Pecked to death by ducks

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Authors: Tim Cahill
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beach when I heard people laughing from some distance away. The mayor's wife and a dozen other women were sitting on the covered patio with the poured-cement floor that was such a luxury people gathered there nearly every afternoon. (Many Marquesans live in thatched-roofed huts with dirt floors.) The television set was on, as it is for two hours a day. The programs are beamed down to the villages by transmitters located on the high peaks of the islands. One French official told me that the government provides TV for the people because they love it. They love it so much that it is feared many might move to Tahiti just to watch Dynasty. But Tahiti is already crowded, employment is scarce, and the government figures it is cheaper to provide the Marquesans with TVs at home than with subsidized housing in Tahiti or Bora Bora. The mayor's TV was the village TV, and it had been provided by the government.
    The women were watching The Towering Inferno, which had

    PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 46
    been clubbed in French. Nobody was looking at the set, except when the building was shown in flame. Then the women were intent on the special effects, and no one spoke.
    The love scenes, on the other hand, set everyone off at once, talking and laughing in a merry cadence. I came to understand that the women of Puamau thought Paul Newman's kisses were the funniest part of the movie.
    The patio was open on three sides. An old man hobbled up to the women and said a few words. The mayor's wife said a single word in Marquesan and began laughing, as did the old man, and all the rest of the women. On the TV, someone started kissing someone else. It was all too much. The women laughed until tears formed in their eyes. First the quip about the elderly fellow with the bad legs and now all this hilarious kissing.
    The next morning, at breakfast, I asked the mayor's wife what she had said to the old man. "Parachute," she told me. Just the thought of it got her giggling, and her husband had to tell me the story. About thirty years ago, he said, the man with the bad legs had been about sixty feet up a tree, shaking coconuts loose. He lost his grip and fell, but not before tearing off a palm frond, which he tried to use as a parachute. The man had broken both his legs. The mayor, his wife, and their three sons and two daughters were rocking back and forth with laughter. Now, the mayor said, hardly able to continue, whenever anyone saw the fellow limping along a path, they thought of the failed green parachute. It was a joke that had kept everyone in Puamau laughing for thirty years.
    The French brought horses to the Marquesas, and like the goats and pigs and breadfruit trees, the horses multiplied beyond counting on the provident land. There are more horses in the Marquesas than anywhere else in the South Seas. Wild horses have to be cleared off airstrips before planes can land. Horses run free in the steep, sloping jungles, in the thick grasses on the plains at three thousand feet. They can be seen drinking from rivers, a waterfall in the background, orchid petals or plumerias on their backs where they brushed against the vegetation.

    The horses—you can tell from the configuration of the heads— are a mix of Arabians, thoroughbreds, and the original Chilean horses brought by the French. They have adapted to the steep jungles of the Marquesas, bred themselves down, suffered some degree of island dwarfism. Smaller than American mustangs, they are strong climbers and eager runners.
    The horses are so plentiful that Marquesans in need of transportation simply take a mare in heat out to the jungle. The strongest stallion to approach is roped and wrestled to the ground by hand. Marquesans ride the horses belly-deep through the surf to break them. It is not unusual to look out to sea and watch a horse lifted up and carried toward the beach by a large wave.
    The thought of riding along the black volcanic sand beaches with the surf pounding in was wonderfully

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