The Sex Lives of Cannibals (20 page)

CHAPTER
14

In which the Author explores the World of Dogs on Tarawa, particularly the world of his dogs, who grew up to be the Biggest Dogs on Tarawa, possibly because he fed them, which led him to look upon his dogs in a different light, particularly when the dogs were described as kang-kang (tasty).

O
ne day, Vaclav, a timid green-eyed dog with white fur, given to us by Tiabo—because he looked like an
I-Matang
dog, she explained—arrived home from his reef explorations with the dog we had always referred to as the brown dog. This dog soon became affectionately known as Brown Dog, because Sylvia would not let me name her Olga. Brown Dog in turn brought her mother, a gentle long-snouted dog with black fur, known in the dog community as the neighborhood slut, and soon called by us Mama Dog, who in turn brought her most recent litter, four shrieking puppies, more pathetic than cute on account of their mangy baldness, but smart nonetheless, who quickly recognized that Sam, our cat, had claws and did not like to be trifled with. And so it came to be that we suddenly found ourselves with seven dogs and one cat, which was not ideal.

The cat was the first to arrive. He had run away as a wee kitten, proving that he was an exceptionally clever cat. I would estimate that the average life span of a cat in Kiribati is about five hours. The I-Kiribati regard cats as useless, inedible, and harbingers of black magic. Litters are generally scooped up as soon as they are found, placed in a bag, and drowned. The I-Kiribati do not have soft and mushy feelings for the animal world. Even children, whom one would assume to be the most sympathetic to the plight of small animals, amuse themselves by flinging a kitten or puppy around by its tail until they grow bored, whereupon the animal is tossed into the current of an outgoing tide. Sam the cat, however, somehow managed to escape this fate and find his way to an
I-Matang
house, where he mewed and moaned and made such a sorry spectacle of himself that we felt obliged to let him in. He quickly made his way to the couch, clambered up, settled himself belly up, and promptly fell asleep underneath the ceiling fan. His fleas too made themselves at home.

Zeus was next. We had only recently arrived on the island and still maintained Humane Society–type feelings for dogs. That would change. Very soon I would be pleased with myself when the rocks I flung drew blood, but at the time such behavior was unimaginable. Zeus was a pitiful sight. A small puppy that had already lost every scrap of fur to the mange, he also had a belly distended by worms and nicks and cuts that were clearly infected. I should have broken his neck right there and then and put him out of his misery. But he was scrappy and personable, and when I made the mistake of giving him some bread, he looked upon me with such happy, grateful eyes that I didn’t know what to do. There was no veterinarian on the island. The last one, a volunteer from Finland, had left when he more or less lost three-quarters of his right leg to a toxic infection caused by a scrape against the coral reef. The new vet had yet to arrive. When Mike wandered by one day I promptly asked him if he would like to have this dog. “He’s very friendly,” I said.

“Do you mean this cruel joke of a dog?” he asked. “The only thing to do with a dog like that is to crush it with a rock.”

“Yes, well, I can’t quite manage to do that.”

“Give it time.”

In the end, we decided to bring the dog to FSP, where we were sure it would grow up to be a much-loved guard dog. We named it Zeus, figuring he could use a little ego boost. Sylvia reported that Zeus had lasted exactly one hour at FSP before another dog ate him.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. The poor thing.”

I had always assumed that the expression
It’s a dog-eat-dog world
was to be understood metaphorically, but apparently there is also a literal dimension and this took some getting used to. It’s a tough world for dogs in Kiribati. Contrast this with the experience of their cousins in the United States, where dogs have their own hotels, are taken for monthly pedicures, are fed gourmet dog food, and are treated with what I now regard as gag-inducing affection and deference. My mother, for instance, apparently feels that rules and discipline are only to be applied to children, whereas when her beagle jumps on top of the table and empties wineglasses in between devouring the Thanksgiving turkey, my mother gets out the camera. “She’s a very independent dog,” she says. Yes, well if that dog happened to find himself on Tarawa, it’s safe to say that it would also find itself on the dinner table. Of course, the I-Kiribati don’t have tables, but you see my point.

The I-Kiribati, particularly those from the northern Gilberts, eat dogs. I could understand why. The diet in Kiribati is so meager that now and then whenever I spied a particularly meaty person I immediately thought of a pork loin. Don’t get me wrong. I had no desire to eat anyone’s arm, but once you’ve digested raw sea worms and boiled moray eels you begin to think a little more creatively about what precisely constitutes food. Still, it was something of a gasp-inducing shock when wandering on the beach on North Tarawa I came across two men skinning a dog, preparing it for the fire. Imagine taking poor Max for a walk and all the while he is bounding along in that happy-go-lucky way of dogs on walks, and meanwhile you’re thinking marinades. The dog was soon impaled on a spit—and I know I’m going to get a lot of hate mail for this—but it smelled pretty good.

Nevertheless, I could not be induced to eat an unknown dog, even though I was assured it was
kang-kang
. This is because most dogs on Tarawa are repellent to behold. Combine the mange with starvation, add in a canine social milieu that rewards feral savagery, and you are unlikely to find a blue ribbon kind of dog. Instead, what you find is a pure Darwinian dog. A tough dog.

I found this out as we tended to Vaclav. He was a puppy when Tiabo presented him to us, unbidden. “You need a guard dog,” she said, and I tried not to feel slighted. “This is an
I-Matang
guard dog.”

Vaclav had white fur, or at least he had some white fur. The mange had gotten him too, and so he was predominantly pink, just like us
I-Matang
. Four hours and five “accidents” later, we decided that he would be an outdoor dog. We cleaned him up and fed him the best the island could provide, fish and rice, and it was with swelling pride when we first heard him bark like a manly dog, a deep sonorous get-away-from-the-house bark.

He had had a rough go of it. Dogs on Tarawa are profoundly territorial. Vaclav found this out one day when he bravely accompanied me to the Angirota Store. It is a short walk, but a mere hundred yards from the house, a half-dozen neighborhood dogs set upon Vaclav, mauling him to shreds for having the temerity to cross their territory, and it was only through some pretty fierce and highly accurate rock throwing that I was able to save him. He limped and hobbled. He bled alarmingly from several gashes. I feared that we were going to have an Old Yeller kind of ending, but within hours he had pulled himself back together and learned a valuable lesson. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.

Soon he made a friend. Brown Dog was roughly the same age as Vaclav, and together they prowled the reef at low tide, which in the dog community was regarded as neutral territory. Sam the cat also wandered out to the reef at low tide. He liked to go fishing. Hovering over a tidal pool, he deftly scooped out a fish, which he would then bring back into the house and play with until it died, and then he would find an ingenious hiding place for it. It was the same with geckos. Whenever he heard the soft plop of a gecko losing its grip, Sam darted with astonishing speed, clasped the gecko firmly in its mouth, no longer fooled by that devious lose-the-tail trick, and brought it back inside the house, where he mercilessly taunted it until it also died. Then he would find an obscure nook somewhere and hide the gecko. Decomposition occurs swiftly on the equator. Hours later, we would follow our noses in an exciting game of Where’s the Dead Animal? Sam enjoyed this immensely.

Vaclav and Brown Dog too brought back interesting finds from the reef. Typically, they returned with skulls. On any given day, our backyard was home to a half-dozen and more dog and pig skulls, roasted an alabaster white by the sun, the bridges of the snouts splintering into barren sockets. Each day, I tossed the skulls into an outgoing tide where they bobbed like the grisly remnants of a Kurtzian (yes, him again) sacrifice, hoping that they would be carried beyond the reef before the tide turned. Each day, the dogs found new skulls upon which they happily gnawed.

We had begun to feed Brown Dog, and as a result she never left. We began to feed her because once, when she hovered a little too near Vaclav’s food bowl, Vaclav’s ears went ominously flat, his teeth flared, his nose twitched, he growled cruelly, and when Brown Dog still did not retreat, he set upon her with such stunning ferocity that I feared he would kill his erstwhile friend. I picked him up by the nape of the neck and decided that, what the hell, two dogs are better than one. I started buying larger fish.

Soon, Brown Dog developed into a big, fleshy, meaty dog. Tiabo was much impressed. She appraised Brown Dog with a knowing eye. “I think Brown Dog will be
kang-kang
,” she said.

“Really?” I said, examining Brown Dog a little more closely. She was a good-looking dog, unaffected by the mange. “You really think she’ll be a tasty dog?”

“We like the brown dogs,” she said. “Fat brown dogs.”

Hmm . . . I wondered. I was mighty tired of fish. Cows are large mammals, I thought. Cows have doleful eyes. Cows are presumably intelligent creatures. I would have eaten a cow, if there happened to be one within three thousand miles of Tarawa. Why not a dog? A healthy dog? A fat, brown dog? I fed Brown Dog a little
extra
. Just to preserve our culinary options.

Apparently, Brown Dog had told her mother about this fortuitous turn of events, and soon she too made her hearth in our backyard. She was a mild-mannered dog, and wise to canine life on Tarawa. She avoided trouble, kept to herself, and when I fed Vaclav and Brown Dog she perked up hopefully, but never begged. She was, however, denied a bowl of fish and rice. If there was a supermarket where I could load up on thirty-pound bags of prepared dog food, I might very well have fed this third dog, but there wasn’t, and frankly, I had enough mouths to feed. Nonetheless, this did not prevent Mama Dog, as Sylvia had begun calling her, from contributing to the household’s security detail.

They were good too, once Vaclav and Brown Dog had developed their barks. It was with great relish that I watched them move like unleashed hounds from hell when they gave chase to an exceedingly foolish Peeping Tom. “Get ’im, boys! Nip him where it counts.”

With remarkable sensory skills, they were able to discern friend from foe. The kids still came by in the afternoons to root for twigs and
te non
. We had reached an understanding: What’s on the ground is theirs. What remains on the trees stays there. Random knife-wielding men no longer traipsed near the house, but walked along the reef, just as they did when passing I-Kiribati compounds. When strangers called, they did so from the road, and if anyone approached the house, they were soon met with what began as a quizzical bark—just to let us know—and morphed, according to circumstances, into something one desperately wanted to run away from. But when two Mormon missionaries approached without a peep from the dogs, I decided that their training needed some more finessing. We didn’t want Elder Jeb and Elder Brian coming around here.

Elder Jeb and Elder Brian were twenty-year-old Mormon missionaries from Utah. They wanted my soul.

“Come in,” I said. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No, thanks.”

“How about a cigarette?”

“No, really.”

“Beer?”

“No, we can’t.”

Exactly. Caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol are three very good reasons why I will never become a Mormon. We don’t even have to get into the highly colorful and fantastically ludicrous theology. To each their own, I say. But leave me alone. When I inquired if they had had any luck finding wives, they decided to move on and try their chances elsewhere. They were very nice about it, and though I did my best to be an asshole, they were never anything but polite, which has been my experience with Mormons everywhere. Still, I tried to teach the dogs to growl menacingly at anyone in pants. Only Mormon missionaries wore pants on Tarawa.

Life with the animals settled into a familiar routine. Each day I boiled a large pot of rice and carved our fish into five distinct servings. The good parts, of course, were for me and Sylvia. Sam got the blood meat, and the two dogs received the rest of the fish, head and tail included. Then one day we noticed that our yard was awash in dogs, vicious dogs engaged in some sort of barbaric ritual that involved, literally, killing each other. Brawls would suddenly break out, until the loser finally limped away to die. Whenever possible, I did my best to break it up. Standing from a safe distance, I pelted the dogs with rocks until they took their fights to the reef. But still they returned. Mama Dog was in heat.

Canine courtship is not pretty to behold. Like a teenage girl, Mama Dog wanted nothing to do with the nice guys. She was drawn to the biggest, baddest, meanest dog on Tarawa, the one who would most likely allow her to produce offspring that were themselves big, bad, and mean, and possibly, just possibly, be able to survive for longer than a month or two. If anyone doubts Darwinism, let them come to Tarawa to study the mating rituals of island dogs. The triumphant winner of Mama Dog’s affections was a heinous beast that looked like the progeny of a steroid-enhanced rottweiler and a bull—not a pit bull—a bull. I hated this dog. He exuded nothing but malice. He had lost an eye in one of his brawls, and this made him appear even more menacing. I dearly hoped that someone would eat him.

A few months later, the puppies arrived. There were seven. A few days later, there were six, then five, then four. It’s a tough life. I had hoped that Mama Dog would have taken her brood elsewhere, but unfortunately they all remained with us. Vaclav was very stoic about the situation. The puppies soon learned that under no circumstances should they go anywhere near his food bowl, and once that was established he simply ignored them. Brown Dog displayed a frighteningly maternal adoration for the puppies, and I desperately hoped that the new vet would arrive soon. Vaclav too was beginning to dangle obscenely. Not to mention the cat, who had begun to spend his nights fighting, and from what we could tell, managing to always lose. Clearly, it was snip-snip time.