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If that largest Spear of the Sea that we saw had attacked me or our boat, he would have killed us and sunk the canoe, for he was four fathoms long, and his weapon was as tall as I am." The tatihi nodded his head gravely. His soul was still in the keeping of the gods of his fathers, and-he saw in Red Chicken's wound the vengeance of the un-appeased Aavehie.
Over the wound the tatihi applied a leaf, and bound the whole very carefully with a bandage of tapa cloth folded in surgical fashion. About the mat on which Red Chicken lay the elders of the village congregated in the morning to discuss the accident and tell tales while the pipe circulated. One had seen his friend pierced through the chest by a sword-fish and instantly killed.
There was no white doctor on the island, nor had there been one for many years. There was nothing to do but call the tatihi, or native doctor, an aged and shriveled man whose whole body was an intricate pattern of tattooing and wrinkles.
I was amazed to find that Red Chicken had no fever, and was recovering rapidly. Without modern medicine or knowledge of it, the tatihi had healed the sufferer, and I drew him on to talk of his skill. His surgical knowledge was excellent; he knew the location of the vital organs quite accurately from frequent cutting up of bodies for eating.
There was a legend, said the tatihi, that the knowledge of this medicine had been gleaned from a dark man who had come on a ship many years before, and with this clue I recognized it as tabasheer, a febrifuge long known in India.
I could sling a stone as big as a mango and kill a man, striking him fair on the head, at the distance those guns would shoot. We made our slings of the bark of the cocoanut-tree, and the stones, polished by rubbing against each other, we carried in a net about the waist." "But if that stone broke your head, why did you not die?" "A tatihi fixed my head.
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