The People in the Trees

  We each had our own guide. Tallent’s was the tall one, Fa’a, and Esme’s the one in the sarong: his name was Tu. Mine was Uva, the man with the bone in the nose, and as he passed before me to hoist my rucksack onto his back, I caught a glimpse of what looked like carving on one end of it. My knapsack was very heavy, but when I reached out to help Uva adjust it on his back—his skin was as textured as rhinoceros hide—he sidestepped me slightly and rocked his shoulders until the bag centered itself between his blades before turning and following the others, who had disappeared between two large trees so thickly pelted with moss that it was impossible to see the bark beneath. He, like his fellow porters, had only a small soft cloth bundle of his own, about the size of a pillow, slung by a fragile rope across his chest.

  We walked. There was no path, and so Fa’a, leading the way, pushed back saplings and bushes and leaves the size of frying pans, each of us catching and pushing them behind us in turn as we passed. I was unnerved at how quickly the jungle had swallowed us, at how insignificant our presence was within it; fifteen minutes or so into our journey, I turned around to look at how far we’d come, only to see that our path had already been obscured by armies of trees. Above and around us, the air was vivid with conversation—honks and clucks and shrieks and chirrups—and even after only a half hour, the sky had been all but blotted out by the treetops, the blobby swatches of blue growing tinier and more infrequent with each step. Uva and the other guides were barefoot, the bottoms of their feet crusted and puffy, but Tallent, Esme, and I wore heavy-soled boots, and with every footfall I could hear unseen creatures skitter on the ground beneath us. The trees’ roots had braided themselves into a slippery latticework, and I had to concentrate on the floor below lest I tripped and fell; in my peripheral vision, all was richly dark green, and so close I felt as if I were walking through a narrowing, furred tunnel, an illusion enhanced by the sunlight, which became ever more inconsistent, dribbling through the dense treetops in trickles.

  Our route, which had been uphill, grew suddenly steeper, and the air at once cooler and moister—so thick was the vegetation that there was no breeze, which only made the trees and bushes around me seem more unreal, more like statuary, although all around us was their smell, a complicated and insistent perfume of loam and rot and sugar that made the back of my throat ache—and still we did not stop. Above me, Esme swayed, and Tu grabbed her arm, swiftly and gently, and although she nodded and kept walking, when I passed her I felt and heard her breath, as hot and loud as a horse’s after a long race. I was carrying nothing except for a small rucksack, but the air had begun to feel as substantive and thick as soup (I thought, ridiculously, of chowder, its pearly buttermilk sheen, its surface a wrinkled skin), and when Tallent announced, after we’d reached a shallow plateau at the top of a particularly steep passage, that we’d stop for the day, I wanted to cry with relief.

  We dropped to the ground, the three of us, while Fa’a—after speaking with Tallent, who listened and then nodded—and the other two guides veered right off what I had come to think of as our path (although there was no path) and vanished into the forest. I drank the water in my canteen, which had become as warm as the air around me and therefore left me parched; Esme lay down and rested her head against her bag and closed her eyes. Around me the jungle hummed, a low, ceaseless buzz, as if the entire island were some sort of mysterious appliance plugged into an enormous yet invisible energy source.

  I must have slept. When I woke, I couldn’t tell how late it was—if such a thing mattered here—although the gloom did seem deeper, more urgently alive. Mats of woven palm had been laid out about three yards from each other, and our bags placed near them; between the first two, Esme and Tallent sat, talking quietly.

  “Good evening,” said Tallent, looking up as I walked over. “Have some dinner.”

  He, unlike Esme and I, had carried two bags, and from the larger he drew a packet of crackers. On the ground, lying bright and disconcerting against the moss, was a can of Spam, its tin lid peeled back like a bedsheet and the meat beneath a slimy, nauseous, feminine pink.

  “I’m not hungry,” I told him.

  “You should eat,” he said. “You’re hungrier than you know, and tomorrow’s another long day. Besides, we should eat these crackers before they get too soggy—nothing stays crisp in this humidity.”

  “By the time I left U’ivu the last time, I was longing for crackers,” Esme said, but her voice had lost its triumphant smugness. She seemed not yet to have recovered from the day’s exertion; her face was still an unattractive, splotchy red that made it look stubbled.

  So I accepted the crackers, which were floury and mild, and spread some cold meat on them. As I handed the empty plastic wrapper back to Tallent, who shoved it into an outside pocket of his bag, I listened to its lively crackle, which made me think of burning wood. “Shouldn’t there be a campfire in cases like this?” I asked them. I even smiled at Esme, who was too busy hacking off pieces from the brick of Spam to notice.

  In answer, Tallent took up a nearby branch and held it to the tip of the flame from his lighter. But the fire almost immediately fizzled, leaving behind a sulky curl of weak smoke. “Oh,” was all I could say. Of course. The wood here was too wet.

  “Don’t worry,” said Tallent. “Once we reach higher ground, Fa’a tells me, the forest will clear and everything will be much drier.”

  I walked a couple of minutes into the forest behind us, in the direction Tallent had pointed, where I found a thin stream, silvery as a snail’s slime, creeping over the surfaces of a series of notched gray boulders. I relieved myself against a tree that disappeared, branchless and almost comically erect, into the canopy above us, and washed my face in and drank from the water, which was cool and tasted faintly salty, oceanic, as if it had been mixed with fistfuls of ground-up seashells. When I returned, Esme was asleep on her mat, another mat pulled over her, her boots lined up at her feet. Tallent, though, remained where I’d left him, his knees pressed against his chest, his head and neck pitched forward a bit, staring into the forest at something I couldn’t see.

  “How was it today?” he asked as I sat down.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “I realize,” he began, and then stopped, looking down at his hands. “I realize I haven’t told you very much about what I’m—we’re—doing here. You were very good to have come. Or very crazy. Or desperate.”

  I laughed, but he didn’t.

  “The truth is, I don’t know, really, what we’ll find,” he continued. Another long silence, which I would come to know meant that he was thinking carefully about what he would say—not because he was afraid that I’d misinterpret him, but because he was the sort of person who never spoke unless he was certain; he was not interested in speculation or theoreticals; he never said anything unless he knew it to be true. Which is not to say he was incurious, or arrogant, or sloppy, or that he never doubted, or rethought things dozens, hundreds of times—nothing of the sort. But he did his wondering, his imagining, in silence; to engage someone in his uncertainties was, I think he felt, presumptuous, and perhaps even rude.

  And yet he was uncertain; he didn’t know what he’d find. He was not a man who operated on hunches and intuitions, and yet this time he had—he had guessed at what he might find, and he had asked me to follow him based on that guess.

  This did not offend or alarm me. Science itself is guesses: lucky guesses, intuitive guesses, researched guesses. I had worked for people who were certain, and it had felt disquieting, and dangerous. And so I had been happy to come here (well, perhaps not happy, but certainly not worried; although Tallent had not been completely incorrect—I had been desperate as well) not knowing the full story. I suppose this sounds foolish now, unrealistic, but when you are young, planning seems less important, less essential, than it becomes when you have things to protect: money, research, a reputation.

  And so I settled back to wait.

  It took some time for him to begin.
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  “As a doctor,” Tallent said, “what do you want the most? You want to cure diseases—you want to eradicate illnesses, you want to prolong life.” (Actually, I had no interest in any of those, at least not in the way I believe Tallent meant it. But I did not contradict him.) “But what I want—and this will sound childish, but it is ultimately why we are here, and it is an interest many of my colleagues share, even if they are too grand to admit it—is to find another society, another people, one not known to civilization, and, I should say, one that does not know civilization.”

  After this came a long disquisition about the discipline of anthropology and its various practitioners and heroes and miscreants and theories, which I mostly ignored, but which I listened to enough to learn that Tallent considered himself—though he did not use the word—something of a maverick, someone who would reshape the field entirely.

  But then he said something that would intrigue me for those many months we were on the island together, and to which I would never find definitive answers. “I know what it’s like to be studied,” he said. “I know what it’s like to be reduced to a thing, a series of behaviors and beliefs, for someone to find the exotic, the ritual, in every mundane action of mine, to see—” And then he stopped, so abruptly that I knew he had just revealed something he had not intended to, and that he, who was not an incautious man, was wondering why he had done so, and regretting it as well.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, and I kept my voice as gentle as possible, so as not to startle him, so as to lull him into continuing.

  But of course he was not a pet or a child, and it would take more persuasion or cleverness than merely a quiet voice to overcome his better instincts. “Nothing,” he said, and fell silent, and I was at once aware of the loud, buggy air, and that I had been holding my breath.24

  It was Tallent who spoke next. “I want to tell you a story,” he said, and then paused.

  I would grow accustomed to this as well, his way of beginning and then stopping, of great, paragraphs-long speeches that would end, abruptly, in silence, sometimes for minutes, occasionally for hours. But this time his silence was brief, and when he spoke again his voice was strong, and the story that emerged was delivered less as a speech and more as a recitation, as if he were a wandering storyteller whom I had encountered in a dark piney medieval forest, not a humid jungle, and I had given him a coin and a slab of black bread to bewitch me, for a moment to transport me from this world.

  “Many years ago, many, many years, before the age of man, there was a great stone, a god, named Ivu’ivu, who ruled alone over a vast kingdom of water. He was very powerful, this god, and his dominion contained everything below the surface of the sea—his was a kingdom of tail-whipping, tooth-bared sharks and gigantic, blind-eyed whales and fleets of fish and fields of swaying sea grasses that brushed against his base like nymphs’ hair.

  “But Ivu’ivu was lonely. All around him he saw couplings, beasts that joined and bred and glided by him, trailed by their offspring. Even the loneliest, the most solitary of his subjects—the hermit crabs with their whorled, spotted shells and the creeping, prickly starfish—were surrounded by children. Being a god, Ivu’ivu was not worried about mortality, but he thought he would like someone to be with, with whom he could discuss the burdens and difficulties of being a god and a king, with whom he might give birth to his own race of children. But for this he would need another god, his equal.

  “Ivu’ivu had a dear friend, a turtle named Opa’ivu’eke, who was almost as old as Ivu’ivu himself and who, because he could live both below and above water, had traveled far and wide and had many marvelous tales about places Ivu’ivu had never been. He regaled his friend with stories of the air and the land, where there were as many creatures as were underwater but who flew instead of swam—Ivu’ivu had to ask the turtle to explain flight to him many, many times before he was able even to begin understanding what it was—or who walked, or ran, or crept on two or four or a dozen legs.

  “One day Opa’ivu’eke was telling Ivu’ivu about his latest journeys, and the god could not help but sigh. ‘What is wrong, my friend?’ asked Opa’ivu’eke.

  “ ‘Ah, friend,’ replied Ivu’ivu, ‘I am lonely. All around me I see happiness, companionship. I too would like a companion, some children. But I need another god, and there can be only one ruler of this world.’

  “The turtle was silent for a long time. Then he bade his friend goodbye and swam away.

  “Some time later the turtle returned, again with wondrous news, but this time even more wondrous than the god could have hoped. On his most recent trip above water, Opa’ivu’eke had talked to another friend, A’aka, the god of the sun, and explained to him Ivu’ivu’s desire. A’aka, it emerged, would like to meet this powerful god of the water about whom he had heard so much. And so a romance began between the god of the water and the god of the sun, with the turtle their messenger. It was he who ferried comments and compliments and questions and chants, spiraling into the cold black depths of the water to deliver A’aka’s words to Ivu’ivu and then, his flippers fanning through the currents—which Ivu’ivu calmed to make his friend’s journey easier—up to the surface, where A’aka would pause in his course in the middle of each day to listen to the news from a world he could never visit.

  “Within time, three children were born: the first a boy, named Ivu’ivu, after the god of the sea; the second a girl, named Iva’a’aka—the Daughter of Stone and Sun; and the third a boy, U’ivu, whose name means simply Of Stone. Half of all three children lived below water, like Ivu’ivu, and half of them lived above it, like A’aka. They floated in and were cooled by the watery kingdom of one father and warmed and nourished by the heat of the other. Always they were sustained by their parents’ love and devotion. And so when they too grew up and became lonely, they turned to A’aka, who blessed them with their own children: mankind. And as long as the humans were kind to their parents, A’aka made sure that their crops would always grow, and Ivu’ivu promised that the sea would always be full of fish and that they would always be able to sail his waters, because men, after all, were his descendants as well and therefore his to cherish and protect.

  “As for Opa’ivu’eke, he lived a long, long life, long enough to see his friends’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren grow and prosper, long enough to give birth to his own children, who bore his name—Stone-backed Animal—and who on land preferred to live atop and in water around the turtle’s favorite child, his godchild, Ivu’ivu. Opa’ivu’eke was not a god, of course, but he was, and is, always honored not only by his two friends but by all his friends’ descendants—for his devotion and selflessness, of course, but also for his noble duties as a messenger. This is why, when a man is lucky enough to find an opa’ivu’eke, he must make a sacrifice to the gods and also eat some of its flesh himself. To do so is to send a message to the gods, a prayer for the one thing that A’aka withheld—with Ivu’ivu’s approval—from his grandchildren: immortality. And maybe one day the gods might answer them.”

  Tallent stopped talking and we both sat for a moment without speaking. I am sitting on the child of a god, I thought. Two gods. It was preposterous, and yet I felt, despite myself, a tremor ripple through me.

  “That is the first story a young U’ivuan learns,” said Tallent quietly. “It is almost as old as these people are—thousands of years old, and it has never changed. They have no written language—or at least they didn’t until the missionaries—but everyone knows it. This symbol”—he traced a circle on the ground with a stick, and through it a straight vertical line—“means turtle, and you find it on ceremonial stones and dishes from hundreds of years ago, from people who have made an offering of one of Opa’ivu’eke’s children to Ivu’ivu and A’aka, hoping that they will be the one who will be granted the exception, who will finally be allowed to live as a god.”

  He was silent again.

  “But there is another story now, one that is
not old at all, one that has in fact emerged only in the past century or so. For many years the grandchildren of Ivu’ivu and A’aka made their grandparents and parents proud, and why not? The humans were brave and resourceful. They were excellent hunters, superior fishermen. They protected their parents against all invaders and properly respected both of their grandfathers. And although years, more than anyone could recall, had passed without anyone finding one of Opa’ivu’eke’s children to sacrifice, neither god seemed to be offended, and all passed in harmony.

  “But then, slowly, so slowly that no one noticed for many years, things began to go wrong. The people of U’ivu felled many trees and did not replant. They allowed people who did not belong on the islands—ho’oalas, or white people—to live among them. The ho’oalas brought with them great beasts made of iron that churned up the soft soil of Iva’a’aka, and great nets with which they scooped vast quantities of seafood from the ocean, more than could ever be consumed. They made waste, mountains of it, and what was not left on the land—on top of their parents!—the humans shoveled into the sea.

  “From below and from above, Ivu’ivu and A’aka grew first alarmed and then angry. Ivu’ivu sent towering waves to batter his children, and A’aka wept to see him do so, for although Ivu’ivu intended only to scare the humans into respect, by destroying them he also destroyed part of the gods’ children—chunks of all three of the islands crumbled into the sea. But still that did not change the humans’ ways. And so A’aka sent blistering waves of sun, ceaseless, remorseless. During the months that he normally retired and left the skies to his sister, Pu’uaka, the goddess of rain, he instead stayed on, hurling sharp daggers of burning light to the ground. And now it was Ivu’ivu’s turn to cry, for although A’aka’s efforts caused the humans’ crops to shrivel and many of them to die, he knew that his children were scalded and scorched and parched and that they longed for fresh water.