Life in the Ring of Fire Part 39: Bullets Galore

Duncan had gone to Vila on Saturday and was supposed to come back on Monday but, not surprisingly, this didn't happen. I was actually pretty surprised to learn how much I missed him. He is generally the one that includes me in all the weird and crazy adventures that I end up getting into, so without him things moved a little slowly. I chewed through a lot of books. The brief foray we'd had into cooler weather came to an abrupt halt, with the sun brazenly blazing it's way through the clouds once more, as if trying to show off the fact that, even during the dead of winter, it can still cause sweat stains.

On Tuesday, the lemon tree outside of my house died for some unknown reason. All of its leaves abruptly fell off and the trunk turned and unhealthy shade of black. I was somewhat saddened by the loss, because I really enjoyed being able to wake up in the morning and walk outside to the lemony-fresh scent of my very own citrus tree. Much more annoying, however, was the fact that all the kids at the school decided that they needed to grab as many lemons as possible from my dying tree, as it would no longer be producing more. This meant that my front yard was filled with screaming, shouting, kids throwing rocks and sticks at my lemon tree, trying to knock lemons loose. Of course, most of the thrown objects missed and clattered loudly onto my tin roof. So basically the noise level in my house never dropped below that of a jet engine operating at full power for the entire week. I felt a sudden kinship with crazy old men who wave shotguns around in the air and shout at kids to get off their lawns.

Friday McKenzie and I headed to the airport early in order to meet a new addition to our Malekula family. A new group of volunteers had arrived in Vanuatu in April and was finishing up training and getting ready to head to their sites. Peace Corps, however, had snuffed us Malekulans and not assigned us any new volunteers, meaning that such inferior islands as Tanna and Ambae were now rivaling us for having the most volunteers. Fortunately, a volunteer that had left Vanuatu a few years ago had decided to re-enlist as part of a master's degree program (I guess it bodes well that someone would like Vanuatu enough to come back after returning to the States), and was being sent to work with the tourism office in Lakatoro. She'd be taking over McKenzie's house in Lakatoro (as McKenzie was slated to move one village over, to Litz-Litz, in order to be closer to her office), which was good, because McKenzie's house had become our official party house and is home to our only refrigerator, a crucial component in the production of frosty brews.

Mindi, our newest addition, arrived at the airport on the 7:30am flight with a familiar vacant, exhausted expression on her face, a sign of having spent the previous night taking full advantage of the Vila party scene before heading out to the islands. The three of us headed back to Lakatoro to take naps because, well, that's just what you do on a Friday afternoon.

On Saturday Duncan returned from Vila. According to him, he'd gone to open an account with a new international bank that had just launched a few weeks earlier. Upon his return, however, he informed me that he had not, in fact, gone to the bank, but what he had done was purchase 450 bullets for his .22 rifle. Vanuatu gun control laws focus more on controlling bullets rather than controlling the guns that fire them. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the reason for this is that the primary concern is, in the absence of park rangers, cutting down on the amount of hunting that people are able to do. Thus, everyone with a gun license is entitled to purchase a certain amount of bullets every month which, I believe, ranges somewhere between 50 to 200, depending on the type of license. Duncan explained to me that, in order to be able to buy 450 bullets, he'd had to purchase gun licenses held by two deceased individuals from the police in Vila. He was on a mission. The owner of a French restaurant in Vila was offering $1000 dollars and 1200 bullets to anyone who could catch 200 flying fox. Flying fox, as I've mentioned in previous blogs, aren't actually flying foxes, but rather a kind of fruit bat that are common in Vanuatu. The French prize them as a delicacy (but, honestly, name a single bizarre, unappetizing animal that the French DON'T prize as a delicacy), and I happened to know that the particular French restaurant that had commissioned Duncan to hunt for them charges a little over $30 for their flying fox dish. Quite a tidy markup, if I do say so myself. I'm something of a fan of flying fox as well, although I have yet to taste it cooked in red wine – like the French serve it – which is supposed to be particularly good. If you can get over the fact that you're eating a leathery bat, flying fox has a very strong, unique, game flavor that goes well with a spicy curry (being extraordinary tough, it has to be stewed for a long time before it becomes edible). Of course, I have the advantage of being friends with the Ni-Vanuatu who hunt the things, so I get to eat them for free, which is a much friendlier price than $30 per. Because they can be sold at such a good price to French tourists, flying fox have basically been hunted to extinction on Efate. They are, however, still quite plentiful on all the other islands of Vanuatu, and so all the restaurants in Vila have to import them. Flying fox can be seen in abundance flying between the fruit trees in Tautu once it gets on towards dusk and actually make a pretty continuous racket late into the night outside my house. Hunting them requires a flashlight powerful enough to spot them hanging in the taller coconut trees, a favorite haunt of theirs. Fortunately, my family had sent me such a flashlight from the States a few months before, which I had loaned to Duncan on the grounds that he allow me to take a flying fox for myself every now and then. Thus, on Saturday night Duncan and I took a shell of kava together to commemorate his return and then he abruptly announced that we were going to go shoot. It briefly crossed my mind that handling firearms while intoxicated is probably dangerous and a bad idea, but then I realized that basically everything I do in my day-to-day life in Vanuatu is dangerous and a bad idea, so I let it go. The two of us walked up and down the road connecting Tautu and Norsup, Duncan's flashlight constantly roving between the coconut trees looking for small, black, ball-shaped figures hanging from the leaves. When he spotted one he'd shout “Dan!” and I'd run over and take a position about a foot in front of him and stand as still as humanly possible. He'd then balance his rifle on my head, take aim through his scope, and shoot the flying fox. Despite the fact that this sounds unbelievably dumb, we actually were able to shoot a lot of them quite quickly. As it turns out, the actual shooting of the flying fox isn't really the hard part about hunting them. They're kind of sitting ducks up in the trees, and will stand perfectly still for minutes on end, just waiting to take a bullet. The problem, though, is that they're bats and are thus really good at hanging onto things, even when they're dead, so what happened is that only about 10% of the foxes that Duncan shot would fall out of the tree upon being hit. For the rest we either had to sit underneath the tree for a while waiting for the wind to knock them loose, try to knock them loose ourselves by throwing sticks or rocks, try and shoot out their legs so that they'll fall down, or give up and try to shoot another one. Thus, for the most part, the 10-15 minutes after shooting a flying fox was taken up by us trying to recover it, slowing us down significantly. I was still surprised as how many we were able to bring in, though. At the end of the night we had about 20 bagged and in the freezer, putting Duncan well on his way to the 200 mark.