“I have brought this pig as an offering to you,” said Ka-ma-lo. “Do not eat me.”
Then Kau-hu-hu wondered at a man’s being so [[170]]bold as to come within his cavern with an offering for him. “Man, why have you come?” he said.
Then said Ka-ma-lo: “Kau-hu-hu, you are a shark, but you are also a god. I have come to ask you to avenge me upon a cruel King and a wicked people. No one else is able to exact the vengeance that my soul craves, and so I have come where no man ever ventured before—into your cavern and into your presence.”
“I am a shark, but I am also a god,” said Kau-hu-hu, “and if that King and that people deserve the vengeance that you crave, it shall be wrought upon them. But if they do not deserve that vengeance, I will kill you and devour you for having come into my cavern.”
“I will tell you why I crave vengeance on that King and on that people.” And thereupon Ka-ma-lo told the Shark-God all that he had suffered.
The King of the land I live in (said Ka-ma-lo) is the owner of a drum, and it is a drum that he had brought to him from far Kahiki. He would not let any one strike on this drum but himself. He made a place for the drum, a sacred enclosure that no one might go into. Now the King of my land, Ku-pa, is a cruel King; indeed, so cruel is he that his people have become cruel, for the kind and the gentle have fled away, and those who have remained under his rule have become harder and harder. And at last it [[171]]has come about that no one will get angry at even the worst thing that the King will do.
I wish that I had fled from the land when others fled. But I had two children, boys, and there was no place that I might have taken them to. They used to play with the King’s children. Yesterday I went into the forest to choose a tree that might be made into a new canoe, for I am the King’s canoe-builder. And while I was away my two boys went towards the King’s house. They came before the enclosure where the drum was kept. The King’s children were not there to play with, and my two boys played with each other for a while.
Now and then they would stand before where the drum was placed, and look at it. They did not know that Ku-pa was watching them—watching to see what the children would do.
At last the boys went into the sacred enclosure, and their going there broke the law that the King had made. They sat down there, my two sons, and they struck upon the drum. They could have struck upon it so that the whole land would hear, or they could have struck so softly that the noise would be only like the fall of rain upon leaves. And that was how they struck the drum; the noise that they made was only a little noise and like the falling of rain upon the leaves in the forest.
But the King heard even that little sound; he came very softly up to the enclosure. The boys [[172]]looked around. They saw him standing there; his eyes were hard as I have seen them, and his lips were cruel and revengeful. He called for his executioner. The executioner came; he slew my two boys in the enclosure where the King’s drum is kept.