Life with the animals settled into a familiar routine. Each day I boiled a large pot of rice and carved our fish into five distinct servings. The good parts, of course, were for me and Sylvia. Sam got the blood meat, and the two dogs received the rest of the fish, head and tail included. Then one day we noticed that our yard was awash in dogs, vicious dogs engaged in some sort of barbaric ritual that involved, literally, killing each other. Brawls would suddenly break out, until the loser finally limped away to die. Whenever possible, I did my best to break it up. Standing from a safe distance, I pelted the dogs with rocks until they took their fights to the reef. But still they returned. Mama Dog was in heat.
Canine courtship is not pretty to behold. Like a teenage girl, Mama Dog wanted nothing to do with the nice guys. She was drawn to the biggest, baddest, meanest dog on Tarawa, the one who would most likely allow her to produce offspring that were themselves big, bad, and mean, and possibly, just possibly, be able to survive for longer than a month or two. If anyone doubts Darwinism, let them come to Tarawa to study the mating rituals of island dogs. The triumphant winner of Mama Dog’s affections was a heinous beast that looked like the progeny of a steroid-enhanced rottweiler and a bull—not a pit bull—a bull. I hated this dog. He exuded nothing but malice. He had lost an eye in one of his brawls, and this made him appear even more menacing. I dearly hoped that someone would eat him.
A few months later, the puppies arrived. There were seven. A few days later, there were six, then five, then four. It’s a tough life. I had hoped that Mama Dog would have taken her brood elsewhere, but unfortunately they all remained with us. Vaclav was very stoic about the situation. The puppies soon learned that under no circumstances should they go anywhere near his food bowl, and once that was established he simply ignored them. Brown Dog displayed a frighteningly maternal adoration for the puppies, and I desperately hoped that the new vet would arrive soon. Vaclav too was beginning to dangle obscenely. Not to mention the cat, who had begun to spend his nights fighting, and from what we could tell, managing to always lose. Clearly, it was snip-snip time.
No one took their dogs to get fixed on Tarawa, even when there was a vet on the island. Dogs were banned on Christmas Island, but on Tarawa animal control consisted of an irregular sweep by a dogcatcher armed with a long stick and a noose. This did not alleviate the dog problem on Tarawa. Nor was it meant to. The captured dogs were used to feed the prisoners.
Instead, the surplus dogs were left to fend for themselves. I had wondered about how Mama Dog was managing to feed her surviving puppies. She was a resourceful dog. A dog has to be to survive on Tarawa. I had assumed she was simply scavenging along the reef, but as I was stunned to witness, she had taken a much more proactive role to putting dinner on the table. One afternoon, as all the dogs lay slumbering in the shade, a small dog of about seven months old wandered by. Our dogs raised their heads, and determining that there was no challenge to their territory here, they went back to their snooze. Mama Dog, however, pounced on the dog. It squealed pathetically. Moments later, Mama Dog had severed its hind leg and fed it to her puppies.
If I had not already been on Tarawa for a long while, I quite likely would have felt appalled and disgusted by this act of cannibalism, but my threshold for feeling appalled and disgusted had notched up considerably since I arrived. Although in the continental world I assigned all sorts of anthropomorphic characteristics to dogs, on Tarawa I saw them as wild animals doing whatever it took to survive. What troubled me here was not the fact that these puppies were greedily slurping away at another dog, but that they might not be able to finish it all and what remained would soon stink horribly and it would be me, of course, who had to dispose of the carcass and that was not something I wanted to do on any sort of regular basis. I resolved to get rid of the puppies. I convinced four people of the superior breeding of these puppies, and one by one, whenever Mama Dog wasn’t looking, I scooped up a puppy and delivered it to its new home. Then I resigned myself to feeding Mama Dog. I bought a bigger fish.
To my dismay, Mama Dog was soon in heat again and the cycle repeated itself. Her belly swelled. Her teats returned. I wondered if I would be able to drown the puppies myself. I did not think I could. There remained a residual Westernness in me that said only really nasty people kill puppies.
Fortunately, the new vet finally arrived and I made arrangements to spare the other animals from the urges and consequences of their hormonal imperatives. The cat was the first to go. Each morning he returned to the house a little more battle-scarred, and though he survived kittenhood, it seemed unlikely that he would survive as a cat unless he was fixed. I picked Sam up and carried him to the pickup truck. If you have never driven a manual- shifting car alone with an uncaged cat, I recommend that you go to great lengths to avoid the experience. I deluded myself into thinking that the cat would sit quietly in the passenger seat, but in fact moments after I started the car he found his way to the top of my head, which he used as a perch to leap toward the window, which sadly for him, was closed, causing him to experience a not inconsiderable amount of panic, which he manifested by ripping me to shreds, pausing only to relieve himself. By the time we reached the vet’s office, a two-room surgery in Tanaea, I was bleeding from a number of slashes and I smelled like cat urine.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you. Welcome to Tarawa. I have a cat for you. He’s presently locked in the glove compartment.”
Hillary, a young volunteer vet from Britain, was kind enough to provide me with antiseptic and Band-Aids. I retrieved the cat and after he calmed down Hillary sedated him. The surgery would be done by Manibure, Hillary’s assistant.
“I can see why he gets into fights. He’s got big balls,” Manibure noted.
“Well, make sure you get them both. I want a mellow cat.”
I returned a few hours later, and found Sam,
“Here,” Hillary said, handing me several needles. “You will need to give him antibiotics for the next few days.”
“Um… Do you mean to say I have to stick a needle into this cat?”
“Yes. Don’t worry. It’s very simple. Just lift up the skin and inject the needle.”
I tried to absorb this. I had been mauled by Sam simply for taking him on a drive. I could only imagine the abuse he would inflict on me once I stuck a needle in him. I need not have worried though. Without feline testosterone coursing through him, he offered nothing more than a meek what-are-you-doing-to-me protest, even after I accidentally punctured his skin the whole way through, sending a stream of antibiotics coursing through the air in a long, useless arc.
A few days later I brought the dogs. Unsurprisingly, they were much more amenable to a car trip. They exulted as they passed through the forbidden territory claimed by other dogs.
“We got Brown Dog just in time,” Hillary said. “In another day or two, she would have gone into heat.”
I thanked Hillary and Manibure heartily for sparing us from that nightmare. By the evening, both dogs were bouncing about as if they had not just that very morning undergone major surgery. They are resilient, these island animals.
I soon ran into Hillary again, as was bound to happen on our small island. I asked her how she was doing, freshly arrived on Tarawa.
“Well, I am not precisely sure what it is I’m supposed to be doing. Manibure is very good and doesn’t need much more training. He knows what he is doing with the pigs. So far, you are the only people to bring in their pets for sterilization. While I find Kiribati very interesting, I fear that professionally I might become a little bored.”
“What was your specialty in Britain?”
“Cows and horses.”
I laughed. Those animals were about as familiar to Kiribati as unicorns.
“I have just learned all these wonderful new techniques, and yet I fear I won’t be able to practice here. For instance, there is this great new technique for sterilizing dogs after they have conceived, and I would be very keen to try it out, but—”
“I have just the dog for you.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The only problem is she is a bit of a wanderer, and I can’t be certain when exactly I might be able to take her in.”
“That’s all right. I can swing by your house and we can do it there.”
The following day Mama Dog found herself strapped to our dining table. Hillary brought her surgical tools, and once the dog was fully sedated she set to work, skillfully incising Mama Dog’s belly.
