"Te mahimahi!" cried Marama excitedly; and I saw a great fish, gleaming with the colors of a fire opal, dart up from the depths, seize a morsel of bait, and disappear. At that instant the line tautened with a jerk that cut the skin of my hand: I was fast to my first dolphin.
He seemed strong as a wild horse. Fathom after fathom of line hissed over the gunwale and into the sea, at a speed that brought a shout to Marama's lips. Then the fish turned and shot up to the surface, rushing this way and that—a streaking flame of azure in the sea. As the line shortened, Marama leaned over the side, long-handled gaff in hand. The dolphin was growing weary; still fighting, but at a slowing pace, he passed close to the side of the canoe—and the native boy's arm shot out. The dugout lurched and nearly capsized as he brought the fish alongside, the gaff deep-buried in the gleaming back. A stroke of the club, a dying quiver, and we seized gills and tail to drag the fish aboard, exclaiming in excited admiration at the play of gorgeous color on his sides.
I had forgotten the impending squall, and now, as I glanced back toward Iriatai, I saw that there was no land in sight. Sea and sky were merged in a thick gloom; the air stirred uneasily; the black clouds were almost overhead. Marama was cutting short lengths of fishline to make fast the loose articles in the canoe; the fish-blub, the baler, the gaff. He passed me a bit of line. "Tie one end to the thwart and the other to your paddle," he said, "and remember that if we swamp there will be no cause for fear—there is small chance that the sharks will find us. Three times have I been swamped at sea, and each time we lay in the water till the waves had calmed, and reached the land without mishap. Look well to the outrigger-lashings forward there—a turn of line might make them more secure."
I doubt if any other type of craft as small and light would have weathered what our canoe went through in the half hour that followed. Long before the wind reached us we could hear the moaning sound of it and see an unbroken line of white advancing across the face of the sea. Then, after a sharp preliminary gust, the squall was on us, shrieking and raving out of the west.
A spume of torn salt water, white and stinging like sleet, drove from crest to crest of the seas, mingling with horizontal sheets of rain which blinded us as we fought desperately to hold the plunging canoe bow-on. It was then that I began to realize the wonderful seaworthiness of the Polynesian canoe—light, sharp, and high-sided, balanced by its outrigger of hibiscus wood, buoyant as cork. In riding such a sea there were sudden fierce strains on outrigger and outrigger-poles—strains which would have snapped the tough wood in an instant, save for its strong and flexible cinnet-lashings. Each time a sea came rearing high above us the bow tossed up to meet the slope of broken water—rose up and up, surmounted the wave, and plunged into the seething trough beyond.
"Bale!" Marama was shouting in a voice that came to me faintly above the screaming of the wind. "Bale, or we shall be swamped!"
As I leaned back to take up the baler I saw that the canoe was a third full of water—mingled sea water and rain. I set to work in a panic, while Marama fought to hold us head-on to the seas, with clenched teeth and a steady eye ahead. Working at top speed to throw the water out, I perceived with a sinking heart that the task was beyond his strength; we had done our best, but in another moment the canoe would fill and swamp. Three times, with a sweep of the paddle that knotted his muscles as though cast in bronze, Marama saved us by a miracle. A white-crested roller seized us with a fierce caprice, spinning the canoe about. Marama's paddle dug deep to swing our bows to meet the oncoming sea and then, with a crackling sound audible above the wind, the haft of hard black wood snapped clean in two.
Next moment the wave burst over the gunwale, and we were struggling in the sea.
