th his machete.

For several hours we climbed the slopes, until we came upon a narrow
trail cut in the side of a cliff, a path perhaps two feet wide, with
sheer wall of rock above and abrupt precipice below. On this the
chief hunter stationed himself and two men while the others scouted
below. This leader was a man of sixty, tattooed from toes to scalp
on one side only, so that he was queerly parti-colored, and capping
this odd figure, he wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. He
motioned to me to take my place in a niche of the cliff, where I
could stand and sweep the trail with my eyes, secure from assault.
He had given directions to the others and intended to provide for me
a rare sight, and to gain for himself a trifle of the glory that had
been his as a young man in wars against neighboring valleys.

For an hour we waited and smoked, hearing from time to time the
clamor of men and dogs in the thickets below. The common way of
hunting boars, said the chief, was to chase them through the woods
and kill them by throwing tomahawks at them. This method allows the
hunter to have a tree always within a short run, and about these
trees he dodges when pursued, or if too closely pressed, climbs one.
It is dangerous sport, as only a cool and experienced man can drive
a knife into a vital part of a boar in full career, and no wound in
non-vital parts will cause the desperate beast even to falter.

Gradually the cries of the men and the barking of the dogs grew
nearer, and suddenly, bursting from the bushes some distance down
the trail, we saw ten bristling hogs. They had been driven upward
until they reached the artificial shelf, and behind them hounds and
hunters cut off all escape.

"_Apau! Aia oe a!_" shouted the rear-guard as the boars took the
trail. "Lo! Prepare to strike!"

The three slayers gripped their clubs and braced their feet. I was
above the chief, who was the last of the trio. Where he planted his
feet, the path was most narrow, so that two could not pass. His
knife was in his _pareu_, which, to leave his legs unhampered, he had
rolled and tucked in until it was no more than a G-string. His
muscles were like the cordage of the _faufee_--the vine that
strangles--and his chest like a great buckler, half blue and half
copper.

"_Peo! Pepo! Huepe! Huope!_" yelled the scouts, in the "tally-ho!"
cry of Marquesan, and the boars struck the trail with hatred hot in
their eyes and with gnashing tusks.

The thr