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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
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