What days of joyous romping we had! One morning a little crowd of us, just the Swanks, Whinneys and ourselves, met on the beach for a pillow-fight. It was a rare sport, and, as the pillows were eighteen-inch logs of rapiti-wood, not without its element of danger. A half-hour of this and we lay bruised and panting on the beach listening to the hoarse bellowing of the wak-waks.
The wak-wak is without exception the most outrageous creature that ploughs the deep in fishy guise. For man-eating qualities he had the shark skinned a nautical mile.
Whinney made a true remark to me one night,—one of the few he ever made. The ocean was particularly audible that evening.
There was something about the unfamiliar appearance of Dr. Traprock's yawl, the Kawa, which filled the beautiful native women with a wonder not unmixed with apprehension. This was particularly true of the lovely creatures who married the three intrepid explorers. The strange object which had brought to the islands these wonderful white men might some day carry them away again! In view of the tragic subsequent events there is something infinitely pathetic in this charming beach-study where Kippiputuonaa is seen anxiously watching "the tree-with-wings" (as she naively called the yawl), where her husband, Dr. Traprock, is at work rigging a new yard-arm. The Kawa, unfortunately, is just out of the picture.]
"Listen to that surf," I remarked. "I never heard it grumble like that before."
"You'd grumble, if you were full of wak-waks," he said.
The wak-wak has a mouth like a subway entrance and I was told that so great was his appetite for human flesh that when, as occasionally happened, some unfortunate swimmer had been eaten by a shark, a wak-wak was sure to come rushing up and bolt shark, man and all. Consequently I did most of my swimming in the lagoon.