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Utterly uninhabited or forsaken, there was a bare trail through this wood, which, led by Raiere, we followed, wading the Aataroa River twice, and I arriving with my mind deeply impressed by the esoteric suggestiveness of the scene. On a level spot, under five ponderous mapé-trees, eight or ten men of Tautira and of Pueu and Afaahiti were completing the oven.
Raiere answered quickly: "Aue! he does not ask for money, but he must live, and we all will give a little. It is good to see the Umuti again." "But, Raiere, my friend," I protested, "you are a Christian, and only a day ago ate the breadfruit at the communion service. Fire-walking is etené; it is a heathen rite." "Aita!" replied the youth.
Tahitua flew through the ripples, and we all hurried to see the new adventure. "Puhi! Puhi!" again said Raiere, and pointed to the rocks. We cautiously stepped that way, and saw, apparently asleep at the foot of the stones, a tangle of huge eels.
At eleven o'clock of the forenoon I, with Matatini and Raiere, a youth of twenty, strolled down the grassy street to the garden of Alfred, where Choti might be painting under the trees, and if a halloo did not bring him bounding to us, we went on to T'yonni's, where he would surely be, either under the mango trees or in the salon.
The Tahitians gave him wide avoidance, with a mutter of exorcism. We descended the bank, and entered the stream at a point just below the last hut of the village. Raiere cast a glow upon the water with his torch, and we saw the shrimp resting upon the bottom or leaping into the air in foot-wide bounds.
At last we came to a place where a tiny natural dam caused the stream to break in glints of white on a crooked line of rocks, and pausing there, Raiere suddenly bent over. He called peremptorily to Tahitua to bring him the big lance, which the little boy carried along with the bag. "Puhi! Haere mai!" he said in a low, but urgent, voice.
Raiere, Matatini, and another boy, Tahitua, hunted the shrimp and eel. After our suppers, about seven or eight o'clock, when it was quite dark, we equipped ourselves for the chase, each with a torch and two or three lances, all but Tahitua, who carried a bag.
Raiere exchanged a few words with the driver of the cart, and as they continued on toward Tautira, he said to me in a very serious voice: "He is a tahua, a sorcerer, who will enact the Umuti, the walking over the fiery oven. He is from Raiatea and very noted. Ten years ago, Papa Ita of Raiatea was here, but there has been no Umuti since." "What brings him here now?" I asked. "Who pays him?"
On Thursday Choti, T'yonni, and I accompanied Raiere to the place of the tii, where the preparations for the sorcery were beginning. We went through a continuous forest of many kinds of trees, a vast, climbing coppice, in which all the riches of the Tahitian earth were mingled with growths from abroad.
In a couple of hours we found ourselves with a full creel of eels and oura, and I a trifle dismayed at facing the march home. Raiere relieved Tahitua of the burden, and a song shortened the way. I gave them the ditty of the New-Zealand Maori, who metaphorically toasted his enemy: O, the saltiness of my mouth In drinking the liquid brains of Nuku Whence welled up his wrath!
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