Amundsen himself was known for his fierceness in the environmental protection movement in his later years. He once blocked a Japanese whaling boat disguised as a scientific research vessel in the Antarctic for seven days, until his own craft got rammed so badly it lost propulsion. He had, quite illegally, pointed a gun at a group of sealers until they retreated. He spent the entire winter on the ice guarding the seals, until he was arrested and charged with criminal intimidation. His hair went completely white; his face, scoured by ice and snow, was covered in scars, while his beard, covered in salt crystals, was hard as baleen. Heart disease often made him wince, and people who saw him knit his brows thought he was unhappy. Only Amundsen knew that he had never felt more contented in his entire life than he did now.
His friends made a special point of presenting funeral invitations to minke whales, fin whales, sei whales, codfish and harp seals. None of them could come, of course, but his daughter Sara did attend the memorial service. A fellow she called Uncle Hank, an old friend of her father’s, brought Sara his personal effects: a hunting gun, a harpoon, a pair of binoculars and the birthday presents he never remembered to send in time. His presents were all the same: a tiny, inch-long boat carved out of styrofoam floating in a deep blue sea inside a crystal box. There was a girl in the boat, with “Sara” written on her cute little dress. On the base of each box Amundsen wrote, in that distinctive flowing script of his that slanted like an ocean wave, “our Pacific,” “our Indian Ocean,” “our Arctic Ocean,” “our Norskehavet,” with the word “our” in bold and the date at the end.
“That’s our village down there.” Anu led everyone through another wood until they reached the edge and a wide-open vista appeared. Some lights were still twinkling in the village below, and in the distance the Laku Laku River was shimmering. “That’s our village, and the mountain is our holy land, as well as our refrigerator.”
By now Umav too had discovered that Hafay wasn’t there. She kept looking back into the darkness to check whether Hafay had caught up. She pulled at Dahu’s hand and said she wanted to go back. Dahu looked at his daughter in the darkness and found that at some point her expression had changed without him noticing, that she no longer had the eyes of a wounded bird.
“Let’s not bother Auntie Hafay for now. She’ll come out when she’s ready,” he said, bending down to whisper to his daughter.
“We’ll sleep in traditional Bunun houses this evening, if you don’t mind. See the two buildings made of bamboo and stone over there? They might not be that comfortable to you, but for the mountains this is a five-star hotel. Inside, you’ll hear the sounds the mountain makes at night.” After hearing Dahu’s translation, Detlef and Sara said they liked the idea. Having lived on an oceangoing fishing boat, Sara didn’t believe that there was any place in the world she couldn’t take.
In a mellow mood from the wine, Anu pointed at the village and continued his explanation, saying, “We call it Sazasa, meaning a place where sugarcane grows tall and animals leap, a place where folks can thrive.” Anu gestured toward a mountain on the other side of the Laku Laku River, then looked round and motioned toward another mountain on their side of the river and said, “My father said the Japanese forced us to leave our original village on that mountain over there and come live here by the river on the slope of this mountain. But it’s all worked out for the best, because now we’re closer to the sea. My dad used to take me hunting when I was little. We would follow the trail up that mountain all the way up to the summit and then go down to the sea on the other side. My dad told me, sea and mountain aren’t the same. The sea washes everything clean. It even washes us clean, inside and out.
“It’s just that the sea isn’t the same as it used to be,” Anu said.
28. The Cave Beneath
Exhausted from the past few days of hiking, Alice finally came down with a cold. She was trembling all over. The medicine in the first-aid kit had no effect, and soon she had sunk into a feverish state with hot flashes and cold shivers and times when she was half-comatose. Atile’i picked several kinds of herbal medicine with the knowledge he had gleaned from the field guides and cooked up a pot of medicinal broth. He collected dry sticks for a fire in order to save propane. Alice drank the broth and her vitality was actually somewhat restored.
“The mountain will cure you,” Atile’i told Alice.
Alice was still determined to take advantage of the last half day of fair weather and make it through the forest to see the mighty cliff. Maybe it was the language barrier or maybe it was that he sensed her determination to get there, but Atile’i, now a powerfully built youth, decided to carry Alice, who was apparently delicate but actually hard as granite inside, through the forest on his back.
This was a typical mid-high altitude alpine forest: the forest floor was covered in layer upon layer of fallen leaves, and the tree trunks were tall and straight, and each cast its own shadow. Atile’i felt like he was walking on waves. It reminded him of the island of Gesi Gesi, as well as of everything on Wayo Wayo. Especially Rasula.
Now Atile’i was holding Alice’s thighs, which were gripping him around the waist. He couldn’t help it: he got an erection.
He remembered Rasula’s kiki’a wine and that last night they’d spent together: the look in her eyes, the sound of her moans, and the smell of her body, her soft body, so totally different from Alice’s but also so alike.
During this time, without anyone to teach him, Atile’i had as a matter of course come to understand certain things. Such as the reason his fellow islanders had established the custom of the “last night,” when young maidens had the right to pull a second son into a thicket of grass: because that was his only opportunity to leave a seed behind on Wayo Wayo.
If any of the girls had gotten pregnant with his child, he hoped it was Rasula. He knew that if an island girl got pregnant, then that was that, and nobody would care whose seed it was. Wayo Wayo women did not calculate their ages in years; they only spoke of “the year I had the first child” or “the year I had my second.” Which was why some Wayo Wayo women did not know how to respond when asked their age, because they were infertile. Such women did not bear the marks of time, and often lacked the protection of relatives. Atile’i hoped Rasula was expecting, so that there would be at least one person to take care of her. He knew it would be his elder brother Nale’ida, though. Nale’ida would be responsible for keeping Rasula’s drying rack covered with fish, for this was the law of Wayo Wayo.
Of course, he had no way of knowing, because at this moment he happened to be on another island, an island who knows how far away from Wayo Wayo. And now he might never be able to ride Gesi Gesi again and find the way home.
At this thought, Atile’i felt that every step was taking him deep into the forest, so deep he might never find his way out.
Alice, riding on Atile’i’s back, felt a strange consolation, as if Thom had finally come back to bear her up. She held the young man closer.
Alice knew that the lifestyle she’d been leading with Atile’i at the hunting hut seemed stable but in fact could change at any time. They could not stay there forever: it was too flimsy, might collapse in a typhoon. And Atile’I couldn’t keep hiding there indefinitely. She had to make some decisions on his behalf, including whether to introduce him to other people, beginning at least with Dahu and Hafay. Perhaps he could be friends with Umav, like brother and sister. Who knows, maybe someday Atile’i might cease to be Wayo Wayoan and “go Taiwanese,” Alice thought.