Call to Slaughter

Butaritari, and Our Friends from the West

Eleven of them are lined up before me as I write this. Four old and seven new, almost triple the number. Eleven is not merely four plus seven. It is a change in character, more than quantity. Will you mobilize against me? Send a team?

I can’t wait.

***

Butaritari is the wettest atoll in the Gilberts, a long ring of taro pits and coconut in Kiribati’s north. The land is so flat you can watch weather coming for an hour before it arrives. Seventeen miles up its lagoon lies Kuma, a village that once supplied the high chiefs of both Butaritari and Makin-Meang with a feast no other village could. Porpoises.

A hereditary man of Kuma shut himself in a screened hut and dreamed his way west, to the porpoise-folk’s own country under the horizon, and invited them to a dance, food laid out and waiting. Spoken correctly, they came. The whole village waded in to garland the arrivals, walked them into the shallows, and slaughtered them there among the flowers. Every household shared in the meat.

Elsewhere in the Pacific men do this by force, clapping stones underwater until a pod panics onto the reef. Kuma never needed force. It coaxed.

The porpoise’s true name went unsaid, by caller and crowd alike. Say it and they might not come. They used a courtesy instead: Our friends from the west.

By 2009 a survey found no one left who called. The dance had become a story people told about their grandfathers.

***

I am not anyone’s grandfather, and I never learned the words that were never written down. But the pieces I carry answer to story before they answer to physics, and story doesn’t require the right words. Only the right shape.

I went out past the reef on the new moon with everything I had and made the old courtesy to my friends from the west.

The porpoises came, as they came to Kuma, and carried the pieces up to me. Seven small barnacle-encrusted ones, scattered across the reef flat a long time ago, unreachable by land-dwellers like me. Until now.

***

I have never carried this many at once. The bag doesn’t close properly now, and everything in it runs warmer than it should, all of them conversing without words. I will need a place for them soon. That isn’t a problem I intend to solve in a letter to you.

— N.

Sir Arthur Grimble, a cadet administrator in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony from 1914 and later its Resident Commissioner, described witnessing the porpoise-calling at Kuma, hosted by a caller named Kitiona, in his memoir A Pattern of Islands (1952). Grimble recorded the caller's waking cry as "Teirake! Teirake!," arise, arise, and noted that the porpoise's ordinary name was withheld even from him.