All over the valley the filling of the pits for reserve against need was in progress.  Up and down the trails the men were hastening, bearing the kookas filled with the ripe fruit, large as Edam cheeses and pitted on the surface like a golf-ball.  A breadfruit weighs from two to eight pounds, and giants like Great Fern or Haabuani carried in the kookas two or three hundred pounds for miles on the steep and rocky trails.

In the banana-groves or among thickets of ti the women were gathering leaves for lining and covering the pits, while around the center of interest naked children ran about, hindering and thinking they were helping, after the manner of children in all lands when future feasts are in preparation.

There was a time when each grove of breadfruit had its owners, who guarded it for their own use, and even each tree had its allotted proprietor, or perhaps several.  Density of population everywhere causes each mouthful of food to be counted.  I have known in Ceylon an English judge who was called upon to decide the legal ownership of one 2520th part of ten cocoanut-trees.  But my friends who were filling the popoi pits now might gather from any tree they pleased.  There was plenty of breadfruit now that there were few people.

Great Fern was culling from a grove on the mountain-side above my house.  Taking his stand beneath one of the stately trees whose freakish branches and large, glossy, dark-green leaves spread perhaps ninety feet above his head, he reached the nearer boughs with an omei, a very long stick with a forked end to which was attached a small net of cocoanut fiber.  Deftly twisting a fruit from its stem by a dexterous jerk of the cleft tip, he caught it in the net, and lowered it to the kooka on the ground by his side.

When the best of the fruit within reach was gathered, he climbed the tree, carrying the omei.  Each brown toe clasped the boughs like a finger, nimble and independent of its fellows through long use in grasping limbs and rocks.  This is remarkable of the Marquesans; each toe in the old and industrious is often separated a half inch from the others, and I have seen the big toe opposed from the other four like a thumb.  My neighbors picked up small things easily with their toes, and bent them back out of sight, like a fist, when squatting.

Gripping a branch firmly with these hand-like feet, Great Fern wielded the omei, bringing down other breadfruit one by one, taking great care not to bruise them.  The cocoanut one may throw eighty feet, with a twisting motion that lands it upon one end so that it does not break.  But the mei is delicate, and spoils if roughly handled.

Working in this fashion, Great Fern and his neighbors carried down to the popoi pit perhaps four hundred breadfruit daily, piling them there to be prepared by the women.  Apporo and her companions busied themselves in piercing each fruit with a sharp stick and spreading them on the ground to ferment over night.