Jerry of the Islands | Page 6

of him. And prepotent!
My word! His blood'd breed true for a thousand generations, and the
cool head and the kindly brave heart of him."
Terrence did not voice his sorrow, if sorrow he had; but his hovering
about Biddy tokened his anxiety for her. Michael, however, yielding to
the contagion, sat beside his mother and barked angrily out across the
increasing stretch of water as he would have barked at any danger that
crept and rustled in the jungle. This, too, sank to Jerry's heart, adding
weight to his sure intuition that dire fate, he knew not what, was upon
him.
For his six months of life, Jerry knew a great deal and knew very little.
He knew, without thinking about it, without knowing that he knew,
why Biddy, the wise as well as the brave, did not act upon all the
message that her heart voiced to him, and spring into the water and
swim after him. She had protected him like a lioness when the big
puarka (which, in Jerry's vocabulary, along with grunts and squeals,
was the combination of sound, or word, for "pig") had tried to devour
him where he was cornered under the high-piled plantation house. Like
a lioness, when the cook-boy had struck him with a stick to drive him
out of the kitchen, had Biddy sprung upon the black, receiving without
wince or whimper one straight blow from the stick, and then downing
him and mauling him among his pots and pans until dragged (for the
first time snarling) away by the unchiding Mister Haggin, who;
however, administered sharp words to the cook- boy for daring to lift
hand against a four-legged dog belonging to a god.
Jerry knew why his mother did not plunge into the water after him. The
salt sea, as well as the lagoons that led out of the salt sea, were taboo.
"Taboo," as word or sound, had no place in Jerry's vocabulary. But its
definition, or significance, was there in the quickest part of his
consciousness. He possessed a dim, vague, imperative knowingness
that it was not merely not good, but supremely disastrous, leading to
the mistily glimpsed sense of utter endingness for a dog, for any dog, to
go into the water where slipped and slid and noiselessly paddled,

sometimes on top, sometimes emerging from the depths, great scaly
monsters, huge-jawed and horribly-toothed, that snapped down and
engulfed a dog in an instant just as the fowls of Mister Haggin snapped
and engulfed grains of corn.
Often he had heard his father and mother, on the safety of the sand,
bark and rage their hatred of those terrible sea-dwellers, when, close to
the beach, they appeared on the surface like logs awash. "Crocodile"
was no word in Jerry's vocabulary. It was an image, an image of a log
awash that was different from any log in that it was alive. Jerry, who
heard, registered, and recognized many words that were as truly tools
of thought to him as they were to humans, but who, by inarticulateness
of birth and breed, could not utter these many words, nevertheless in
his mental processes, used images just as articulate men use words in
their own mental processes. And after all, articulate men, in the act of
thinking, willy nilly use images that correspond to words and that
amplify words.
Perhaps, in Jerry's brain, the rising into the foreground of consciousness
of an image of a log awash connoted more intimate and fuller
comprehension of the thing being thought about, than did the word
"crocodile," and its accompanying image, in the foreground of a
human's consciousness. For Jerry really did know more about
crocodiles than the average human. He could smell a crocodile farther
off and more differentiatingly than could any man, than could even a
salt-water black or a bushman smell one. He could tell when a
crocodile, hauled up from the lagoon, lay without sound or movement,
and perhaps asleep, a hundred feet away on the floor mat of jungle.
He knew more of the language of crocodiles than did any man. He had
better means and opportunities of knowing. He knew their many noises
that were as grunts and slubbers. He knew their anger noises, their fear
noises, their food noises, their love noises. And these noises were as
definitely words in his vocabulary as are words in a human's
vocabulary. And these crocodile noises were tools of thought. By them
he weighed and judged and determined his own consequent courses of
action, just like any human; or, just like any human, lazily resolved
upon no course of action, but merely noted and registered a clear
comprehension of something that was going on about him that did not
require a correspondence of action on his part.

And yet,