Kiss Fishing

The usual plight of missionaries returning from South Sea islands is to relate Christian miracles and not be credited. The unusual plight of Marist Father Arsene J. Laplante last week was to relate a puzzling native miracle and to be believed because of incontrovertible evidence. He had a cinema film showing it.

In Father Laplante's film, called Bemana after a village on Viti Levu, largest island of the Fijis, natives were shown weaving bamboo shoots into a 200-foot net. After purification, this seine was dragged through the waters of the Singatoka River by women and boys. When the net had been drawn in a small circle in shallow water, the tribal chief waded in, waving a bewitched fan. After him followed a few huge Fijians who grasped three-and four-foot sharks by the tail, picked them up thrashing, quietly kissed them--either on the belly or just in front of the caudal fin. Thereupon each ugly shark went rigid, was put ashore never to move again.

"Combing the river," as natives call such biannual shark drives, baffled Father Laplante completely, baffled as well those who saw his film. Even the missionary, who has spent ten years trying to implant French Catholicism in Fiji, was ready to admit possibility of something preternatural. He remembered having tried to convert a certain native. The man demurred; he was already a Methodist. When the tribe combed the river, the dusky Methodist waded inside the net with the vampire-priests, was bitten by a shark.

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