Kunos

People from my part of Leyte call this particular sea creature kunos. They’re essentially crablets weighing no more than a few ounces each. They’re not difficult to catch and they abound in mangroves that grow abundantly in places where the saltwater mixes freely with fresh river water. And they taste mighty good in ways that only crabmeat delivers.

As a boy, I was only interested in the pagatpat species of the mangrove because of its flower and not of the decapodes that live underneath its shade in deep burrows around each tree and among the roots that seem to jut out from the mud floor. Every boy I grew up with know of the pagatpat flower and the joy it brings to one who knows how to make them into bullets. Yes, bullets.

Where I grew up, factory-made toys were expensive and none of us could afford one so we made the toys ourselves. The pagatpat flower is turned into a bullet simply by inserting one in a young, small-diameter bamboo tube with one flower already jammed on one end and pushing the other flower quickly into the tube and in the direction of the enemy. The mechanism at work is much like pumping air into a tire tube, except that the pagatpat gun makes a loud pop and had been known to drive public school teachers mad. Their collective revulsion, occasioned by 10-year-old boys popping a couple of flowers into the butt of 10-year-old girls in class when the maestro isn’t looking, was such that the school principal issued an edict that said anyone caught smuggling the bamboo gun in his handbag would be sent home forthwith and his parents summoned.

So, that’s the pagatpat for you. There are several species that abound in Leyte shorelines, of course, including the red, the black and the loop-root kind. But the mangrove known to host the most number of kunos abodes is the pagatpat variety. The biggest and fattest kunos live in burrows too deep for even the most frustrated and most persistent littoral crustacean hunter to dig with a shovel or any kind of digging tool. The kunos are smart little animals who disappear from you from six feet off and would remain in the mud and underwater for as long as it takes you to move elsewhere and find someone else to hunt. This was a problem because the kunos are such a tasty fare it is a sin not to try to catch them in volumes that allow one to sate one’s craving without going mad in the process. My friend and I solved this problem with the use of an old umbrella, a piece of wood about a meter long, a strong half-inch wide elastic band and a few meters of clear nylon string. These materials are fashioned into a gun that fires a bamboo-and-metal projectile along the length of a discarded umbrella tube as accurate as hell at 12 paces. It takes deft craftsmanship to make a well-balanced metal-tipped bamboo projectile that runs true to target and not let the kunos get away with a tangential shot to one of its appendages. The smartest ones are usually the biggest. You take aim at them from 10 feet away, but the wind spoils the dart’s path and you hit one of its pinchers instead. The kunos reacts so quickly and so violently that the pinchers break from its body, allowing it to dart quickly to its burrow where it will not emerge for days, maybe a week even. This was why the missile has to be handcrafted such that the forward thrust provided by the elastic band allows the metal tip to find its target without tipping over the bamboo body trailing behind. Only a given length of metal tubing stabilizes the dart’s path to its target, the thing being without feather stabilizers that only jams in the tube and alerts the kunos of the oncoming danger. Failure to acknowledge these truths results in a hunt that ends in gnawing failure that hurts the ego more than the hungry stomach.

I would remember the kunos abundant in my Leyte hometown whenever I pass by shorelines and see mangroves there standing in polluted brackish waters. Not that the shorelines of my youth escaped the filth and mostly plastic debris nonchalantly thrown away by an uncaring, ignorant resident. The last time I looked at my hometown mangroves had few of the deep burrows that mark the abodes of swift and agile kunos able to parry the steel-tipped darts with a ferocity and grace that are the marks of a healthy and well-fed animal. None of the holes had the signs of a large animal inside, their openings barely a few millimeters wide. And there were just a few of them, unlike in the past when everywhere one looks there was a big brave kunos atop a mound of mud daring one to take aim and see if the dart was true. I had one elastic-driven gun built quickly and took aim not once or twice but many times. In each one I missed.