T was well for Hiwa and Aelani that a generous soil and a soft climate gave them food and warmth. The separation from her lover, the hardships of the escape, the lacerations inflicted by sharp lava and thorny jungles, the ordeal of motherhood, the rescuing of the boat, the grief and suffering, the bodily exhaustion and mental strain, concentrated in forty-eight hours, which Hiwa had undergone, would have killed any ordinary woman. And Hiwa, of iron constitution as she was, escaped a lingering death from fever, fatigue, and wounds almost as narrowly as a sudden one from violence. For many days she lay tossing on her bed of ferns, sore from head [29] to foot, bruised and strained and torn, aching in all her bones, parched with thirst, at times wildly delirious. Yet, in her lucid moments, she managed to nurse her babe, and to pick wild fruits sufficient to keep herself from absolute starvation. For her child’s sake she fought hard for life and won. Health and strength returned to her.
Then began an existence much like Robinson Crusoe’s on his desert island, but without clothes, tools, or weapons. It was unlike Crusoe’s also, in that it was cheered by mother-love, and inspired by a great purpose.
Although Hiwa had been served from infancy by chiefs and chiefesses, she now did a slave’s work with willing hands. She gathered grasses and made a hut—ample shelter from the rains. She plaited tapa and wrapped the royal mamo in it, and covered and sealed it with a coating of gums, and over all with a coating of coral sand, so that moths could not get at it or bees bore it or mice gnaw it, and she layed it away in a secret place. She also plaited tapa mats for beds and coverlets, and tapa garments for herself.
[30] Among the first things she did, she chose a hiding-place in the cavern for the boat, and plaited a great quantity of matting, and collected a great quantity of gums, and covered the boat and sealed it up, as she had sealed up the mamo, that it might be perfectly preserved until Aelani should have need of it. The sealing of the boat was the work of three months.
Fire was a prime necessity. She had great difficulty in getting it, although she was acquainted with the only method known to her people, and had seen the thing done many times. Rapidly and with all her strength she rubbed a pointed stick in a groove, made in another stick of the hau tree, until at last the fine combustible powder in the end of the groove ignited. Then she fanned it to a flame, feeding it with dry leaves and little pieces of wood. During all her stay in the crater she never once allowed it to go out.
She made fish-hooks from shells, filing them down with a sharp stone, and braided lines and nets from the fibre of the olona. A few minutes’ work each morning supplied [31] her with fishes for the day. Sometimes she cooked them in ti leaves, but more frequently ate them raw, as the most refined people in the Hawaiian Islands do to this day—people of pure white as well as native blood. Some varieties of fish are considered great delicacies raw. The malihini (newcomer) marvels to see ladies and gentlemen who would grace any society in Europe or America eating fish raw; but he eats oysters raw.
Fish and poi are the Hawaiian staff of life. Poi is made from taro, one of the most digestible and nutritious of vegetables. Fortunately for the exiles, taro grew abundantly along the swampy borders of the stream. Hiwa baked it under ground, on hot rocks, and mashed it with a stone, and kneaded and pounded it until it became a soft dough, and mixed it with water and left it to ferment. Then it was poi, which little Aelani learned to eat almost as soon as his mother’s milk. In that barbarous age, as now, making poi was considered too severe work for women, even for female slaves, and no chief had condescended to it; yet the goddess-queen [32] bent her back to the task, meanwhile chanting to her child ancient meles that commemorated the glories of his ancestors for forty generations.
They were by no means confined to fish and poi. Baked bread-fruit, pounded up and mixed with milk of cocoanuts and juice of sugar-cane and berries, made a luscious dish closely approaching a civilized pudding. Any quantity of fruit was to be had for the picking, and Hiwa often succeeded in snaring wild geese, rich and fat from their diet of berries, and ducks that visited the pool.
Before Aelani was six months old he added to his diet of mother’s milk and poi large yellow ohias and delicious berries, the ohelo, the poha, and the akala, sweetened with juice of sugar-cane. At the end of his first year he toddled down to the beach and swallowed the tiny fishes his mother gave him, their tails wiggling as they disappeared. At the end of his third year he swam like a fish himself, and felt as much at home in the water as out of it. And so, never seeing a human form or hearing a human voice save his mother’s and his own, he grew to be a [33] strong, supple, active boy, of brave spirit and of thoughtful, inquiring mind.
In time there was a work-shop under the shade of the great koa tree, and tools—shells of all sizes and shapes, sharp stones that served for knives, and rough stones that served for saws and files—and coral sand for polishing. Sticks and pieces of wood, heavy and hard like iron, were selected with anxious care, and were cut and fashioned with infinite labor. Hiwa worked patiently with the tools Nature gave her week after week, and at length that task was finished—the complete arms of a warrior of sizes adapted to a boy—a sling woven from his mother’s hair, long spears, pololu, short spears, ihe, a war-club, newa, and a feather helmet, but not of the mamo, the oo, or the iiwi, for these were unattainable. There were also blunted darts, and circular, highly-polished disks of stone, swelling with a slight convexity from the edge to the centre, such as warriors used in athletic games.
Then a training, already begun, was patiently continued month after month and year after year. For two hours or more [34] each day mother and son bowled the disks and fought sham battles. The teacher was intelligent and exacting. The pupil was apt. He was scarcely more than half grown when he could bring down a flying bird with his sling, and, while running at full speed, could hurl spear after spear at a hair’s-breadth and not miss. He could catch spears faster than they could be thrown at him; he could parry them; he could avoid them, twisting his body like a flash of lightning. He could hurl the disks farther and straighter, run faster, leap higher, and stay under water longer than Hiwa, although in training him she had equally trained herself. She had been familiar with such things from childhood, and knew that in these warlike feats her boy already excelled all men except Kaanaana. He was also immensely strong for his years, and gave promise of gigantic stature.
He fought his first battle when he was eleven. He was sitting, as he had been taught to do, on a rock at the bottom of the pool spearing fish, when his mother dived down and hastily beckoned him to the surface.
[35] “It is a shark,” she said as soon as their heads were above water. “I am going to kill him.”
A man-eating monster eighteen feet long was swimming leisurely about, carrying terror to smaller fishes that had thus far found the pool a safe refuge from sharks, and had accordingly congregated in large numbers. It was the first fish larger than an ulua that Aelani had ever seen.
“Let me kill him!” he eagerly cried, catching hold of the stick, sharpened at both ends, which Hiwa held in her hands.
For a moment, as it seemed to Hiwa, her heart stopped beating. The boy was a mere child, and, if he should become frightened and lose his wits at the critical instant, he would surely be bitten in twain. But there was no sign of fear in his face. His eyes shone, and his pulses throbbed with the joy of coming battle. Why should not he do it? He was a fish himself almost, with human intelligence. He knew the trick perfectly, for in the training, in which nothing a warrior should know was forgotten, he had been exercised in it many times, his [36] mother personating the shark. Even baseborn men faced sharks without fear, and Aelani, though but a child, was Aelani, The Pledge from Heaven.
“He is born to great deeds,” reflected Hiwa, “and must learn to do them. And there is no danger, for only the God of Sharks can swim before a child of Wakea and Papa.”
Nevertheless, she armed herself with a spear and kept near him.
The boy swam quietly out to within a few fathoms of the shark, and then lay upon the water, almost motionless. The great fish, thinking he had an easy prey, approached slowly and turned to bite. As he did so a small hand, quick as lightning, thrust the stick between his jaws, and they closed over it, burying one sharp end in the roof of the mouth and the other through the great tongue into the lower jaw. The next instant, with the supple swiftness of an ulua, the child dived and glided away. His work was finished. He had only to keep beyond reach of the mighty tail threshing the water in death agony.
[37] The teeth were laid carefully aside for the war-club of man’s estate, and the bones were preserved for fish-hooks and other domestic uses. Soon, however, there was a glut of sharks’ teeth and bones, for the flesh, being cast into the pool, attracted other sharks, and these, slaughtered in turn, lured still others to a cannibal repast and a sudden demise. The pool swarmed with sharks, and furnished Aelani great sport. Of course, other fish became less plentiful. Yet there were enough.