Tomorrow, tomorrow! Aiá!”

  The very thought of it set him aquiver. “Tomorrow, tomorrow!” He had been here so long. …

  He dragged the canoe up on the beach, placed the logs under the curving stem so that he might launch it easily on the morrow. He would never need to climb the high plateau to the lookout again. Let the eaters-of-men come!

  As Mafatu waited for his supper to cook, he set about preparing for his homeward journey; he would start at daybreak with the ebbing tide. He would be ready. He filled bamboo containers with fresh water, sealed them with leaves that were gummed into place, watertight and secure. Then he stored them carefully in the canoe. He prepared a poi of bananas and sealed it, likewise, into containers; there it would ferment and sour and become delicious to the taste. Then he picked a score or more of green drinking nuts and flung them into the canoe. And as he trotted back and forth across the beach and his supper steamed on the fire, one thought alone, like an insistent drum beat, echoed in the boy’s heart: “Tomorrow I shall start home! Tomorrow, tomorrow!”

  Never again need he hang his head before his people. He had fought the sea for life and won. He had sustained himself by his own wits and skill. He had faced loneliness and danger and death, if not without flinching, at least with courage. He had been, sometimes, deeply afraid, but he had faced fear and faced it down. Surely that could be called courage.

  When he lay down to sleep that night there was a profound thankfulness in his heart. “Tavana Nui,” he whispered, “my father—I want you to be proud of me.”

  He fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

  Before dawn he was awakened by a sound of measured booming, like the beating of a supernatural drum. Thump-thump THUMP! Thump-thump THUMP! It rose above the thunder of the reef, solemn and majestic, filling the night with thunder.

  Instantly awake, listening with every sense, Mafatu sat upright on the mats. Far out on the reef the seas burst and shot upward like sheeted ghosts in the moonlight. There it came again: Thump-thump THUMP! Thump-thump THUMP! Steady as a pulse, beating in the heart of darkness. …

  And then Mafatu knew. The eaters-of-men had come.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HOMEWARD

  A chill sweat broke out over Mafatu’s body. He crouched there listening, unable for the moment to make a single movement. The rhythmic message that boomed across the mountain brought him a message of doom. Thump-thump THUMP! Thump-thump THUMP! It shivered along his nerves, setting his hair on edge.

  Warily, moving with utmost caution, Mafatu crept out of the house. The beach was softly brilliant in the light of the waning moon. Any figure moving along the sand he could have seen instantly. He stopped, every nerve strung like a wire: the beach was deserted, the jungle silent and black with mystery. The boy rose to his feet. Swift as a shadow he turned into the undergrowth where the trail led to the high plateau. The jungle had never seemed so dark, so ominous with peril. The tormented roots of the mapé trees clutched at him. Lianas tripped him. Tree-ferns, ghostly in the half-light, rustled about him as he passed, their muted hush seeming to say: “Not yet, Mafatu, not yet.”

  By the time he reached the plateau he was breathless and panting. He dropped to his knees and crawled forward, an inch or two at a time. One false move might spell destruction. But he had to know, he had to know. …

  Thump-thump THUMP!

  The measured booming grew louder with every inch that he advanced. Now it pounded in his ears, reverberated through his body, thrummed his nerves. Somewhere below in darkness, black hands drew forth from hollowed logs a rhythm that was a summation of life, a testament of death. Uri crept close to his master’s side, the hair ridging on his neck, his growl drowned in the thunder.

  Now the boy could see into the cleared circle of the Sacred Place. Leaping fires lighted a scene that burned itself forever into his memory. Fires blazed against the basalt cliffs, spurts of flame that leaped and danced, showers of sparks borne off on the back of the night wind. Now a deep wild chanting rose above the booming of the drums. From his vantage point Mafatu saw six war canoes drawn up on the beach. Mighty canoes they were, with high-curving stems and decorations of white shell that caught the firelight in savage patterns. But what held the boy’s eyes in awful trance were the figures, springing and leaping about the flames: figures as black as night’s own face, darting, shifting, bounding toward the sky. The eaters-of-men. … Firelight glistened on their oiled bodies, on flashing spears and bristling decorations. High above the drums’ tattoo rose the mournful note o
f the conch shells, an eerie wailing, like the voices of souls lost in interstellar space.

  Mafatu saw that the savages were armed with ironwood war clubs—clubs studded with sharks’ teeth or barbed with the sting-ray’s spike. Zigzags of paint streaked their bodies. And towering above all, the great stone idol looked down with sightless eyes, just as it had looked for untold centuries.

  Mafatu, lying there on the ledge of basalt, watched the strange scene, powerless to move, and he felt Doom itself breathing chill upon his neck. He drew back from the edge of the cliff. He must flee! In that very instant he heard a crashing in the undergrowth, not twenty yards away. A guttural shout ripped the darkness. The boy flung a desperate glance over his shoulder. Four black figures were tearing toward him through the jungle; he could see them now.

  He turned and ran blindly down the trail whence he had come. Slipping, sliding, stumbling, his breath all but choking in his throat. He felt like a man drowning in ice-cold water. He felt as he had sometimes felt in dreams, fleeing on legs that were weighted. Only one thought gave him courage as he ran: his canoe, ready and waiting. His canoe. If only he could reach it, shove it into the water before the savages overtook him. Then he would be safe. …

  He knew this trail as he knew the back of his hand. That knowledge gave him an advantage. He could hear his pursuers, slipping, stumbling through the brush, shouting threats in a language strange to his ears. But there was no mistaking the meaning of their words.

  On the boy dashed, fleet as an animal. Thorns and vines clutched at him. Once he tripped and sprawled headlong. But he was up and away in an instant. Through the trees he caught a glimpse of white beach and his heart surged. Then he was speeding across the sand, Uri at his heels.