“Apau! Aia oe a!” shouted the rear-guard as the boars took the trail. “Lo! Prepare to strike!”
The three slayers gripped their clubs and braced their feet. I was above the chief, who was the last of the trio. Where he planted his feet, the path was most narrow, so that two could not pass. His knife was in his pareu, which, to leave his legs unhampered, he had rolled and tucked in until it was no more than a G-string. His muscles were like the cordage of the faufee—the vine that strangles—and his chest like a great buckler, half blue and half copper.
“Peo! Pepo! Huepe! Huope!” yelled the scouts, in the “tally-ho!” cry of Marquesan, and the boars struck the trail with hatred hot in their eyes and with gnashing tusks.
The three slayers were five hundred feet apart. The first struck at all ten, as singly they rushed past him. Three he stopped. The second man laid prostrate four. The three remaining were, naturally, the fittest. They were huge, hideous, snarling beasts, bared teeth gleaming in a slather of foam, eyes bloodshot and vicious. The old chief saw them coming; he saw, too, that I had shrunk to a plaster on the wall while he faced the danger like a warrior in the spear-test of their old warfare.
“Aia! Aia!” he said to encourage me. His club of ironwood, its edge sharp and toothed, he grasped with both hands; he widened his foothold and threw his body forward to withstand a shock. He calculated to an inch the arrival of the first boar, and swung his u'u on its head with precision. The boar crumpled up and fell down the hillside. The second he struck as unerringly, but the third he chose to kill with his knife.
Feis, or mountain bananas
Man in pareu, native loin cloth
