Читать книгу Wild Life in Southern Seas - Becke Louis - Страница 6

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Four miles north-west from Nanomaga, a tiny isle of the lately annexed Ellice Group in the South Pacific, lies a great patch of submerged coral, called Tia Kau—the best fishing ground in all the wide South Sea, except, perhaps, the atolls of Arrecifos and Christmas Island, in the North Pacific. Thirty years ago, when the smoke and glare from many a whaler’s try-pots lit up the darkness of the ocean night from the Kermadecs to the far Pelews, the Tia Kau was known to many a sailor and wandering trader. But now, since the whaling industry died, and the trading vessels are few and far between, the place is scarcely even known by name.

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A hot, steamy mist lies low upon the glassy surface of the sleeping sea encompassing Nanomaga, and the lazily swelling rollers as they rise to the lip of the reef have scarce strength enough to wash over its flat, weedy ledges into the lagoon beyond. For since early morn the wind had died away; and the brown-skinned people of the little reef-girt island, when they rose from their slumbers and looked out upon the dew-soaked trees, and heard the moan of the distant breakers away on Tia Kau, said to one another that the day would be calm and hot till the sun was high and the wind came. And, as your true South Sea Islander dreads the blistering rays of the torrid sun as much as he does the stinging cold, each man lay down again upon his mat and smoked his pipe or cigarette, and waited for the wind to come.

Along the silent and deserted beach long lines of coco-palms, which slope seaward to the trades, hang their drooping, languid plumes high above the shallow margin of the lagoon, which swishes and laps in gentle wavelets along the yellow sand. A shoal of pale grey mullet swim close inshore, for out beyond in the deepening green flit the quick shadows of the ever-preying frigate birds that watch the waters from above.

’Tis roasting hot indeed. As the mist begins to lift, the steely ocean gleam pains the eye like a vast sheet of molten lead, and the white stretch of sand above high-water mark in front of the native village seems to throb and quiver and waver to and fro; the mat coverings of the long row of slender canoes further down crackle and warp and swell upward.

Presently the one white trader on the little island comes to the doorway of his house and looks out. Not a living thing to be seen, except, far out beyond the reef, where the huge bodies of two blackfish lie motionless upon the water, sunning themselves; and just above his head, and sitting on its perch, a tame frigate-bird, whose fierce eye looks upward and outward at the blazing sun.

“What a terror of a day!” mutters the trader to himself, as he drinks his morning coffee, and then lazily sinks into a cane lounge on his verandah. He, too, will go to sleep until the breeze springs up, or some inconsiderate customer comes to buy tobacco, or tell him the local gossip.

In and about the village—which is a little further back from the trader’s house—the silence of the morning heat reigns supreme.

The early meal of fish and taro has been eaten, and every one is lying down, for the smooth white pebbles of sea-worn coral that cover the ground around the high-roofed houses of pandanus thatch are hot even to the native foot, though here and there may be a cool strip of darkened shade from the overhanging branch of palm or breadfruit tree. Look through the open doorway of a house. There they lie, the brown-skinned lazy people, upon the cool matted floor, each one with a wooden aluga, or bamboo pillow, under his or her head, with their long black tresses of hair lying loosely uncoiled about the shoulders. Only three people are in this house, a big reddish-brown skinned man, a middle-aged woman, and a young girl. The man’s and woman’s heads are on the one pillow; between them lies the mutual pipe smoked out in connubial amity; the girl lies over in the corner beside a heap of young drinking coconuts and a basket of taro and fish, her slender figure clothed in nought but a thick girdle of fine pandanus leaf. She, too, has been smoking, for in her little hand is the half of a cigarette.

A wandering pig, attracted by the smell of food, trots slowly to the door, and stands eyeing the basket. His sleepy grunt betrays him, and awakens the girl, who flings her bamboo pillow at his head with a muttered curse; and, crawling over to where her sleeping parents lie, she pillows her head upon her mother’s naked thigh, and falls asleep again.

Another hour passes, and then a faint breath moves and sways and rustles the drooping palms around the village, and the girl awakes. Had she been dreaming, or did she hear a faraway curious sound—a mingling of sharp, whistling notes and hoarse, deep gutturals, such as one may hear when a flock of terns and boobies are darting down upon their prey? Tossing back her black mane of hair, she bends her head seaward and listens intently, and then, rising, goes to the open door, and looks out upon the shimmering blue. The white man, too, has heard, and she sees him running to the village. The dulled, sleepy look in her big eyes vanishes, and darting over to her slumbering father, she slaps his brawny arm.

“Ala! Ala! awake, my father. There be a flock of gogo crying loudly, and the white man is running hither.”

The big man springs to his feet, followed by his wife, and in a moment the whole village is awake, and the men run beachward to their canoes; for the flock of gogo means that a shoal of bonito, perhaps twenty thousand or more, are passing the island on their way to Tia Kau.

Before the men, laden with their fishing tackle, have reached the canoes, the village children are there, throwing off the coverings of mats in readiness for launching, and then, with a merry clamour of voices, the slender craft are lifted up and carried down to the water’s edge. The white man, too, goes with them in one Muliao’s canoe, and the women laugh and wish him luck as they see him strip to the waist like one of their own people, and show a skin almost as brown.

Over the reef they go, thirty or more canoes, paddling to the west. There, a mile beyond, is a vast flock of gogo—a small, sooty tern—the density of whose swaying cloud is mingled with the snowy white of gulls. How they flutter, and turn, and dive, and soar aloft to dive again, feasting upon the shining baby kanae, or mullet, that seek to escape from the ravenous jaws of the bonito, whose way across the sea is marked by a wide streak of bubbling, hissing foam!

Meanwhile, as the canoes fly in pursuit, one man in each busies himself by hurriedly preparing his fellows’ tackle, which is both for rod and deep-sea fishing. Lying side by side upon the ama, or outrigger grating, are four rods. And such rods! twelve to fourteen feet in one piece, eight inches in circumference at the base, and tapering to an inch at the point. But big and clumsy as they look, they are light, tough, and springy. The line is of two-stranded fau (hibiscus bark), and is not quite as long as the rod itself; the shank of the hook is of pearl-shell, gleaming and iridescent as polished opal, and the upward curving piece that forms the barbless point is cunningly lashed to the heel of the shank with fine banana fibre. In length these hooks range from one to three inches, and at the lashing of the point and shank are two tiny scarlet feathers of the parrokeet. Lying beside the rods are the thick, neatly curled lines for deep-sea work. But just now these are not wanted.

And as the canoes draw near the whirling, shrilly-crying birds, the water becomes a wild, seething swirl of froth and foam, for the bonito are travelling swiftly onward, snapping and leaping at the persecuted kanae, and their tens of thousands of bodies of shining blue and silver sparkle brightly in the sun. And then with a wild shout of glee the leading canoes shoot into the fray, quickly followed by the others.

“Tu! Tu!” (“Stand up, stand!”) cry the paddlers amidships, and in an instant the men seated for’ard and aft drop their paddles, seize their rods, and each man bracing his right leg against the rounded thwart on which he has been sitting, swings his bright, baitless hook into the whirl below. Almost ere it touches the water a fish leaps to it, the tough rod of pua quivers and trembles, the fisher grunts, and then with a strong, swift, and steady sweep of his naked arms, and a triumphant cry of “Maté!” (“Struck) the first atu, ten pounds of sheeny blue and polished silver, is swung clear of the water and dropped into the canoe, where he kicks and struggles among the paddlers’ feet. In another minute every other canoe is hard at work, and the loud shouts and cries of the excited natives add to the din of the wheeling birds and the splashing of the water and the furious kicking and thumping against the frail, resonant sides of the canoes, as fish after fish is swept upward and outward, and dropped struggling into the bottom, among its bleeding and quivering fellows.

Around the largest canoe, from which six natives fish, is the wildest boil and bubble of all, for the cunning crew have hung from a bended stick over the side a bright piece of mother-of-pearl, and at this the hungry fish leap fiercely. How they swarm and “ring” round the canoe like a mob of frightened cattle upon some wide Australian plain, who smell their deadly enemy—a wild black! Not that the bonito are frightened; they are simply mad for the shining hooks, which look so like young and tender half-grown flying-fish.

But still on and on the main body go, and the canoes go with them, steadily on to the Tia Kau, although now each man has taken perhaps twenty or thirty fish from eight to ten pounds in weight; and the paddlers’ arms are growing weary. Already the white man is tired, and is sitting down, smoking his pipe, and watching the moving cloud of birds above. And yet his comrades swing their rods, and add fish after fish to the quivering heap below. Time enough for them to smoke, they think, when the fish are gone—and then, suddenly, with an almost noiseless “flur-r-r!” they are gone, and the white man laughs; he knows that there will be no more atu to-day. For there, swimming swiftly to and fro upon the now quiet surface are half a dozen pala, the dreaded foe of the bonito for all time.

The canoes come to a dead stop; the shoal of atu have dived perhaps a hundred fathoms deep, and will be seen no more for many an hour. And so the natives sit down and smoke their pipes, and hurl reproaches and curses at the pala for spoiling sport.

“Why grumble, Muliao?” asks the white man of his friend. “See, already the canoes are weighted down with fish. But yet let us catch one of these devils before we return to the shore.”

“Meitake! Aye, that shall we, though who careth to eat of pala when bonito is to his hand? But yet to punish these greedy devils for coming here—” and Muliao takes from the outrigger a coil of stout three-stranded line, which he makes into a running bowline and hangs over the side of the canoe from the end of his rod, while another man picks up a small bonito, passes a line through its gills, and then throws it far out upon the water only to draw it in again as fast as he can pull, first passing it quickly through the bowline on Muliao’s rod. But already a pala, a long, slender, scaleless fish, six times as big as the biggest salmon ever caught, and with teeth like a rip-saw, has heard the splash, and is speeding after the decoy. Deftly the dead fish is drawn through the trap, followed by the eager jaws and round head and shoulders of its pursuer. Then, whish! the bowline jerks, slips over his smooth, rounded body, and tightens in a fatal grip upon the broad, bony tail. And then there is a mighty struggling, and splashing, and leaping, and the canoe shoots hither and thither as the crew haul on the line; for a full-grown pala is as strong as a porpoise. At last, however, he is dragged alongside, and then Muliao, grasping a heavy turtle-spear in his right hand, rises to his feet and watches. And then, with arm of strength and eye of hawk, the spear is sped, and crashes through the pala’s bony head.

“Aue!” and Muliao leans pantingly back in the stern. “Pull him in, my friends, and then let us to the shore. To-morrow, if the day be fair, shall we fish together on Tia Kau, and with God’s blessing and the help of the white man’s tobacco catch many fish.”