Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

'Talk about mixing business with pleasure,” she called out to him as he moved along the footpath to the richly colored volcanic beach.

“ Be careful where you step along here,” he bluntly cautioned.

“ Why? What're we afraid of? Scorpions, snakes, iguanas, what?”

She could hear the softly cushioned roar of the ocean as it rose up to meet them, as if it were lulling the world with some eternal hymn. A shaggy, unkempt grove of pandanus trees lined their way, each tree looking like an old man trying to get up the cliff, each bent from the effects of the ocean wind on their woody bodies. The ground was spongy with rotted palm fronds, and all around them the spiny, saw-toothed foliage crackled and tore at her with a disturbing and eerie wind giving it life. For a moment, seeing Jim ahead of her, the cane cutter strapped to his hip, she felt a mild but compelling wave of fear rush in to her.

“ Careful!” he shouted, and pointed at obstacles in their way, lashing out from time to time with the cane cutter, swiping away at vines and saw-toothed leaves. “Puka!” he next shouted. “Large enough to swallow you whole. Careful!”

“ What? What're you saying, Jim?”

“ Watch out for these!”

She peered down at his feet to see a strange hole large enough for either of them to slip through; it appeared to spiral to a bottomless cavern.

“ Puka, it's called. Volcanic hole carved out of lava,” he explained. “I'd hoped to get here before dark.”

“ I can see why.”

After several minutes of steady, rhythmic hacking with the cane knife, Jim stepped into a surprising and unblemished clearing, into which she quickly followed. This unimpeded area the size of a ballfield was neatly divided by ancient stones covered with spongy moss picked up by the beam of her flashlight. The clearing was bracketed by rows of slender, tall coconut trees acting as silent sentinels here, their plumed tops tilting to the wind, which seemed a refreshing but eerily constant force. She saw evidence of a graveyard in the distance and a marsh and stream beyond. A cluster of stunted kamani trees hung low over the setting. Behind this swampy area there was an impenetrable wall of hau trees that stretched back into the valley.

“ We're almost there,” said Jim.

“ What is this place?” she asked, feeling it had a sense of haunting.

“ Just a clearing.”

“ It's more than that.”

“ Well, legend has it there was once a village here, part of the Wailanos people, whose beneficent deity was the lizard. They were mostly fishermen.”

“ Really? I sensed there was something about this place.” She imagined the simple life that had once gone on here, the sound of babies crying, of women pounding poi or beating tapa, of men telling tales as they repaired nets and others working shark tooth and shell into a lei. She pictured old women bathing their babies in the nearby surf. She could even hear the laughter of the children in the tidal pools… but then she realized what it must be that she was hearing: the rushing surge of the sea and its counterpoint, the outgoing flow, that timeless heartbeat of the ocean.

Still, if any place on earth harbored spirits, she sensed them here, felt them blowing lightly over her hair and down her neck. She'd felt a similar sensation once as a child, stepping lightly through a deserted cemetery. Her curiosity about headstones and what they said had gotten the best of her even as a young girl, and it had grown with age into what some considered a morbid hobby, which put off a lot of gentlemen callers along with her profession. Still, visiting old cemeteries and studying what was written on ancient headstones had always held a fascination for her. She'd taken vacation tours in New England just to get to the oldest cemeteries in the land, and one day she hoped to get to see some of the oldest in Europe, Great Britain and Ireland. She told Jim this, and added, “Just feels like we're being watched, you know.”

“ Hey, come daylight, if you want to check for headstones, you'll find 'em here but no markings,” he said. “For now, let's trudge on, huh?”

“ You're reading my mind now, Parry.”

“ Let's just say I'm beginning to learn.”

They continued on. “Just how often have you brought women here, Jim?”

“ Don't do this, Jess.”

“ Do what?”

“ See what I mean?” he asked without looking back.

“ No, I don't see what you mean.”

“ Your damned FBI training takes over once more.”

“ That's a nasty thing to say,” she replied with a tinge of indignity.”It's better than saying you're too suspicious.”

“ Well, you don't deny that you've been here before, and if you've been here before, a place like this, you don't come alone, now do you?”

“ All right… all right. You're the second, if you want the truth.”

“ I want the truth.”

“ But I've never dived here with anyone.”

“ Diving doesn't look safe here. Not a place for the islander dive shops to bring their charges.”

“ You got that right.”

“ Whataya mean? No one dives here?”

“ No.” He turned and stared long into her eyes. “We'll be the first.”

“ A virgin dive. That'd be something to take home. But this place… it's kind of a spooky, Jim,” she observed. “I mean it's really desolate. If anything should happen down below…”

“ This location can be reached from the Hana Highway.”

“ That doesn't inspire confidence. Isn't there something like six hundred curves?”

“ Six hundred seventeen, mostly hairpins, with fifty-six one-lane bridges, but in case of emergency, go toward Hana Town, not away. There's a small hospital there.”

“ And I'm sure they're equipped with the latest in decompression chambers, sure. Where's the nearest phone?”

“ We're not totally isolated. I've got a CB radio in one of the packs, and you saw the village of Hana as we came over, a few cattle ranches, and if things get too rough, we can always hike up to the Hana-Maui, only six hundred dollars a night to stay in the lobby's john,” he joked.

She wasn't laughing.

“ Come on, Jess… there's a dirt road pull-in the other side of the helicopter pad. We could have visitors tomorrow, and our pilot's due back by noon. In any case, it's not quite as impregnable as it looks from the air, not if you're willing to make the trek.”

“ Do you really think Lopaka Kowona used this place as he did Koko Head on Oahu?”

“ It's worth a look-see; that's what I think. Drop one of those tanks here.”

“ What?” she gasped, a little out of breath.

“ We go down sharply from here. I don't want you losing your footing. It's only just wide enough for one foot at a time, and if you fall, it's a straight plunge into the sea.”

Protesting, Jessica said, “Only the other day I was using a cane, remember.” She did as he suggested, placing one of the heavy air tanks on the ground. When she did so, she saw a place where they might climb out over the cliff ledge and stand over the Spout, which continued to blast water into the night sky like a powerful Chicago fire department boat she'd once seen battling a blaze from its moorings in the Chicago River just below the Michigan Avenue bridge.

Seeing her stare off in the direction of the Spout, he said, “Quite a sight. See what I mean?”

The ocean water roared here, a fierce lion, as it was pummeled and forced through the underwater tunnel and out through the whale-like promontory of rock at the spoutlike egress. The thunder it created was deafening, the water reaching them in a light spray even here. “Yeah… yeah, I do.” She was beginning to feel like Fay Wray in the frightful kingdom of King Kong.

Below them, lava rocks jutted from the frothy foam, forming gargantuan sea monsters that seemed perched on the waves, readying for any morsel to fall into their demonic jaws. It might be insane and impossible to dive here. It was anything but the peaceful underwater crater she'd dived in on the opposite side of the island before she'd ever met Jim Parry. Here the current and the dragon rocks would make it a precarious and risky venture, an underwater Dungeons and Dragons, filled with every sort of obstacle and demon, she surmised from the murky surface.