It required several men on a side to launch our forty-foot canoe, and altogether eight embarked, vaulting aboard as she took the water, each into a seat only just wide enough. Jack wielded a paddle, but I was placed in the very bow, where, both outward and back, the sharpest thrills are to be had. As we worked reefward in the high breaking flood, more than once breath was knocked out of me when the bow lunged straight into a stiff wall of green water just beginning to crest. Again, the canoe poised horizontally on the springing knife-edge of a tall wave on the imminence of overcurling, and then, forward-half in midair, plunged head-into the oily abyss, with a prodigious slap that bounced us into space, deafened with the grind of the shore-going leviathan at our backs. I could hear Jack laughing in the abating tumult of sound, as he watched me trimming my lines so as to present the least possible surface to the next deluge. He knew, despite my desperate clutches at the canary streak on either hand, that I was having the time of my life, as, from his own past experience, he had told me I would have.
It was more than usually rough, so that our brown crew would not venture out as far as we had hoped, shaking their curly heads like serious children at the big white water on the barrier reef. Then they selected a likely wave for the slide home, shouting strange cries to one another that brought about the turning of the stern seaward to a low green mounting hill that looked half a mile long and ridged higher and higher to the burst.
“‘A hill, a gentle hill, Green and of mild declivity,’... It is not!” some one quoted and commented on his Byron and the threatening young mountain, with firm hands grasping his paddle, when, at exactly the right instant, he joined the frantic shrill “Hoe! Hoe!” (Paddle! paddle like—everything!) that sent all the blades madly flying to maintain equal speed with the abrupt, emerald slope. Almost on end, wiki-wiki, faster—faster, and yet faster, we shot, ever the curl of white water behind, above, overhanging, menacing any laggard crew. Once I dared to look back. Head above head I marked them all; but never can fade the picture of the last of all, a magnificent Hawaiian sitting stark in the stern, hardly breathing, curls straight back in the wind, his biceps bulging to the weight of canoe and water against the steering paddle, his wide brown eyes reflecting all the responsibility of bringing right-side-up to shore his haole freight.
And then the stern settles a little at a time, as the seething bulk of water dissipates upon the gentle up-slope of the land before the Moana, while dripping crew and passengers swing around in the backwash and work out to repeat the maneuver.
Few other canoes were tempted out to-day, but we saw one capsize by coasting crookedly down a wave. The yellow outrigger rose in air, then disappeared in white chaos. Everything emerged on the sleek back of the comber, but the men were unable in the ensuing rough water to right the swamped boat. We lost sight of them as the next breaker set us zipping inshore, but later saw them swimming slowly in, towing the canoe bottom-upward, like a black dead sea monster, and making a picnic of their plight.
An hour of this tense and tingling recreation left us surprisingly tired, as well as chilled from the strong breeze on wet suits. Mr. Ford, with a paternal “I-told-you-so” smile at our enthusiasm over the canoeing, was prompt for the next event on our program, a further lesson in surf-boarding. After assisting me for a time I noticed he and Jack were sending desireful glances toward the leaping backs of Pharaoh’s Horses, and I knew they wanted to be quit of the pony breakers inshore—the wahine (woman) surf, as the native swimmers have it, and manfulwise ride the big water. Our friend had a thorough pupil in Jack, who with characteristic abandon never touched foot to sand in four broiling hours.
Nursing my own reddened skin in the cool tent-house, I saw a weary figure dragging its feet across the lawns, which it was hard to recognize for Jack until he came quite near. Face and body, he was covered with large swollen blotches, like hives, and his mouth and throat were closing painfully. Rather against his wish, I sent Tochigi to summon a doctor. He had not given a thought during those four hours, face-downward on the board, to the fact that under the vertical rays of a tropic sun a part of him never before so exposed was being cooked through and through. Shoulders and back of neck were cruelly grilled; but the really frightful damage was to the backs of his legs, especially the tender hind-side of the knee joints, which were actually warping so rapidly that in a few moments he could not stand erect because the limbs refused to straighten. Between us we managed to get him into bed, and later on, restless with the intolerable pain of his ruined surfaces, and thinking my room might be cooler, he could progress there only on heels and palms, face upward. “Don’t let me laugh—it hurts too much,” he moaned through swollen lips, realizing the preposterous spectacle.
Little aid could be rendered, either of diagnosis or practice, by the physician, Dr. Charles B. Cooper. From his six-foot-odd of height he bent wide, black eyes upon the piteous mass on my bed, that indisputably required all known sun-burn remedies; but the swollen blotches were plainly beyond him. He had observed cases of mouth and throat swelling from fruit poisoning in the tropics; but this patient had eaten nothing that he had not been living on for weeks. And also there was the blotched body.
“Just my luck!” this from the sufferer. “I’m always running into something no one ever saw or heard of! Although this is something like the shingles I had on the Sophie Sutherland.”
Dr. Cooper left some medicine, and later his filled prescription came from a druggist, to relieve the torturing burn. Meantime I kept up a steady changing of cool, wet cloths on the warped legs, while Jack’s “It can’t last forever!” was the best cheer under the circumstances, until the blotches began to subside and the throat could swallow grateful drafts of cold water, and a supper of long, iced poi-cocktail—“Such beneficent stuff,” he dwelt upon it.