Octopus versus rat.

Farm kitty Toerau and me.


We finished up our mid-day meal and like usual, I put a kettle of hot water on the stove for tea and coffee.  On the farm in the Tuamotus, it rarely gets hotter or colder than 85° year-round.  That’s the temperature of the lagoon water, which keeps things incredibly constant.  A hot beverage was more about prolonging our meal than anything else.  Like any kind of farming, our work was almost sure to be physically demanding.  As soon as lunch was over we would be back at it until the end of the day.

As we were waiting for the water to boil we heard a clatter come from the food closet.  The door was open and a giant rat thudded to the floor.  This was impossible.  The farm is a football field’s distance from the land.  If it had swum all the way out there, it had risked getting eaten by sharks, groupers, eels and a whole host of other hungry denizens of our coral atoll.  Impossible or not, the Houdini rat was there on the floor, it’s black, beady eyes full of panic.

Almost immediately afterwards, our farm cat Toerau jumped after in hot pursuit.  Toerau was an elegant calico with the short hair that characterizes cats in warm climates.  She caught up to it in no time but her slender frame halted abruptly in front of the intruder.  It was a lot of rat and she was visibly unsure what to do next.  I had found her as a kitten, soaked and terrified under some wet cardboard at a neighbor’s farm in the middle of a cyclone.  Toerau means north wind in Tahitian, which is the direction from which cyclones typically hit our atoll from.  She had grown up on the pearl farm and had never known the sights and smells of land, let alone any creature more menacing than the small house geckos that are ubiquitous in the islands.

The rat didn’t lose any time and darted straight behind an empty plastic water barrel.  With no TV, radio and limited social interaction, this was the most exciting thing we had seen in a very long time.  I jumped up from my seat and raced to the barrel.  Toerau was there already, her tail twitching in anticipation.  I lifted the barrel, exposing the vermin.  It looked at me then at Toerau and surprised everyone by running straight off the deck into the water, ten feet below.  It landed with a splash and did the rat paddle on the surface for a few feet.  We were jumping up and down, screaming our lungs out which I suspect spurred its next move that was no less surprising than its leap of faith into the water.  It dove down then swam about ten feet horizontally underwater before coming back up for air.  It was a windless day and the gin clear lagoon showed every detail of the coral two feet below.

The farm is held above the coral head by poles, some of which are at a 45° angle to the water.  The rat was now visibly aiming for one of them.  Suddenly we noticed a movement through the transparent water.  It was rust red and looked like a fist-sized piece of dead coral on the move but we immediately  recognized it as one of the small octopuses that inhabit the coral head.

My parents’ mentor when we first came to the atoll in the early 70’s was a wise Paumotu (person of the Tuamotus) man named Raumati who had what seemed to be a supernatural connection to the weather, creatures and atoll ecology.  He had told my parents of an octopus scaling a waterfront coconut tree to eat baby rats out of their nests, high up in the fronds of the tree.  He was not one to speak when he didn’t have something to say and was often solicited for his wise counsel.  Regardless, the octopus story had always seemed more than a little incredible - until now.


A couple of resident octopuses doing the wild thang underneath the farm.


The octopus was at an equal distance from the rat as the pole.  I could see it was better at geometry than me because it calculated the trajectory of the rat’s escape route.  If it chased the rat like I had expected it to, the rat would have reached the pole in time to scamper up.  Instead they arrived at the same time and the octopus whose mass couldn’t have exceeded the rat’s, engulfed the unlucky mammal and swam off happily with it to it’s silent underwater lair.  Above water on the deck of the pearl farm it wasn’t so quiet – the air was filled with wild cheering and the sound of our feet hitting the wooden planks as we jumped up and down, celebrating entertainment of the wildest variety.

The Pearl. (part two)

The following Sunday I made my way across the 5 kilometers of lagoon that separated our farms.  He invited me to eat with him which I gladly accepted.  After I cleaned my plate of stewed chicken, peas and white rice with a piece of baguette, he asked me with a half smile if I wanted to see the pearls.  He knew I was more than a little eager to see them and he seemed to be enjoying taking his sweet time.  Of the 20 oysters second-grafted, 14 of them had produced pearls.  It was the first time I had seen pearls that big that had come from my own work and it was an unforgettable moment.  Instead of just pouring them all out of a single bag, he had separated them by category, the rounds in one bag, the baroques in another and so on.  They all sat on a towel that he had laid out on his table in different little piles.

I looked at them one at a time, turning them in my hand, inspecting them for their color, shape and blemishes.  I could feel Julien’s eyes on me, studying me.  He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bag that he carefully opened, poured into his hand then placed The Pearl directly in front of me.


It stared up at me from the table, an impossible luster reflecting everything around it.  It was a delicate lagoon green that was unmistakable, even in the poor light of the makeshift outdoor kitchen.  I saw my own hand in it as I reached to pick it up.  Flawless.  Not even the tiniest pin-prick could be found, nothing to keep it real.  It measured up at over 15mm’s making it the largest pearl of the small batch.

As I marveled at it, it struck me that Julien might have placed it in front of me as a gift.  After all, I had asked for nothing in return for the work that I’d done.  I had been grateful to have the opportunity to try my hand on his oysters but on the other hand I had come through for him and produced some respectable results, on par with an experienced technician.

I went into it with no expectations of profit, only gratitude for being given the opportunity.  The Pearl changed the game though and left me lusting after it.  I pushed the desire away and gave The Pearl back feeling the fever of covetousness rising.  Julien was and still is a friend but I sensed that his generosity, possibly like my own, cohabitated with a another emotion. 
  
In what now seems a gesture of idealistic stoicism, I wordlessly finished admiring the pearl, reached across the table and placed it in front of him.  He scanned my face, hesitated a moment then quickly put the pearl back in his pocket.

The Pearl. (part one)

"Are you sure?”  This seemed crazy to me.  I searched Julien’s green eyes for any sign of him kidding around.  His sun blackened face was typically animated by a faint mischievous smile, infused with good nature but sometimes you wondered.  Julien was a Paumotu (person of the Tuamotu Archipelago) and one of the tiny handful of farmers who had started farming Tahitian pearls around the same time as our farm, circa 1990.

But he was dead serious.  “If they all die, no problem.”

Julien had accosted me on the quay where the people from different far-flung parts of the atoll came together every week.  Essentials like food and gasoline arrived on the weekly supply ship, making it a great excuse to put work aside and catch up with fellow farmers.  This was often a less-than-sober occasion but today Julien and I were both clear headed. 

A year or so earlier a Japanese graft technician had done a trial run at his one-room farm and the pearls were in need of harvesting.  Julien could have killed the oysters and harvested the pearls as most would have done but word had reached him that I had been recently instructed in the secret craft known locally as the “surgreffe.”  The surgreffe involved making a tiny incision in the flesh of the oyster and gently extracting the pearl.  The pearl is then replaced by a nucleus that mimics the pearl and boom, the process starts all over again but with a much bigger nucleus, consequently resulting in a larger and far more valuable pearl.  At the time it was the strict domain of Japanese (and one Australian) technicians that jealously kept the secret.  It requires a steady hand, very specific tools and a knowledge of where and how to use them.  I had all of these but was lacking in a last crucial piece of the puzzle: experience.  My instructor in the surgreffe, the Japanese technician Yamamoto, who had taught me had let me do a couple in front of him.  I had the basic idea down but without practicing I felt like I was thoroughly unqualified to risk the lives of another farmer’s oysters.  It is said that to begin to master pearl seeding or the “first graft” of oysters, it requires having done a minimum of 10,000.

Despite my objections, Julien insisted and the following Saturday found me leaving our bumpy windward side and crossing the atoll’s lagoon to his farm on the east side, grafting tools in my pack and butterflies in my stomach.

His farm consisted of nothing more than a ramshackle hut on crumbling wooden stilts with a short walkway that led to his motu, a segment of the chain in the mini islands that make up the atoll of Ahe.  The east side of the island is what you might imagine a coral atoll to look like.  Dark green coconut trees arc away from a thin strip of cream colored sand that meets water so clear you aren’t sure where it starts.  It then blends into every possible shade of blue and turquoise and is further enhanced by the wild contrasting pinks and oranges of coral gardens that span off into deeper water.  Fat parrot fish languidly crunch coral near the surface and flip their blue/green and sometimes orange/yellow tails out of the still water.  The peace that infuses life on this side of the atoll is due to the lack of wind and chop on the water.  The prevailing wind comes from the East so the east side of the atoll is typically in the lee, especially where there are trees to block it.

As much as his property invited leisure, all I had on my mind was how I would best do what I came to do.  My primary concern was the well being of his oysters but I knew that sooner or later I would have to start on the road to being experienced in the craft. Also, grafting outside of one’s farm publicly places a pearl technician within a quality continuum.  I wanted to be sure I was at the right end of the continuum and yet I was stepping into unfamiliar territory with no safety net.  Despite my friend’s nonchalance I knew that a botch-job here could stick to me like a bad odor for an indefinite amount of time.


The oysters had been placed in retention nets that allowed Julien to know that what he brought me was guaranteed to have pearls waiting inside.  This is a common way that farmers have of getting an early indication of the quality of their technician’s work.  The nets are on the oysters for the first six weeks usually, then removed so that the health of the oyster isn’t affected by the mesh that will quickly clog with marine growth.

While he was out retrieving the oysters from their holding lines I got my tools together, sharpened my knives and was ready for him on his return.  The operations of the 20 oysters he brought me went surprisingly well and a year and a half later found us back on the wharf of the port for the arrival of another supply ship.  He told me that he had harvested the pearls and that if I wanted to come and see them I was welcome to.

Please tune in next week for PART TWO.