For several hours we climbed the slopes, until we came upon a narrow trail cut in the side of a cliff, a path perhaps two feet wide, with sheer wall of rock above and abrupt precipice below.  On this the chief hunter stationed himself and two men while the others scouted below.  This leader was a man of sixty, tattooed from toes to scalp on one side only, so that he was queerly parti-colored, and capping this odd figure, he wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles.  He motioned to me to take my place in a niche of the cliff, where I could stand and sweep the trail with my eyes, secure from assault.  He had given directions to the others and intended to provide for me a rare sight, and to gain for himself a trifle of the glory that had been his as a young man in wars against neighboring valleys.

For an hour we waited and smoked, hearing from time to time the clamor of men and dogs in the thickets below.  The common way of hunting boars, said the chief, was to chase them through the woods and kill them by throwing tomahawks at them.  This method allows the hunter to have a tree always within a short run, and about these trees he dodges when pursued, or if too closely pressed, climbs one.  It is dangerous sport, as only a cool and experienced man can drive a knife into a vital part of a boar in full career, and no wound in non-vital parts will cause the desperate beast even to falter.

Gradually the cries of the men and the barking of the dogs grew nearer, and suddenly, bursting from the bushes some distance down the trail, we saw ten bristling hogs.  They had been driven upward until they reached the artificial shelf, and behind them hounds and hunters cut off all escape.

“Apau!  Aia oe a!” shouted the rear-guard as the boars took the trail.  “Lo!  Prepare to strike!”

The three slayers gripped their clubs and braced their feet.  I was above the chief, who was the last of the trio.  Where he planted his feet, the path was most narrow, so that two could not pass.  His knife was in his pareu, which, to leave his legs unhampered, he had rolled and tucked in until it was no more than a G-string.  His muscles were like the cordage of the faufee—­the vine that strangles—­and his chest like a great buckler, half blue and half copper.

“Peo!  Pepo!  Huepe!  Huope!” yelled the scouts, in the “tally-ho!” cry of Marquesan, and the boars struck the trail with hatred hot in their eyes and with gnashing tusks.

The three slayers were five hundred feet apart.  The first struck at all ten, as singly they rushed past him.  Three he stopped.  The second man laid prostrate four.  The three remaining were, naturally, the fittest.  They were huge, hideous, snarling beasts, bared teeth gleaming in a slather of foam, eyes bloodshot and vicious.  The old chief saw them coming; he saw, too, that I had shrunk to a plaster on the wall while he faced the danger like a warrior in the spear-test of their old warfare.