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I shall always remember with pleasure my first lahe'u. I was accompanied by the native teacher alone, and we paddled off from the village just after evening service, and brought to about a quarter of a mile outside the reef.
As he was hauling in, and I was looking over the side of the canoe to watch it coming up, I felt a sharp, heavy tug at my own line, and, before I could check it, thirty or forty yards of line whizzed through my fingers with lightning speed. "Lahe'u!" shouted the teacher, hurriedly making his own line fast, and whipping up his paddle.
For some two or three minutes the canoe was dragged steadily landward, and I knew that once the lahe'u succeeded in getting underneath the overhanging ledge of reef, there would be but little chance of our taking him except by diving, and diving on a moonless night under a reef, and freeing a fish from jagged branches of coral, is not a pleasant task, although an Ellice Islander does not much mind it.
Ioane, disregarding the utu as being of no importance in comparison to a lahe'u, was plunging his paddle rapidly into the water, and endeavouring to back the canoe seaward into deeper water, but, in spite of his efforts and my own, we were being taken quickly inshore.
If, however, we meant to try for takuo, a huge variety of the mackerel-tribe, or lahe'u, a magnificent bream-shaped fish, we had no need to go so far as the dangerous Tia Kau; three or four cable-lengths from the beach, and right in front of the village, we could lie in water as smooth as glass, and seventy fathoms in depth.
We returned to the shore within two hours from the time we left, with my lahe'u, an utu, and five or six salmon-like fish called tau-tau, all nocturnal feeders, and all highly thought of by the natives, especially the latter.
Out flew the line, and then came a shock that made the canoe fairly jump, lifted the outrigger clear out of the water, and all but capsized her. But the ruse was successful, for, with a furious shake, lahe'u changed his course, and started off at a tremendous rate, parallel with the reef, and then gradually headed seaward.
"There will be much talk over this to-morrow, for these people here are very conceited, and think that no one but themselves can catch lahe'u and pala. They will know better now, when they see this one."
The lahe'u we hung up under the missionary's verandah, and at daylight I had the intense satisfaction of seeing a crowd of natives surrounding it, and of hearing their flattering allusions to myself as a papalagi masani tonu futi íka a white man who really could fish like a native. On a Tidal River
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