No Surrender Soldier Read Online Free

was what he scrounged for dinner. Some nights it was fish, sometimes shrimp or crab. On less successful hunting trips, Seto brought home frogs and snails.
    Once he snared a deer. He gutted it with his butcher knife, then stuffed venison up his chimney in a bamboo basket to smoke slowly so it would last a good while. The chimney sat at the opposite end of Seto’s cave from the hatch in which he emerged above ground. The chimney allowed him to cook.
    Another time he trapped a wild boar. By the second day of eating it, Seto felt as if he had vomited his entrails out. That would have been no death of honor, to die in the jungle from eating pig. Seto vowed to the spirits of his dead ancestors not to eat swine again, even though he found a fat pig penned up beside a house built not far from the edge of the jungle.
    Seto was grateful for plenty of breadfruit, coconuts, nuts, papayas, and mangoes, in season. If not for the fruit of the trees, he was sure he would have starved. Although, he never developed a liking for breadfruit, so bland when fresh and sour when fermented.
    Most of all, having chosen his hiding place by a river saved him. The Talofofo tributary was the water of life to Seto.
    Seto clipped with scissors the thread of his last stitch in his mending. Then he snipped his hair.
    “You like, Mister Rat? Do I look handsome? Handsome enough for a wife?”
Rat stopped chewing the bars, cocked his head, and scrunched his ears forward. He returned to gnawing at rusted slats.
“Hai, I never marry. My intended is probably someone else’s wife, or dead. I am but an old man. An old, old man beyond my fifty-eight years. Too old to marry. I see myself in the river. I see how hunched my back has grown from stooping in this hovel. No woman would have me.”
    Seto pulled his shocks of black hair and chopped it short. He clipped the ends of his scraggly gray mustache and beard. Seto scooped up stray hairs and put them in a coconut shell. He wasted nothing.
    He ignored the rumblings of his stomach beneath his protruding ribs. Seto learned early if he ate when he was hungry, then he would never have enough food. He waited for nightfall.
    Mended and groomed, Seto dressed, then climbed his ladder of bamboo tied together with rope. He removed a bamboo covering and burrowed like a rat out of his hole in the ground. That first whiff of night air smacked Seto in the face and reminded him that he was alive. He took a deeper breath. If only he could clear the rattle from his chest caused by soot from the underground chamber.
    Tonight I shall treat myself to a bath.
Seto brushed off chunks of cut hair stuck to his oily neck and back.
    Seto searched deep into the twilight, deep into the mango groves and tangantangan vines, deep into the thicket of reeds and pandanus trees. He listened. He dared not speak, not even to himself, once he stepped beyond his hidden home. Other than familiar mosquitoes buzzing, frogs croaking, and geckos chirping, he heard nothing alarming to send him scurrying back down his hole. He ventured to the river to bathe.
    He usually checked shrimp traps first. Tonight he rested in knowing he had rat for dinner.
    Besides, he itched.
    Seto took off his clothes and laid them at the trunk of a tree, where they blended in. The water was a cool relief from the muggy air. He bathed like a crocodile dragging its belly near the bottom, eyes peering up cautiously, nostrils skimming above water. He rubbed his scaly hands roughly against his skin in place of washcloth and soap. He emerged from the water and dressed. His cave was so damp, drying off was a waste of time.
    Seto checked his palm-woven shrimp traps. Nothing. He reached into a sack and pulled out grated coconut to refill the bait pouches that dangled below the traps.
    Next he checked his snare.
If only I could catch me a dog. What a delicacy and reminder of home
.
Or, the unthinkable, to toss my snare over one of those well-fed cows in the pasture.
Seto shuddered.
Too