• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Dance?

“And then we kill them.”

“How?” I asked.

“With clubs,” Chief Jamino replied.

“And then what?”

“And then we eat them.”

Well, I thought, here was my chance to get the nitty-gritty details of cannibalism. I asked the chief how they prepared the men they were about to eat. How was the flesh cooked?

“We cut the man into small pieces and put it inside the bamboo. And then we roast it over the fire.”

“Did you use any seasoning?” Well, I was curious.

“No, only the meat.”

“Were there any parts of the man you didn’t eat?” I asked. If I were a cannibal, I figured, there would certainly be a few parts I wouldn’t touch.

“No,” the chief said. “We eat the whole man.” I absorbed this. Then Chief Jamino added: “But not the woman. We don’t eat the woman, and the woman don’t eat the man. The woman was used as a messenger from village to village.”

Well, I thought. There’s at least one upside to being a woman in Vanuatu.

Chief Jamino led me to a large pile of what I took to be stones. “This is where we put the bones,” the chief said. And so they were. The bones stretched the length of a school bus, stacked waist high. These were the remains of the Big Nambas that the Small Nambas had devoured. “This is a thigh bone,” the chief said, plucking out a calcified limb.

Finally, I asked Chief Jamino what I had come all this way for. “Why did you eat people? Was it a ritual, where you had to destroy an enemy completely so that he doesn’t attack you in the spirit world?”

“No,” he said. “In former times before the whiteman come, there were many men but not much meat. And so we kill the men for eating.”

And that’s all I really wanted to know.

I HAD ALWAYS BEEN FOND OF NATURE. PROVOCATIVE AND outlandish as that might seem, it’s true. That fondness, however, didn’t mean I had any great desire to climb a twenty-five-thousand-foot mountain—where’s the fun in oxygen depletion?—or dogsled across the frozen tundra. I just liked knowing that nature was there, out there, somewhere. Sitting in a heated living room, watching the nature channel on television, I’d find myself hoping that the animals of the world were all as comfortable as I was. If there was anything I could do for them, I’d be happy to send a check.

In Vanuatu, however, it doesn’t take one long to realize that nature might not be so benign. There are no koala bears on these islands. There are, however, sharks. And moray eels too. One day, we had been snorkeling above a coral reef in Mele Bay. I had finally mastered the skill of diving ten feet or so below the surface without inhaling copious amounts of water, and as I plunged to get a closer look at the angelfish clustered in the coral I was startled to find myself face-to-face with a moray eel. If there is a more frightening-looking beast in the world, I hope never to encounter it. This was five feet of electrically charged muscle attached to a face not even a mother could love. Immediately I swallowed a gallon of seawater.

“Moray eel,” I sputtered once I had reached the surface.

“Did you see the jellyfish?” Sylvia asked. I had seen it, a translucent blob of poison riding the current. A few moments later, as we swam back to shore, we found ourselves giving a wide berth to a brightly banded venomous sea snake.

It was the centipedes in Vanuatu, however, that had me rethinking my affinity for nature. These creatures—insect is such an inadequate word—terrified me. It was the cat who had noticed the first one. He had been given to us by our friend Adam, who had called one day and said, “I know just what you need.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do. What you need is a kitten.”

“Adam,” I said, “I do not want a kitten.”

“Excellent. I’ll be right over.”

“No, Adam, seriously. I do not want a kitten. I am a kitten hater.”

“Fantastic. You’re going to love this kitten.”

“Please don’t do this to me. Just because you have been grossly negligent with your cat…what’s her name again?”

“Ms. Muggles.”

“Just because you have