Description
At the top of Gebin Pad, a hill on the island of Gebar, which white people today call ‘Two Brothers’, there lived in a stone, a dogai named Uzu. She looked like all other dogai: tall and skinny with a face like a flying fox, with long teeth and very, very big ears. Indeed, her ears were so big that when she lay down to sleep, she could use one as a mat and the other as a blanket.
Uzu was a good dogai, being very kind to anyone in trouble. One day a woman, along with a number of girls from the village of Gebi went out fishing on the reef, stringing the fish together as they caught them.
In the late afternoon they turned back to go home. One of the little girls, who also happened to be named Uzu, walking in shallow water, was stung by a stone fish. The pain was so terrible that she could not walk. She sat down and watched her friends disappear around Umai Piti Gizu. The tears streamed from her eyes, now being quite alone, the sun going down into the sea. From her home, the dogai Uzu saw all that had happened, and made her way towards the little girl. Little Uzu saw the ugly dogai coming and screamed with fright, “Oh mother, mother, the dogai is going to kill me. But she was quite wrong. This good dogai pulled a hair from her head, tied it around little Uzu’s foot over the wound and carried her on her shoulders, to the dogai’s mysterious home. Inside the stone shelter, she made the girl sit down and spread leaves over the sore place on her foot and told her to sleep. The dogai she went off to dig Kutai and Kog (bud yams). When the girl woke up next morning, she was given the best parts of the freshly roasted yams. The dogai contented herself with the burnt crusts.
Every day she fed the little girl until she was well. The dogai took her back to her village and told her that when the men cut up dugong and turtle, to set aside a portion for her. The dogai also made a parcel of yams for her family as a present. So young Uzu ran off to her mother and told her the whole story. Then after, when the canoes returned from hunting, little Uzu filled a basket, just as the dogai requested, and made her way up the hill outside the stone, calling “Aka-Aka (granny, granny) I have brought your share of the meat and fat.”
