How Katafa had created so much personality with a few cuts of a knife must remain a mystery. She had, and the thing was Itself. Every moment was making it more so, for its fuzzy head was drying rapidly in the sun and Dick, recognising this, placed it on the hot sand higher up and started to hunt for the pole.
There was no pole to be seen on the reef, and he reckoned that if it had been blown into the lagoon after the head, it would come ashore on the same drift.
He was right. He found it just where the tree roots on the left of the beach came into the water like great claws, and, fetching it, fixed Nan again on its tip.
Then, with the pole on his shoulder, he came running along the lagoon side through the trees. Canoes, clubs, dead men, even Nan himself, were forgotten. The memory of Katafa had rushed suddenly out at him from the trees, and the sudden passionate desire to get to her nearly drove him back along the road he had come—would have done so but for the fact that his main purpose, after scouting, that morning, was food.
There was food at the house, a crab he had put by and some baked fish and taro, and the quickest way to the house was by the lagoon bank.
Arrived there, he stuck Nan against the house, fetched out the food from where he had hidden it to protect it from the robber crabs, and sat down to eat.
Katafa must have been as hungry as himself, but his hunger made him forget that fact, although all the time he was eating he was thinking of her; when he reached her at last, labouring up the hillside with the remains of the food wrapped in a great leaf, she was in the shelter of the rock, asleep, and, placing the leaf on the ground, he sat down beside her.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE CALL OF KAROLIN
If the blue parua birds resting above the house were indeed the birds of long ago, they might have fancied nothing changed since those days when the father of Dick returned from the valley of the idol with Emmeline.