ee slayers were five hundred feet apart. The first struck at
all ten, as singly they rushed past him. Three he stopped. The
second man laid prostrate four. The three remaining were, naturally,
the fittest. They were huge, hideous, snarling beasts, bared teeth
gleaming in a slather of foam, eyes bloodshot and vicious. The old
chief saw them coming; he saw, too, that I had shrunk to a plaster
on the wall while he faced the danger like a warrior in the
spear-test of their old warfare.

"_Aia! Aia!_" he said to encourage me. His club of ironwood, its
edge sharp and toothed, he grasped with both hands; he widened his
foothold and threw his body forward to withstand a shock. He
calculated to an inch the arrival of the first boar, and swung his
_u'u_ on its head with precision. The boar crumpled up and fell
down the hillside. The second he struck as unerringly, but the third
he chose to kill with his knife.

[Illustration: _Feis_, or mountain bananas
Man in _pareu_, native loin cloth]

[Illustration: Where river and bay meet at Oomoa, Island of Fatu-hiva]

He laid down the _u'u_ and drew the knife with one motion, and as
the powerful brute rushed at him, stepped aside in the split second
between his gauge of its position and its leap. His knife was thrust
straight out. It met the boar with perfect and delicate accuracy.
The beast fell, quivered a moment, and lay still.

It was a perfection of butchery, for one slash of those tusks,
ripping the chief's legs, and he would have been down, crashing over
the cliff, and dead. I was almost in chants of admiration for his
nerve and accuracy.

"Ah, if this had been war, and these had been enemies!"

The dead boars were slung on poles, but a half dozen had to be left
on branches of trees for the morrow, and it was late in the day when
we reached Grelet's house for the feast.

Pae, the elder woman of the household, received us joyously. In the
master's absence she had become a different being from the sulky,
contrary one I had seen while he was at home. Usually she and
Hinatiaiani, the mother of the baby, ate their food squatting beside
the cook-house; they rarely came upon the veranda, never sat upon a
chair, and never were asked to our table. Now they were in
complete possession of the house and Pae was transformed into a
jolly soul, her kinsfolk about her on the veranda and the bottles
emptying fast. She celebrated our arrival with the boars by bringing
out two quarts of _c