Raiere cast a glow upon the water with his torch, and we saw the shrimp resting upon the bottom or leaping into the air in foot-wide bounds. He poised his smallest lance and thrust it with a very quick, but exact, motion, so that almost every time he impaled a shrimp upon its prongs. The oura was instantly withdrawn, and Tahitua received it in his bag. All but he then began in earnest the quest of the bonnes bouches. We separated a hundred feet or so, and treading slowly the pebbled or bouldered and often slippery floor of the river, keeping to the shallow places, we lighted the rippling waters with our torches, and sought to spear the agile and fearful prey. The oura lances were five feet long, not thicker than a fat finger, and fitted with three slender prongs of iron—nails filed upon the basalt rock. One saw the faintest glimpse of a shrimp on the bottom, or a red shadow as the animal darted past, and only the swiftest coordination of mind and body won the prize. Whereas Raiere and even Matatini secured most of those they struck at, I made many laughable failures. I missed the still body through the deceptive shadows of the water, or failed to strike home because of the lightning-like movements of the alarmed shrimp.
The sport was fascinating. The water was as warm as fresh milk, transparent, and with here a gentle and there a rapid current. A million stars glittered in a sky that was very near, and the trees and vegetation were in mysterious shadows. Only when our torches lit the darkness did we perceive the actual forms of the cocoanuts, mango- and purau-trees which bordered the banks and climbed the hills into the distance. The puraus often seemed like banians, stretching far over the water in strange and ghostlike shapes, with twisting branches and gnarled trunks that in the obscurity gave a startling suggestion of the fetish growths of the ancients. I felt a faint touch of fear as I groped through the stream, now and again falling into a deep hole or stumbling over a stone or buried branch, and I looked often to reassure myself that Raiere’s gigantic figure loomed in the farther gloom. There was no danger save in me; the scene was peaceful, but for our own disturbance of the night and the river, and not even a breeze fluttered the dark leaves of the trees. The mountain rose steeply at our backs, and constellations appeared to rest upon its shadowy crest.
At last we came to a place where a tiny natural dam caused the stream to break in glints of white on a crooked line of rocks, and pausing there, Raiere suddenly bent over. He called peremptorily to Tahitua to bring him the big lance, which the little boy carried along with the bag.
“Puhi! Haere mai!” he said in a low, but urgent, voice.
Tahitua flew through the ripples, and we all hurried to see the new adventure.
“Puhi! Puhi!” again said Raiere, and pointed to the rocks. We cautiously stepped that way, and saw, apparently asleep at the foot of the stones, a tangle of huge eels. Their black and gray slate-colored bodies lay inert in folds, as if they had gathered for a night’s good slumber, and not until Raiere, with unerring aim thrust the great spear, with its half-dozen points of iron, into one of them, did the others scatter in a mad swim for safety. The mere transfixing of the eel did not always mean his securing, but another of us must put a lance in the contorting curves and with quick and dexterous motion lift him to the bank where his struggles might be ended with knife or rock. The release of him for a second might permit him to wriggle to the river and escape.
With the finding of the first eel, began an hour’s search for his fellows. We had struck their haunt, but they did not yield us half a dozen of their kind without diligent, though pleasant, work. We splashed to places when one sang out that an eel was in sight, and pursued them in their divagations through the river, trusting to drive them into eddies or under the fringe of plants hanging from the banks where we hunted them out.
In a couple of hours we found ourselves with a full creel of eels and oura, and I a trifle dismayed at facing the march home. Raiere relieved Tahitua of the burden, and a song shortened the way. I gave them the ditty of the New-Zealand Maori, who metaphorically toasted his enemy:
O, the saltiness of my mouth
In drinking the liquid brains of Nuku
Whence welled up his wrath!
His ears which heard the deliberations!
Mine enemy shall go headlong
Into the stomach of Hinewai!
My teeth shall devour Kaukau!
The three hundred and forty of my enemy
Shall be huddled in a heap in my trough;
Te Hika and his multitudes
Shall boil in my pot!
The whole tribe shall be
My sweet morsel to finish with! E!