The Sex Lives of Cannibals

one hour at FSP before another dog ate him.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. The poor thing.”

I had always assumed that the expression It’s a dog-eat-dog world was to be understood metaphorically, but apparently there is also a literal dimension and this took some getting used to. It’s a tough world for dogs in Kiribati. Contrast this with the experience of their cousins in the United States, where dogs have their own hotels, are taken for monthly pedicures, are fed gourmet dog food, and are treated with what I now regard as gag-inducing affection and deference. My mother, for instance, apparently feels that rules and discipline are only to be applied to children, whereas when her beagle jumps on top of the table and empties wineglasses in between devouring the Thanksgiving turkey, my mother gets out the camera. “She’s a very independent dog,” she says. Yes, well if that dog happened to find himself on Tarawa, it’s safe to say that it would also find itself on the dinner table. Of course, the I-Kiribati don’t have tables, but you see my point.

The I-Kiribati, particularly those from the northern Gilberts, eat dogs. I could understand why. The diet in Kiribati is so meager that now and then whenever I spied a particularly meaty person I immediately thought of a pork loin. Don’t get me wrong. I had no desire to eat anyone’s arm, but once you’ve digested raw sea worms and boiled moray eels you begin to think a little more creatively about what precisely constitutes food. Still, it was something of a gasp-inducing shock when wandering on the beach on North Tarawa I came across two men skinning a dog, preparing it for the fire. Imagine taking poor Max for a walk and all the while he is bounding along in that happy-go-lucky way of dogs on walks, and meanwhile you’re thinking marinades. The dog was soon impaled on a spit—and I know I’m going to get a lot of hate mail for this—but it smelled pretty good.

Nevertheless, I could not be induced to eat an unknown dog, even though I was assured it was kang-kang. This is because most dogs on Tarawa are repellent to behold. Combine the mange with starvation, add in a canine social milieu that rewards feral savagery, and you are unlikely to find a blue ribbon kind of dog. Instead, what you find is a pure Darwinian dog. A tough dog.

I found this out as we tended to Vaclav. He was a puppy when Tiabo presented him to us, unbidden. “You need a guard dog,” she said, and I tried not to feel slighted. “This is an I-Matang guard dog.”

Vaclav had white fur, or at least he had some white fur. The mange had gotten him too, and so he was predominantly pink, just like us I-Matang. Four hours and five “accidents” later, we decided that he would be an outdoor dog. We cleaned him up and fed him the best the island could provide, fish and rice, and it was with swelling pride when we first heard him bark like a manly dog, a deep sonorous get-away- from-the-house bark.

He had had a rough go of it. Dogs on Tarawa are profoundly territorial. Vaclav found this out one day when he bravely accompanied me to the Angirota Store. It is a short walk, but a mere hundred yards from the house, a half-dozen neighborhood dogs set upon Vaclav, mauling him to shreds for having the temerity to cross their territory, and it was only through some pretty fierce and highly accurate rock throwing that I was able to save him. He limped and hobbled. He bled alarmingly from several gashes. I feared that we were going to have an Old Yeller kind of ending, but within hours he had pulled himself back together and learned a valuable lesson. It’s a dog-eat- dog world out there.

Soon he made a friend. Brown Dog was roughly the same age as Vaclav, and together they prowled the reef at low tide, which in the dog community was regarded as neutral territory. Sam the cat also wandered out to the reef at low tide. He liked to go fishing. Hovering over a tidal pool, he deftly scooped out a fish, which he would then bring back into the house and play with until it died, and then he would find an ingenious hiding place for it. It was the same with geckos. Whenever he heard the soft plop of a gecko losing its grip, Sam darted with astonishing speed, clasped the gecko firmly in its mouth, no longer fooled by that devious lose-the-tail trick, and brought it back inside the house, where he mercilessly taunted it until it also died. Then he would find an obscure nook somewhere and hide the gecko. Decomposition occurs swiftly on the equator. Hours later, we would follow our noses in an exciting game of Where’s the Dead Animal? Sam enjoyed this immensely.

Vaclav and Brown Dog too brought back interesting finds from the reef. Typically, they returned with skulls. On any given day, our backyard was home to a half-dozen and more dog and pig skulls, roasted an alabaster white by the sun, the bridges of the snouts splintering into barren sockets. Each day, I tossed the skulls into an outgoing tide where they bobbed like the grisly remnants of a Kurtzian (yes, him again) sacrifice, hoping that they would be carried beyond the reef before the tide turned. Each day, the dogs found new skulls upon which they happily gnawed.

We had begun to feed Brown Dog, and as a result she never left. We began to feed her because once, when she hovered a little too near Vaclav’s food bowl, Vaclav’s ears went ominously flat, his teeth flared, his nose twitched, he growled cruelly, and when Brown Dog still did not retreat, he set upon her with such stunning ferocity that I feared he would kill his erstwhile friend. I picked him up by the nape of the neck and decided that, what the hell, two dogs are better than one. I started buying larger fish.

Soon, Brown Dog developed into a big, fleshy, meaty dog. Tiabo was much impressed. She appraised Brown Dog with a knowing eye. “I think Brown Dog will be kang-kang,” she said.

“Really?” I said, examining Brown Dog a little more closely. She was a good-looking dog, unaffected by the mange. “You really think she’ll be a tasty dog?”

“We like the brown dogs,” she said. “Fat brown dogs.”

Hmm… I wondered. I was mighty tired of fish. Cows are large mammals, I thought. Cows have doleful eyes. Cows are presumably intelligent creatures. I would have eaten a cow, if there happened to be one within three thousand miles of Tarawa. Why not a dog? A healthy dog? A fat, brown dog? I fed Brown Dog a little extra. Just to preserve our culinary options.

Apparently, Brown Dog had told her mother about this fortuitous turn of events, and soon she too made her hearth in our backyard. She was a mild-mannered dog, and wise to canine life on Tarawa. She avoided trouble, kept to herself, and when I fed Vaclav and Brown Dog she perked up hopefully, but never begged. She was, however, denied a bowl of fish and rice. If there was a supermarket where I could load up on thirty-pound bags of prepared dog food, I might very well have fed this third dog, but there wasn’t, and frankly, I had enough mouths to feed. Nonetheless, this did not prevent Mama Dog, as Sylvia had begun calling her, from contributing to the household’s security detail.

They were good too, once Vaclav and Brown Dog had developed their barks. It was with great relish that I watched them move like unleashed hounds from hell when they gave chase to an exceedingly foolish Peeping Tom. “Get ’im, boys! Nip him where it counts.”

With remarkable sensory skills, they were able to discern friend from foe. The kids still came by in the afternoons to root for twigs and te non. We had reached an understanding: What’s on the ground is theirs. What remains on the trees stays there. Random knife-wielding men no longer traipsed near the house, but walked along the reef, just as they did when passing I-Kiribati compounds. When strangers called, they did so from the road, and if anyone approached the house, they were soon met with what began as a quizzical bark—just to let us know—and morphed, according to circumstances, into something one desperately wanted to run away from. But when two Mormon missionaries approached without a peep from the dogs, I decided that their training needed some more finessing. We didn’t want Elder Jeb and Elder Brian coming around here.

Elder Jeb and Elder Brian were twenty-year-old Mormon missionaries from Utah. They wanted my soul.

“Come in,” I said. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No, thanks.”

“How about a cigarette?”

“No, really.”

“Beer?”

“No, we can’t.”

Exactly. Caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol are three very good reasons why I will never become a Mormon. We don’t even have to get into the highly colorful and fantastically ludicrous theology. To each their own, I say. But leave me alone. When I inquired if they had had any luck finding wives, they decided to move on and try their chances elsewhere. They were very nice about it, and though I did my best to be an asshole, they were never anything but polite, which has been my experience with Mormons everywhere. Still, I tried to teach the dogs to growl menacingly at anyone in pants. Only Mormon missionaries wore pants on Tarawa.