IT is mid-afternoon and the humidity is overbearing even in the shade of the trees, and creepers have woven their tangled mass on top of them to block out the sun.
We have just made it through the tall grass on our way down from one of the hills on Tavewa Island and now we face this unbearable heat.
My guide Ron Doughty thinks we’re lost but I am dumbfounded.
I had marked the start of our ascent at a tavioka (tapioca) plantation with a scarecrow planted in its midst, and on our way down we had just walked through a tavioka patch and past a scarecrow, so to be lost is kind of absurd.
We can’t be lost.
Ron, in the meantime is trying to find a way for us out of the undergrowth, and so I follow him religiously just so we can escape the punishing humidity.
With difficulty we pull, push and clamber our way through, at times pausing to search the slant of the shadows for a sense of direction before we continuing.
As soon as we hit a patch of coconut trees, Ron smells the path we are looking for and knows we will soon be out of our predicament and into the cool embrace of the sea breeze.
We did hit the path all right and it looked familiar enough. Or so we thought!
Ron’s loud exclamation only confirmed that we really needed a refresher course in boy scouting skills.
“Dammit! We’re back where we started,” he laughed. Then he added: “Tivadra just played his trick man.”
Tivadra is the guardian dwarf of Tavewa Island and is said to have resided there for as long as anyone can remember.
He precedes the Doughty family as Tavewa Island is Tivadra’s ancient abode. Even the former landowners, the Nacula islanders, never permanently settled on the island, they only used it as their plantation in the olden days.
The dwarf, since then, has been sighted over the centuries and according to Fanny Doughty, he only shows himself to visitors.
“E dau vasagai ira ga na vulagi o koya. E dau vakaraitaki koya ga vei ira. (He only plays tricks on the visitors and he only shows himself to them).
“One time, when my husband (Otto Doughty) was still alive, we sent a young man to take his lunch. On the way he had to jump across a drain.
“When he did jump, he said a short old man also jumped across but in the opposite direction.
“So he came and told me he didn’t know that a short old man also lived on the island,” Fanny laughed.
The Doughty’s couldn’t think of a short old man living on the island and reached the only conclusion they could — it was Tivadra.
According to that account, Tivadra wore a long flowing beard as white as his hair, which he brushes backward.
Ron adds his mother and an auntie also got lost in a mangrove while looking for lairo (mud crabs) not far from where we had just got lost.
“They were just wondering around in there for hours,” Ron said.
Ron and I had viewed the mangrove from the top of the hill earlier that day and it was not a big swamp. In fact, the island is not big for anyone to get lost so easily. It’s just about a kilometre wide at its widest point and three kilometres long.
Tourists have even fallen for Tivadra’s trickery as one couple found out that a leisurely evening stroll turned into a whole night out affair of sleeping under the stars and at the mercy of the mosquitoes.
“They were just going around in circles in a small area as they could not find their way back to their resort. The next morning they were puffy from all the mosquito bites,” Harry Doughty said.
Hearing the stories, I still couldn’t believe we were Tivadra’s latest victims but we did end up some 400 metres from where we first started up the hill — at the far end of Lotuma, the Murrays’ settlement and quite near the fabled Tivadra’s Gateway.
We had just visited the gateway before we headed up the hills but maybe the old man was trying to send us back to his gateway, which is just a stone’s throw from Lotuma.
Tivadra’s Gateway lies near a rocky outcrop known as Withered Palm rock on the lee side of Tavewa Island and below his gateway, the breakers exhibit their power.
A very dangerous place for anyone but it is a perfect place for an ancient dwarf to call home because it is far from prying eyes.
From the rocky gateway, Tivadra roams the island. His favourite place is the flat lands near a valley where one of two springs on the island is located.
The islanders compare him to the Irish folk legend of the leprechaun, one who hoards riches.
“If he is caught by his hair or beard he will certainly grant any wish to the one who catches him,” Fanny said.
This part of the legend seems to be true because there has not been another sighting of an old man with a white beard and hair since that sighting at the ditch many years ago.
Retracing our steps down the hill and over a bowl of grog that evening, I concluded that we had done ourselves right when coming down the hills because we followed the grass we had splayed on our way up.
We followed all the landmarks up there, the grove of trees, the bed of rocks before the grass and above all, the cassava patch with its scarecrow.
How else could we have gotten lost?
