THE DAY WAS BREATHLESSLY HOT. Ura, chief of police, steamed and sweated as he lolled from one door of his coral-lime house to the other in a vain attempt to intercept the ghost of a breeze. At length he abandoned the hope of finding comfort indoors, and sent his numerous children in search of Ears, Husks and Everything.
In the course of time the three policemen appeared, and having consulted with their chief, they went off to their respective villages to cry the law of Ura: every man, woman and child was to go to the outer beach for a grand community turtle-hunt.
I was sitting on the front balcony above the trading station when Husks announced the coming event at Central Village. Men and women rose from their morning slumber to stagger out into the blazing sunlight. They blinked stupidly, rolled their tongues in their cheeks, scratched their heads and, still half asleep, turned to cross the islet to the outer reef. Hitching up my pareu and hanging a pail of water goggles around my neck, I followed.
Community fishing is a common occurrence on Puka-Puka. Periodically, one of the villages rouses itself and issues a challenge to the other two to join in a fishing competition for rock grouper, snappers, bonito, albacore, flying-fish, turtle, or whatever kind of fish happens to be plentiful at the time. When the day’s fishing is over, each participant takes his catch to the churchyard, where it is counted and scored for his village. The village scoring the largest combined catch is entitled to do a little song and dance, usually very wicked, in which many disparaging allusions are made concerning the members of the losing villages. Then the fish are divided equally among all the men, women and children of the island. Everyone hugely enjoys these competitions, even saturnine old William, who roars out curses and cynical remarks with greater gusto than usual. Then the people go home to cook their fish, none too fragrant after a day in the full blaze of the Puka-Puka sun.
Ura, being chief of police, could not, of course, lower his dignity by opening any trifling competition such as a grouper-fishing where there would not be the slightest risk of anyone being killed or maimed for life. With him it must be torchlight netting along the treacherous sunken Arai Reef or, best of all because most dangerous, turtle-hunting. Although little Ura could not possibly bring in a turtle, he could at least send out his neighbours to hazard their lives, and personally accept the credit for a big catch.
Benny overtook me before I reached the reef. He was carrying a piece of light native wood about four feet long and six inches wide. It was for me, he explained, to be used as a head-rest while at sea, so that if I wanted to I could take my usual siesta.
On reaching the outer reef I was startled at the sight of the gigantic combers roaring along the serrations and knife-edges of coral, but Benny was not in the least alarmed. He flung my board beyond the breakers and without waiting for a lull ran confidently out to the spot where an immense comber was just curling to fall. In another instant he would have been crushed to death on the coral had he not plunged headlong into the foam. I lost sight of him for half a minute, but presently he bobbed up beyond the breakers, smiling, and as happy as a porpoise.
I knew how he had done it, having seen the same thing done many times before, but I had never had the courage to attempt it myself. Benny had merely hurried out between breakers to a point where the undertow would carry him to sea, although the foam above him was rushing shoreward. After swimming with the undertow until nearly out of breath, he had brought himself to the surface with a few strong strokes.
While hesitating, I heard a cackling voice cry: ‘Come on, Ropati-Cowboy!’ It was old Mama. She hobbled industriously past, her breath coming short and raspingly. As unconcernedly as Benny she made her way across the reef, her grass skirt but partially hiding her fleshless limbs and her shoulder bones protruding as sharply as juts of coral underfoot.
‘Lord!’ I wondered, ‘will Little Sea ever be like that?’
Just then, with an indecorous flutter of grass skirt, old Mama flopped into a billow of foam and a moment later reappeared far beyond the break of the surf.
I hesitated no longer, for I thought I saw Little Sea and her cousin Desire out beyond Benny, and I wondered whether they were laughing at me. I rushed out, threw myself into the next comber with suicidal abandon, and dived until my hands touched the coral. Then, to my astonishment – for I expected only to make myself ridiculous – I found that I was being carried rapidly seaward. The foam thinned, disappeared, and, as I was wearing my water goggles, I could pilot myself through the fantastic forests of coral. There were mountains that seemed to be standing upside down, canyons wider at the base than at the top, dark caves from which slimy things stared, coral trees whose roots were spread out in the water while their boughs were embedded deep in the sea, bottomless abysses and colours such as we poor humans who live on land never dream of. A huge fish finned lazily only a few feet away, and a shark eyed me as he swam gravely past.
On crossing a crevice in the coral I saw the head of a conger-eel, his cold bloodless eyes watching me as though deliberating whether or not to attempt such a large morsel. His fang-toothed mouth was quite large enough to have taken my leg. I had heard of men being seized by giant leptocephali and held beneath the surface until they drowned. Panic seized me and I swam frantically for the surface. Then of a sudden my fears vanished, for there was Benny at my side, grinning reassuringly. He had come down to see to it that nothing happened to the boss of his store. My confidence returned at once; I felt that I could have returned and kicked that conger-eel out of his hole.
‘Ah!’ said Benny with one of his usual ‘ifs’ when we had reached the surface, ‘if you had followed Mama you would have seen something! There was a whooper of a shark here just now.’
The long swells and the wide hollows between them were dotted with heads, for most of the inhabitants of Puka-Puka had come out. Little Ura, with a gorgeous red-and-yellow pareu about his loins, was chattering away, ordering the young men of his village to catch many turtles for the honour of the sometime deacon of the church. Mama was by no means the only grandma present, for the octogenarians had turned out en masse from their huts and lean-tos and were paddling about, diving and splashing as unconcernedly as though they really belonged in the sea rather than on land. Some of them were buoyed up with pieces of wood such as mine, and they were so completely at home in the water that they actually dozed off for a few minutes from time to time, resting on their little supports.
On the other islands, Penrhyn and Manihiki for example, there would have been much concern about sharks, but at Puka-Puka no one pays the slightest attention to them. It is claimed that no one of the island has ever been attacked by a shark, and I know from experience that they treat these monsters with complete indifference.
Benny and I swam leisurely along the reef. With our water goggles adjusted we gazed at the fishes displaying their polychromatic scales to the sea world, as, with true Puka-Pukan languor, they finned from coral to coral. As the current carried us along, I saw, in a fissure in the sloping bottom, a great patuki, his body partially hidden, but his immense fanged jaws in full view. The brute was not over eight feet long, but his mouth was large enough to swallow two men at once. He was mostly head, his body tapering to a cone. It made me decidedly uncomfortable to think that, if he caught a man, he would have to digest half of him before the other half could enter his stomach, much like a frog dining on a sparrow. And if he caught him feet first, and the man’s head reached above the surface – well, it would be anything but a pleasant sort of death.
Benny too saw the monster. ‘That is the only fish the Puka-Pukans fear,’ he said. ‘Look at his mouth! Big enough to swallow a man!’
With a painful attempt at nonchalance I replied: ‘Yes, but his body is not big enough to hold half a man, so we have nothing to fear.’
Just then the patuki wriggled out of his hole and opening his jaws in a blood-curdling manner displayed a sabre-toothed mouth and a blood-red gullet.
Benny was unawed. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I never thought of that. There is nothing to fear.’
With that he turned head downward with a duck-like flop, swam close to the monster, and gave him a contemptuous kick. The patuki closed his jaws with a snap and returned to his hole at once.
Benny’s face was beaming when his head broke water. ‘Now I know that you were right when you said he was harmless!’
‘And supposing I had been mistaken? What then?’
His face became grave at once. ‘I never thought of that!’ he said. ‘If you had been mistaken he would have eaten me, wouldn’t he?’
‘Of course.’
‘You white men always think of these things; but they never occur to us Puka-Pukans. Anyway, now I have kicked one I shall never be as afraid of patuki as I was before.’ He felt quite heroic when I explained to him the nature of his risk.
He then suggested that we swim a mile or two out to sea and hunt for a giant turtle. As is commonly known, these green turtles found in tropic seas live for a thousand years and weigh three or four hundred pounds. They have jaws capable of snapping off a man’s arm with the ease of a shark bisecting a jellyfish. But it is not commonly known, I believe, that the tails – of the males only – are their most deadly weapons.
Benny explained this to me as we swam leisurely seaward. The male’s tail is much longer than the female’s, and he has the habit of hooking it around anything that touches it, holding it in a vicelike grip, and sounding. So, when a man is grappling one of the giant Chelonia, if he allows his arm or leg to touch the tail, he is instantly caught, the tail hooking the limb and pinning it against the shell. Thereupon he loses his hold on the turtle’s flipper while vainly trying to free himself, and is dragged beneath the surface to drown. For this reason the man who, alone, brings in a male turtle is looked upon as a toa (a superman) by the people of the atolls.
A mile from shore we rested for a little while, propped up on my wooden support. The water was like polished steel, and now we were far enough from the reef to be in the midst of the great undulations of the Pacific. When we sank into the long troughs the island would be lost to view below the oily backs of the rollers, and then it required but little imagination to believe oneself hundreds of miles from land. But the next undulation would raise us, showing the island ablaze in the sunlight, an emerald of dazzling beauty resting lightly on the bosom of the sea. Benny was explaining the methods of catching the giant turtle.
‘The easiest way is the most dangerous. You grasp the turtle by the skin at the nape of his neck, and then steer him ashore, riding on his back. This is seldom done with the male turtle, for your legs come too close to his tail. If we find a female turtle today you can ride her in this manner, but if it is a male, leave him to me. We hold the papa turtle by getting the right arm under his left front flipper; then, reaching up, we can catch hold of the front edge of his upper shell. This too is dangerous, because during the struggle the hands may come within reach of the turtle’s mouth. That is how King Pirato’s father was killed: the turtle grabbed him, carried him down, and drowned him. In either of these ways, once you have got a safe hold, the turtle cannot sound, and, since he is very clumsy, you can easily guide him by jerking him to one side or the other. Now, Ropati, you take the mama turtle and I will take her husband. Ura will be surprised when he sees us coming in.’
‘But hadn’t we better find the turtles first?’
‘There they are,’ said Benny. ‘I saw them a long time ago, but being a white man, you are not supposed to notice such things.’
Following his gaze, I saw what appeared to be two coconuts floating a hundred yards or so away.
‘Grab her like this,’ said Benny, taking me by the scruff of the neck, ‘and steer her this way.’ He jerked me from side to side in a most unceremonious manner. ‘Swim close behind and take the one I leave. We can surprise them, because they are in the midst of their lovemaking and are blind to everything else.’
We swam to within twenty feet of them, adjusted our water goggles, and dived, Benny first, I following. They made a motion to part, when, in a flash, Benny twisted his arm around the larger turtle’s left flipper. Instantly I lost them in a cloud of foam. I swam past, too excited to think of fear. The female was sounding, but her movements were so slow that I soon caught up with her. Following Benny’s directions, I caught her by the nape, wound my legs around her shell and pulled upward. She responded immediately, flapping to the surface in a panic, and just in time, too, for my lungs weres bursting for want of air.
By the time I had overcome my excitement sufficiently to be aware of what I was doing, I found my pelagic Pegasus swimming mightily for the coast of South America, many thousands of miles away. I had lost my board, and at the moment I could see neither Benny nor the island, as they were behind me; and here was I in the middle of the Pacific aboard a brute I was afraid either to turn loose or to stay on. I was helpless and was about to loosen my hold, when I heard Benny yelling Puka-Pukan curses behind me. He was telling me to turn the creature landward. For the moment I had forgotten his instructions about guiding; now, when I put them into practise, my fiery turtle turned like a well-broken mare. A moment later, rising to the top of a swell, I saw the island before me, and Benny, all submerged but his head, driving his papa turtle towards the reef.
The male turtle was swifter than the female, reaching the reef in about thirty minutes, while my Chelonia needed a good three-quarters of an hour, so Benny had his safely turned over before I arrived. I was glad, for I enjoyed the glory of coming in alone, and when, about two hundred yards from the reef, I met Little Sea and Desire – pretty little water nymphs – I lost six points in my course while gazing at them.
‘Aué! Have you got a turtle?’ cried Little Sea.
I was as offhand about it as possible, saying that old Mama had been pestering me for turtle steak, so I had to go out and get her some.
‘Aué! The white man’s got a big turtle!’ little Desire screamed, and the words were as welcome to me as honey to a bear. They swam beside me, one on either side, and no returning Roman conqueror could have ridden the high horse with more vainglory than I rode my lowly Mrs Turtle. As we approached the reef, however, I had grave doubts as to how my triumph would end. I now knew how to get out to sea but had not the faintest notion of how to weather the surf in getting ashore. But with Little Sea and Desire present I did not hesitate. Without a thought of the combers I drove straight on, willing to meet instant death rather than to be shamed before them.
It turned out to be both easy and exciting. A great sea lifted us high and, crashing down with a deafening roar, carried us swiftly along on light foam as soft as eiderdown. As we were swept across the reef the turtle’s plastron shell protected me from the coral. Little Sea and Desire had no need for protection; they were as much at home in the surf as a pair of periwinkles.
Sitting on his turtle, with many flourishes and more lies, Benny told the people of Puka-Puka how I had bravely grasped my ferocious brute, and how I had insisted on bringing in the male one, only he would not allow it. He added many marvellous details, in the true native fashion, for unless it is bragging about themselves, there is nothing in which Puka-Pukans delight more than in telling of the prowess of their friends.
It is the law of the island that turtle and sail-fish belong to the entire population; so, if a man catches either of these creatures it is delivered to the headmen of the villages and divided equally among all the population. When only one turtle is caught and shared among five hundred and fifty-odd inhabitants, the individual portions, one might think, would be small. But they are larger than the uninitiated would suspect, for of an average green turtle’s three hundred pounds not ten are wasted. The Puka-Pukans eat the entire shell, the flippers, head and tail. They consider the carapace and plastron shells the most delicate parts, so, when the turtle has been eaten, there is hardly enough refuse to fill a hat. On other islands half the turtle is thrown away, and I remember Viggo saying that although a turtle is a huge creature, there is very little meat on him.
The meat is red and tastes, to me, like a cross between beef and crabmeat. The fat is green and is good for soup stock. In the female turtle are thousands and thousands of eggs, minute clusters, many of them no larger than pinheads, which will not hatch for ten, twenty, perhaps a hundred years! I believe I have seen as many as twenty thousand eggs in a single female, and I should not have been surprised to learn that there were twice that number. As a female lays only from four to five hundred eggs a year, one can easily calculate how long it will be before the smallest eggs are laid: fifty years, perhaps. Think of a pregnancy of fifty years! There are dozens of these clusters of a hundred or more minute eggs, and from that they range upward to fully developed ones the size of a hen’s egg. The smaller eggs are a rare delicacy, but with me half the pleasure of eating them is lost because of the thought of the thousands of embryo lives I am destroying through the murderous grind of my molars.
Eight turtles were caught that day, only one of them by the people of Ura’s village. The chief of police was mortified beyond words. He returned to his splendid coral-lime house, wrapped his head in a bundle of dirty rags, pleaded sick, and refused to be seen for three days. But on the fourth day he emerged, resplendent in blue trousers and red silk shirt, and, summoning his policemen, held a grand session of court to fine the villagers for straying pigs. All the pigs on Puka-Puka stray all the time, and as everyone owns pigs Ura had no difficulty in choosing his victims. Thus, Leeward Village, which had shamed him by catching more turtles than his own settlement, was summoned en masse and each man fined a shilling. So Ura’s dignity was re-established. But the fines were a small matter, for at Puka-Puka no one ever pays them.
While speaking of turtle-hunting, I will describe a much commoner way of catching the giant Chelonia.
I had been seriously ill from ptomaine-poisoning and decided to take a two weeks’ vacation on Frigate Bird Islet. It is contrary to the local taboo for anyone to visit Ko (or Frigate Bird) except during the copra-making seasons, when the entire population moves to the various islets; but as I was a foreigner and had been very hapikipiki, the fathers of Leeward Village generously permitted me to go to their islet. Furthermore, it was November, the season when the turtles come ashore to lay their eggs, and I had agreed to lie in wait for one.
Taking old William and Benny with me, I was soon camped in a little hut on the west point of Frigate Bird, in a grove of tall puka trees where the wind moans with a pleasing dolorousness and a dozen species of sea birds squawk discordantly from their perches in the branches. It is also a favourite nesting-place of the island doves (rupe), birds about the size of a bantam hen. Their cooing is in pleasing contrast to the sounds made by the other birds – a music as lonely sounding as the moaning of the wind through the puka trees.
We had not been half an hour on Frigate Bird before William rushed back, his hat-brim askew, his arms flapping wildly. He had found a turtle’s track only a short distance from the hut. It must have been a huge turtle, for its path was a good three feet wide.
When I had seen the furrow she had left behind her, I wondered that there is a turtle left alive in the sea; for the natives of all the islands know that the female lays her eggs every ten or twelve days four or five times during the months of November and December. When a track is found they have only to keep watch at the place during the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth night thereafter, at high tide, and they will catch the turtle when she returns to lay another batch of eggs. Each batch is laid within a hundred yards or so of the preceding one.
I remember reading somewhere that a turtle is very clever in hiding the spot where she lays her eggs, but this is nonsense. From the shallows to the shore brush she leaves a track as plain as an armored tank’s, and the place where she deposits the eggs is hollowed out much like a hog-wallow, the sand being heaped a foot or more high over the eggs. After laying, she wobbles straight back to the reef, leaving another trail so deep and plain that one might stumble in it if one had failed to see it.
I have also read that she returns when the eggs hatch and eats many of her young. I have never observed or heard of such a thing on Puka-Puka. Here the eggs usually hatch in the daytime, and a green or a tortoiseshell turtle is never known to come ashore in the daytime, although occasionally they come at three or four in the morning, not returning until daybreak. When the eggs hatch, the first baby turtle digs a round hole to the surface and wobbles clumsily out, followed by a second, and a third, and so on, in single file. On reaching the surface they follow in single file to the shallows and dive in. Then the tragedy begins, for there is no morsel daintier than a baby turtle, and every fish seems to be waiting for them. Of the hundred that leave the beach, not more than fifty reach the reef, and in crossing it eight or ten more are gobbled up by spotted eels. Then, as soon as they are through the breakers, the big fish beyond swirl into them and swallow them to the last turtle.
How a baby turtle manages to escape its enemies during the first few months of life is a mystery to me. I have seen them hatch only once, and on that occasion, I am sure, not a turtle survived. The Puka-Pukans say that often all of them are eaten before they reach the reef. But a turtle lives for hundreds of years, and each year the female lays from four to six hundred eggs, so that of the two hundred and fifty thousand eggs she will lay in five hundred years a few young turtles escape to carry on the species.
William and Benny and I dug out one hundred and six round white eggs that day. They were not particularly palatable but quite good enough for three hungry men on Frigate Bird Islet. Benny decided that they had been laid two days before, so that we might expect Mrs Turtle to return eight days later. Then we would lie in wait and catch her by turning her over on her back. Afterwards we would make four signal fires on the north side of the islet, which, according to the code, would inform the villagers on the main islet that a turtle had been caught.
The eight days passed as I should like the rest of my life to pass. I paddled about in the lagoon with my water goggles on, slept in the shade on the beach or sat on a coral mushroom fishing. Each day I grew stronger until I arrived at the stage of health when one derives the keenest delight from the mere fact of being alive.
On the eighth night we walked the beach during high tide, but when it had ebbed we returned to our little hut in the puka grove and went to sleep. Benny explained that turtles seldom crossed the reef at low tide, but that this was not an absolute rule.
An hour later I awoke as completely refreshed as though I had enjoyed a long and dreamless night’s sleep. William and Benny were snoring at the other end of the hut, and an owlish shearwater squawked a discordant love song to the moon, now an hour or more past the meridian.
I arose and crept out of the mosquito-net, thinking that Mrs Turtle might have come ashore despite the low tide. Turning down the beach, I had not walked a hundred yards before I came to a fresh track ploughed from the shallows to the shore brush. I stopped abruptly, for a moment unable to believe that this strange reptile from the mysterious sea had come ashore and was now actually in the brush only a few yards away. But on such a night anything seemed possible – anything but the commonplace.
The first ripples of the incoming tide were lapping over the reef and now a few inches of water lay over the coral between the reef and the shore. The water lay steely calm half-way out and the shadows of the coral stood forth with beautiful clearness. A tiny wall of water not more than a foot high swept shoreward, jet black save for the flashing flecks of spray that rose and subsided as the water rippled over the shallows. The patch of calm water dwindled until the wave broke with a faint hiss on the beach. A moment later the backwash was on its way out to the reef and soon the shallows were calm again, though now a few inches deeper than before.
Sitting in the sand near Mrs Turtle’s track, I peered into the shadows of the shore brush. Once I thought I saw her moving, but it was only the foliage stirred by the breeze. Several times I heard the crackle of breaking twigs as she broke through the brush.
She was quiet for a few moments, and then I heard a sharp scraping noise, followed by the patter of sand against the brush foliage. I rose, crept close, and turned my flashlight in that direction. At my feet, so close that I could have touched her, was a huge green turtle, weighing at least three hundred pounds. She turned her head to stare at me with cold fishy eyes and then, with a deliberate, almost haughty motion, turned again to her work without paying me the least further attention.
Moving behind her, I sat down and placed my flashlight on the ground so that the light was fully on her. I expected her to move away, but she did not, and the natives have since told me that when a turtle has once started to dig the pit for her eggs, nothing can frighten her away. They say that her eggs must fall and she will go on with her work until her task is accomplished.
There was something solemn, almost religious, about that midnight labour, beset with danger, to prepare a nest for her young. I watched with a feeling akin to awe, as though eavesdropping on some esoteric rite. Did she know that death awaited her only a few feet away – that she would never cross the reef again to plunge into the cool sanctuary of the sea? If there was any terror in her reptilian brain she failed to show it. More likely she was the stoic she appeared to be, an inveterate fatalist whose hundreds of years of experience had placed her above the vicissitudes of life, or even of death itself. This light now turned upon her was merely another of those inexplicable phenomena which happen on that strange place, dry land. As I watched her I turned over all sorts of queer thoughts such as will come into a man’s mind in the wee hours of a moonlight night on the remote beach of an uninhabited islet.
She dug her pit with her hind flippers, using the right and the left one alternately. With one flipper she would reach to a spot directly under her tail, scrape away about a handful of sand and gravel, and, cupping the bottom of her flipper, bring the sand to the surface and deposit it near the pit. Immediately the other flipper would be swung into the hole, while with the first she would brush away the sand she had brought to the surface. This was done by scraping the flipper vigorously across the ground, and it was that sound I had heard before coming up to her.
It was interesting to observe that, although one flipper was shorter than the other, when the hole became too deep for her to reach bottom with the short one, she still went through all the motions of scraping, cupping the flipper, and brushing the ground where the sand would have been. This somewhat lessened my opinion of Mrs Turtle’s common sense.
When the pit was as deep as she could make it – about twenty inches – she dropped in her eggs (one hundred and fourteen, as it later proved), filling the pit to within three or four inches of the surface. Then, working both her hind flippers at once, she scraped sand into the pit, patting it down firmly and pushing it under her plastron shell until she had a mound over the eggs about a foot high. Then for the first time she put her great powerful front flippers to work. Reaching out, she scraped them across the ground so vigorously that a shower of twigs and gravel went flying into the air. This was done, I suppose, to conceal the spot where she had laid her eggs, an entirely futile attempt. Half the shower was rained upon me with such force that I jumped to my feet. Deciding that I had seen enough of Mrs Turtle’s private affairs, I moved a few yards away to sit on the beach near her track. For ten minutes longer I heard her flinging the sand about; then she was silent.
I must have waited a full hour longer, for the moon had dropped close to Arai Reef, and I could see the foam and spray where the combers broke over the sunken coral. Venus had risen and in another hour dawn would break behind the puka trees. I flashed my light twice into the brush, only to see Mrs Turtle lying still, resting after her labour. Presently my head sank on my chest, and I dozed off for a few minutes.
I was aroused by a peculiar noise. It ceased the moment I looked up. There was Mrs Turtle, perfectly still, not more than ten feet from me. I was directly in her path; all that I had to do was to walk up to her, get a firm grip on her carapace shell above the tail, and turn her over – but there was plenty of time for that.
I watched her for fully ten minutes; then all at once she breathed. It was a raucous respiration, sounding startlingly loud in the still night air. Perhaps it was the long exposure under the moon’s full light that made me act as I did. At any rate, it occurred to me that Mrs Turtle was an exceedingly human sort of creature, so I decided to have a little confidential chat with her.
I explained the great mistake she had made in coming to a populous island to lay her eggs. ‘In your hundreds of years,’ I said, ‘you should have learned that only the loneliest sandbanks are safe for you, and that your greatest danger is from an encounter with man.
‘And now, madam,’ I went on with a little flourish, ‘see what your lack of forethought has brought you to. Tomorrow you will be split in two – Vavaji ake, as the Puka-Pukans say – and eaten to the last corner of your shell. You will have ceased to exist. For many hundreds of years you have flopped across the reefs of lonely atolls, ploughed up the beaches, and laid your hundreds of eggs; for centuries you have paddled with dignified deliberation about the seven seas, dining on the choicest turtle grass, and contemplating the starry firmament through long tropic nights. All these centuries you have escaped being made into soup for aldermen’s dinners; you have escaped the spears and ropes of savages; and, most amazing of all, at about the time William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel, when you hatched out on some remote and moonlit tropic beach, you escaped your enemies in the sea and by some freak of chance managed to grow to maturity, safe from all sea creatures, only now to be unceremoniously flopped over by a mere South Sea trader.
‘Outside the reef old Papa Turtle is waiting for you. When he rises to breathe he gazes shoreward, wondering what is keeping you so late. But he shall never see you again. He will wait beyond the reef for a few days, and then, perhaps, he will paddle off in search of another mate. Tomorrow your body, from the tip of your nose to the end of your tail, will be ground between the jaws of five hundred hungry savages. What a forlorn end to a life of adventure such as yours!’
Again Mrs Turtle breathed hoarsely, and this time she struck her flipper on the sand with a loud slap as though annoyed that I should keep her waiting. I rose and stepping behind her grasped her shell. I made a feeble attempt to turn her over, but as she was very heavy I did not try again, for I was willing to believe that she was too heavy for me. She waddled slowly down the beach, while I stood where I was, watching her. When she had almost reached the water, I cried, ‘And now, madam, I will give you three pieces of advice: Drive deeply and at once whenever you see a ship, boat or canoe. Never go ashore at an island where you see fires at night. And above all, avoid man, your greatest enemy.’
Old Mrs Turtle wobbled on without so much as a glance back, flopped gracelessly into the water and disappeared. Dawn was at hand as I walked back to the puka-grove; Benny and old William were still asleep
Neither of them would speak respectfully to me all that day. They soon discovered the turtle tracks and my own as well. They knew what had happened, but they were unable to account for my strange behaviour. And when we returned to the main islet the following day and people heard the story, I was in disgrace. William cursed horribly in four languages, and Benny emitted such a splutter of ‘ifs’ that he nearly choked in the process. For all that, I am glad I acted as I did; and if Mrs Turtle is capable of emotion, I am sure that she is glad too.