I SOMETIMES THINK that I have lived at Puka-Puka long enough to know something of my neighbours’ mental processes, to understand them individually and collectively. Some grave old grandmother or grandfather will stop at the store to pass the time of day with me, or I will see the village fathers deliberating in one of their monthly assemblies, and they appear to be very much like parents and grandparents at home. Then something will happen to convince me that these men and women of mature stature are, have been, and always will be children, and in order to account for their actions I have to hark back to my own childhood days. Thus it was in the affair of the sandpiper.
One day, walking along the causeway leading from Leeward to Central Village, I encountered my friend, old William, the lone infidel of Danger Island, and stopped to have a yarn with him. It was a Monday morning, and as I had been to church the previous day, I had again to make my peace with William, who looked upon my occasional back-slidings with ill-disguised contempt.
‘Puka-Puka men all damn fool Christians! Bloody lubbers!’ he said. ‘Whas a matter, you? Whas a matter you go to church for?’
‘Well, William, it’s this way,’ I said. ‘Little Sea belongs to the church, and now that she is living with me, I go now and then to please her.’
‘Hmm!’ grunted William. He took off his hat brim to scratch his head, swatted a bloated mosquito that had been dining on one of his great ears, and then went on irrelevantly, ‘Puka-Puka damn fine island. Plenty eat, plenty sleep, no work – not like when I was a boy on whaling ship.’
This profound reflection seemed to have exhausted him and he said no more for a time. Of a sudden he cocked his head to one side in a listening attitude. Then, to my great astonishment, he opened his great white-fanged mouth and chirped, ‘Twit-twit! Twit-twit!’ in a high ridiculous voice not at all like his ordinary speaking voice. A moment later he jumped up and went hobbling off at a great rate, chirping his plaintive ‘twit-twit! twit-twit!’, and disappeared in the brush.
I observed then that Puka-Puka had unaccountably roused itself from its usual mid-morning stupor. One old man, so decrepit that I had thought he could never again leave his hut, came charging down the causeway with the rest of the inhabitants close behind him, all of them chirping, ‘Twit-twit! Twit-twit!’ like a parcel of lunatics. King-of-the-Sky passed, carrying the village shotgun. He is a huge man, six feet four on bare hoofs and composed of two hundred and seventy pounds of solid bone and muscle. Everyone was greatly excited and all hurried in one direction and scattered through the trees and bush inland.
For a moment I was too greatly astonished to move; then an infectious madness seized me. I did a caper on the narrow causeway, let out a whoop and a few ‘twit-twits’ on my own account, and followed in the wake of the others.
I found them gathered about one of the taro excavations, partially hidden by bush and puka trees. It had been raining and there were six or eight inches of water over the mud where the plants grew. Everyone was ‘twit-twitting’, from the great-grandfathers to the babies who had only just learned to walk.
King-of-the-Sky stood in the middle of the taro-bed, waist-deep in mud and water. His six-inch mouth was spread even wider in a smile of great self-importance; he held his gun at the ready while his gaze followed the flutterings of a lone sandpiper that circled about the swamp.
With a flutter the sandpiper approached to within thirty feet of King-of-the-Sky. He raised his gun slowly; a terrific explosion followed, the rebound upsetting the superman into the mud. A cloud of smoke rose over the taro-beds, while the poor little sandpiper turned a dozen aerial somersaults and landed with a splash in the swamp. Thereupon King-of-the-Sky plunged through the muck and retrieved his prey, while the villagers shouted, ‘Mate! Mate!’ (‘He is dead! He is dead!’) Forthwith the crowd dispersed as quickly as it had assembled. Everyone had rushed home to witness the second act in this, to me, still mysterious little atoll diversion.
Soon King-of-the-Sky appeared sauntering, mud-bespattered, through Leeward Village, the shotgun on his shoulder and the sandpiper swinging in his hand. A few of the children followed him, but all the older people were seated in front of their houses so that when he passed they could cry in the truly ingenuous native fashion:
‘Where have you been, King-of-the-Sky?’
‘Aué! Look! He’s shot a sandpiper!’
All of them appeared to be enormously surprised, as though they had not themselves witnessed King-of-the-Sky’s heroic adventure.
A few moments later, the little show at an end, the street was again deserted. Everyone had moved into the shade of their houses to resume their disturbed siestas.