Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (9 page)

Julian was quiet at first, though later he opened up. He drove me to Mojo’s place, where it turned out Mojo’s friends from the States, Jon and Jordan, were staying. Jon and Jordan are semiprofessional mixed-martial-arts fighters who came to Eleuthera to surf. Jordan also models and has worked as a paralegal. They’d been on the island for a few days and knew their way around by now. In spite of being extremely nice people, each had a certain predatory air, which made sense for semiprofessional fighters. Their quick eyes reacted instantly to any motion, and they moved with a wary balance, as though they were ready to leap in any direction on a moment’s notice and jump-kick someone’s chest. This was a great relief to me; I’m a professional predator myself, and it was good to have people to talk shop with who understand where I’m coming from.

Mojo’s house is a classic surf shack that no Hollywood set designer could improve on. Built from whatever materials Mojo could scavenge or repurpose, it resembled Pee-wee’s playhouse. Squiggly walkways were built of scrap two-by-fours; lush palms and tropical plants grew over old surfboards stacked haphazardly in odd corners of the yard; weird detritus had been picked off the beach and nailed up wherever it would be useful or decorative. There were pieces of driftwood, mysterious skulls, fan coral, parts of buildings that had been washed into the sea and retrieved. I immediately fell in love with the place.

I dropped my suitcases and Julian suggested a bar where we could get a drink and something to eat. I invited Jon and Jordan to join us, and we left in our respective cars. Julian drove my rental to the Bottom Harbor Beach Club, which, it turned out, he was part owner of. Bottom Harbor was full of American ex-pats, locals, and the odd vagrant surfer. It also had WiFi access. After a couple of drinks, I decided it would be absolutely necessary to become a regular here.

I offer this as tried-and-true words of wisdom: If you find yourself alone in a strange place where you don’t know anyone but you’ve got important things to get done quickly and you’re going to need help, find a good bar and show up repeatedly. Buy people drinks with abandon and tip the bartenders lavishly. This is the fastest way to make friends and get information.

Bottom Harbor became my watering hole for the next eight days. Even when it meant going home to eat nothing but hot dogs and stale bread, I showed up at Bottom Harbor and spent money. This ended up being a wise move. Julian and Jon introduced me to a number of people at the bar: Double Dee, an American ex-pat bartender and co-owner of the bar, so named for her massive bosom. Abe and Allie, bartenders and brothers from Oregon with whom I would later go spearfishing.

One night I met a very young Bahamian man named Smith, who wore a red shirt and black pants. Julian and I got to talking to him about drinking and driving on Eleuthera, which is apparently legal and appeared to be almost a national pastime.

“Just don’t hit nothing and nobody cares,” Smith advised, displaying his melodic Bahamian accent (sort of a Jamaican accent, but softer and with a whole other dictionary of slang). He took a pull on his beer and continued: “Whatever you do, don’t get into an accident, especially after dark, mon. You run into something or go off the road out here and you’re f**ked, mon. Ain’t nobody coming. Go ahead, you call the police. After eight at night, no police officer coming out there. Nobody’s coming and you’re just f**ked. So don’t get into no accidents, mon.”

I didn’t know if Smith was exaggerating, but the next day I told Jon what Smith had said and asked if there was anything to what the kid had been telling me.

“Smith? You know who he is, right?”

“Not really.”

“Smith is the f**kin’ magistrate, man. He runs the police department for this whole part of the island.”

“That kid looked about eighteen years old! He didn’t have on a uniform, just a red shirt and black pants.”

“That’s how they roll, man. Smitty is all hooked up through his family. I don’t know how old he is, but Smitty
is
the law around here. Hell, he was on duty, too.”

That first night, I ended up at the octagonal home of a friendly American ex-pat attorney named Sherman, whose wife somehow knew who I was. When it was time to leave, neither Jon, Jordan, nor I had any idea how to get back to Mojo’s place. Someone suggested that Julian’s shorter and quieter brother, Basil, guide us home.

One of the biggest mistakes of my life was letting Basil drive my rental car. There wasn’t much choice, however, given that Eleuthera doesn’t have reliable street signs and I had no clue where I was in terms more specific than “somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.”

Anyway, Basil was mind-bogglingly drunk. I suppose that someone driving a car can perhaps swerve a bit or drive extremely fast, but doing both at the same time is really pushing one’s luck. I contemplated my own death, and seriously considered opening the door and making a jump for it. After fifteen minutes of the most terrifying journey of my life, much of it spent off the road, Basil let himself out in a town close to Mojo’s place. I gratefully took the wheel and followed Jon’s borrowed Jeep.

I spent my first full day on Eleuthera driving around with Jon and Jordan in an open Jeep with holes in the floor and a twelve-pack of the local Kilik beer in the back. We met up with Double Dee and the brothers from Oregon and arranged to caravan to the north end of the island to explore some caves. Later, we found ourselves stranded by the side of the road with an overheated engine and a leaking head gasket.

The bad news was that none of us had a cell phone that worked on Eleuthera, and there’s no Bahamian equivalent to the American Automobile Association. The good news was that we still had plenty of beer and we were broken down in a tropical island paradise. We applied ourselves to the beer until Double Dee drove up and pulled over to help. Tow trucks are in short supply out there, so we towed out the Jeep with a hemp rope tied to Double Dee’s SUV. The day disappeared on us, and plans to get a boat and hunt invasive goats on a nearby island were scrubbed in favor of conch fritters and rum at a wonderful roadside dive.

We stayed up late into the night at Mojo’s shack, drinking grog and talking rifles. Sadly, Jon and Jordan had to fly home the next day. Being as close to saints as mixed-martial-arts fighters can be, they left expensive surfboards, board bags, fins, and wetsuits behind at Mojo’s place for future visitors to use.

I’d been having a good time so far, but as I drove back from dropping off Jordan and Jon at the airport, I knew I had to spear some lionfish. I drove out to Bottom Harbor to talk to Abe.

Abe is a big, broad man who turned forty the day I arrived on the island. He had wanted to be a physician and had actually started medical school, but left after becoming frustrated with how poorly his patients cared for themselves. He is so agreeable, with such a tendency to be satisfied with the simpler things in life, that it would be easy to assume he’s uncomplicated, which would be dead wrong.

Abe offered to go spearfishing with me, but first he had a lot of work to do around the bar, even in the late morning. The kitchen was full of dishes and the bar needed straightening up. I can’t bear to sit and watch someone else do all the work, so I ended up spending most of the afternoon washing the previous night’s dishes in the kitchen of Bottom Harbor. This wasn’t too bad, though, as Abe kept the rum and Coke flowing.

Finally, everything was done. As we considered where to go, Allie, a charter-boat captain, bartender, and real-estate investor, walked in and offered to take us out to a piece of land on the water that he’d recently bought to subdivide and resell. He’d just gotten a road cut out to the water by Julian, who owns and operates a bunch of earth-moving equipment in addition to renting cars and owning a bar. Apparently nobody on Eleuthera does just one thing.

So it was that I found myself clawing my way back to the surface from the underwater cave with a spear in my hand. The lionfish that had slipped off my spear thankfully broke off its pursuit of me and disappeared in the other direction. I took an enormous breath, cleared the fog from my mask, and went in search of another target.

I didn’t see the shape so much as the pattern of the lionfish under a rock ledge — a stripy mass of pointy fish flesh. I brought my spear up to the lionfish and readied my aim only a few inches away. Lionfish don’t move off even when the hunter is close; they feel that secure about their defensive capabilities. I launched the spear, and the three prongs shot into the fish. It was skewered neatly. I swung the spear about — not too fast, for fear of pushing off the squirming, angry fish. After clearing the ledge and surfacing, I held the spear over the water to avoid attracting sharks and swam back to drop the lionfish into a waiting bucket.

When I’m hunting on land, I feel quite secure. I can tell myself, truthfully, that I’m the most dangerous thing in the woods. Even in the middle of the night, when I’m tracking the blood sign of a deer through thorns and scrub harboring black bears and coyotes and perhaps the odd mountain lion, I believe that. I
know
I’m the most dangerous thing in the forest and, because of that, I’m not afraid. I go forth in the woods with courage and resolve.

Here, in the water, my courage and resolve are muted. It’s more a state of moderate willingness and trepidation. Swapping a high-powered rifle for a spear on a rubber band may have something to do with that. Spearfishing in these waters means hunting in the company of massive barracudas and tiger sharks and other things that could rip me open before I could so much as reach for my dive knife. Hunting underwater in the ocean can do wonders for an inflated ego.

I dropped the lionfish into a bucket at the edge of the water and swam out in the other direction along the cliffs. A broad, leopard-speckled stingray flapped its way lazily below. The predator in me readied the spear and wanted to kill it, take it, and eat it for dinner. But I stopped myself midway, knowing that this great beast of five feet in wingspan could kill me in a matter of seconds even if my spear shot true. It happened to Steve Irwin, “the Crocodile Hunter,” and he knew what he was doing. Certainly it could happen to me.

Here, I’m not the top predator. That’s a hard thing to get through my head. In the ocean, everything I learned hunting in the eastern United States is turned upside down. I’m just so much meat waiting for a fight I can’t win.

I nailed another lionfish and brought it up to the bucket. That’s when I realized I’d lost sight of Abe. I looked around and didn’t see him or a snorkel or any sort of floating thing that might possibly have been Abe.

I told Allie I couldn’t find Abe, and we looked for him together from the top of the cliff. Allie climbed to the other side and looked for him there. Many minutes went by. This was bad. If we didn’t see him right away, it meant his mortal clock was ticking. He must have gone under one of those rock ledges and hit his head, I thought. Or something else had happened and he was drowning. We had to search the ledges and pull him out and perform CPR and get his heart started before there was serious brain damage, and this had to start
now
because Abe must be out there bobbing in the tide and we
must not
wait any longer. Because Allie was the more experienced diver, I gave him my mask, snorkel, and fins so that he could start searching the ledges while I ran back to the car to get the spare equipment and then could work along the ledges in the other direction.

I thought of Abe with a head injury, bobbing in the tide under a ledge. I wondered if he was still getting air through the snorkel. I thought of the whole journey defined by the sudden death of my diving companion. I thought of Allie and wondered if he would come to hate me for being the reason why Abe was out in the water in the first place. I thought of what would happen when the authorities on Eleuthera came out to determine what had happened. What would this book be in the wake of Abe’s death?

Then, Allie called out that he saw something that could be Abe. And it was! Abe was working his way around the point far to our right, way beyond where he should have been. An entire future that had unfolded in my mind suddenly and happily ceased to be.

We brought the lionfish that Abe and I had speared to Bottom Harbor Beach Club in a bucket, more or less alive. We found ourselves shivering, our core body temperature having dropped from being in the water for so long. Shots of Goldschläger warmed us up quickly. The bar filled and I got to talking to a lobsterman named Spider, a strong, wiry, fiftyish man with dark skin and a mostly shaved head — there were just a few thin, razor-manicured zigzags of hair.

Lobstering in the Bahamas isn’t done like it is in New England. In the Bahamas, they fish for spiny lobsters, which have no claws. New England lobstermen drop baited traps to the bottom of the ocean and later haul them up on ropes, to be emptied on the deck of a boat. Bahamian lobstermen don masks and fins and dive, holding their breath, with spears. Sometimes they use artificial shelters sunk to the bottom to attract the crustaceans. These are not exactly traps, as the lobsters can leave whenever they want to.

This method shapes the experience of the fishermen in several ways. First, it makes them total badasses. Second, they have a very good idea of what’s happening on the reefs. They see with their own eyes the diversity and density of species on one reef as opposed to on another, and they know when things are changing, for better or for worse.

“I know the lionfish is the enemy of the grouper,” Spider said, not a trace of doubt in his voice.