AE on Norwich Island, Part 26

Amelia Earhart on Norwich Island

Part 26

September 15^th, 1937

Cats had figured in her dreams.  She lay in the gently swaying hammock as the light of dawn began to filter through the trees.

Strange dreams, confused. 

Houses, thatched houses.  Maybe a little island village.  Brown people, black haired, young and old, men and women going about their business, talking….  She tried to remember words, couldn’t, but yes, she thought it was The Lady’s language.  Boo-ka’s.

Chickens, pigs, dogs.  And cats. 

A little store.  How did she know it was a store?  A counter, in a window.  Board siding, a push-up shutter.  A cute little black-and-white kitten licking itself on the counter.  And a sign!  Yes, there had been a sign!  In English.  She was suddenly desperate to remember it, what it might tell her.

“Garden?” 

No, that wasn’t it. 

“Gardener?” 

That seemed righter. 

And “Store.” Certainly “Store.”  Another word; she tried to summon it, couldn’t.

But then the store had changed.  The whole place had changed, become wild, overgrown, uninhabited.  She had gone into the store and it was all abandoned, nothing but a broken bed, some bottles…  And a dead cat.  The black and white cat; somehow she knew it was the same one she had seen alive.

She had snapped awake out of that dream, pondered it as the midnight moonlight fell softly through the branches.  The forest was quiet but for the rustling of crabs – who never seemed to sleep – and rats, who were active but inoffensive at night, out about their own errands. 

Cats.  Dead and alive.  Did they mean something? 

Where was Boo-Ka? Nowhere to be found.  How lonely it was without her!

Then – there she was…. No, it wasn’t her.  Other ethereal forms, other ghosts, flitting through the trees.  Crowds of them, ghostly children, moving fast across her campsite, mouths open, screaming in silence.  Terrified, fleeing….

Fleeing others – adults, men, who came swiftly through the trees with weapons – spears and big clubs.  Where had she seen such things?  A museum somewhere.  But these were ghost weapons in the hands of ghosts, who brandished them triumphantly as they pursued the ghost children into the woods.  All in silence, but for the scrabbling of rats and crabs, the occasional murmur of a roosting bird.  Then they were gone.

Had she been asleep?  Had it been another dream?

“Of course.”

But she was awake when she said it.

Then she had slept again, and Boo-Ka had come.  Saying nothing, doing nothing, but there, filling the void, comforting. 

In her dream she asked The Lady about it all.  About Mister Eric and Koata and the schooner.  About the village and the cats.  About the ghost-children and ghost-warriors.  About ungenauigkeit.  And Boo-Ka had explained somehow, and it had all made perfect sense, and had been comforting.

But in the slowly gathering light of morning, she couldn’t remember anything The Lady had told her. Just the impression she had conveyed.

Dear Mrs Eho

If you are reading this, I’m probly dead, or non compos mentis. Either way, pls believe that I have no regrets. Well I regret that I’m maybe going to die on this godforsaken the way it looks like I may – slowly and uncomfortably. I always thought I’d pop off quick, in a crash or explosion.

But I’ve made my bed, and I’ll lie in it. No regrets!!!

Mother, you are not to allow anyone to say that my death – if it happens on this island – was the result of female incompetence or lack of ability. Praps it reflects MY incompetence or inability, but that’s different. Point is, it had/has/will have nothing to do with our sex. That’s not only because Fred was part of it all, but more importantly because once our belly antenna was gone – which of course we didn’t know – there was no one – woman, man, or person of neutral gender – who could have brought us in to Howland Island by anything other than pure luck. My biggest fear – the thing I DO regret – is that my fate may produce a setback in the progress of women into the skies, and into every other worthy line of endeavor. That must not happen, Mammy, you must not let that happen!!

I started to call this island “godforsaken.” It’s not, and that fact is a comfort to me. I’ve not been visited by the God of traditional Methodism, or by Jesus or the angels, or even by a goddess like Hera or Athena – but there’s a spirit here, Mommie; I’m as sure of it as I am of anything. It seems to have the silly name “Boo-ka” – no idea why, no idea what it means, but that’s what it – she, the Lady – conveys to me. She seems intent on encouraging me to die, to make some sort of transition to – well, to something else, beyond the sky. Peraps I will, or peraps Mister Eric and Mister Koata will get here first, and I’ll be saved, though probably not my foot. The matter is not yet out of my control, but sometimes I feel that I’m teetering on the edge.

I’m getting kinda tired, and this li’l compass I’m using has almost no lead left. Please know that whatever happens I love you, and Pidge, and the li’l David & Amy – and GP, too.

Yr doter,

AE

September 17^th, 1937

Rain fell in the night.  Not a huge storm like the one that had brought her to Freshwater Camp, but intense and lasting a good twenty minutes.  Roused by it out of her hammock, she limped around setting out cans and the turtle shell to catch water.  Lay on her back then with her mouth open, laughing despite the stabs of pain up her leg.  Stood up, holding onto a tree, and rinsed herself, rinsed her hair.  Laughed and cried and shouted with relief. Picked up leaves off the ground, each a precious cuplet of water, drank them one after another. Now in the morning she found that the rivulet was running again.  Not much, but enough.  She scooped water from it and filled every bottle and can she had left, the dutch oven, even her Swiss shoes.

She felt alert, organized, ready to move on – except for her foot, which hurt terribly, was clearly getting gangrenous, and now there was a new cut – relatively clean, as though from a knife – just above her ankle.  Where had that come from?  She soaked it again in a tide pool, re-wrapped it, and made her way back to camp.

Firewood was running low, so once again she moved her gear and hammock, just across the clearing to the south, on the slope running down to the lagoon. 

She had never been down to the lagoon from Freshwater Camp. She should see what was there.

Leaning on a stick – hadn’t there been a bamboo rod? – she hobbled down the ridge slope into a rather pleasant grassy area.  Pleasant except for the heat.  Cut off by the ridge from the trade wind, it was steaming. 

She struggled through a band of brush, and came out on a ledge of coral bordering the lagoon.  There was a narrow sandy beach below the ledge; she lowered herself gingerly onto it.

Offshore there was a tiny islet, a sloping block of shelving coral.  It lay in a small bay, almost filled by a sandbar.

In which there were clams.  Their broken shells lay along the shore, and when she looked closely and probed with her stick, she found that there were living beds of them.  Big ones like the few she had collected up by the Norwich City, and smaller ones, butterclam size. 

“Well, there’s a dietary change of pace.  I’ll bring down Mrs. Turtle’s shell and see how many I can collect.”

Even with my increasingly useless left foot, I found that it was not difficult to pry the big clams off the coral that underlies the sandbar.  It was a struggle, but I carried fifteen of them up here to my new campsite – still Freshwater Camp, though the rivulet has again dried up, but now my fire is on the south side of the clearing made by the falling tree.  I arranged the clams in the coals, and the heat soon caused them to open.  Cutting out the meat with my knife was easy too, and I grilled it on my steel plate griddle.  A delicious change from fish and booby flesh and the leathery sea cucumbers.

With some regret, I have adapted Fred’s sextant box to hold this journal and my letters with a bit more convenience, removing the small compartments and latches that had held the instrument and its attachments but caused my humidity-softened paper to bunch up.  It was with a pang of sadness that I pried off the little aluminum swivels that Fred improvised to hold the compass and the bubble levels that made the sextant usable in the air.  He was a clever man, and a good man.  I miss him very much.

I have arranged the clam shells with their open sides up, in hopes that another rain squall will come and fill them with water.  Every little bit helps.  I am deeply afraid of running out of water, or even of running low, as dehydration does nothing good to body or mind.  Between this and the fear of what is happening to my foot and leg…

“You could cut it off.  I’ll dispose of it for you.”

“I’ll bet you will.  And meanwhile I’ll bleed to death.”

“Not if you make a good tight tourniquet.”

“So now you’re a surgeon?”

“You know how to do it.”

This was true.  She’d learned about it, seen an amputation in Toronto.

“With a dull folding knife.”

Did the crab shrug? Could a crab shrug?

“It’ll hurt, but you’re courageous, remember?  Courage is the price we pay….”

“Dry up, you disgusting…”

She threw a rock, halfheartedly. The crab ducked.

Yes, she could probably do it.  The infection didn’t seem to extend above the knee yet, so if she sawed through the tendons around the patella….

But in her dream she had still had her leg.  Mister Eric and Mister Maude had said so.

“Cats, Meelie, cats.”

“What is it with cats?”

“More than one way to skin one.”

“Have you ever seen a cat?  What do cats have to do with anything?”

“Everything.  I could catalogue the ways, but you’d get bored.  Catatonic, even.”

“Puns are a low form of humor.”

“I’m a crab, honey, we like it low.  Look out for that frigate.”  

He scuttled away as a big black frigate bird landed with a crash in a small bush.

“My goodness!”  

She jumped up from the log where she had been sitting, instantly regretting it as pain coursed through her leg.  There were birds falling all over the clearing – boobies and frigates.  Some shook themselves and walked away or leaped into the air.  Others tried to walk or fly but fell down, their wings or legs broken.

A fight in the sky.  There must be another big boobie-frigate bird melee.  As though to confirm her hunch, a couple of fish fell along with two or three more birds, and one of the injured boobies coughed up a flying fish.  There were now a half dozen birds staggering around the clearing, squawking at each other.

“Well… don’t look a gift bird in the beak.” 

Putting her pain out of her mind, she began tethering birds to bushes and trees, for future consumption. The boobies, she decided, were all males.

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Notes

“A little store.” When we first visited Nikumaroro in 1989, the Gardner Cooperative Store was still standing, with its sign in place; see Amelia Earhart’s Shoes p. 81. Inside, on the remains of a bed, was a naturally mummified cat.

“… ghostly children, moving fast across her campsite, mouths open, screaming in silence…” See Thirteen Bones, pp 1-2.

“…so once again she moved her gear and hammock, just across the clearing to the south…” Moving from what we would call the “M” feature to create the “SL” feature at the Seven Site; see http://ameliaearhartarchaeology.blogspot.com/2009/09/seven-site-background.html

“I pried off the little aluminum swivels that Fred improvised to hold the compass and the bubble levels that made the sextant usable in the air.” Referring to artifacts 2-6-S-03a and 03b, the Seven Site’s enigmatic “gidgies;” see Amelia Earhart’s Shoes, pp 348-9 and https://tighar.org/wiki/2-6-S-03a_and_2-6-S-03b

“I have arranged the clam shells with their open sides up, in hopes that another rain squall will come and fill them with water.” Thus creating “Clambush 2, in the SL Feature complex at the Seven Site. See http://ameliaearhartarchaeology.blogspot.com/2012/09/artifacts-of-seven-site-clam-shuckers.html.

“… seen an amputation in Toronto.” My invention; I have no idea what procedures Earhart might have observed while working as a nurse’s aide in Toronto.

“…tethering birds to bushes and trees, for future consumption.” The Seven Site’s SL Feature contained the remains of six Frigate birds and 22 boobies; See http://ameliaearhartarchaeology.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-birds.html