The Calling

It was the time of in-between. The strong south-easterlies of the dry season had faded and daily the island people watched big thunderheads grow over the glassy sea to the north-west. Soon, heavy rains would break and it would be a little cooler.

Matthias woke with the day, the way he always did. He turned on his back and surveyed the wooden poles and palm thatch above him. Better get up, he thought. He did so and walked between the huts, past the little cargo-cult shrine with its brightly painted model aeroplane dangling on a string, and down to the narrow, palm-fringed, beach.

It was very humid; perhaps the rains would soon come. He stood alone in the shallows and poured water over his grateful body in the first light. Ocean swells boomed on the reef but in the lagoon it was calm. Then the sun shafted through the tree-topped black mountains to the east. There would be no wind. It was as good a day as any for the Calling.

People were stirring in the village. Thin wisps of smoke drifted up through the palm fronds as cooking fires were coaxed into life. Children moved listlessly amongst dogs and chickens on the clean-swept, grey sand between the houses. A leggy cockerel shrilled thinly.

Matthias sat and chewed on some cold baked kau-kau, drank home-made coffee, and regarded his wife Mary with affection. Many women were named Mary, a name beloved of the missionaries who also brought peroxide of hydrogen to kill the nits and start a blond tradition out in the Islands.

Matthias went to the beach and stood by the slim little canoe pulled up above high water mark. He found he couldn’t put it off any longer. He stood inside the frame, lifted the front outrigger up to his chest, and walked the light craft down the beach and into the water.

He looked out over the lagoon, beyond the white breakers pounding the coral ledges. Except for the swell it was calm and there was no sign of wind. He pushed off alone and paddled quietly towards the slim passage in the reef. The sun was well up and the calm water glittered. The day was growing hot.

The canoe threaded through the brown and green shallows and the sand-patched coral heads and came to the open sea. The little craft rode the smooth swell easily. Matthias looked down into the clear, midnight-blue depths and watched little dancing shafts of golden light frame his own shadow. To the west a dark patch of noddy-terns rested quietly on the sea whilst frigate-birds lazily scythed the air above. The tuna must have gone down, thought Matthias. He wound a cloth about his head and paddled slowly on out to sea.

He looked back and couldn’t see the village huts any more; just smoke from the copra drier. The palms stood low and salt mist on the reef was a grey veil. He stopped paddling and looked all around and the sea vista made him feel good.

What a pity, thought Matthias, that the whites were intercepting all the cargo. During the war, his father had said, many good things had fallen from the sky. Now there was nothing, no matter how the cargo shrines were tended in the village.

His father had been a councillor and when the fighting stopped and there was all that talk of independence, he had flown south with others in a silver balus to the big country and had actually seen it all.

There was the factory in the chief city from which money poured all day long; you could see the men packing it in wooden boxes. And the aeroplanes came and went at the airport and the shops were filled with cargo of the very best kinds. No one knew why it didn’t come to his country any more, but the white men were suspect.

Back home there had been all that talk of driving the strangers out and getting the cargo for themselves. The white people did go and still no cargo came. And there was that fool priest who said salvation was nigh and nobody tended the food gardens and things had got pretty bad at one stage. Matthias’s stomach growled at the thought of youthful hunger.

The man drew his mind back from the dreaming, took a sip of water from a bottle, and looked around. Nothing, not even a bird. The sun glitter threw bronze arrows.

It would have been better if the tuna schools were feeding, thought Matthias. Frenzied fish and white water with dipping birds wheeling all around; and sharks cruising the edges like wolves.

Matthias, perched on his slender little canoe, thought it wouldn’t have to be a very big shark, else it might have to be lashed alongside, and a canoe was hard to paddle thus all the way back home. No! A smaller one would do. Best of all an ocean white-tip because everyone knew they had the most mana.

Matthias took up his urk-urk rattle, made of coconut-shell pieces threaded on a rattan hoop. He clattered it in the sea, and started his Calling. He had been the village Caller ever since manhood.

Through half-closed eyes, reaching back in time, softly chanting, he called to his ancestors in the spirit world. The shark rattle stirred the sea. It made foam, just a little, and drops of salt water sparkled in the sun. Matthias sat singing his song without words and willed a shark to come. It was very important.

He grew silent, sat upright, and peered around. The surface of the sea was calm and unbroken. The little canoe gently heaved on the dying ocean swell. He drank some more water, for it was mid-morning and the sun scorched the world.

Dozing and dreaming and wishing for just a little breeze to cool him, Matthias heard the first noddy piping thinly and looked behind to see a nervous ripple of bait fish on the surface. He took up his paddle and quietly turned the canoe and headed towards where, at any moment, the sea would burst into life. Already the frigate-birds were circling and waiting high above.

The first tuna arced gracefully out of the water and, at that signal, a patch of sea was churned white as a school of skipjack attacked the massed anchovies. Noddies screamed shrilly, fighting for bits, and the frigate-bird bankers claimed interest from all.

Matthias sat and watched the carnage. Where were the sharks? He knew they would be underneath the tuna, exacting toll of anything hurt or careless.

The feeding frenzy stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The ocean was calm, the sun was hot, the silence almost oppressive. All around, nothing, and the canoe heaved gently on the now faint but everlasting swell. Matthias sang softly and rattled his shells.

A dorsal fin came up in the water. It was a big one with a white tip to it and Matthias knew it was too much for him. He grew silent, put the rattle down in the canoe and waited. The fin disappeared. He felt hungry and would have liked to eat a little but tradition forbade it.

Afternoon wore on and it was still hot. Matthias sank down into the bottom of his canoe with his back against the outrigger beam and dozed off; partly because he was tired but also because he knew that a man’s spirit was strongest in a relaxed mind and body.

He woke and looked around him. Nothing. He sat up and took some more water and, in a land where the sun rises and sets at six o’clock all year round, knew it was mid-afternoon. A tiny catspaw of breeze gently stroked the sea. Matthias dipped some salt water and poured it over his head. It soaked his headcloth and trickled down the back of his neck. It was pleasant. Once more he perched on the gunwale and sang his shark-calling song and shook his rattle in the water.

He sensed rather than saw it. There it was again! The faint shadow rose and passed under the canoe. Matthias tensed and gently beat the canoe side with the bamboo handle of his fishing spear and the six-foot shark turned in curiosity. When it was out of sight he rattled the coconut shells in the water and soon it was back. As it passed underneath it rasped against the canoe and two amber-bead eyes regarded Matthias curiously.

The Caller chanted now more urgently and beguiling words came through unbidden. “Come my little friend, the village has need of you now. Come and ride in my fine canoe to the village and you will be honoured. Come and use your sharp teeth on the enemies of our ancestors.”

The shark came alongside the canoe and hesitated. Matthias leaned over and slipped a thin, flexible rattan running noose over the shark’s head. There was a big, propeller-shaped, wooden piece attached to the end of it. The man shouted with excitement as he jerked the noose tight and the startled fish jumped and made off in a flurry of spray.

Matthias the Caller knew that the shark would not sound but thresh about the surface in panic, the wooden propeller dragging behind. He took up his paddle and followed. In time the fish tired and, drawing alongside, Matthias picked up his fish spear. “Oh Shark! Forgive me but we need you now,” he said, and took the fish neatly between the eyes, in the brain. It wasn’t a very big shark but the canoe was almost filled as the Caller turned for the shore, weariness now overcome.

Villagers were on the beach as he came ashore and the good news soon spread. “Did you take this fish according to our custom?” inquired a leader, who was a woman because things are matrilineal in that place. When Matthias confirmed the good news the Elders carefully washed the shark and carried it reverently through the village and hung it in the little shrine where the model aeroplane dangled on a string. And the whole village assembled to pray for help.

And in the morning the shark was taken down and the jaws cut out and cleaned and put back to hang in the shrine and the rest of it was burnt and the ashes scattered with ceremony around the village. Everyone said how things would get better from now on. Cargo was sure to come. Already the first rains were smoking on the horizon.