anous tunic, fresh flowers in her hair, a treasured
pink silk garter clasping her rounded arm. "Big White Brother," she
called me with pride, though often I saw a sad wonder in her great
eyes as she squatted near, silently watching me. Her possessive ways
were pretty to see as she walked close by my side on the trail from
my cabin to the beach, while Exploding Eggs regarded her jealously,
insisting on his prerogative as _Tueni Oki Kiki_, Keeper of the
Golden Bed, the glittering magnificence of which he described
minutely to her.

We arrived at a merry scene upon the beach. Women and children were
in the surf, or on rocks under the cliffs, fishing for _popo_, the
young of _uua_. With bamboo poles twenty feet long and lines of even
greater length, we stood up to our necks in the sea and threw out
the hook baited with a morsel of shrimp. The breakers tumbled us
about, the lines became tangled, amid gales of laughter and a medley
of joyous shouts. Tiring of fishing, Vanquished Often and I would
breast the creaming waves side by side, to turn far out and dash in
on the breakers, overturning all but the wary. Or a group of us,
climbing high on the cliffs, would fling ourselves again and again
into the sea, turning in mid-air, life and delight quickening every
muscle.

Wearying of this sport, we embarked in canoes, fishing or sailing,
and many small adventures we had, for the younger and more daring
spirits delighted in scaring me into expostulation or the silence of
the condemned and then saving my life by a hair's-breadth.

We had gone one morning about the southern cape, and were harpooning
swordfish and the gigantic sunfish when a commotion a thousand feet
away brought shouts of warning from my companions. We saw two whales,
one with a baby at her breast. The other we took to be the father
whale. Huge black beasts they were. Upon this mated pair a band of
sharks had flung themselves to seize the infant.

There were at least twenty-five sharks in the mad mob, great white
monsters thirty feet in length, man-eaters by blood-taste, tigers in
disposition. Though they could not compare with their prey in size
or power, they had heads as large as barrels, and mouths that would
drag a man through their terrible gaps. That their hunger was past
all bounds was evident, for the whale is not often attacked by such
inferior-sized fish. Storms had raged on the sea for days, and maybe
had cheated the sharks of their usual food.

T