Now Kohokumu was a bore, and I was squeamishly out of sorts with him for his volubleness, but I could not help admiring him as I watched him go down.Past seventy years of age, lean as a toothpick, and shrivelled like a mummy, he was doing what few young athletes of my race would do or could do.It was forty feet to bottom.There, partly exposed, but mostly hidden under the bulge of a coral lump, I could discern his objective.His keen eyes had caught the projecting tentacle of a squid.Even as he swam, the tentacle was lazily withdrawn, so that there was no sign of the creature.But the brief exposure of the portion of one tentacle had advertised its owner as a squid of size.The pressure at a depth of forty feet is no joke for a young man, yet it did not seem to inconvenience this oldster.I am certain it never crossed his mind to be inconvenienced.Unarmed, bare of body save for a brief malo or loin cloth, he was undeterred by the formidable creature that constituted his prey.I saw him steady himself with his right hand on the coral lump, and thrust his left arm into the hole to the shoulder.Half a minute elapsed, during which time he seemed to be groping and rooting around with hisleft hand.Then tentacle after tentacle, myriad-suckered and wildly waving, emerged.Laying hold of his arm, they writhed and coiled about his flesh like so many snakes.With a heave and a jerk appeared the entire squid, a proper devil-fish or octopus.
But the old man was in no hurry for his natural element, the air above the water.There, forty feet beneath, wrapped about by an octopus that measured nine feet across from tentacle-tip to tentacle-tip and that could well drown the stoutest swimmer, he coolly and casually did the one thing that gave to him and his empery over the monster.He shoved his lean, hawk-like face into the very centre of the slimy, squirming mass, and with his several ancient fangs bit into the heart and the life of the matter.This accomplished, he came upward, slowly, as a swimmer should who is changing atmospheres from the depths.Alongside the canoe, still in the water and peeling off the grisly clinging thing, the incorrigible old sinner burst into the pule of triumph which had been chanted by the countless squid-catching generations before him:
"O Kanaloa of the taboo nights! Stand upright on the solid floor! Stand upon the floor where lies the squid! Stand up to take the squid of the deep sea! Rise up, O Kanaloa! Stir up! Stir up! Let the squid awake! Let the squid that lies flat awake! Let the squid that lies spread out..."I closed my eyes and ears, not offering to lend him a hand, secure in the knowledge that he could climb back unaided into the unstable craft without the slightest risk of upsetting it.
"A very fine squid," he crooned."It is a wahine" (female) "squid.I shall now sing to you the song of the cowrie shell, the red cowrie shell that we used as a bait for the squid--""You were disgraceful last night at the funeral," I headed him off."I heard all about it.You made much noise.You sang till everybody was deaf.You insulted the son of the widow.You drank swipes like a pig.Swipes are not good for your extreme age.Some day you will wake up dead.You ought to be a wreck to-day--""Ha!" he chuckled."And you, who drank no swipes, who was a babe unborn when I was already an old man, who went to bed last night with the sun and the chickens--this day are you a wreck.Explain me that.
My ears are as thirsty to listen as was my throat thirsty last night.And here to-day, behold, I am, as that Englishman who came here in his yacht used to say, I am in fine form, in devilish fine form.""I give you up," I retorted, shrugging my shoulders."Only one thing is clear, and that is that the devil doesn't want you.Report of your singing has gone before you.""No," he pondered the idea carefully."It is not that.The devil will be glad for my coming, for I have some very fine songs for him, and scandals and old gossips of the high aliis that will make him scratch his sides.So, let me explain to you the secret of my birth.The Sea is my mother.I was born in a double-canoe, during a Kona gale, in the channel of Kahoolawe.From her, the Sea, my mother, I received my strength.Whenever I return to her arms, as for a breast-clasp, as I have returned this day, I grow strong again and immediately.She, to me, is the milk-giver, the life- source--""Shades of Antaeus!" thought I.
"Some day," old Kohokumu rambled on, "when I am really old, I shall be reported of men as drowned in the sea.This will be an idle thought of men.In truth, I shall have returned into the arms of my mother, there to rest under the heart of her breast until the second birth of me, when I shall emerge into the sun a flashing youth of splendour like Maui himself when he was golden young.""A queer religion," I commented.
