Our custom was to start an hour before sunset and paddle north to a break between the two long islands, where we dragged our canoe through the ankle-deep wash of the barrier, waited our moment, and slipped out through the surf. The outer face of the reef shelved off steeply, and our line, which reached the bottom at two hundred fathoms, would have reached the reef as well. Marama usually took the stern, paddling gently, while I did the fishing forward. Our bait was fish, saved from the previous day's catch and salted. I chose a morsel large as a man's fist and tied it with strong thread to the point of one of the great wooden hooks used in this deep-sea fishing: a fork of ironwood, six inches from tip to tip, and barbed with a cod-hook lashed on to point down and inward. It was useless, I learned, to fish with an ordinary hook for these dwellers on the bottom. Their habit of swimming down vertically, to seize the bait from above, made necessary the use of our barbaric implement. When my hook was baited, I fastened a large pebble to the line, with a special hitch that Marama had taught me. Coil after coil ran out as the pebble sank, until at last I felt the slackening which told me that it had touched bottom. Hauling up a yard or two, I gave the jerk which freed my coral sinker, and settled myself to wait. Sometimes an hour passed without a strike, and then, when I was least prepared for it, some monster of a hundred pounds seized my hook with a rush that carried my arm elbow-deep into the black water alongside. Hand over hand I brought him slowly to the surface till he lay wallowing beside the canoe, eyes bulging with the release from the pressure of his deep-sea haunts. A blow with the blunt side of our whale-spade ended his struggles, and taking hold by the gills, we tilted the canoe and slid the quivering body inboard. Sometimes, as my fish neared the surface, I felt a sudden slackening of the line--one of the small sharks that prowled along the reef at night had helped himself, leaving only a bodiless and gaping head upon the hook. Once or twice, when the marauder rose close to our canoe, Marama sprang to his feet in a rage--keen-bladed spade in hand--and ended the shark's life with a cutting blow forward of the eyes. At those times we seized our paddles and made off swiftly for new fishing-grounds; for the scene of the ensuing feast was no place for our light canoe.