Piggy

Lobsters in lobster pot: 0

Lobsters picked up off the reef at low tide: 9

1673 – ujelang

It has all gone a bit Lord of the Flies out here. No facepainting or murder as of yet, but the rest of the ingredients are all there.

We are on an uninhabited atoll hundreds of miles from anywhere, and you get the feeling that god might have had it purpose-built for Jesus to retire to in the event that he chose not to sacrifice himself for the sins of man. Paradise found. There are perhaps a dozen little islets ringed around a small lagoon, the biggest a mile long and 200 metres thick, the smallest circumnavigateable in five minutes (we sail between them, but obviously jesus could have just walked on water). Each island has a sandy beach facing the lagoon, a lush green interior, and millennia of coral met by breaking waves on the ocean side. Large schools of meaty fish swim up in curiosity, no fear of fishermen, as the squeaky calls of the dolphins travel to your ears from hundreds of metres away. There are no animals, insects or plants that can do you any harm on land, and even the sharks seem pretty mellow. The wind is subdued and the lagoon water petal still. It is easy to find low slung coconut trees that yield fat, sweet meat.

We arrived, as usual, just after dawn, and a large pod of dolphins met the boat at the pass, bobbing and breaching and generally being dolphins. They, and the voluminous cloud formations high in the sky, seemed positive portents. 

We dropped anchor on the main island and headed to shore. This island had been inhabited 30 years previously and, having had no fresh fruit or veg for some weeks, we were hoping that the previous occupants had planted fruit trees that we could pick from. We found pandanus and breadfruit trees, but nothing edible on them. An old church. The remains of a path running through the long abandoned village. Blocks of concrete, wells, rope and miscellaneous plastics. Dominating all of this, the thick jungle towering and making incursions all around, effortlessly reclaiming the space, hand in hand with the multitude of big, thick spiders webs, and the swarm of flies that followed each of us as we fanned out in the brush, hunting for fruit. Bzzzzzzz. Landing on runnels of sweat and open cuts. Bzzzzzz. Jump in the water for temporary escape but they wait for you. Bzzzzzzz. Why so many flies here? We made animal cries so as to not lose each other in the dense vegetation, and after one such ‘ai ai ai!’ I heard a big disturbance to my left, and looked across in time to see a family of pigs legging it from under a bush. Pigs! So pig shit, so flies.

After a while I found my crewmates in a copra clearing, climbing coconut trees in an amateur but ultimately successful fashion,  drinking down their prizes as the flies continued to buzz around. They had seen pigs too. Other Marshallese islands have pigs, but they are domesticated. The last wild pigs we saw were in the Marquesas, where men would go in gangs on horseback into the hills and hunt for them, big aggressive things with tusks. We considered whether we wanted to hunt a pig, and how we might go about it.

After consulting the ‘Collins Gem SAS Survival Guide’ and ‘Country Living’ book, before an indulgence in the ‘Joy of Cooking’ section on pork, I concluded that roast pig sounded very good, but that it would be very hard to catch one. There was no flexible wood to make a bow for a bow and arrow, deploying snares or other traps might catch a pig way too big for our needs, and a pig might easily snap a speargun line and disappear into the jungle with a valuable metal spear.

So we kind of forgot the idea and went again to forage for fruit on the island the following day, this time in the other direction. On this side of town there were loads of pigs, and if you were quiet they would trot, rather than run, away from you, and even then not very far. I tracked two little ones, mere toddlers, and then crouched behind a log as they sort of sniffed the air and wondered what was going on. Then one of them started walking towards me! I took a deep breath and got ready to spring, but in that moment he saw me, and bolted off at a right angle. If I had the Hunter’s Instinct, which I know from spearfishing I definitely don’t (too well fed probably), I would have managed to grab the little blighter, but as it was he was off and into the undergrowth before I even moved. I walked slowly back to the boat thinking of spare ribs in sweet and sour sauce, of belly pork in oyster sauce, of crackling, and of how much of a dude I would have felt to catch a pig with my bare hands.

I was last back to the boat and Tom, grinning, informed me that he had caught a pig with his bare hands. After a long and roundabout chase. He brought her to the boat. Black, perhaps 2ft long, tied to a piece of wood and sleeping. Until the cat attacked her, after which she became quite unsettled. I made her a little den in the dingy, gave her some coconut, which she devoured, and named her Esmerelda. Esme for short.

I have always really respected vegetarians. My only defence against the strong environmental, health and animal welfare arguments for not eating meat is that there are some methods of meat production that are (in 21^st century England) exceptions to the rule, and are necessary for both the existence of the animal and its habitat, and the livelihood of the farmer. For example, hiking in the Yorkshire dales reveals flocks of sheep that graze hillsides that have no other practical use, hillsides that are all the more beautiful for the short shocks of purple heather and gauze that the sheep help to maintain. The valley farm houses that exist to husband the sheep would make anyone dreamy of an idyllic rural existence*, and are surely more in keeping with our ideals than acres of heavily irrigated soybeans grown on former rainforest land in Brazil for the Tofurkey market. I reason that if the animal has not suffered in life and the land and workers have not been exploited, the odd meat feast should be a joyful and juicy occasion (the fact that I regularly eat meat that does not fit this criteria is something I am working on…). Similarly, the pigs on this island have no predators, a whole island to wallow around in, and as I was the one processing it, it couldn’t have satisfied my criteria better.

I also happen to think that you should, at least in theory, be able to kill any animal that you to eat. It was for this reason that I stood over Esme on the beach the next day with a sharp knife and a hammer. The little animal, held down on a tree trunk, seemed resigned to her fate. The first blow to the crown of her head caused her eyes to roll to the back of her head and she stopped moving. After the second blow blood started dribbling out of her mouth and nose and her body became limp. A pig’s main artery is on the left side of its neck. I found it with the knife as I slit clean across her throat and wind pipe, and at this the pig either woke up or started spasming in death: her legs pushed against the log and flecks of blood came out of her windpipe with what would have been screams if her vocal chords had still been connected. She was held tight and after perhaps 30 seconds stopped moving. I cut around the spine at the neck and twisted the head off, which we hung up as coconut crab bait.  It wasn’t pleasant but I wouldn’t say it was harrowing either.

Then the real work began. We built a fire and burned then scraped off the hair and outer skin with machetes, leaving the pink skin we associate with pork and a smokey, fatty smell that remained until we ate it and I thought was quite appealing. Then we tied it spread-eagled to a tree, cut around and tied up the anus to prevent the obvious, and then very gently made a shallow cut from there, down the length of the belly to the neck. Having a super sharp knife made all the difference and I managed to get the kidneys, heart and liver out before cajoling out the rest of the guts unruptured. Then back to the boat to shave off remaining bits of hair and wash the skin with baking powder.

The body was glazed with honey and oil, stuffed with grated coconut and our last can of mushrooms, and put in the oven. Emma fried the heart, liver and kidneys with pepper until the outside tiptoed on the edge of crunchy. Extremely tasty. In my only encounter with emma that hasn’t been full of warmth and understanding, we argued about how to get the skin crispy but keep the meat moist. French verses English methods. And then towards sunset the animal came out of the oven and we sat down to eat.

This blog is nothing if not honest, and I stay true to that by passing on my opinion that the eating of the meat didn’t justify the death of the baby pig. For starters, there wasn’t much meat on the thing – it was skinny and small and the only real hunks of meat were on the upper thights (hams). The ribs were the size of the pens you get in argos, and the meat between them barely worth bothering with. The skin, my favourite bit, wasn’t crispy (damn the French). It only fed four of us for one meal. Killing an older pig for a big feast or to preserve and eat over a long period would have been a better scenario, but we had no fridge and no wedding to go to, and there is absolutely no chance we could have caught a larger pig by chasing it down anyway.

However, if you add the whole two day process of plotting, hunting, considering, killing and preparing the pig to the sensory pleasure of eating it, I think actually it probably was worth it. It was only the second time I have eaten meat in about two months, and for sure I am going to appreciate (and moderate) any meat I eat when I am back in ‘civilisation’ much more. Paradoxically, the whole process makes me understand why so many people eat so much meat – I think it is a hangover (especially in China) from a time when meat was scarce, expensive, a massive hassle to get, and therefore a big luxury. Imagine waiting around for months a pig to be big enough to eat, watching it and feeding – you would appreciate that chop.  To be able to have it every day signified success and contentment. The trouble is that my generation has never experienced a scarcity of meat (in London it is cheaper to buy a hot piece of chicken and chips than a loaf of bread) and so we consume it mindlessly, fuelling the huge and disgusting industrial meat machine that is hidden so effectively from us.

So, in conclusion: ‘less meat, more feasts, thank you pig’.

The hunting continued on Lobster reef, opposite Pig Island. We spent a couple of hours nosunnomoondeepstars on the reef at low tide, ankle deep in lapping waves, looking for lobsters. The technique is to tie your headtorch on the end of a pole, then tiptoe along the reef with the torch casting a wide light over the shallow rockpools. If the lobster sees you before you see it it does this amazing backwards sprint using its tail, and you never see it again. If you see it first, you grab it by the tail, ignore it’s weird spasms, and chuck it into the bucket.

And as though to define the word ‘abundance’, next to Lobster Reef sat Coconut Crab Island. There are few things more angry looking than a coconut crab, whose DNA is less like the crab you and I know, and more of a mash-up of lobster, tank, and Nick Griffin. An adult crab is bigger than a dinner plate, with thick legs for climbing coconut trees, claws the size of a child’s fist that it uses to open the coconuts it finds, and armour that needs several blows of a hammer to get through.  Their coconut diet gives the large chunks of meat in their claws and legs a creamy, delicate flavour, and their entire tails are filled with a buttery, nutty, smokey fat that you can pour over your rice. The tips of the claws seem to be neither meat nor fat, and have the texture and subtle flavour of pate.

They live in holes at the base of trees, or under mounds of decaying palms, and are fairly easy to find. As a consequence of this, and their amazing taste, there are few of them left on inhabited islands, and the ones on Bikini are likely radioactive, so when we got to this island and found the place crawling with the bastards we were very, very excited. Once found, you wave your machete in their face, and they either grab it with their deathgrip claws, allowing you to lift them up and straight into the bucket, or they run backwards to the other side of their hiding place, where hopefully someone else is there to grab them from behind.

We caught four during a midnight stomp on the first night, boiling them on a driftwood fire the next afternoon and finding an anglo-french entente – Emma made a creamy pepper sauce, I did a sweet and sour with starfruit jam. Though really the flavour of the meat was enough by itself. Eating these crabs requires total concentration, and no one spoke as we selected, cracked, peeled and ate the meat. A huge weather system passed around us – numerous types of clouds, high and low, big rainshowers that moved past us, visible for miles, thick rays of sunlight in between adding to the colour and the drama. The pre-dusk air seemed to hold a  weight of expectation, as if this whole incredible architecture had been assembled for some god, and everyone was waiting for him to show up. It felt somehow unreal.

*         I have no illusions that the life of a farmer is a tough and unrelenting one, made all the more difficult by unfair supermarket practices, land prices and the glut of cheap meat available, but farmers are a hardy lot and surely would choose this life over having no farm at all.