a toast to pepito

"He was the last of the old timers," said Jimmy, when he called to tell me.
Pepito taught Jimmy, and all the other kids in Makaweli Valley how to hunt. They would saddle up their horses and mules (with plenty of Budweiser in the saddlebags), pick up their rifles and skinning knives, whistle to the two-score pig dogs, the trackers and the grabbers, and hele off "up the volcano, into the interior." There they would track the feral pigs and goats, packing out the meat several days later to smoke and eat and make luau. It was not an easy matter to kill an angry boar. One door of Pepito's shack has boar jaws nailed all over it, the tusks long and sharp.
Pepito lived in a shack in the middle of taro fields. You had to cross the Waimea River to get there, thread the dirt paths and make it through the pack of snarling, mangy, dogs and flies. "Get back here," Pepito would shout. "Cut that out." His shack was small, without electricity or running water, and it squatted over thousands of Louis L'Amour and other paperback westerns and war stories. Pepito sat in a lawn chair in the open, a cooler or three filled with ice and meat and beer nearby. He was a wild man in his youth, who once rode his mule into the local bar and ordered him a beer. By the time I was working in the bar, in the 70s, he had been barred.
But he settled down as the years passed. He graciously took me, my husband and in-laws on a pig hunt for Life magazine, mounting us and guiding us and instructing us for free. By the time I saw him for what I suspected would be the last time, three years ago, he had reluctantly given up the cigarettes and beer and was not hunting regularly any more. He tended the irrigation ditches in the taro fields, fed his bored hunting dogs, read his novels and entertained his frequent visitors with tolerance and grace.
Pepito was an ali'i, a chief, and a wise man. Mahalo for your counsel, Pepito. And much aloha for the aloha you shared with us.
Why I can't stop: I have to drink a Bud for Pepite.