Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill Page B

romantic, though the reality chafed a bit. Marquesans ride on hand-carved wooden saddles. Stirrups are bits of twisted wire tied to the saddle with old rope. The fact that there are stallions in the jungle or roped to trees along the trails makes riding another stallion an exciting process of rearing, chasing, biting. During these fights and near fights stirrups break, cinch straps snap, and the wooden saddle raises nasty sores on the rider. It is better to ride bareback.
    One day I borrowed a horse and rode to the deserted beach at Taaoa, near Atuona. I rode bareback, like the people in Gauguin's paintings, and the mountains above caught the drifting South Pacific clouds that turned the high peaks slate-blue with distant rain. Gauguin had painted the mountains this blue—it had been a matter of much hilarity in Paris.
    Later, I visited the basalt god that squatted on the stone terraces above Taaoa. There was something indelibly Marquesan about the idol. The people are professed Catholics on these islands, they watch TV, the children go to schools, yet few will consent to visit the tikis at night. The old gods still have some power. I wanted to talk about this power with Edmundo, the formerly dead archeologist, over dinner that night.
    I placed a gold-colored Central Pacific franc at the feet of the tiki, as is the custom, and rode out of the shadowed forest until I could see the sun and sea at the end of the trail below. When I

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    judged I was far enough away, I shouted, "Edmundo is alive!" The horse spooked, but I brought him under control and sat looking back into the darkness. I felt like a child throwing rocks at a haunted house. "Alive!" I shouted, and kicked the horse so that we galloped into the light.

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    next, and the first order of mutilation will be the MALE'S PHALLIC ORGAN OF REPRODUCTION!"
    There were those writers who dismissed UFOs out of hand: Castrators from Outer Space indeed. The mutilations were clearly the work of some perverse cult of blood-drunk Satanists. To explain the usual lack of footprints around the tortured cattle, one writer suggested blood-drunk Satanists in helicopters.
    Another letter proposed an intriguing conspiracy. Noting that several mutilations had occurred near a large military installation in Colorado, the writer suggested that agents of the U.S. government were skulking about the fields on moonless nights, scalpels in hand. Their job: horribly mutilate the cattle in brutal and inexplicable ways so as to cause terror in the souls of the local ranchers who would then sell their land to the military at cut-rate prices.
    The most intricate explanation came from a certain F. Smith, of Colorado. In a striking booklet entitled Cattle Mutilation: The Unspeakable Truth, Smith works hard to demolish the arguments of conventional UFO theorists, of those who favor Satanists in choppers, and, most especially, of those scientists who see the mutilations as the work of such predators as foxes and flies.
    Smith starts by setting the record straight on certain important cosmic matters. First of all, no planet can remain habitable forever, and this prevents the universe from "going to seed and becoming inbred." The time when humans must leave Earth is called Judgment Day. At that time we will join the great cosmic community of humans beyond the solar system. We refer to that community as "heaven."
    It follows, then, that extraterrestrials are not merely aliens, but angels. These angels are pretty rough customers. Smith states that they are not "neutered individuals" or "chubby infants," but are, instead, the mighty soldiers of scripture, "ENEMY soldiers" whose duty is to prevent us from traveling beyond the solar system until the Day of Judgment, a day that is rapidly approaching. Smith sees evidence of the Apocalypse in the population explosion itself. "An explosion can be described as an extremely rapid

    release and degradation of energy.