| Description |
Personal story
This is a story told by Mathias Tini at Raputput village, Makada on 2 November 2022.
The speaker recounts a recent experience hunting a pig.
On Thursday last week, I went down to the garden. I went for the purpose of hunting with the dogs. Carrying a spear for [shooting] pigs, I went. [I] went until I met the pig that was eating cassava in the garden. Then the dogs chased the pig, they chased it [and] we went and went. Down in the woods, in the forest, [it] came back again and went, went up into a ditch, into a hiding place. But there was no way out. [When] there was no longer any path for [the pig] to follow, I shot away with the spear.
[When] I shot away with the spear, it went and went and ran into another ditch, a hiding place. [When] it went into another swampy place, I climbed another [area]—just then, [onto] the roots of the tree. Up in the ditch. I broke it with a knife, cut at the backbone with a knife. Then it ran down again. It fought with the dogs. It came down again, returning back to the place where [I was cutting it]. I cut again a second time at the [same] place. [It] ran down again [and] a third time [at] the [same] place I killed the pig. I chopped up its back. [It] lay down.
My daughter approached me [and] I sent her running for the children. [She] went down to the village. The brothers went down; they singed the pig, [and] they butchered it. Having butchered the whole pig, they shared everything out to us [and] we came [to the village]. [We] came down to the village [and] they cooked it in an earth oven. After [they] cooked it in an earth oven, we ate pork from Thursday until Friday. That is all.
[Translation adapted from Barlow (2024:51–54)]
Barlow, Russell. 2024. The Makada dialect of Kuanua. Te Reo 67(1): 1–71.
Interpretive summary by a Kuanua speaker from Gazelle Peninsula with understanding of the dialect.
On Thursday of last week, I went to work in the gardens, so I prepared the hunting dogs and spears, just in case we found pigs. We found a pig rooting through the garden, eating tapioca, so the dogs surrounded it. But the pig escaped and ran away through the bushes and into the jungle, being chased by the dogs. That went on for a while, until they cornered it in the trenches, where it fell and was trapped by the roots of the trees and had no way to escape.
I then threw my spear at the pig the first time, but it still struggled and forced its way out to escape. A second time, I shot it again, and then, the third time, I managed to kill the pig.
The dead pig was then brought home, cleaned, cut up, roasted, and then shared amongst the people in the village. They were all fed with pork for the next two days, Thursday and Friday.
(Steven Gagau, May 2024)
(revised, Russell Barlow, May 2024) |
