I listened. It was the most unearthly and at the same time the most beautiful bird-song I have ever heard. "What is it?" I asked, as the cry resounded again, a piercing screech of pain ending in a long yowl of joy. "It is the motherhood cry of the _fatu-liva_," he said. "She has just laid an egg." "But why the note of suffering?" I queried. "The eggs of the _fatu-liva_ are square," said Whinney, and I was silenced. Motherhood is indeed the great mystery. Little did I realize that night how much I was to owe to the _fatu-liva_ and her strange maternal gift which saved my life in one of the weirdest adventures that has ever befallen mortal man. It was a placid day on the sea and Kippy and I were returning from a ten-mile swim to a neighboring island whither I had been taken to be shown off to some relatives. "_Wak-wak,_" I had said when she first proposed the expedition, but she had laughed gaily and nodded her head to indicate that there was not the slightest danger, and, shamed into it, we had set forth and made an excellent crossing. On the return trip, midway between the two islands, I was floating lazily, supported by a girdle of inflated dew-fish bladders and towed by Kippy. She had propped over my head her verdant _taa-taa_ without which the natives never swim for fear of the tropical sun, and I think I must have dozed off for I was suddenly roused by a hoarse Klaxon-bellow "Kaaraschaa-gha!" which told me all too plainly that I was in the most hideous peril. _"Wak-wak!"_ I barked, and all my past life began to unfold before me. It was a horrid sight--the _wak-wak,_ I mean. He was swimming on the surface, and at ten feet I saw his great jaws open, lined with row upon row of teeth that stretched back into his interior as far as the eye could reach and farther. Mixed up with this dreadful reality were visions of my past. I seemed to be peering into one of those vast, empty auditoriums that had greeted my opera, "Jumping Jean," when it was finally produced, privately. "Help! Help!" I screamed, reverting to English. Suddenly Kippy seized the _taa-taa_ from my nerveless grasp. Half closing it, she swam directly toward the monster into whose widening throat she thrust the sharp-pointed instrument, in, in, until I thought she herself would follow it. And then, as she had intended, the point pierced the _wak-wak's_ tonsil. With a shriek of pain his jaws began to close and, on the instant, Kippy yanked the handle with all her might, opening the _taa-taa_ to its full extent in the beast's very narrows. Choked though he was, unable for the moment to bite or expel the outer air and submerge, the brute was still dangerous. Kippy was towing me shoreward at a speed which caused the sea to foam about my bladders but the _wak-wak_ still pursued us. A second time my dauntless mate rose to the occasion.