THE GREAT KILL

Dick, who had heard the first thunder of the battle in the woods, running from the trees had seen Katafa standing watching the cachalot come into the pool, but he had no eyes for her. The excitement of the fight and the fear of injury to the dinghy moored by the bank held him from thought of anything else.

Then, when the cachalot broke away, he followed, running through the trees, hallooing, mad with excitement and the desire to be in at the death.

He could see, through the branches overhanging the water, the foam in the wake of the fight and a long line of following gulls.

The gulls were coming down already. The high cloud of them had broken, and, as if on a moving stairway, they were coming down in a great curve that broke and flittered about the nearly dead leviathan, surging now slowly, tongueless, torn, half eviscerated, towards the break of the reef.

It seemed as though scarce consciously it was making a last attempt to get to sea to the freedom it had lost. The sharks grazing on it, tearing into it, were indifferent. It might get to sea or remain in the lagoon, it was all the same to them; it was theirs. The burgomasters and the bo’suns, clanging and wheeling and swooping, were indifferent. As long as it did not sink, it was theirs.

Dick, knocking himself against trees and tripping on the undergrowth, followed till he reached the banana beach opposite the bank. Here, where he had slain Sru, son of Laminai, whose body the tides and gulls and sharks had long dispersed, he stood to watch whilst the cachalot, practically dead, moved in a great ring on the water, a ring described beneath a vortex of birds.

Never had the lagoon looked more beautiful, glass-smooth, except where the vast bulk moved half submerged, escorted by the gulls whose reflection flew white on the surface, and whose shadows on the floor seemed phantom birds circling amidst the shark shadows and the shadows of the dogfish.

Then, as Dick watched, little by little the dying cachalot gained speed; rising on the water as the momentum increased, the great bulk showed clear, moving in the circle that Nature has prescribed for all creatures dazed or confused.

As the speed increased, the sharks held off for a moment, dozens of dark fins breaking the surface of the water. The gulls, ceasing their clamour, circled like a coil of smoke, and silence fell on the lagoon, broken only by the rush of the fish and the murmur of the reef tinged with the first fires of sunset.

Dick watched without moving till the flurry passed, the leviathan, like a ship turned turtle, moving ever more slowly whilst the shark fins vanished and a gull lit on it as the gull had lit on the chest of Sru.

When he returned to the house, Katafa was nowhere in sight. He did not trouble about her; his mind was too full of the things he had seen. He ate his supper and turned in, but he could not sleep. Katafa, supperless in her shack, gazing with wide-open eyes at the starlight seen through the leaves, could not sleep. She had seen him come back, cook his food, and vanish into the house. He had never called for her as he usually did were she absent at meal time; he never had called for her unless he wanted her for something, to help in the cooking, to carry his spears, to work the boat. She was less to him than the fish he had just eaten or the mat he was lying on.

It was only now that she recognised this. Steadily, bit by bit, strand by strand, the clutch of taminan on her conscious mind had been broken so that her heart could beat as the human heart beats and her eyes could show her heart what it desired. Powerful as ever in her subconscious self, the spell remained capable of separating her for ever from the touch of human being, but her conscious mind had found release, an object to grasp with all the pent-up passion of her nature—and its indifference to her.