The Tia Kau. 
37 
the wheeling birds and the splashing of the 
water and the furious kicking and thumping 
against the frail, resonant sides of the canoes, as 
fish after fish is swept upward and outward, and 
dropped struggling into the bottom, among its 
bleeding and quivering fellows. 
Around the largest canoe, from which six 
natives fish, is the wildest boil and bubble of 
all, for the cunning crew have hung from a 
bended stick over the side a bright piece of 
mother-of-pearl, and at this the hungry fish 
leap fiercely. How they swarm and “ ring ” 
round the canoe like a mob of frightened cattle 
upon some wide Australian plain, who smell 
their deadly enemy—a wild black ! Not that 
the bonito are frightened; they are simply 
mad for the shining hooks, which look so like 
young and tender half-grown flying-fish. 
But still on and on the main body go, and 
the canoes go with them, steadily on to the Tia 
Kau, although now each man has taken perhaps 
twenty or thirty fish from eight to ten pounds 
in weight; and the paddlers’ arms are growing 
weary. Already the white man is tired, and is 
sitting down, smoking his pipe, and watching 
the moving cloud of birds above. And yet his 
