Hawaii - James Michener [61]
There was a little coconut left and a small amount of breadfruit, but no taro. Even the pigs, absolutely essential to the success of the journey, were famishing. But in this extremity the thirty pddlers, who worked constantly, survived amazingly. Their stomachs had long since contracted into hard little fists, shrunk to nothing under tight belly muscles. Their strong shoulders, devoid of even a trace of fat after nearly a month's steady work, seemed able to generate energy from nothing. With neither food nor adequate water, the men sweated little; through sun-reddened eyes they constantly scanned the horizon for omens.
It was old Teura, however, who saw the first substantial sign; on the twenty-seventh morning she saw a small piece of driftwood, torn away from some distant tree, and Teroro avidly directed the canoe toward it. When it was pulled aboard it was found to contain four land worms, which were fed to the astonished chickens.
"It has been in the ocean less than ten days," Teura announced. Since the canoe could travel five or six times faster than a drifting branch, it seemed likely that land lay somewhere near; and old Teura entered into a period of intense concentration, clutching at omens and interpreting them hopefully by means of old prayers.
But West Wind was not to be saved by incantations. It was Mato, a trained sailor, who late one afternoon saw in the distance a flock of birds flying with determination on a set course westward. "There's land ahead. They're heading for it," he cried. Tupuna and Teroro agreed, and when, a few hours later, the stars rose, it was reassuring to see that the Seven Little Eyes confirmed that they were near the end of their journey.
"A few more days," Teroro announced hopefully.
And two days later, aching with hunger, Mato again spotted a bird, and this one was of special significance, for it was a gannet, poised seventy feet in the air; suddenly it raised its wings, dropped its head toward the waves, and plunged like a thrown rock deep into the ocean. It looked as if it must have split its skull on impact, but by some mysterious trick, it had not, and in a moment it flew aloft with a fish in its beak. Deftly it flipped the food into its gullet, then plunged again with head-splitting force.
"We are surely approaching land!" Mato cried. But many on the platform thought of the gannet not as a harbinger of land, but rather as a lucky bird that knew how to fish.
In the early morning of the twenty-ninth day a group of eleven long black birds with handsome cleft tails flew by on a foraging trip from their home island, which lay somewhere beyond the horizon, and Teroro noted with keen pleasure that their heading, reversed, was his, and while he watched he saw these intent birds come upon a group of diving gannets, and when those skilled fishers rose into the air with their catch, the fork-tailed birds swept down upon them, attacked them, and forced them to drop the fish, whereupon the foragers caught the morsels in mid-air and flew away. From their presence it could be deduced that land was not more than sixty miles distant, a fact which was confirmed when Teura and Tupuna, working together, detected in the waves of the sea a peculiar pattern which indicated that in the near distance the profound westerly set of the ocean was impounding upon a reef, which shot back echo waves that cut across the normal motion of the sea; but unfortunately a heavy bank of cloud obscured the western horizon, reaching even to the sea, and none could detect exactly where the island lay.
"Don't worry!" Teura reassured everyone. "When the clouds do lift, watch their undersides carefully. At sunset you'll see them turn green over the island. Reflections from the lagoon." And so convinced was Teura that they were approaching some small island like Bora Bora