CHAPTER V
TRAINING A WARRIOR
IT was well for Hiwa and Aelani that a generous soil and a soft climate gave them food and warmth. The separation from her lover, the hardships of the escape, the lacerations inflicted by sharp lava and thorny jungles, the ordeal of motherhood, the rescuing of the boat, the grief and suffering, the bodily exhaustion and mental strain, concentrated in forty-eight hours, which Hiwa had undergone, would have killed any ordinary woman. And Hiwa, of iron constitution as she was, escaped a lingering death from fever, fatigue, and wounds almost as narrowly as a sudden one from violence. For many days she lay tossing on her bed of ferns, sore from head to foot, bruised and strained and torn, aching in all her bones, parched with thirst, at times wildly delirious. Yet, in her lucid moments, she managed to nurse her babe, and to pick wild fruits sufficient to keep herself from absolute starvation. For her child’s sake she fought hard for life and won. Health and strength returned to her.
Then began an existence much like Robinson Crusoe’s on his desert island, but without clothes, tools, or weapons. It was unlike Crusoe’s also, in that it was cheered by mother-love, and inspired by a great purpose.
Although Hiwa had been served from infancy by chiefs and chiefesses, she now did a slave’s work with willing hands. She gathered grasses and made a hut—ample shelter from the rains. She plaited tapa and wrapped the royal mamo in it, and covered and sealed it with a coating of gums, and over all with a coating of coral sand, so that moths could not get at it or bees bore it or mice gnaw it, and she layed it away in a secret place. She also plaited tapa mats for beds and coverlets, and tapa garments for herself.
Among the first things she did, she chose a hiding-place in the cavern for the boat, and plaited a great quantity of matting, and collected a great quantity of gums, and covered the boat and sealed it up, as she had sealed up the mamo, that it might be perfectly preserved until Aelani should have need of it. The sealing of the boat was the work of three months.
Fire was a prime necessity. She had great difficulty in getting it, although she was acquainted with the only method known to her people, and had seen the thing done many times. Rapidly and with all her strength she rubbed a pointed stick in a groove, made in another stick of the hau tree, until at last the fine combustible powder in the end of the groove ignited. Then she fanned it to a flame, feeding it with dry leaves and little pieces of wood. During all her stay in the crater she never once allowed it to go out.
She made fish-hooks from shells, filing them down with a sharp stone, and braided lines and nets from the fibre of the olona. A few minutes’ work each morning supplied her with fishes for the day. Sometimes she cooked them in ti leaves, but more frequently ate them raw, as the most refined people in the Hawaiian Islands do to this day—people of pure white as well as native blood. Some varieties of fish are considered great delicacies raw. The malihini (newcomer) marvels to see ladies and gentlemen who would grace any society in Europe or America eating fish raw; but he eats oysters raw.
Fish and poi are the Hawaiian staff of life. Poi is made from taro, one of the most digestible and nutritious of vegetables. Fortunately for the exiles, taro grew abundantly along the swampy borders of the stream. Hiwa baked it under ground, on hot rocks, and mashed it with a stone, and kneaded and pounded it until it became a soft dough, and mixed it with water and left it to ferment. Then it was poi, which little Aelani learned to eat almost as soon as his mother’s milk. In that barbarous age, as now, making poi was considered too severe work for women, even for female slaves, and no chief had condescended to it; yet the goddess-queen bent her back to the task, meanwhile chanting to her child ancient meles that commemorated the glories of his ancestors for forty generations.