I went down with her several times, but could not master the art of entrapping the fish, and was overcome with fear when I had entered one of the dark caves and heard a terrible splashing nearby, as if a shark had struck the coral in attempting to enter my hazardous refuge.

Even Miss Impossibility had not the courage to face a shark; yet every time she dived she risked meeting one.  Red Chicken had killed one at this very spot a few weeks earlier.  The danger even to a man armed with a knife was that the shark would obstruct from a cave, or come upon him suddenly from behind.

Often we had with us in the fishing a Paumotan, Pascual, the pilot of the ship Zelee, who was in Hanavave visiting a relative.  He was the very highest physical and mental type of the Paumotan, a honey-comb of good-nature, a well of laughter, and a seaman beyond compare.  To be a pilot in the Isles of the Labyrinth demands many strong qualities, but to be the pilot of the only warship in this sea was the very summit of pilotry.  He had an accurate knowledge of forty harbors and anchorages, and spoke English fluently, French, Paumotan, Tahitian, Marquesan, and other Polynesian tongues.  From boyhood until he took up pilotage he was a diver in the lagoons for shell and in harbors for the repair of ships.

“I have killed many sharks,” he said, “and have all but fed them more than once.  I had gone one morning a hundred feet.  The water is always colder below the surface, and I shivered as I pulled at a pair of big shells under a ledge.  It was dark in the cavern, and I was both busy and cold, so that as I stooped I did not see a shark that came from behind, until he plumped into my spine.

“I turned as he made his reverse to bite me, and passed under him, out to better light.  I knew I had but a second or two to fight.  I seized his tail quickly, and as he swept around to free himself I had time to draw the knife from my pareu and stab him.  He passed over me again, and this time his teeth entered my shoulder, here—­” He opened his shirt and showed me a long, livid scar, serrated, the hall-mark of a fighter of mako.

“But by fortune—­you may be sure I called on God—­I got my knife home again, and sprang up for the air, feeling him in the water behind me.  Twice I drove the blade into him on the way, for he would not let me go.  My friend in the canoe, who saw the struggle, jumped down to my aid, and being fresh from the air, he cut that devil to pieces.  I was not too strong when I reached the outrigger and hung my weight upon it.  We ate the liver of that mako, and damned him as we ate.  I had fought him from the ledge upward at least eighty feet of the hundred.”

“Aue!” said Red Chicken, hearing me exclaim at the tale.  “You have never seen a man fight the mako? Epo! To-morrow we shall show you.”

On the following day when the sun was shining brightly, several of us went in a canoe to a place beneath the cliffs haunted by the sharks, and there prepared to snare one.  A rope of hibiscus was made fast to a jagged crag, and a noose at the other end was held by Red Chicken, who stood on the edge of a great boulder eagerly watching while others strewed pig’s entrails in the water to entice a victim from the dark caves.