|
Walter E. Traprock - The Cruise of the Kawa
left foot, bare of any inscription, and she tickled it playfully with a blade of haro. Radiant
Kippiputuonaa - whom I soon called "Kippy" for short - your name shall ever remain a blessed memory,
the deepest and dearest wound in my heart.
Kippy proposed that I should be marked for identification in the usual manner, but I shuddered at the
thought. I was far too ticklish; I should have died under the needle!
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.
"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.
Speaking of the lagoon reminds me of an absurd bit of information I picked up from Kippy that made me
feel as flat as a pressed fern. We were wandering along the shore one morning and she suddenly pointed
to the Kawa and said laughingly.
"Why Tippi-litti (Triplett) bring Tree-with-Wings over Hoopoi (cocoanuts)?"
"Why not swim?" she asked. "Look see. Big hole."
I looked and saw. A whole section of the atoll near where we were standing was movable! Kippy jumped
up and down on it and it rocked like a raft. At the edges I saw that it was lashed to the near-by trees with
vines! Cheap? You could have bought me for a bad clam. As I thought of the days we had sweated over
those damned cocoanuts, of Triplett's peril, of the danger to the yawl, while our very families looked on
and laughed, thinking it was a game, and we might have slipped out the movable lock-gate and simply
eased through - well, for the first time in my married life I was mad. Kippy was all tenderness in an
instant.
"Face-of-Moon, no rain," she begged, "Daughter of Pearl and Coral eat clouds."
She chinned my ear passionately, and I was disarmed in an instant.
I hated to tell Triplett - it seemed to dim his glory, but I needn't have worried.
"Good business," he exclaimed. "We can get her out inter the open an' have some sailin' parties. I'd like
to catch one of them wak-waks."
|
