“Oh, Jesus,” Gina said. “I think I’ll wait, too.” I saw a pile of dead animals at the side of a dilapidated shed; a cow, a cat, two mongooses. They could’ve been there since the attack a week ago.
“Wait there,” I told Gina. “I’ll call you if I need you”
Breathing through my mouth, I walked to the pile. I could see bite marks on the cow and all the animals appeared to be bloodless, sunken.
“You are who?” I heard. An old Fijian woman, wearing a faded green T-shirt that said Nurses Know Better pointed at me. She looked startled. They didn’t see many white people out here.
“Are you from the Fiji Times?” she said. “We already talked to them.”
I considered for a moment how best to get the information. She seemed suspicious of the newsmakers, tired of them.
“No, I’m from the SPCA. I’m here to inspect the animals and see if we can help you with some money. If there is a person hurting the animals, we need to find that person and punish them.”
“It’s not a person. It is the vampire dogs. I saw them with my own eyes.”
“This was done by dogs?”
She nodded. “A pack of them. They come out of there barking and yelping with hunger and they run here and there sucking their food out of any creature they find. They travel a long way sometimes, for new blood.”
“So they live in the hills?” I thought she’d pointed at the mountains in the background. When she nodded, I realized my mistake. I should have said, “Where do they live?”
It was too late now; she knew what she thought I wanted to hear.
“They live in the hills.”
“Doesn’t anyone try to stop them?”
“They don’t stop good. They are hot to the touch and if you get too near you might burn up.”
“Shooting?”
“No guns. Who has a gun these days?”
“What about a club, or a spear? What about a cane knife? What I mean is, can they be killed?”
“Of course they can be killed. They’re dogs, not ghosts.”
“Do they bite people?”
She nodded. “If they can get close enough.”
“Have they killed anyone? Or turned anyone into a vampire?”
She laughed, a big, belching laugh which brought tears to her eyes. “A person can’t turn into a vampire dog! If they bite you, you clean out the wound so it doesn’t go nasty. That’s all. If they suck for long enough you’ll die. But you clean it out and it’s okay.”
“So what did they look like?”
She stared at me.
“Were they big dogs or small?” I measured with my hand, up and down until she grunted; knee high.
“Fur? What color fur?”
“No fur. Just skin. Blue skin. Loose and wrinkly.”
“Ears? What were their ears like?”
She held her fingers up to her head. “Like this.”
“And they latched onto your animals and sucked their blood?”
“Yes. I didn’t know at first. I thought they were just biting. I tried to shoo them. I took a big stick and poked them. Their bellies. I could hear something sloshing away in there.”
She shivered. “Then one of them lifted its head and I saw how red its teeth were. And the teeth were sharp, two rows atop and bottom, so many teeth. I ran inside to get my husband but he had too much kava. He wouldn’t even sit up.”
“Can I see what they did?” I said. The woman looked at me.
“You want to see the dead ones? The bokola?”
“I do. It might help your claim.”
“My claim?”
“You know, the SPCA.” I walked back to the shed.
Their bellies had been ripped out and devoured and the blood drained, she said.
There were bite marks, purplish, all over their backs and legs, as if the attacking dogs were seeking a good spot.
The insects and the birds had worked on the ears and other soft bits.
I took a stick to shift them around a bit.
“The dogs will come for those bokola. You leave them alone.” She waved at the pile of corpses.
“The dogs?”
“Clean-up dogs. First the vampires, then the clean-up. Their yellow master sends them.”
“Yellow master?” She shook her head, squeezed her eyes shut. Taboo subject.
“You wouldn’t eat this meat? It seems a waste.”
“The vampire dogs leave a taste behind,” the woman told me. “A kamikamica taste the other animals like. One of the men in my village cooked and ate one of those cows. He said it made him feel very good but now he smells of cowhide. He can’t get the smell off himself.”
“Are any of your animals left alive?”
The woman shook her head. “Not the bitten ones. They didn’t touch them all, though.”
“Can I see the others?” I would look for signs of disease, something to explain the sudden death. I wanted to be sure I was in the right place.
One cow was up against the back wall of the house, leaning close to catch the shade. There was a sheen of sweat on my body. I could feel it drip down my back.
“Kata kata,” the woman said, pointing to the cow. “She is very hot.”
It looked all right, apart from that.
I could get no more out of her.
Gina was sweating in the taxi. It was a hot day, but she felt the heat of the cow as well. “Any luck?” she said.
“Some. There’s a few local taboos I’ll need to get through to get the info we need, though.”
“Ask him,” she said, pointing at the driver. “He’s Hindu.”
Our taxi driver said, “I could have saved you the journey. No Fijian will talk about that. We Hindus know about those dogs.”
He told us the vampire dogs lived at the bottom of Ciwa Waidekeulu. “Thiwa Why Ndeke Ulu,” he said. Nine Waterfall. In the rainforest twenty minutes from where we were staying.
“She said something about a yellow master?”
“A great yellow dog who is worse than the worst man you’ve ever met.”
I didn’t tell him I’d met some bad men.
“You should keep away from him. He can give great boons to the successful, but there is no one successful. No one can defeat the yellow dog. Those who fail will vanish, as if they have never been.” He stopped at a jetty, where some children sold us roti filled with a soft, sweet potato curry. Very, very good.
The girl who cleaned my room was not chatty at first, but I wanted to ask her questions. She answered most of them happily once I gave her a can of Coke. “Where do I park near Ciwa Waidekeulu? How do I ask the chief for permission to enter? Is there fresh water?”
When I asked her if she knew if the vampire dogs were down there, she went back to her housework, cleaning a bench already spotless. “These are not creatures to be captured,” she said. “They should be poisoned.” To distract me, she told me that her neighbors had five dogs, every last one of them a mongrel, barking all night and scaring her children. I know what I’d do if I were her. The council puts out notices of dog poisonings, Keep Your Dogs In While We Kill the Strays, so all she’d have to do is let their dogs out while the cull was happening. Those dogs’d be happy to run; they used to leap the fence, tearing their guts, until her neighbor built his fence higher. They’re desperate to get out.
They do a good job with the poisoning, she told me, but not so good with the clean up. Bloated bodies line the streets, float down the river, clog the drains.
They don’t understand about repercussions, and that things don’t just go away.
The client was pleased with my progress when I called him. “So, when will you go in?”
With the land taboo, I needed permission from the local chief or risk trouble. This took time. Most didn’t want to discuss the vampire dogs, or the yellow dog king; he was forbidden, also. “It may be a couple of weeks. Depends on how I manage to deal with the locals.”