One thing the traveller in a hurry seldom discovers is the local atmosphere of folk-lore, of olden song and story. This is the element that gives such a charm to the Scottish Highlands, and a thousand other places where the world makes pilgrimage. Our Rotorua lakeland country is wonderfully rich in human interest of that kind— chiefly brown humanity’s folk-lore, but none the less appealing on that account.

On one of my long-ago cruises around the shores of the beautiful lakes I had an old Maori friend with me, one who prided himself on his knowledge of the ancient ways and ancient unwritten literature of Lakeland; and sailing or paddling around the shores or at the camp-fire at night under the waterside trees, the tales of the times of old came forth— stories of fierce warfare, of tribal vendettas handed down from father to son, of love and romantic adventure. And songs without end; most of them tinged with melancholy, as is the Maori way, and to every song an explanatory legend.

* * *

A brisk wind whistled from the ferny hills above the Ohau, at the western end of Rotoiti, when we set our spritsail for the sail down the lake to Tapuwae-haruru, curving in a sandy half-moon below sacred Matawhaura mountain. Headlands covered with fern or forest came out to meet us as we drove eastward before the favouring breeze. The first on our right hand was a bold, island-like cape, jutting out in a high cliff face. This was Motutawa Peninsula; on its flat top once stood a strong palisaded village of the Ngati-Pikiao tribe. The lakeward front of the high kurae gleamed chalky white, a precipitous wall, which no assailant could scale. Its steeply sloping landward side was defended by trenches and stockades, but all now was lone where the busy pa once stood, and tangled bracken and tupakihi bushes clothed the storied hill. As we sailed past the ancient castle hill, Tamarahi told the story of a romantic tragedy which occurred there a century ago, and in camp that night I learned the farewell song of the lovely Tikawe.

A Story came from Hauraki, our big Maori steersman, as we paddled our canoe along the winding Mokau River, on the first day of a long cruise up that bush waterway. On our right-hand side of the river, five or six miles from the Heads, where the Mokau delivers its waters to the Tasman Sea, we passed a rocky bluff, called Patokatoka, the “Rock Fort.” Its face and summit were hung with outjutting trees and tall plumed fern trees. In the face of the bluff there was a shallow cave, and close to the cave there grew an ancient knotty and mossy rata tree. That cave, long ago, was the lurking place of one Paepipi, a cannibal of cannibals. Under the bank, almost hidden from view, floated his light canoe, tied by a flax-line to the rata tree. Here Paepipi lived a lonely life, because of his taste for human flesh. Before he canoed up-river to this spot, this man-eating member of Ngati-Maniapoto lived near the Heads, not far from where the bridge is now, and there he had an unpleasant habit of knocking stray Maori travellers on the head. It sometimes happened that these strangers were people of importance, and then Paepipi the hungry was in trouble.

Now, Paepipi was a deceptive fellow to the eye. He did not look the merciless cannibal. He carried always a smiling face—he was forever on the grin. Strangers thought him a jovial, benevolent man.

One day Paepipi was out gathering shellfish on the sandbank a little way below his home, when a stranger hailed him from the opposite side of the river, the south bank: “Haria mai he waka” (“Bring me a canoe”).

“Wait until I have finished gathering my shellfish,” shouted Paepipi. He called to his wife: “Prepare the oven for our meal. I am bringing a stranger with me.” Then he leisurely paddled his canoe to the opposite bank, where the lone traveller stood waiting, took him aboard and ferried him across.

The newcomer was on a journey northward from the Taranaki country. Paepipi hospitably took him to his home and the wife spread a mat in front of the house, where he might rest until the meal was ready. He entertained the stranger with joke and tale while the woman heated the haangi, and the stranger thought to himself: “Why, what a merry fellow this is! He is surely the kindest, most open-hearted man I have ever met!” And all the time the oven was heating.

“Is the haangi ready yet?” Paepipi presently asked his wife.

“In a very little while,” she replied, “it will be ready to cook our meal.”

The Maori was punctilious in such matters of social etiquette as the returning of a feast or a gift. The feast was a tribal obligation; the guests could not rest content until they had entertained their hosts at a kai-haukai. Sometimes even individual personal services were taken up by the group of families constituting the hapu, who considered it their duty to make a fitting requital for kindness rendered to one of their members. A pakeha often enough would consider an expression of thanks sufficient. Not so the Maori. He would rack his brains and tax his resources to the utmost to repay a favour in the most generous manner possible. I have known of quite trifling services to people of the older generation handsomely acknowledged, in the form of valuable gifts, sometimes after the original action had all but been forgotten. When the saving of life was involved, gratitude knew no bounds.

This example of native custom and of the intensity of feeling aroused by a deed of humanity was related to me by an old Arawa friend of mine, the venerable woman Heni te Kiri-karamu, who in her young days had fought under two flags, first the Kingite and then the Government. The period was the Waikato War, the scene the Upper Waihou, not far from the present town of Matamata. Many hundreds of people had assembled at Peria and other Kingite villages and camps on the Upper Waihou at the end of 1863, and Heni and her Koheriki sub-tribe rejoiced in the security and rest and food they found there in the fruitful land of the Ngati-Haua after their perils and scanty rations during the months spent on the warpath from the Wairoa Ranges southward. Her brother and sister left Peria to join their compatriots in the great Waikato fortress at Paterangi; Heni remained with her children and her mother. She was about twenty-three years of age at this time; she had been seven years married, and had carried a child on her back all through the earlier part of the war; carried, too, a gun and ammunition. Her husband and she had parted.

One day a party of the Koheriki, Piri-Rakau and other people in the principal village set out to Hangaa, across the Waihou River, on a bush expedition for wild honey. They had to cross the Waihou River, which was high after recent heavy rains in the hills. Heni watched all her companions swim or wade the swift stream. She could not swim, so she attempted to wade it. When she reached the middle of the river the current swept her into deep water. Her friends had passed on out of sight and hearing, but they quickly missed her, and several of them came back to the river to look for her.

Said one of us: “Hello, there’s old Hopa from the Three Sisters. Wonder what he’s making yonder?” We were riding through Kihikihi to school, and with the curiosity of youth we went over to watch the ancient man. He was squatting on the grassy road in front of the little weatherboard whare built for his use when he happened to visit the frontier township, and he was making a kite,—a Maori kite, a kahu, or manu, which is a very different affair from our kite of pakeha childhood.

Hopa’s flyer was made mostly of dried raupo reeds, fastened with flax, and shaped like a bird with outspread wings and a wedge-like tail. It was about six feet long, and we wondered however he was going to get so large a kahu afloat in the air.

But the ancient was not going kite-flying at his time of life, though in Maoridom it was usually the old men, not the boys, who flew kites for amusement—and as a means of divination. We found that he was making it for his friend, Major William Jackson, the veteran Forest Ranger and Commander of the Waikato Cavalry. Jackson was interested in these old-time Maori artifacts, and perhaps this raupo bird was intended for some museum.

Hopa te Rangianini was a chief and wise man of the Ngati-Matakore sept of the Ngati-Maniapoto tribe. His home was at Whenuahou, at the foot of yon terraced hill Tokanui, one of three cones curiously alike which the settlers called the Three Sisters, a few miles south of the Puniu River, the Maori border line. Those three ancient fort-hills, looming blue in the King Country distance, always were fascinating places to us frontier boys. There was a singular attraction, too, about Hopa (the name was the Bible Job). He was a man of short, compact frame, with an uncommonly massive head. His brow, high and broad, denoted intellect; his expression was a mingling of sternness and shrewdness. Every inch of that strong, hard old face was deeply incised and black-pigmented in the tattooer’s best art; it was literally a carved head, trenched in the heroic manner of old. From chin and neck to his ears and the roots of his grey hair the old warrior was moko’d and no doubt he was similarly decorated hip and thigh. His deep-set eyes still held the glitter of his fighting youth, when he carried his double-barrel gun and his tomahawk on many a far-roving foray.

Calm, sunlit Kawhia Harbour lay spread out in a smooth plate of silver-and-pearlshell the morning we went boating across from Powewe township to the Rakaunui tidal river on the south side. It was the top of high water when we left the beach where the giant pohutukawa, ancient beyond reckoning, spread enormous branching heads of foliage and crimson flowers over the story-haunted beach. Wonderful old trees; some of them have names of their own, such as Tangi-te-Korowhiti, the king of them all; in under its arching roots there is a shallow cave which an old-time tohunga used as a dwelling. In the shade of that tree and of its neighbour, Te Papa-o-Karewa, the rite of tohi-tu-tama, the ceremony of baptising a man child and dedicating him to Tu, the god of war, was performed by the priests. On the outstretched lower branches the bodies of slain foes were aforetime hung. Ghosts haunt those broad canopies of branch and leaf. Even the young Maori avoid the tapu trees after dark, and if compelled to go along the beach at night they will wade through the water, should the tide be in, sooner than walk under the black shadows of the pohutukawa. Certain curiously-shaped rocky ledges on this beach-side have their names and legends. A long red-streaked sandstone rock, like some sleeping saurian monster, is called Tatua-a-Kawharu, or Kawharu’s Girdle, and a singular hole like a giant footprint impressed in the rock is known as Kawharu’s Footstep.

This Kawharu was a locally renowned toa or hero of long ago, particularly celebrated for his jumping feats in storming forts and leaping at his foes. Yon never-failing water spring that bubbles out near the dwellings under the arching greenwood is named after Koata, a chieftainess of many generations ago, wife of Kawharu. Above us we saw the terraced heights of Motu-ngaio Pa, once a fort of huge scarps and ditches, now peaceful and beautiful with pakeha orchards and flower gardens.

The kahawai were leaping here and there, breaking the looking-glass surface. A long fishing canoe, with two figures leisurely paddling, trawling kahawai lines, was silhouetted against the dazzle of the water. We came to the low shores of the Rakaunui arm and entered the winding estuary. Maori women were at work in a kumara garden at Taumaha, the beach on our right; there were maize patches and small potato fields, with pig-proof manuka fences. A grey duck rose scuttling from the quiet water as we rounded a reed-fringed bend of the river.

The low shores gave place to grey limestone cliffs, and the river narrowed in. The rocks assumed strange shapes as we went on; they rose in castle-walls, with ledges and squared-off faces that almost seemed the work of human hands. Twisty trees, mostly karaka, flax bushes, clumps of flowering koromiko, grew in the crevices of the cliffs. At one place we passed a deserted camp of old, where grape vines trailed over the grey weathered rocks and dipped into the water. Bushy and ferny dells opened out, and the song of the tui came ringing like a morning bell. Bands of semi-luminous fog still wreathed the hills; on the water ahead of us the sun was drawing up the little mists that presaged a hot day.

We landed at a small kainga on the west bank of the Rakaunui, and the few Maori there came out to greet us with many loud calls of “Nau mai.” Here the best house we saw that day of long ago was a whare-nikau of the type that has all but disappeared. The nikau palm fronds used for the thatch of roof and walls were skilfully plaited in a chevron-like design. It is quite an art in itself, the thatch-weaving of such a house, and really beautiful are some of these nikau dwellings that have nearly all given place to ugly cottages and mere shanties of weatherboard and corrugated iron. Looking up the narrowed river here, between the castellated walls of rock, we saw in the distance the first of the pakeha settlers’ homes in these parts, on a sunward-looking hill, cleared and grassed.

Sitting at ease in the shady front of the pretty summer dwelling, one listened to tales and songs of old Kawhia, and noted local place names and the stories of their origin. One of the men told of the great hauls of shark made in the good midsummer, when all the tribe gathered for a fishing excursion that they made a glorious water picnic. But his best fishing tale was a big eel story.

The storyteller showed us the rocky arched entrance to a cave a little way above the kainga. The gateway to the ana was in a confused pile of great limestone rocks, all flaked and split by ages of weather. The entrance to this cave was just large enough, he said, to admit a man. Inside, it dipped downward and opened out, and there was a pool of water there, in a high arched chamber. In that darksome pool lived a great tuna, a famous eel which no one had ever been able to capture. Many had entered that cave in pursuit of the eel, but it eluded all their efforts with hook and many-pronged matarau spear.

At this kainga there lived a man whose wife, Poroaki, asked him to go and get her a basket of eels. The husband bethought him of the great eel in the cave; that would be a capture worth many a basket of the ordinary creek tuna. So into the dark cave he went, with his spear and an axe and a torch (rama) made of resinous wood, and sought that big tuna. He found it by the light of his torch gliding about the pond, and he attacked it with his spear. He transfixed it, and then there was a terrific struggle. Drop-

We were paddling our red-pine-tree canoe along a quiet, deep reach of the amber-coloured Mokau, far up the winding course of that lonely forest waterway. It was early in the day, and the smoke-like mists of a summer morning were slowly melting away into the deeper recesses of the mountains, green and blue, that rose on either side, clothed from water to skyline in a dense garment of bush and ferns. Below us were the growling rapids of Panirau, up which we had poled our strenuous way the previous evening; we had camped on a shingly islet just at the top of the rapids, in a magnificent gorge, with forested cliffs lifting near a thousand feet above us. Now, on the third day of our cruise, we were afloat on the Upper Mokau, where never a boat of European construction had yet been seen. It was a grand, wild, silent place, and our inland voyage had all the freshness and fragrant charm of an exploring expedition. There were four of us—two pakeha and two Maori. Tuki and Hauraki had poled and paddled their long canoes on the Mokau from their boyhood, and they knew every mossy boulder and every outbending tree as a city man knows the street signs and the houses on his daily way. Every waterfall and rapid and every creek that came stealing in from the bush glooms had its name, and often a legend or a song, and of these one or other of the Maori talked now and again as we leisurely paddled our dug-out along that glorious rosy morning.

Two or three miles above Panirau we came to a place where a small dark stream flowed out of the misty forest between tree-arched cliffs on our left hand. Here there was a rocky rapid, and at the confluence of the tributary with the Mokau there was a little sandy spit.

“That’s the Manga-takiora, that creek,” said Tuki. “And there’s a story about that patch of sandy beach there—a very good Maori story. All about Rokiroki’s great pig—oh, what a poaka it was!”

But Tuki would not tell us the story just then. It was a long tale, he said, and it could wait until we were comfortably in camp that night. And so, at our cheerful bivouac fire in the evening, after our kai had been tucked away, we heard the tale of Rokiroki.

* * *

Down yonder at the Manga-takiora and near about it (so went the canoe-man’s story), there were cultivations and food-gardens in the days of old. The tribes have long deserted the place, and the forest has spread its arms over the place again. But our fires burned there in the days of my father, and the sound of the axe was heard in the forest clearings. A little way above the Manga-takiora there lived an elderly warrior of my tribe, Ngati-Maniapoto, and his name was Rokiroki. He lived in a hut some little way apart from the rest of the villagers, and he had but one soul to keep him company, his youngest daughter, a little girl, who would be perhaps ten or perhaps twelve years old; her mother was dead. There they lived, and the old man used to come down to the riverside, just where the Manga-takiora joins the Mokau, to tend his potato gardens and his kumara patch; and his little daughter would come with him for company, and sit quietly weaving a flax basket while her father worked. This was long ago. I do not know exactly how many years, but it was not long after the great siege of Pukerangiora, on the Waitara, in Taranaki, when our army of Waikato men captured many people of the Atiawa tribe, and brought them home as slaves.

Now, when Rokiroki came down one morning, a morning just like this, to look at his food-gardens, he was watched from the bush beyond the little clearing by a pair of glaring, murderous eyes. They were vengeful eyes, and hungry eyes! The man of these eyes was a wild and desperate man, and his empty belly ached for meat. He lurked just within the shelter of the bush, concealing himself behind the thick shrubs and ferns, and, peering forth into the clearing, he spied Rokiroki, bending down weeding his kumara. He did not notice the little girl, who sat under a tree some distance away, plaiting a food-kit. The wild man in the bush stealthily stalked old Rokiroki. As the kumara weeder moved along the patch, the man with the hungry, red eyes crept along the bush edge, too, following him and ever drawing nearer.

At last Rokiroki came to the edge of his cultivations, on the top of the bank above yonder. Still he heard nothing and suspected nothing.

Just as he was about to turn, the Wild Man sprang from the bush, and with one terrible bound was upon his back! He clutched Rokiroki by the throat and bore him to the ground.

Then the Man of the Bush reached forth his hand to his flaxen belt to draw his toki. his small stone axe, wherewith to smite Rokiroki on the head and kill him. But Rokiroki was not to be slain so easily. Although an old man, he was a man of powerful muscle, and he fought his mysterious assailant right well.

Over and over they rolled on the ground, sometimes Rokiroki and sometimes the Wild Man on top. Rokiroki at last managed to tear his enemy’s hand from his throat, and he called loudly for assistance—called to his little daughter that he was being murdered.

There was a vague story about some Maori Lost Atlantis that once existed on the western coast of the North Island of New Zealand. One dim legend ran that it was an island and that it vanished suddenly and mysteriously, obliterated by the gods of ocean.

To clear up these uncertain tales, and to discover what there was of authentic history in the word-of-mouth traditions, I consulted two kaumatua of the Ngati-Mahuta tribe, Patara te Tuhi and Honana Maioha, of Mangere, Manukau Harbour. This was in 1898. They were brothers and of high rangatira rank, much tattooed survivors of the grand old generation whose minds were stored with tribal history, legend, poetry. Patara’s wise, shrewd, benevolent old face was a wonderful picture of trenched, scrolled designs, the work of a long-gone tohunga-tā-moko on Motutapu Island. Men with histories, too. So, sitting in the sunshine in the comfortable lee of a tall row of cultivated flax, on their Ararata farm, the veterans of Ngati-Mahuta told the story of the lost land called Paorae.

Old England has its memories of fertile coast lands devoured by the tide; of villages and churches and farms that within historic times have disappeared beneath the waters of the North Sea and the English Channel. New Zealand, too, has lost lands to Tangaroa, through the joint agencies of subsidence and erosion of the coast. But there was no island, the old men said; there was a great tract of mainland which the ocean has won for its own; and the waves now surge over the long-vanished kumara grounds of the teeming Ngaiwi people.

A long, long time ago, Patara’s narrative went, a large expanse of low-lying land, dotted with dwellings and cultivations, stretched out seawards from the present South Head of Manukau Harbour. This tract of country extended southward in the direction of Waikato Heads. Anciently, the face of the land round Manukau Harbour and the Heads presented a very different appearance from what it does now. Then, the greater part of what is now Manukau (or originally, Manuka) Harbour, with its shallow tidal flats, was solid land, covered with kauri and other heavy timber. This land was low-lying, flat, and sandy, and through it ran three long saltwater creeks, or arms of the sea. Gradually, in the course of long years, the sea, to use Patara’s words, ate up the soft soil, until the sea slowly but surely took the land for itself. Thus, the Manukau was turned into a saltwater sea, and sea-birds screamed and fishes played where once thick forests grew.

A Gorge profound and misty opened at our feet. All around was forest, tall and tangled and liane-looped; it clouded with green and shadowy-blue the ranges to the skyline; it leaned over the gulch edge and hid from us the depths below, where an unseen river rushed with a dull noise over its rocky bed. The ravine was the valley of the Mangorewa River; we were in the heart of the bush midway between the northern shore of Lake Rotorua and the Tauranga coast. We had come in here searching out the ancient fort of Te Pehu, a place of memories, the tragic story of the Tapuika tribe. Our Maori companion, Hohepa Tauhuroa, was one of the very few who were acquainted with this long-lost haunt of the ancient children of the wilds. It was difficult to trace the outlines of the old parapeted pa which crowned the cliff-top; but just on the left as the track wound round to the side facing the ravine there was a massive earthwork, the high wall of a flanking bastion. The great age of this deserted fort was indicated by the large size of the trees growing in the trenches and the dug-in house sites.

Overlooking the gorge, and sloping gently down for a hundred yards or so, there was a narrow terrace cut out of the hillside, just about wide enough to give room for a row of the old-time nikau huts of the Maori. All vestiges of any whares had disappeared; but a series of singular little doorway openings cut in the mossy cliff was seen on the right, and investigating these we found that they gave access to ancient cave dwellings. We counted nine of these artificial caves, all on an alignment; a number of them, close together, were connected by openings cut through the soft rock. The doorways, three to four feet high, exactly resembled the openings to the rua, or kumara-pits which are often seen on the sites of old hill-forts. No doubt these caves, or some of them, were originally made for food-stores, and here the ancient foresters kept their supplies of aruhé, or fern-root, and other foods of primitive man.

Entering one rua near the lower end of the terrace we found it to measure five feet in height, with a length of thirteen feet, and a width of eight feet six inches. The roof was of a dome-shape, carefully rounded; the marks of the stone axes and the matā-tuhua, or obsidian knives, with which the Maori chipped out the soft rock, were still as plain as if they had only been made yesterday instead of centuries ago. The sides of the little underground dwellings were very smoothly cut; the floors were dug out to a foot or more below the level of the outer terrace. Here the forest-refugees of old spread their fern-tree fronds as a floor-covering (whariki-rau-ponga) and over them their mats; in the centre of the floor each cave-family kindled its nightly fire. We saw the ashes of camp-fires there, but they are those of present days, for Maori pig-hunters out in these forests occasionally spend a night here—they are in no fear of the ghosts of the long-vanished cave men, and they have written their names in charcoal on the walls. The other caves are similar in design, and about the same height as that described, but are narrower.

Some distance away to the west, perhaps half a mile on the other side of the Mangorewa Gorge, there is another ancient forest pa, called Te Weta, once occupied by a hapu of the tribe that held Te Pehu. There are said to be some cave dwellings there also, but we did not search out the pa.

This traditional story of Te Pehu Pa, and the conquest of the forest-dwellers by the lakeside Arawa nearly two hundred years ago, was told me shortly after our expedition in 1906 by the old man Akuhata Waharoa, of Utuhina, Rotorua. It is an illustration of the fierce feuds and vendettas which were carried on by tribe against tribe, actuated by the never-dying thirst for utu (revenge). It is the story of a stone axe, and all the trouble it caused.

“This is what I know of Te Pehu Pa and the people who dwelt there in the hill-caves; the history I was taught by my father. Te Pehu fort was built there, far in the forest, by the Tapuika tribe, eleven generations ago. The Tapuika are a clan of the Arawa; their ancestors came in the Arawa canoe, and the remnant of the tribe live at this day at Te Puke and elsewhere between Rotorua and the coast. Their chiefs in Te Pehu at the period I am telling of were three, named Te Koata, Rakawhati, and Whanganui. Now there was a certain man of the lakeside Arawa, one Katu, of Ngati-Ihenga hapu, who went from here to Waikato on a visit to some of his friends. His Waikato hosts presented him with a valuable stone adze (toki) and a very large shark’s tooth ear-pendant (mako-taniwha). Rakawhati and Whanganui from Te Pehu Pa were also on a visit to Waikato, and they knew of the presentation of these articles of Maori taonga to the Rotorua man. They were anxious to secure these treasures for themselves, and on their return they lay in wait for Katu on a certain trail which he frequented. Leaping out from the thickets on the Ngati-Ihenga man, they forcibly robbed him of his axe, and tore his shark’s-tooth pendant from his ear. Then they returned to Te Pehu rejoicing.

“Katu went on to Puhirua, the large stockaded kainga, which in those days stood near the lake shore between Te Awahou and Te Puna-i-Hangarua (now known as Hamurana). There he stood in the middle of the village square, and he raised a loud lament and tangi’d for his lost treasures. The people of Ngati-Rangiwewehi, his wife’s tribe, asked him, ‘Why do you weep?’ He replied, ‘My treasures have been taken from me with violence by Rakawhati and Whanganui, those men of Te Pehu.’

“The lakeside tribes related to Katu were exceedingly angry at this affront, and a small armed party speedily marched into the forest and before the walls of Te Pehu demanded compensation for the robbery of which Katu had been the victim. They stood there without the stockade gate and loudly requested that certain valued kakahu waero (dogskin cloaks), of which Tapuika were known to be possessed, should be given to them as utu.

“Then stood forth Rakawhati the chief and brusquely shouted to them: ‘He whakahihi ta koutou ki te haere mai ki te tono utu! Kaore e hoatu!’ (‘What a conceit you must have to come here and ask for payment. No, you will get none!’).

“And the men of Ngati-Rangiwewehi and Ngati-Ihenga marched home as they came, without the dogskin cloaks, and anger burned in their hearts.

“Some time after this episode Te Koata, the head chief of Te Pehu and Te Weta, came in on a visit to Puhirua. The Ngati-Rangiwewehi had not forgotten or forgiven the forest-men for their insult, and they took the opportunity to plunder Te Koata of what taonga (valuable property, ornaments) he had in his possession, as utu. Te Koata did not return direct to his home in the bush, but went to Kawaha, the headland to the north-west of Ohinemutu, where there stood a large pa of the Ngati-Whakaue tribe, the most powerful section of the Arawa nation. He told the people of that pa of what had occurred, and cried for vengeance on Ngati-Rangiwewehi.

“And there rose up a certain man of Ngati-Whakaue, eager to raise the feud against Katu’s people. Taking an old flax mat, a kakipora, and rolling it up after setting it alight, he swiftly departed for Puhirua by night with the intention of setting fire to the great carved house called ‘Tawake-hei-moa,’ of which Ngati-Rangiwewehi were exceedingly proud. The flax mat would smoulder for a long time without being consumed by the fire. Arriving at Puhirua when the people were asleep, he stole up to the rear of the carved house and thrust the smouldering kakipora into the dry raupo-thatch walls, left it there, and fled back to his village. The meeting-house was speedily ablaze. When the alarm was raised the tribe ran to the marae, and loudly lamented the destruction of their whare-whakalro. Quickly divining the hand of Te Koata and his friends in this act, they cast about for immediate and terrible utu.

“A party of men was swiftly despatched to the village that stood near the Fount-at-Hangarua (now known as Hamurana spring), where lived a member of the Tapuika tribe, an old woman named Waitāréré. Her they seized (she had nothing to do with the case, but that did not matter) and haling her quickly to Puhirua, they cast her into the still burning ruins of the carved house and roasted her alive. Kaitoa! The burning of the whare-whakairo was avenged. The old woman’s death was the utu for the stolen axe and the shark’s-tooth of Katu.

“But Ngati-Rangiwewehi and their friends did not let the feud rest there. They carried the war into the Tapuika country. Raising a strong war-party, they marched through the forest to Te Pehu, and furiously assaulted that pa. They succeeded in capturing it and in killing many of the occupants. The survivors fled down the gorge and across the Mangorewa to Te Weta Pa, and there the Tapuika made a final stand. But the lake men were again victorious. They stormed the pa, and few escaped the battle-axe and spear.

“The morehu, or remnant, of the garrison crept back through the forest to the desolated site of Te Pehu Pa. Among them were the three chiefs, Te Koata, Rakawhati, and Whanganui, who had escaped the general slaughter. In fear and trembling they took refuge in the caves which had been cut in the sides of the hill pa, and there they hid until the victorious Arawa had marched home again, carrying with them the heads of many of the slain and much plunder, besides some of the Tapuika women for slave-wives. And long after that they continued to live in the cave dwellings, existing on the wild foods of the forest and the birds they caught, and always keeping a watchful eye for their foes. They did not venture to rebuild their homes in the pa. And so was finally avenged the theft of the stone axe of Katu’s by the insolent chiefs of Tapuika.

“These caves,” concluded old Waharoa, “are very old indeed. It is eleven generations since they were first dug out by the Tapuika for food stores. Probably it was not until Te Koata’s time that they were enlarged and used as human habitations. From Te Koata down to the present day is seven generations of men.”

A generation=25 years. The history of Te Pehu pa, therefore, dates back about three hundred years.

Swelling up in easy rondures sweetly moulded as a woman’s breasts, some of the ancient volcanic hills of Maori Land are places to enchant the eye and the imagination. Such symmetrically shaped mountains as Putahi and Whatitiri, in North Auckland, and Pihanga, South Taupo’s wooded cone, perfectly proportioned, easily sloping in their lines of rest, seem to the fancy Demeter made visible; not mere rock and soil, but the sex embodiment of Papa-tua-nuku, our mother Earth. In contrast there is the bold, insistent upthrust of such sharply-cut peaks as Putauaki and Kakepuku—like still active Ngauruhoe—which a primitive people could not but endow with masculine attributes. Kawa is one of the little women mountains; softly rounded Kawa, resting yonder on the northern border of the King Country, a few miles south of the olden frontier river, the Puniu. Facing her—the pakeha’s railway line between them—Kakepuku lifts in steeply conical lines to his crater summit. Little wonder that in Maori legend Kakepuku is husband, victor in the battle of the mountains for the graceful Kawa’s love.

On the northern and eastern sides Kawa presents an evenly slanting convex face, greatly tattooed in the successive scarps of an ancient fortress. On the western, the hill is hollowed; the ancient volcanic forces breached the wall on that side and fiery lava flowed to the plain. In yonder sheltered glen the people of old-time grew their food-crops; and in there is a spring which supplied the garrison. It was a romantic mountain, Kawa, to one’s youthful vision, viewed from the “white” side of the frontier river, sometimes lightly veiled in wet mists, but more often standing out in clear outline against the western sky, a nippled knoll of richest blue.

This story of three centuries ago, told me by my old Ngati-Maniapoto legend-keepers who live on the Puniu south bank, within near sight of Kawa, concerns the day when the little mountain was a fortified hold, with terraces and scarps, now fern-grown or grassy; several successive lines of stout timber palisading encircling the central knoll. On this mound was the tihi, the well-stockaded citadel where the chief and his family lived.

At the period of our story a chief named Tarao was the head of the sub-clan of Tainui descent which had its home on Kawa Hill. His people grew their kumara and taro and hue, introduced from the tropic isles, in the warm decomposed volcanic soil of the inner slopes and the floor of the olden crater, fished for eels in the great marshes and lagoons of Kawa swamp that spread over the plain for miles below, and snared and speared birds in the bush. There they lived in peace and comfort until Tarao gave mortal offence to Karewa, of Kawhia Harbour.

Now, Karewa’s sister had become Tarao’s wife; the two sub-tribes were closely akin. But it is possible to overstep the bounds of freedom, even when dealing with a brother-in-law, and that was what Tarao did. It may be that he was over-fond of practical jokes; at any rate he played exactly the wrong kind of grim jest on the touchy Karewa.

* * *

Tarao and his followers went to Kawhia at Karewa’s invitation on a visit of friendship; they visited the chief of the Tai-Hauauru—the Western Sea—at his hill-fort, Pounui. Tarao had heard much of the strength of this fortified position, and Karewa, when visiting him, had boasted that it was an impregnable pa. Tarao surveyed it from below before he entered, he gazed long and keenly at it, appraising its defences. To his companions he made the cryptic remark: “Teitei awatea, papaku po” (“High in the daylight, shallow at night”).

By this he meant that while Pounui might seem a lofty and formidable place by day, when its defences were manned, it would not be so difficult to scale it under cover of night.

After the ceremonial and festivities customary on the occasion of such friendly visits, Tarao and his party left Pounui for their homes. Karewa and his people waved them farewells and cried their last haere ra! and the visitors from inland disappeared from sight in the forest. But Tarao had not yet done with Pounui Pa. He thought of Karewa’s boastful praise of his pa, and he decided to give him a lesson in caution and watchfulness.

Bidding his men await his return he left them in camp in the hills and returned alone to the shores of Kawhia Harbour. He watched Pounui from the bush until darkness fell, and then he scouted up to its base. He lay there concealed until the midnight hours, then he climbed the hill, entered the stockaded village, and crept into the large house in which Karewa and many others slept. If any sleepy inmate saw him enter, quietly drawing back the sliding door, he was probably taken for one of the hapu.

Knowing exactly where Karewa slept, Tarao, with the utmost care, as noiselessly as a Red Indian on the scouting trail, crept to his brother-in-law’s side. He remained there unmoving until he was certain the chief lay in a heavy sleep. He felt for the greenstone patu, or mere, the sharp-edged club which Karewa always carried. It was secured by a peculiarly plaited cord formed of thin thongs of dogskin passed through the hole in the handle of the mere, and looped loosely round his wrist.

Tarao carefully unfastened the weapon from the sleeper’s wrist, without awakening him, and substituted his own patu, a greenstone weapon somewhat similar to Karewa’s in weight and size. So, leaving the house presently as silently as he had come, he passed like a ghost through the pa and descended to the valley. In the morning he rejoined his men and the party marched home to the Waipa Valley and Kawa Hill. Tarao’s heart bounded with pride at the glorious trick he had played on his brother-in-law. He laughed to himself; he thought: “Oh that I could have seen Karewa when he awakened this morning and looked at his patu pounamu!”

* * *

Karewa, as it chanced, waked from his sleep very soon after Tarao had crept thief-like out of the dark house. Instinctively he felt for his greenstone patu; he felt it, and slept again. But in the morning light, when he came to look at the weapon, he saw it was not his own familiar patu. The greenstone was a darker tint, a dark green stone; his own patu had a band of lighter colour—the Maori term it inanga, or whitebait, running transversely; moreover, the hand-grip end was differently worked from his, and the dogskin thong was also made differently.

Then Karewa realised what had happened. It was Tarao’s patu pounamu. He knew exactly how it had been done, as accurately as if he had witnessed it.

Karewa did not at all appreciate the cleverness of the trick. He was greatly angered; he looked at it in this way: “Tarao had me at his mercy; he stole upon me in the night and he could easily have killed me. He exchanged patu weapons with me in the midnight to show what he could have done had he liked. He has murdered me! For this insult I shall have revenge!”

* * *

And revenge he planned—utu—satisfaction for the injury to his feelings and the silent threat of what might have been. But he did not hurry about the task of exacting that utu. A sufficiently strong and justifiable také, a casus belli, was required before he and his Kawhia men could enter confidently upon a fighting expedition. The patu incident, while provocative, was scarcely enough to warrant war upon Tarao.

That také was soon provided by a quarrel between some of Tarao’s young men and a party of Karewa’s hapu who came inland. The disagreement befell on the shore of Kawa Repo, the great expanses of lagoons and marshes that spread to the west and the south from the foot of Kawa Mountain. There were many rauwiri, or eel-weirs (pa-tuna) on the dark-brown watercourses which flowed slowly towards the Waipa River from the morass. The Kawhia men camped beside the swamp and feasted on the eels. A dispute ended in a fight, and Karewa’s men returned to their chief with a tale that justified invasion.

Meanwhile, Tarao had given much thought to the intertribal situation, and he came to the conclusion that in the event of war with his affronted relative Kawa Hill, with its smaller garrison, would not hold out against a long-continued attack. So, like a wise commander, he prepared for the worst. He must be ready, if need be, to abandon the hill-pa and take refuge in the forest. He set his people to work to prepare a way of retreat.

This way was a rua-keria, or subterranean passage. The whole strength of the hapu was engaged in the digging of a tunnel and covered way, through the narrow ridge on the southern side of the pa, from the terrace just below the summit. This tunnel they dug out and downward until it reached the thick clump of bush that covered the hill-slopes on the south side, beyond the outermost lines of the fortification. It was a heavy task, but there were many hands, some digging away with wooden spades, others carrying out the earth in flax baskets. It took a long time to dig the tunnel and to timber it roughly, but at last it was finished, leading down the hill to the woods, where its mouth was hidden from all enemies. It would enable an outnumbered or starving garrison to escape right under the feet of a beleaguering enemy, should matters come to that last extremity.

* * *

Over the ranges from Kawhia coast came Karewa and his army. They laid siege to Tarao’s hill castle, and there within the stockaded lines of Kawa Tarao waited anxiously for the assault which should determine whether he would have to make use of his secret route of flight.

The Kawhia men having drawn their lines all round the pa, to prevent the escape of the occupants, Karewa ordered the assault. Up the steep ferny hill swarmed the naked warriors. They battered at the palisades with their stone axes, they hacked away at the vine-ties, and they thrust their long manuka spears through the interstices at the warriors within. The red blood flowed, and the ferocious battle-yell shook the air, and there was the inciting storming-cry of the assaulting captains: “Kokiritia—Patua—Kainga!” (“Charge on them—Slay them—Eat them!”).

Force of numbers began to prevail. From one terrace to another the defenders were driven back, until, after a struggle which lasted the whole of one day, from the rising to the going down of the sun, only the upper terraces and the tihi at the summit were left in the hands of Tarao and his hapu. Then Tarao decided that Kawa was no longer a desirable home.

We had been some days travelling by rough horse-trails through the Urewera mountains and forests, and it was a relief after so much gorge and range traversing and so many river crossings, to see the wooded cliffs step apart at last and the valley widen out into a great plain of grass and maize fields. A few miles before we rode out from the hill-pent gravels of the Whakatane River we were hailed by a jolly-looking Maori woman, who stood at the fence of a three-whare hamlet on the low terrace between stream and wooded hillside. “Come to kai,” was the invitation; the little kainga of Ngamahanga was just squatting down to its open-air breakfast. It was our second that morning; the first had been eaten at sunrise in camp in the heart of the bush at Waikari-whenua. We were ready for that meal, after our rough and rather wet ride, and the tin plateful of boiled eggs and the flax basket of trout were capital fare. The trout had been caught in an eel-trap; it tasted all the better for the unorthodox method of its capture. The eggs seemed of make unfamiliar. The hospitable wahine, noticing my enquiring look, said: “They are peacock eggs, pakeha.”

“Peacock eggs?”

“Oh, yes; we have plenty of peacocks here,” and she pointed over the fence. It was the first time we had seen peahens in the working role of domestic fowls. They certainly were a success at Ngamahanga that morning.

When we called our good-byes to the kind folk of the little settlement—it was the first inhabited spot we had seen for some forty miles—and went on our way towards the Urewera villages at Ruatoki, an old man joined us on his roan pony. He was good company, this white-whiskered veteran of the Hauhau war-trail; active still for all his near-fourscore years; his eyes peered out with the keen glitter characteristic of these few surviving warriors, from under very thick bushy eyebrows. And after our horses had been given their gallop and we pulled up to a walk, the old man told the stories of the wayside. Forest-hidden ancient forts on the clifftops, the scenes of long-ago battles, venerable trees and their legends. The story that most of all captured my fancy was the legend of yonder rock of romance, the great flat slab called Te Tapapatanga-a-Te Rau-tawhiri—which, out of consideration for the reader, shall henceforward be called Fragrant-Leaf’s Rock.

* * *

A Charm of the Waikato River is the wealth of legend and romance along that grand waterway, the noblest of all New Zealand rivers. From Lake Taupo all the way down to the sea, every mile of its winding course has its folk-story and its song, and its lower waters have the records of the Maori War to sanctify them. This tradition concerns the beautiful valley of Orakei-korako and neighbourhood, where the river plunges through the rocky passes and roars in flying foam over its innumerable falls and rapid runs and round its little wooded islands.

A few miles below the old Maori village of Orakei-korako, on the riverside road that leads southward from Atiamuri, are the Haere-huka Rapids, where the river is broken by a wild fall, just below a green and lovely islet clothed to the water’s edge with foliage. Below the furious foam of the rapids again are other fairy isles, dripping everywhere with moisture; the spray of the cataract. Huge hills rise on either side of the river, wooded of base, scarred of side, with rounded shoulders, rearing here and there Titanic masses of grey volcanic rock, like swags on the backs of mountain giants. Down there, near the proper left bank of the river—the side on which our road goes—there is a great black rock, rounded by centuries of water-rush, protruding its glistening head. The strong river surges round it ceaselessly—spray bathes it ever, and sometimes the angry little waves completely hide it from sight. But it always emerges, the embodiment of eternal stability, in that turmoil of mad waters. This is the rock which gives its name to the rapid. Haere-huka, the olden Maori called it, the rock of “Moving Foam,” or “Flying Foam.”

And here, on the green bank overlooking the rapid-whitened river, I heard the story of how that great rock gave fresh courage to the heart of a weary and broken man.

About a century ago a friendly party of the Ngati-Tuwharetoa tribe, of Taupo, visited Rotorua, where they were treated with the accustomed generous hospitality of the Maori. One of the dancers in the Arawa haka and poi to amuse the visitors was the beautiful wife of Taua, chief of the Ngati-Tunohopu branch of Ngati-Whakaue. She excelled all the women in the grace and dexterity of her movements. Amongst the guests was a young chief of Taupo named Harakeke, who was smitten with the charms of the lady. During the stay of the party at Rotorua, Harakeke secretly made love to Taua’s wife to such purpose that when the guests were ready to return she consented to abandon her husband and fly with the Taupo chief.

Taua endeavoured to arouse the Arawa tribe to take up his cause and punish the Taupo people for the abduction of his wife. But they refused, partly because they were afraid of the great chief Te Heuheu, of Taupo, and also because of their relationship to his tribe. Despairing of success, Taua composed and sang the following song, which in the end had the effect of rousing the Arawa to a sense of the injury to their fellow-clansman and the insult to the tribe:

[Translation.]

In this song—which is often sung at the present day by members of the Arawa tribe when they wish to appeal to sentiment—the composer implored Teketapu (Te Amohau), the Rotorua chief, not to restrain him, but to let his body, or even his spirit go, if only to gaze wistfully at the distant mountains of Taupo from Te Hemo Gorge, from Piopio Mount or from Tauhunui Ridge. He called on the principal chiefs of Taupo by name at their respective dwelling-places to espouse his cause, avenge his dishonour and restore “the corner-post of his house”—the worker by day, the closerup up of the house by night—his wife. He lamented that the chiefs turned away from him, and he vented his rage by cursing Te Harakeke, the author of his sorrows, as a flax plant growing in the swamp (a play on his name; harakeke is the name of the flax) who could become his warawara, or food for revenge.

Taua’s poetical appeal was irresistible, and a small party of tino toa—tried warriors—prepared to accompany the chief. The company set out for Taupo, travelling only at night. Swimming across the Waikato River at Motu-whanake, a small island at the mouth of the Whirinaki branch of the Waikato, midway between Te Niho-o-te-kiore and Orakei-korako, Taua and his men marched rapidly along the bank of the river to the Haere-huka Rapid, where they camped. From this bivouac the warriors passed by way of Orakei-korako (along where the telegraph line now runs) to a valley about four miles north of where the present road joins the motor road from Rotorua to Taupo. The Rotorua men arrived there at daylight and found a number of the Taupo people camped; they were warriors who had marched out to offer battle to Taua.

The Arawa at once attacked the Taupo party, but after at first gaining what appeared to be a victory, they were beaten off with some loss. In sorrow and dejection they retreated to their camp at Haera-huka, and halted there as darkness fell. Overwhelmed at the loss of their friends, the Arawa sank down on the bank of the Waikato just opposite the rock now called Haere-huka. After resting, a discussion arose as to what their course should be. Nearly all were for returning to Rotorua at once to secure reinforcements.

Not so Taua. He knelt by the edge of the river, his taiaha in front of him, stuck in slanting against his shoulder, both hands on it, and so rested, as was often the custom. All the time the others were speaking he remained silently gazing at the dark rock in midstream, over which the waters fiercely raged, only to allow the head of it to reappear. It was a bright moonlight night, and speaker after speaker arose by marama’s clear beams and urged Taua to return to his home. One of them had a presentiment that Taua would be killed if they persisted, and that they would be overwhelmed by “the snows of Tongariro”—their enemies of Ngati-Tuwharetoa.

Taua at last arose and addressed his warriors. Taiaha in hand, he strode back and forth, speaking in quick, decisive words. He spoke of the loss of their friends and of the shame that would attend them if they returned unsuccessful. Pointing to the rock in the midst of the rapids, showing distinctly in the light of the beautiful moon, he compared their present position to it. Constantly overwhelmed by the rushing waters and the flying foam, it always reappeared unmoved and firm as ever. “I have taken courage from the rock,” he said, “and nothing will turn me back. Your arguments flow over me as the spray flies over yon rock!” He urged that if they returned on their tracks at once they would take the enemy unawares and secure a victory.

Taua’s speech was so eloquent and forceful that it carried all his warriors with it. They were animated with his own heroic and determined spirit. “Ae! We shall follow you!” they cried. At midnight the Arawa arose and took the fighting trail again. They quickly reached a deep valley on the old path from Orakei-korako to Taupo, a mile or two before where it joins the present road at the “Height of Land.” Here, just at dawn, they fell on their unsuspecting enemies. Taken completely by surprise, the Taupo men were borne down by the furious assault, and heavy was the slaughter. In such manner did Taua avenge his erring wife.

And the victorious chief of Ngati-Tunohopu straightway adopted the name of Haere-huka, after the courage-inspiring rock in the Waikato, and his descendants now bear it. There is a Taua Tutanekai Haere-huka in Rotorua to-day. Let not that name be forgotten, for it holds a heroic and a poetic memory.

Classic mythology tells us how Paris judged the contest of the goddesses for the prize of beauty. There is a little Maori word-of-mouth story, now for the first time recorded, that deserves to become as well known as the familiar Greek legend.

In Lake Rotorua, about midway between the southern shore and the island of Mokoia, there is a shallow place, a long sandbank, called by the Arawa people “Te Hiwi o Toroa,” or “The Shoal of the Albatross.” It is perhaps 25 feet below the surface of the water; at any rate, it is considerably shallower than the surrounding parts, and it is, or was, a favourite fishing bank for koura (the fresh-water crayfish) and kakahi shellfish.

Paddling out towards this bank one day of long ago, came a canoe party of four. At the steering paddle was a Maori chief whose name was Uenuku-Kopako, which we shall abbreviate to Uenuku. His crew consisted of his three wives, Rangi-whakapiri, Hinepito, and Tao-i-te-kura. These names also we shall considerately reduce to the simple Rangi, Hine and Kura.

Uenuku was a handsome fellow, tattooed in the best Maori manner, and a warrior of some renown. As it happens in most harems, there was considerable jealousy, and the thatched house of Mokoia was not always a peaceful home. The ladies were not at all in agreement on the question of matrimonial precedence, as to which of them was, or should be, the favourite wife, the one to accompany the lord and master on his jaunts abroad, and the one recognised as his chief partner.

Uenuku became very weary of this continual bickering, and had he not been a kind-hearted fellow, he might have settled the question by knocking one or two of the wahines on the head with his sharp-bladed greenstone mere. At last he bethought him of a plan of settlement, and he ordered out his canoe.

Just over the shoal, Uenuku bade his wives cease paddling, and look down through the clear water. They peered over the side and watched the little crayfish crawling on the white pumice sand.

“Now,” said Uenuku, “this is the place of the test—it is the day of decision. I am weary to death of your quarrelling, your disputing as to which of you shall be my first wife. It must cease—must cease. This is the test. You shall dive for me, and the one who proves the best and strongest diver, she shall be my best-beloved wife. The one who touches the bank and returns with a handful of shell or sand to prove it shall be the wanner.”

Now,” said the white-haired dame Mere Ngamai, of the Ngati-Awa, “this is a tale of the days of old, the tale of the young girl Miro and her love for her chieftain Hikareia. She loved even unto death. Whakarongo mai! Listen to my story.

“Hikareia was a young chief of a tribe far in the north of New Zealand, and Miro was a certain puhi, a girl whom her family kept sacred from man until such time as she should be given ceremoniously in marriage. The fame of that young girl spread throughout the land. The young man heard of her, of her beauty and her sacredness; she was much in his mind, and he desired greatly to meet her. And at last they beheld each other face to face at a gathering of the tribes, and each conceived a great desire for the other. They loved, and from that time onward they had no thought but for each other.

“When the girl’s kinsfolk heard that the young people loved each other they were angry, and they returned to their homes—they had been on a visiting journey among the tribes of the North—and they took Miro with them.

“Time passed, perhaps a year. Hikareia and the girl still loved each other though far separated. At last Hikareia persuaded his elders to prepare for a great gathering of the tribes at his village, a hui, a very great hui. The harvest of the kumara was gathered in; the men snared and speared great numbers of the forest birds and preserved them in bark containers; and they caught huge quantities of fish and sun-dried them against the time of feasting. The women wove the finest of flax robes, for there must be generous gifts to the guests. Hikareia planned all this because the hui would enable him to meet his love again; the young chieftainess would come with her tribe to the assembly.

“The word went forth, and from far and near the tribes gathered to the ceremonial congress in Hikareia’s pa.

“And, as the lover hoped, Miro came, and with her her father and her brothers, and their tribesfolk. They came in their large canoe—for canoes were the only means by which people could reach that place, which was on an island. The name of the canoe was Te Punga-i-orohia (The Polished Anchor-stone). They arrived at the village, a hill pa overlooking the sea, and there the lovers beheld each other again.

“It was not long before the two young people secretly appointed a meeting in the woods. There they met, in the fragrant twilight of the bush, and they loved each other as men and maids will. And Hikareia and the girl took each other as man and wife.

This story may more properly be classed as a historical narrative than as a folk-story. It is the story of an intertribal war episode which developed curious complications and called for Government intervention with a military demonstration in the form of an expedition to Tauranga, and sundry cannibal incidents far removed from the original argument. But it comes in as a popular tale of old oft-told in the meetinghouses, especially by the descendants of Taraia’s warriors of the Thirties and Forties, who live in the Waihou and Ohinemuri country.

* * *

Where the main road to Tauranga from Paeroa and Waihi, in the Ohinemuri, goes down to the long crooked shore of Katikati Harbour, there is a half-circle curve round the base of a beautiful mountain facing the entrance to the estuary. This height is Hikurangi, a topographically descriptive place-name that occurs in many parts of New Zealand; an ancient Polynesian name, literally “tail of the sky”; it means sky-line, the place where the last light of day lingers. That is the modern motor way, but the ancient Maori trail goes right over the top of the peak; the wary oldtimers liked to keep to the top of the ridges.

My story, as told by Ngati-Tamatera, and also, with some variations, by the Ngai-te-Rangi people, goes back eighty-seven years to the era when New Zealand, newly placed under the British flag, was only just emerging from the cannibal era, despite the fact that missionaries had been toiling away for two decades at the task of taming Tangata Maori. The most conservative pagan of them all—”conservative” is an extremely mild adjective in this case—was Taraia Ngakuti, the head chief of the Ngati-Tamatera tribe, of Ohinemuri. Taraia was lord of the high, low and middle justice in the Waihou River Valley, from the Hauraki waters inland to Te Aroha mountain. To his last day (in 1871) he was the very perfect and complete savage.

It so happened at this period, the year 1842, that Taraia’s nearest neighbour on the Tauranga side of the range, the chief Whanake, of the Ngai-te-Rangi, set about establishing a close season for sharks. It must be explained that the shark fishery of Katikati Harbour was greatly prized by the Maori. The mango of these waters was a specially desirable kind, and provided a great part of the tribe’s food supply. Whanake had a feud with Taraia over the rights to land near Nga-Kuri-a-Whare, on the Katikati shore, and the shark-catching privileges were involved in the quarrel. There was also a blood vendetta. Taraia’s mother had been killed in an olden battle, and her body carried off by Ngai-te-Rangi for a cannibal meal.

Taraia had fought the coast dwellers many a time, but he considered he had not yet taken sufficient utu. The grim warrior awaited his chance. Whanake proclaimed a rahui, forbidding the catching of sharks on the debatable shores. Taraia was soon informed of this, and he determined to assert his claim to the sea-harvest. He despatched a herald to his rival with an ultimatum in the symbolic fashion of the Maori. It consisted of two articles. One was a rourou, or round flax basket containing smoke-dried eels. The other was a musket cartridge. With these silently eloquent emblems the bearer delivered this message: “Ki te whawhai mai koe ki te ngeangea he ra kai tua; ki te whawhai mai koe ki te taonga a Tu, ka tangi te whatitiri, ka hikonga te uira ki runga o Hikurangi” (“Should you choose to make war with eels only [i.e. to accept the basket of eels], then the day of our combat is far off; but should you choose to wage battle with the weapons of Tu the war god, then presently shall the thunder crash and the lightning flash on the summit of Hikurangi mountain”).

Whanake, in no way loath to defy his hereditary enemy, accepted the musket cartridge and rejected the basket of eels, which symbolised the food treasures of the Ohinemuri and Waihou rivers. It was an acceptance of the war challenge. The speedy result was a fighting expedition launched by Taraia against the Ngai-te-Rangi chief.

Whanake and his sub-tribe occupied a fortified village on the island-like peninsula of Ongare, yon green mound jutting out into Katikati harbour. Expecting an attack, the inevitable sequel of his acceptance of the emblematic cartridge, the chief strengthened his palisades and saw to his arms and ammunition.

Taraia’s column of seventy warriors from Ohinemuri cautiously approached Ongare under cover of darkness, and came stealthily scouting up to the pa. It was in the midnight hours that Whanake’s wife, in a sudden fear, awoke her husband and said: “E haruru ana te waewae a te tangata” (“I hear the resounding tread of men’s feet”).

Whanake rose and went outside. He listened intently a while in the darkness, and returning to his wife said: “E hara, e kui; ko te tai e akiaki ana ki te naenae” (“Not so, wife; it is but the tide lapping on the shells of the beach below”).

So, satisfied, the pair turned to slumber again. It was the sleep of death. A little while before dawn, Taraia and his war party burst into the pa, swept all before them with musket-shot and tomahawk, and slaughtered the too-confident Whanake and eleven of his tribe.

The cannibal victors hurried back to their own country, across the ranges, with their newly-made slaves and their booty. The miserable cap- tivescaptives bore on their backs flax baskets containing several bodies of their own dead, cut up for the oven. When a little way over the top of Hikurangi they came to a grove of trees where there was a good spring of water. At this sylvan spot, a favourite resting-place of Maori travellers, Taraia ordered a halt.

“Cook food for us,” he ordered the captives. “Make ovens and cook your accursed tribe for us. I shall eat Whanake myself!”

So the haangi were made, the steam-ovens of hot stones in the earth, and there by the mountain spring, the hunters of men feasted on their kill.

Soon all were on the march again, the slaves carrying the rest of the bodies for the home-stayers. Taraia returned down the Waihou in his war-canoe from Ohinemuri to Kauwaeranga, near the sea waters of Hauraki. There the tribes feasted on the “fish of Tu,” and then Taraia fortified his pa against an expected expedition from Tauranga, for he knew that Ngai-te-Rangi would not readily forego revenge.

It was at this juncture that the Government at Auckland intervened, with the result that it was bluntly told by Taraia to mind its own business and refrain from interfering with matters of purely Maori intertribal politics. With true native logic he enquired why the Government should be so solicitous about his foes, the Ngai-te-Rangi. “Did they not eat my mother?” It was even proposed that a constable should serve Taraia with a summons in his stockaded pa. They did not know the Maori then. That experience was to come.

The sun was hot in the still, windless valley of the Rangitaiki, and though we got a trifle wet in the fording of the deep and strong river —it was some ten miles above the Murupara Bridge on the road from Rotorua to the Urewera Country—boots and trousers soon baked dry when we off-saddled for lunch at the old camp ground at Ngahuinga. We let our horses graze for an hour and boiled the billy, and then had the afternoon before us for the ride up to our camping place on the bush edge at Te Tapiri, on the rim of the ranges, a thousand feet above the Kaingaroa Plain. In a little while we came to the falls of the Wheao. This tributary of the Rangitaiki, flowing through the high fern and the black-fruited tupakihi, poured itself over a broad ledge of rock into a great circular pool surrounded by steep bushy banks. Below, the brimming pool emptied itself in a series of little rapids towards the main river.

“There she is, there’s the old woman,” said Harehare, the whitebeard from Murupara. He pointed to a small rounded piece of timber, black and polished by water wear, that lay in a backwater where the eddies had undermined the nearer bank. “There’s Hine-ngutu, the old kuia. She’s lasting well, that old woman.”

Harehare’s story, a legend told all along the Rangitaiki, was that long ago, a century or so, an aged woman called Hine-ngutu, when carrying home a load of firewood on her back one day to the village which then stood here, was hailed by one of her fellow gossips. She turned to answer her, forgetting that she was on the very brink of the great whirlpool below the fall. She tumbled off the narrow, slippery track into the furious waters below and she was never seen again. But a log of wood appeared in the pool, circling round and round, and as it seemed to bear a resemblance to a human body, the fancy grew that it was poor old Hine-ngutu. Once an attempt was made to haul out the log, but it eluded all lassos. Hine dived to the bottom for a while until the fishers desisted. Now, of course, she is tapu through and through, and though she is very much reduced in size by water attrition, she is the same old piece, the visible transubstantiation of Hine-ngutu. Of that there can be no possible doubt, say the Maori.

As we watched the deep churning basin, with the tapu bit of timber tossing in the water, but hemmed in there by an old log with no history to speak of, a big black shag rose heavily from a projecting branch where it had been watching us. It was the sable-plumaged variety of kawau that the Maori calls papua—an interesting word to the philologist, by the way, for it at once suggests an inquiry as to whether its origin had anything to do with Papua, the great Black Island. It circled over the pool, a silent, sombre bird of omen; it settled on a bush on the other side, and sat there, its eyes fixed on us.

Our Maori companions said the papua was always there. It fished in the Wheao, and it lived beside the mystic pool. “That old fellow,” said they, “is Hine-ngutu’s guardian. He watches the river, and he lives alone here. No doubt he is an atua, a god of some sort. Anyhow, it is best not to meddle with him. If we leave him alone he’ll leave us alone. Perhaps some foolish pakeha will shoot him some day—and come to grief in the Rangitaiki.”

Curious fellow, the Maori, revealing a blending of shrewdness, close observation and an incurably lively imagination. Who among the matter-of-fact pakeha tribe would have identified that bit of log with Hine-ngutu, or linked up a stray shag with that old-wives’ tale of the Wheao whirlpool?

The primitive belief in the practice of makutu, the “black art,” has persisted long in such conservative districts as Taranaki. The peculiar interest of this illustration of the ancient faith lies in the fact that one of those concerned in the rites was a white man. It is a remarkable instance of the survival of purely pagan sacrosanct wizardly ceremonies up to the time of the present generation. The white man who was present at the ceremony was Kimble Bent, the runaway soldier, who died in 1916 after fifty years of life with the Maori.

Many episodes of Kimble Bent’s strange and perilous life with the Hauhaus were related by me in a book published in 1911, “The Adventures of Kimble Bent.” The old pakeha-Maori told me this true story of Maori magic in 1913.

In the year 1879, Kimble Bent—Tu-nui-a-moa the Maori called him—after fourteen years of wild bush life, had emerged from his exile in the Upper Patea forests and was living with his Maori friends at the large native village of Taiporohenui, near the present town of Hawera, Taranaki. It was one of the principal villages of the Ngati-Ruanui tribe; in that fighting clan Matangi-o-Rupe, Bent’s chief, and to all intent his owner, was a leading man. Bent had had to wife Rupe’s daughter, a handsome girl named Te Hau-maringi-wai—“The Wind-that-Shakes-the-Rain-drops-Down”; she was lately dead. The youngest child of the Rupe family at this time was a boy of about ten years old, named Whai-pakanga. Now, this boy, at the date of our story, lay in a high fever, sick unto death. The family were in deep sorrow and were already thinking of making preparations for the funeral wake.

As the sick boy lay there in a little wharau, or hospital-shed, erected close to the entrance to the raupo-thatched house, a tohunga came to Rupe’s home. This tohunga was Hupini, the chief sorcerer and warlock on the South Taranaki Plains. He was a very great medicine-man indeed. He was popularly accredited with strange occult powers; with the ability to kill an enemy even though that enemy might be far away, by the projection of the will, and the hurling through space of his magic charms and spells. Killing by Maori “wireless,” in fact. Hupini was a man of about sixty, and belonged to the Whanganui tribe. He was tattooed of face, sharp and glittering of eye.

Te Apanui, the old chief of Ngati-Awa, lay dying, in his village on the tidal riverside at Whakatane. He was a man of wisdom and much curious knowledge; he was, for one thing, a skilled artist in wood-carving, an art for which his forefathers had been famed. Skill in such a craft, which the highest rangatira did not disdain, was often to a large extent hereditary; there are families in which the eldest sons have been noted for their beautiful wood-carving for one generation after another. The art of the whao, the carver’s chisel, descended from father to son in that small tribe of well-schooled artificers Ngati-Tarawhai, of Okataina and Rotoiti, in the Arawa country. In Ngati-Awa Te Apanui’s father before him had been a tohunga-whakairo, and the son, Wepiha Apanui, hoped to inherit the ancestral talent.

Wepiha intended to be by his father’s side when the old man died, but as that moment seemed long delayed, he agreed to go out for a morning’s fishing near the heads with a pakeha friend who was on a visit to the village. The pair anchored their canoe just inside the bar and began their fishing, but scarcely had they dropped their lines overboard before they were startled by the bang-banging of double-barrel guns and the crack of rifles in the village.

“Aue!” exclaimed Wepiha. “Kua ngaro te whao!” (“The art of the carving-chisel is lost!”) In great agitation he pulled in his line at once and in furious haste hauled up the stone anchor. “It’s all your fault!” he cried to his companion. “You would insist on coming out fishing, and now the old man’s dead!” Seizing his paddle he sent the spray flying, his pakeha friend plunging in his blade just as vigorously, urging the light canoe towards the beach.

Dashing ashore at the village waterfront, Wepiha rushed up to the chief’s house, thrusting the people aside right and left.

“I may yet be in time!” he exclaimed to his companion.

The old man lay under an awning spread in front of the house. Was he dead yet? Wepiha, with one glance, saw that the gun-firing in announcement of death was premature. The kaumatua was still breathing, but he was at his last gasp. It may be that he rallied his fast-ebbing forces until his beloved eldest son had reached him.

Wepiha instantly stooped down at his father’s side and seized the old man’s right thumb. He bent down and put the thumb in his mouth, and closed his teeth on it, then released it. The next moment, with a long expiring sigh, the chieftain’s spirit passed.

“He is dead!” said Wepiha to the people around him as he rose. The tears flowed from his eyes and that was the signal for an outburst of grief and gun-firing from the assembly. The women gathered about the low couch of death to raise the tangi wail. Wepiha, after a fitting display of filial sorrow, walked away secretly elated. The art of the whao was his. He had just been in time to receive the silent gift, to imbibe the sacred wisdom of the whakairo from his father’s well-skilled hand. He had been taught carving, but only in this way could the full and peculiar knowledge of the tribe-head be passed on to him. And that afternoon he cheerfully began work in his carving shed, on a paddle for his pakeha fishing mate.

The incident described in the last story was an illustration of one method of absorbing the hau, the sacred essence of wisdom, the soul of skill and knowledge. In the higher departments of learning and occult lore there was the custom of ngau-taringa, by which a venerable sage of the priesthood passed on the hau of his spiritual power, his mystic manatapu, to a near kinsman or other selected successor. In this rite the tauira, the pupil or successor, ceremoniously bit the ear of the dying ancient.

* * *

The supreme tohunga of the Ngati-Tuwharetoa tribe a century and more ago was Tai-Pahau, who lived at Waihi, that pretty village on the southern shore of Lake Taupo, near Tokaanu, a waterfall tumbling over the wooded cliff in its rear, the steam of hot springs coiling up close to the quiet waterside. Tai-Pahau was the uncle of the high chief Te Heuheu Tukino, who in his old age was overwhelmed by the great landslip at Te Rapa, near Waihi, with fifty of his tribe. At the time of this narrative Te Heuheu was in the prime of life, a powerful, very active warrior. The time came when the venerable priest, who was probably about a hundred years old, lay dying. He lay in his house attended by one of the youngest of his daughters, Te Wai-Aromea. Te Heuheu had marched out on a war expedition against the tribes of Lower Whanganui and the West Coast. He had gone as far as Poutu, on the shore of the lake Roto-a-Ira, some twelve miles from Waihi. When he left the home village with his fighting men he did not realise that his old uncle’s end was so near, otherwise he would have deferred his march.

On the day that Te Heuheu camped at Roto-a-Ira, the aged wise man felt that his end was at hand; he knew he would not see another sun rise. So he called to his daughter, and he bade her despatch a swift messenger to Poutu and urgently recall the chief, leaving the warriors in camp.

“Tell him,” he said, “that I am at the point of death. He will know what I want.”

The old man’s instructions were obeyed. The messenger departed at his utmost speed. It was already night; it would be late when the runner reached Te Heuheu, and it would be well after midnight before the chief came to Waihi. The dying tohunga waited patiently, he would know intuitively when his nephew was at hand.

Like the Scottish Highlander and other people of the mountains and the forests whose minds are a blend of the poetic and mystic, the Maori was, and is, a believer in the faculty, or gift, or whatever it may be called, of second sight. Coming events, more particularly events involving death and disaster, were foreshadowed to the seers, those endowed with a kind of clairvoyant sense, the power of matakité

Mata—face; kité—to see. “The seen face”; to behold an apparition; to see one’s self in a vision—a portent of death under certain circumstances. Equivalent to the Gaelic taisch, second sight.

A remarkable modern Irish example of what our Maori call matakité was contained in a cable message from London some two years ago, describing a phantom vessel. This was a “ghost-ship” which appeared off Innisbofin Island just before a great hurricane which caused loss of life on the West Coast of Ireland. This phantom craft, a kind of Hibernian Flying Dutchman, followed one fishing boat all night, and did not answer any hail. The fishermen took it as a portent of coming disaster and returned to port just in time to avoid the hurricane. There was a phantom canoe a death-craft, seen on Lake Tarawera a few days before the great eruption of 1886, but in that instance no one profited by the omen.

I was discussing with a native friend the old-time Maori warrior’implicit belief in omens, portents, apparitions and warnings He said he believed one explanation of the celebrated Te Kooti’s extraordinary success in avoiding death or capture during his long pursuit by the Government forces was his clairvoyant power, his gift of ‘matakité.” Certainly Te Kooti possessed in an acutely developed form what may be called a “warpath sense.” He had a preternatural alertness in the bush, on the trail and in camp; some instinctive mental radio gathered the faint sounds that indicated danger and set him on his guard. But above and beyond that he no doubt possessed telepathic powers.

Usually, we only hear of these presentiments, or portents, after the thing they appeared to foreshadow has come to pass; and so we are most of us sceptics. But those who have seen much of primitive races can call to mind genuine instances of matakité or moemoea, or whatever it may be termed. In New Zealand many a New Zealander who has had much to do with the natives, and many a white man in the South Seas who has gained the sympathy of the Island people, can tell of such cases. A Maori woman once told me that she was crossing a stream on her return to her village (Waikanae), after a short journey, when she saw in front of her a thin, trembling mist. In this mist she beheld the dim face of her father. This was in broad daylight. The fog-wraith faded away, and, weeping, she hurried home to her kainga, to find that her father—whom she had left in perfect health only a few hours previously—had suddenly died, about the very time the misty apparition had appeared to her.

* * *

One quiet autumn night in 1869, a New Zealand Government expeditionary force, composed of white Constabulary and Wanganui and Arawa Maori, lay silently in wait just outside the bush village of Whakamara, in South Taranaki. This was Colonel Whitmore’s column, hunting up the rebel chief Titokowaru and his band of forest fighters, who were not only fanatic Hauhaus but cannibals, and whom they had dispersed a few days before at Otautu, on the Patea River. With the utmost secrecy the Government force took up a position under cover of darkness in front of the forest camp, to which Whitmore had been guided by his Maori scouts. The tall, black forest rose all around; the kainga was a group of thatched huts in a small clearing hacked out of the woods. The column was waiting for daylight; meanwhile the pakeha and Maori soldiers made themselves as comfortable as they could among the fern and flax clumps, and under the lee of fallen trees. They were so close to the Hauhaus that they could hear the Maori talking excitedly on the marae, in the centre of the group of whares, and distinctly the advance guard of Kupapa, or Government Maori, heard Titokowaru addressing his warriors.

In the Kupapa advance guard were a number of Rotorua and Maketu men, who had been enlisted a few months before for service on the East and West Coasts. One of them was Corporal Metara, a man of tried pluck and fighting aptitude. Metara lay in the fern with his comrades. Wrapped in his shawl, he fell asleep, with his rifle ready to his hand; and as he slept he dreamed.

* * *

With the first grey light of dawn the Government column, the Maori riflemen in the lead, rushed the Hauhau village. There was wild work for a few minutes, and when the first sharp attack was over and the smoke of battle cleared away sufficiently to enable the assailants to see that the Hauhaus had abandoned the kainga, a quick pursuit was ordered. Metara and his comrades first fired the village and destroyed the great Niu, the rebels’ sacred pole of worship, which stood in the centre of the settlement, and which was said to have been the original Niu set up by the prophet Te Ua, the founder of the Pai-Marire worship. The flagstaff was about seventy feet in height; it had three yards, each of the upper two crossed at right angles to the one below it, and at the lower yardarms were wooden carved birds, representing the rupé, or dove. From the yardarms, also, dangled flax ropes; these were for the atua or gods and angels to ascend

I have often thought, when reading efforts of fiction dealing with the Maori, ancient and modern, that there is really no need to go to the trouble of inventing tales about the native people when there is already lying to hand for the gathering such a wealth of the true romance, the real thing, in the unwritten annals of the race. But I suppose the explanation lies in the fact that it is after all less trouble to give the imagination play than to search out the truth about things. Research involves pains, yet there is the satisfaction of knowing that it was something that really happened, that it reflects the manners and thoughts of an ancient people.

That ancient people’s ways were not tame civilisation’s ways and their ideas of humour were the antipodes of those of the conventional pakeha. But the one thing eternally the same is the way of a man with a maid.

* * *

In a great cirque of that perpendicular cliff of dark-grey rock, the ancient dolerite, that fences in the seaside town of Whakatane on the south and leaves it only a narrow belt of flat between precipice and tideway, there is a curious cave. Its entrance seems like a ruined doorway to some ancient underground temple; a temple this, however, much battered and diminished in size during the last few decades. Earthquakes in the year 1886 either brought down a portion of the rocky roof or shattered the sides, for since then the place would hardly make a habitable shelter, although in the olden days it accommodated fifty or sixty people. For five or six hundred years back its story goes, not mere shadowy myth, but well attested tribal tradition, handed down for generations in the Ngati-Awa tribe of Whakatane. We hear of it first when the Mataatua canoe made the shores of the Bay of Plenty with her tapa-clad immigrants from the islands of the Eastern Pacific, and when her captain, Toroa, his wife, Muriwai, and their daughter, Wairaka, and their crew for many nights made this convenient cave just above the beach their communal sleeping place. To-day its name commemorates the far-travelled chieftainess of Hawaiki, who landed here clad in the scanty dress of the tropics; for the Ngati-Awa folk will tell you that it is Te Ana-a-Muriwai (The Cave of Muriwai).

Wairaka, the daughter of the chiefly pair (according to the Ngati-Awa version; the old people of the Urewera have a somewhat different story), was the tribal beauty; and a masterful young person withal. Tall and lissome, and fully developed of figure, even in her young girlhood, she is the heroine of song and legend and proverb to-day as a woman unexcelled in swimming and in paddling the canoe, as well as in the vigorous posturedances of the Maori-Polynesian. Like the splendid Muriwai she was as dauntless a sailor as the best of the men, and could wield a steering blade as skilfully as that grim old viking Toroa himself.

Many a man in that crew of South Sea Argonauts desired Wairaka as his wife, but the queenly girl of Mataatua was not easily pleased. Many a youth among the people who gathered in the big, dimly-lit cave and talked themselves to slumber on their couches of fern and Hawaikian tapa sighed for a share of Wairaka’s sleeping mat. The brown maid of those old days was permitted to indulge her own sweet fancy in the matter of lovers; no conventions hindered the youthful affairs of the heart, to whatever lengths they were carried; only with marriage did society and a husband step in with interdictions and club-law punishments. And Wairaka, if still heart-free, was also by no means loth to love and be loved with the full-tide passion of the tropics-bred race.

As the presence of the far-voyaged Mataatua people became known among the older race—for there were native tribes on these Bay of Plenty coasts, populous tribes and strong, long before the canoe made the New Zealand coast—visitors thronged the Whakatane beach, and the beautiful Wairaka’s fame went throughout the land. Many an aboriginal chief and warrior came to greet Toroa and his family, and press noses with Wairaka; and intermarriage began between newcomer and the original people. But the haughty Wairaka saw nothing worthy of her fancy in the uncouth, shaggy-haired men of the bush, who danced about their camp-fires on the beach, and made interminable speeches to Toroa in a dialect harsh-sounding, ripped out with the fierce impetuosity of the savage.

* * *

The night-fire burned low in the Ana-a-Muriwai. Dim shapes of mat-swathed sleepers near the central hearth were lit awhile by the flickering embers; in the recesses of the cave there was darkness profound, though scarcely silence, for the snores of the slumberers rose and fell in a volume that blended with the alternate murmur and muffled thunder of the surf on the bar, which glistened white in the pale moonlight far out in front of the cavern entrance.

Up the centre of the deep cave was a narrow fern-strewn passage, in the middle of which the nightly fire burned; on either side, divided from each other by low barriers, were the couches of the families. In the customary place of honour, near the right-hand side of the entrance, was the bed of Toroa and his wife. Near by reposed Wairaka, the one wakeful one in this troglodyte dwelling, this dimly moonlit summer night, a night of strange imaginings and longings, vague whisperings of unknown things.

Throwing back the tapa coverings, the girl sat up and gazed out upon the tideway, steeped in the dreamy beauty of the small moonlight, with the thinnest wafts of sea-mist drifting over the face of the waters like fairy gauze. And out of the dim dreamland came a figure, silently darkening the cave entrance.

A low voice breathed in the amazed girl’s ears; a face was stooped to hers in the greeting of the hongi.

“It is I, O Wairaka,” the whisper came. “You know me not, yet I am your lover, your husband. I am the one led to you by the gods. You are love-ripe, marriage-ripe; refuse me not.”

The mystified Wairaka answered not, but waited, and the voice came again: “Presently you shall know who I am, but not to-night, nor the next night; but be content, we are for each other; it was for me, though you knew it not, that you have tarried alone, refusing all men. For the present seek not to know my name, nor my tribe—let this be sufficient”—and the mysterious visitor took Wairaka’s right hand in his and passed it over his face from brow to chin.

To the girl’s touch the man’s untattooed face seemed as finely smooth as her own.

The stranger sank down by Wairaka’s side, her hand in his; both now silent; the bold lover unrepulsed. They spoke in whispers; Wairaka’s brain awhirl with the long-repressed passion of her race, so strangely and swiftly touched to life by the low voice and hand of this stranger from the moonlit outer spaces. Whither he came, or who he was, she cared not; for the moment he was Love and she was a free woman, warm and waiting.

When the first morning light came, and drowsy ones yawned and sat up and rubbed their eyes, Wairaka awoke, and, remembering, stretched out her hand for her strange lover. He had disappeared.

The next night, at midnight, the lover came again; and again before daylight he had gone. For several nights this was repeated nor did Wairaka once catch a glimpse of her mysterious tane’s face

* * *

Feminine curiosity could not long remain unsatisfied, and the wondering Wairaka, though complaisant enough when the night-roving lover was by her side, and ready to promise that she would be patient until he was ready to reveal his identity, resolved at last to break the spell and penetrate the mystery. Like a wise girl she took her mother into her confidence.

Standing all by itself on the great pumice plain, three miles back from Lake Taupo’s white cliffs, the long-dead volcanic peak called Tauhara makes a bold blue-painted sector of landscape that relieves the flatness of the green and grey tussock and manuka prairie. It goes up in the sharp slants that only volcanic mountains show, with a huge irregular hollow in its heart, the ancient crater, fractured on one side like a broken cup, the outflow of the ancient streams of fire. The plain here is some 1,500 feet above sea-level, and the topmost rim of Tauhara is another 2,000 feet and more in air. There is a track to its top, winding up through the gullies of bush and fern, a track along which one can ride a horse—a Maori horse, used to such work—to within a short distance of the summit.

* * *

It is a peak of poetry and romance, this Tauhara, a name that can be translated broadly as the rejected, or unwanted, one, the “odd man out.” It has come to be called “The Lone Lover,” because of the folk-tale of its origin, a nature-myth from the hazy past. This is the legend accounting, in the imaginative manner of the Maori, for Tauhara’s presence on this plain, so far removed from other mountains of any size. Tamati Kurupae and other elders of Taupo tell the story (“Tauhara is my mountain,” says Tamati; “my sentry-height and food-store from the ancient days”).

In the long ago Tauhara stood in a very different place. There was a great group of mountains; they all stood close together on the central plain south of Lake Taupo. Most of them are there still, and Ruapehu is chief of them all, but in the far-away days Taranaki stood there, and also Tauhara and Putauaki (the pakeha now calls this peak Mount Edgecumbe). They were males, those mountains; they were gods and warriors—all except one, who was a female. Her name was Pihanga—yonder she stands still, with her soft robe of forest about her, near the south side of Taupo Moana. (In Taranaki legend Ruapehu was the chief female, and Taranaki was her husband.) And all these men mountains loved Pihanga, but the only one she favoured was Tongariro, who defeated the others in a mighty battle of the volcanoes.

Tauhara and Putauaki, who stood where Roto-a-Ira lake is now, said to the other mountains: “We shall go hence; we shall go to the sea which looks towards the rising of the sun.” And Taranaki said: “I shall go to the setting place of the sun” (“Ka haere au ki te towenetanga o te ra”). And so those mountains uprooted themselves and departed, crying their farewells to Pihanga, who was now the wife of Tongariro.

It was a magic journey, in the hours of darkness, the only time when fairies and mountains can move abroad. Tauhara and Putauaki travelled north towards the morning sunshine. Putauaki was halted by the dawn when he had traversed the greater part of the way to the sea, and there he stands to this day, at the northern end of the Kaingaroa Plain, fifty miles from Taupo, and he looks down on the wide valley of the Rangitaiki. He is Ngati-Awa’s sacred mountain.

Tauhara travelled slowly, with tardy, lingering steps; often and longingly he looked back towards Pihanga, whom he was leaving. And when daylight came he had only reached the place where he stands now, near the shore of Taupo Moana. And he ever looks back across the lake at fair Pihanga, gently slanting yonder with her blue garment of forest drawn closely about her.

Tauhara is ever on the lips of the older Maori of Taupo, as it is ever before their eyes. Often there comes in a low crooning song, the eighty-years-old lament for Te Heuheu the Great, who, with fifty of his people, was overwhelmed in the landslide at Te Rapa, near Tokaanu:

The song apostrophises the noble dead, bids him live again, to recite his sacred chants of power, grasp once more his treasured greenstone patu, lead his warriors once more to battle.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when Maori hapus lived in the very heart of Tauhara, for the deep wooded valleys and sheltered slopes on the western aspect were the best cultivation grounds anywhere near the north end of Lake Taupo. The soil was rich, and the forests which clothed Tauhara then—there is still much bush on this side of the old volcano—were alive with birds. The Maori point out the sites of villages; one is Te Morere. The massive ferny hill which forms the north-western buttress of the mountain is Te Hue; anciently there was a pa there; below is the square-topped hill Tau-Waenga (Central Resting Place). This, too, was an ancient height of defence. “It is quite different soil, the soil of Tauhara, from our pumice plains,” says Tamati Kurupae. “It is the oné-matua, the good rich volcanic earth, and in it we used to grow our best crops. I have grown potatoes there in that old Mōréré kainga, in the warm heart of Tauhara. It was a beautiful place for our cultivators of old—safe, sheltered, fertile, and the forests protected us.”

Green headlands dipping to rocky points, fringed with pohutukawa trees that glow with crimson blossom in midsummer, give topographic charm to the generally low shores of Lake Rotorua. One is romantic Owhata, the ancient home of Hinemoa, she who swam the lake for love of Tutanekai. Another, nearer Rotorua town, is Kawaha Point; eye-resting in its verdure, it is a little over a mile to the westward of the Ohinemutu hotsprings village. The rock-strewn top of the cave is called Te Rangi-Kawhata. On the hilltop are the grassy trenches and ramparts of an ancient fort. At the matarae, the point, with its grey masses of stones, there once was a fishing village. A little way around the point to the north lies a rocky islet covered with shrubs. Near this insulated mass of rhyolite there is a cave with a rock-arched entrance, half-screened by bushes and ferns. It is a story-cave, a refuge place of long ago. The name by which it is known in the hitherto unwritten story of Kawaha is Te Ana-o-Tuno-hopu (Tunohopu’s Cave).

Here, on the lakeshore, two hundred years ago, there lived a chief named Tunohopu, with his wives and children and slaves. The fenced hamlet stood on the beach, near the point. There were four or five children, one a little boy called Tai-operua.

Just before dawn one morning, the sleeping kainga was aroused by the yells of a band of armed men, a small roving taua of the Ngati-Tuwharetoa tribe from Taupo. The enemy burst into the village and slew most of the people before they had time to seize a weapon or launch a canoe. Most of the Kawaha dwellers happened to have gone across to Mokoia Island, so that Tunohopu had very few of his warriors by his side.

Realising that only instant flight could save him and his children—my Maori narrator did not mention the wives, who were apparently of less account—Tunohopu darted out of his whare, taking his children with him, and made for the water. He snatched up his spear as he jumped from his sleeping mat, and with this he ran one of the enemy through as he left the house. Rushing down to the lake under cover of darkness, he waded out to that rocky islet near the point, carrying two of his children and the others following. Then he and the little ones cautiously waded across to the shore again, and crept into the cave, where they were completely sheltered.

But Tunohopu now discovered that his youngest child, the little boy Tai-operua, was missing. He had been lost in the confusion, and was now either dead or a captive. The fugitive family remained in the cave of refuge until their enemies had gone. The Taupo men did not remain long; they set fire to the village and then made off southward. The Mokoia people, on seeing the burning kainga, manned their war-canoes and came dashing across the lake, and the warriors, pursuing the Ngati-Tuwharetoa, came up with the rearguard and killed several men. But most of the raiders got clear away, and they carried with them as a trophy the infant, Tai-operua, slung in a flax basket on a man’s back; he was a captive of Tamamutu, the leader of the war party.

Tunohopu sorrowed greatly for his lost child. At last he heard that little Tai-operua was alive and was well treated by Tamamutu at his Taupo home. The father resolved to recover the boy. To have raised a war-party and marched down to the country of Ngati-Tuwharetoa would have pleased him well, but he doubted if that would assist him to regain his child. So, in the year following the raid on Kawaha, Tunohopu set off for Taupo, all alone.

After a journey of more than sixty miles, the father reached the place where Tamamutu’s village stood and cautiously reconnoitred it. Outside the fence of the pa he saw a small boy and asked him, “Where is Tamamutu’s house?” The boy directed him to a large carved building in the centre of the village. Tunohopu boldly walked into the village, unnoticed, and, without hesitation, entered the house occupied by the chief. It was walking into the lion’s den, for the two tribes were still enemies.

Tamamutu, intensely surprised, and marvelling at his foeman’s audacity in venturing alone into the midst of his adversaries, greeted his visitor with the ceremonious politeness of the Maori rangatira. Tunohopu told him why he had journeyed there from Rotorua; he longed for his captive son and had come to recover him or die.

“You shall have your child,” said Tamamutu. “But first the tribe must see you and know all about it.”

It was near evening, and Tamamutu said he would presently announce Tunohopu’s presence to the tribe. “And now,” he said, “you must adorn yourself, and attire yourself in fine garments and throw aside those worn pueru which you wore on your long journey from Rotorua, for I wish you to look noble and chieftain-like before your enemies.”

So Tunohopu laid aside his tattered flax mats, and dressed and oiled his hair and fastened it with a bone heru or comb in the ancient fashion, and in it he placed plumes of the huia bird, the badge of chieftainship, and he girded himself with a finely woven soft flax kilt, and over his shoulders he put a long ornamental bordered black-tasselled cloak of the same material, presented to him by Tamamutu. And then, at his host’s request, he stood at the doorway of the house, looking out on the marae, with his taiaha or spear-staff in his hand.

The Waiteti is one of those dew-clear little rivers that spring up like fountains from deep springs under the ferny hills around Rotorua and flow in smooth, shiny twistings to feed the sky-blue lake. Above its mouth, where the weeping-willows fringe a pumice-sand shore, are the grassy ramparts of an ancient fortress of the Arawa people, the old pa Weriweri. On this green hill-face, within the lines of the stronghold, Matehaere and his wife and family had their home, on the very spot where their ancestral hero Ihenga built his fort five hundred years ago. There are not many places in New Zealand so saturated with legend as this campground of the brown immigrants from the far-away Eastern Pacific. The trench on the west side of the pa is, even to-day, after the lapse of five centuries, ten feet deep; the escarpment on the south flank, where Maori spades assisted Nature, is thirty feet high, and in olden times a stout stockade crowned the walls.

From Weriweri pa Matehaere and I made a pilgrimage one day up the valley of the Waiteti to a curious little valley of tapu, in the heart of the hills. We were following the footsteps of the old wise man’s long-gone forefathers. We passed through beautifully sheltered glens and dells that had held hamlets in other days; now all were deserted, gone back to the wild of fern. Maori tracks twisted in and out all over the lovely country, through the high fern and the bushes of glossy green tupakihi, with its black clusters of elderberry-like fruit, and the thickets of manuka, that in springtime are showered with delicate white blossom, till they look as if a snowfall had powdered the face of the country, and diffuse an aromatic fragrance, the most insistent of the grateful odours of the bush.

The Waiteti wound through these silent hills like a band of silver. It is an incredibly tempting sight for the angler in these parts to stand on the river-bank just above some still, clear pool alive with beautiful fish— particularly if it be just before the fishing season opens. In the spawning season the upper parts of the stream are full of the big rainbow trout; you will see them lying there on the bottom in the sun-warmed reaches, as still as so many rocks, until, perhaps, you are tempted to drop a stone into the stream for the fun of seeing them scatter, like a shoal of mullet before a shark.

Walking up this quiet valley we saw the old homes of Matehaere’s clan, where generations ago burned their home-fires, where their thatched huts dotted the river-banks, and human voices livened the now desolate places. Two miles up the valley from the point at which the stream intersected the main road, we came to a place where the little river took the character of a mountain-stream, and ran in rapids excitedly, whitening itself in cataracts and spray. On either side the banks were clothed with fern and flax, and here and there with groves of the cabbage-tree, from which the river took its name. On a ferny knoll, where we had a good view of the stream, bending round in an arc below, and sending its water-music far through the still summer-day air, the old soldier of the Arawa halted and said:

“Let us rest here awhile, and I will show you the sacred place of my ancestor Ihenga.”

Across the valley there was an unusually large ti palm, or whanake, as it is more often called here, growing on a tiny flat on the opposite bank of the stream, the right. It was a monster of the cordyline tribe, a palm with a trunk of remarkable height and an immense bunchy head.

“See yonder whanake tree,” he said, “and the smaller trees that grow around it, in a clump? That spot is called Te Motu-tapu-a-Ihenga (The Sacred Grove of Ihenga). It was close by there that Ihenga once had his dwelling-place, and in that grove of trees was his sacred place, where he, as an ariki and priest of his tribe, retired to invoke the gods and to work divinements. That great whanake is said to have been planted there by the hand of man; this our people frequently did, because the tree was pleasant to the eye, and a rough garment was made from its long leaves. That tree is tapu, because of Ihenga, and also because the place was used as a burial place by Ihenga’s descendants.”

Then, turning to the right, Matehaere pointed down into a little valley that dipped abruptly at our feet, a palm-dotted dell, through which a tiny stream crept down and searched its way to the Waiteti. The valley was shaped like a shallow cup; one side opened to allow the creeklet to reach the river. That little stream, said the old man, was the sacred river Wai-oro-toki. On the opposite side rose a steep fern-covered hill. Its name was Te Whakaeke-tahuna; it was the first fortified hold which Ihenga built in this Lakeland, and was occupied by him before he lived at Weriweri and made his waterside fortress there.

“Now, friend,” said Matehaere, “Ihenga the chief had three treasures. One was his god Utupawa, a stone carved in the semblance of a human being; it was brought to this country from Hawaiki. Hither Ihenga brought his god, and he sought for it a resting-place, and he set it up on yon ferny hill above the Waiteti, not far away from his home. His second treasure was his mokai, or pet, called Kataore, which was a creature in the form of a taniwha or huge lizard. He fed and cherished this strange creature, and it lived in a fountain-well, which you will see in the bed of the Waiteti. Long afterwards it became a man-eating monster, and it was killed at Lake Tikitapu. And his third treasure was the sacred rubbing-stone, Hine-tua-hoanga, which I will show you lying by the brink of that very tapu stream in the valley below us. And Ihenga’s friends and neighbours here were the fairies, the Patupaiarehe. They belonged to the fairy tribe of Mount Ngongotaha. But now let us go down into the valley and look upon the sacred waters and the hoanga stone of power.”

The old man led the way down through a tangle of shrubbery to the bottom of the little cup-valley, till we reached the Wai-oro-toki. The name means “Axe-sharpening Water.” It was a rivulet of coolest, clearest water that welled up from a little gushing fountain spring under the side of the hill, where a thicket of native shrubs almost hid it from view, and invested it with a mystery and gloom that, to the Maori, heightened its mana-tapu. Tall whanake gently swished their long sword-leaves, and now and then a soft air stirred the grey and dried dead leaves that drooped in bunches below the crown of green. The stream, only a few feet wide, but deep and still, flowed very silently, just moving the cresses and water-weeds that fringed it; it was so clear that you could see every stone and pebble on its sandy floor. It was a slumbrous spot; and old Matehaere, as he stood on the bank, seemed half-afraid to break the supernatural quiet of the sacred valley.

“No Maori will drink of this stream,” said he, after a while. “Its waters are tapu, for two reasons. One is that the sacred bones of Whakaue, one of our great ancestors, from whom the Ngati-Whakaue tribe takes its name, were buried in its source, dropped down into the puna, the river-well there under the hill. The other reason is that the very sacred axe-rubbing stone, Hine-tua-hoanga, lies by the river brink. It is death to drink of this water, though it looks so clear. The tapu would kill any Maori. Once two men drank of it unwitting of its history, and they quickly died when they discovered what they had done. And see, yonder is the axe-sharpening stone of our ancestor Ihenga. You are the first pakeha to look upon it.”

I examined the tapu relic. It was a flat block of grey stone, apparently a kind of sandstone, about three feet in diameter, lying on the creek edge, half in and half out of the water. In its smoothly-polished upper surface were three deep grooves, worn by generation after generation of men in their work of orooro-toki or axe-rubbing. It was a whetstone, used by the natives of the stone age for the polishing and sharpening of their axes, adzes and chisels. Many such whetstones or hoanga were in use, but this one is regarded by the Maori as exceptional, because of its antiquity, and because many generations of high chiefs and priests had used it for the polishing and sharpening of their stone weapons. Said Matehaere, as he stood at a safe distance from Hine-tua-hoanga:

“My forefathers, it is said, brought that axe-sharpening stone hither in the canoe Arawa from the distant island of Hawaiki, away in the land where they say it is always summer. What though it be very heavy, as you say? The explanation is easy; it was very light when first it was brought to this place, but through continual resting here, and through the tapu, it has become heavy! It bears a name of wonderful mana, for Hine-tua-hoanga, the Woman of the Whetstone, was a goddess of our remote ancestors; she was a stone, and it was upon her sacred back that the gods and our great ancestors ground sharp the edges of their stone axes. And we have a very ancient and sacred chant which is used when sharpening axes in this way; it was first used for the sharpening of the stone tools with which the trees were felled in Hawaiki for the building of the canoe Arawa to bring my ancestors across the Great-Ocean-of-Kiwa to this country. Let us climb to the hill above and there I shall recite the karakia.”

We crossed the sacred brook—the Maori evidently consider the tapu is well diluted when its waters mingle with the main river, for the Waiteti is under no ban as to drinking—and breasted our way up through the manuka and fern to the clear hillside above. And there, beside the fern-covered earthworks of the ancient pa Whakaeke-tahuna, Matehaere, last chief of Ngati-Ihenga, recited his strange old chant, for this most tapu relic of stone-age man. The karakia dates back at least six centuries; it was composed in Hawaiki and recited by the priests over the stone axes; every step in the process of felling the forest trees and working the timber was sanctified by the Polynesians with appropriate ritual, for the propitiation of the spirits of the forest of which Tane was the father and the guardian.

This was Matehaere’s chant for the sacred stone of the Wai-oro-toki:

[Translation.]

There is no road, no way to the far South Land, save by the will of the gods, save by thee, O Whakarewa-in-the-Sky, our guide to the distant places. Hither thou didst bring Poutini and Wharaua, axes made of the sacred greenstone; brought them o’er the ocean far. There, in that distant land, we’ll see, flashing and shining in the waters, the sacred treasure-stone of Tangaroa; the lightning-flashing stone, the bright and glistening stone. Banished be the tapu’s spell! I place the sacred stone on Hine-tua-hoanga, the goddess of the whetstone, that the

axe-blade may be sharp to fell the great totara tree. Come, ancestral shades! Come hither, ancient spirits, spirits of the distant places! Come sharpen me my stone axe-blade to hew me down the woods of Tane, to make fly the chips of Tu-kehu, the son of Mumuwhango, the forest child for whom we sought, to cross the flowing waters.

This ancient rune requires an explanatory note or two Tangaroa is the god of the ocean, and of fish and all other creatures of the sea. The greenstone is spoken of as “the sacred stone of Tangaroa” because it was in Maori legend originally a fish, turned to stone by some magical power. Tukehu is a name for the totara pine which in Maori mythology was the offspring of Mumuwhango, who was one of the wives of Tane-Mahuta, the creator and guardian of the forests, and of all that dwell therein. Tane is often used in Maori song as an emblematical term for a canoe; “the narrow path by which the ocean is crossed” is a canoe made from Tane’s forest-child. Our totara pine does not grow in the South Sea Islands; the word totara may have been an ancient name for some Hawaikian tree of another kind, such as the tamanu, one of the best of the South Sea timbers, or else it has been introduced into the karakia since the Maori came to New Zealand. As for the axe-sharpening stone, it is a block of the ordinary grey stone of the district, notwithstanding Matehaere’s picturesque account of its transportation from the South Sea Isles.

Human nature is the same through all the ages, and a cannibal warrior named Kotiora, who lived in his stockaded village on the shores of Lake Rotoehu, one hundred and fifty years ago, was in essentials no better and no worse than some evil-tempered pakeha bullies whose ways are revealed to us now and again through the medium of the Magistrate’s Court reports.

Kotiora was the overlord of the Rotoehu shores. His spear and mere held sway from Lake Rotoiti on the one side, to Rotoma on the other; and you may see the spot where his fortress stood on the lakeside cliff—if you know where to look—as you motor along the bush road from Rotorua towards Te Teko and Whakatane.

It so befell one day that Kotiora bethought him of an old feud he had with the people who lived on the shores of Rotoiti. He sallied forth with a war-party and scouted up along the wooded cliffs of the most beautiful of lakes until he neared the island-like peninsula Tumoana. With allies from Rotorua, he attacked the fortified village there. The pa was captured, and there was a fearful slaughter. Kotiora returned with much “long pig” for commissariat, and with a great prize in the shapely form of a handsome young woman. This girl, whose name was Te Aoniwaho, he took to wife.

The captive wife dwelt there many moons, at Rotoehu, with her husband, but she was by no means resigned to her fate. Kotiora taunted her more than once with her origin, and bragged of having eaten her relatives. This did not tend to happiness in the whare, and poor Aoniwaho wept many a bitter tear.

The climax of woe for the wahine came one morning when Kotiora was in a surly mood. He ordered his wife to cook him a meal of whitebait, the little inanga, which swarmed in all those lakes before the pakeha trout was introduced.

Aoniwaho prepared her earth-oven, the haangi, and set a flax basket of whitebait therein for the process of steam-cooking. But everything went wrong that morning. When the young wife uncovered the oven, the inanga was not cooked. Some one, perhaps, had put the evil eye on it.

Kotiora shouted from the front of his whare: “Bring me my food.”

“It is not yet cooked,” said Aoniwaho. “I have put it in the haangi again.”

“Bring me my food,” roared the bully. “I am hungry, I say. Bring me the inanga.”

Motiti Island, the Flat Island of the New Zealand coastwise sailor, lies in the soft blue waters of the Bay of Plenty, eight miles from the coast. It resembles, from a distance, a low, bare table. “Motiti Wahie-Kore” (“Motiti-where-there-is-no-firewood”) it was called of old. Now there are three groves and there are large cultivations, a pakeha farm, as well as Maori fields and gardens; there are rich crops of maize, and fat cattle are raised for the Auckland market. Coasting scows call at the fertile island to load produce and stock. That is Motiti to-day. This is a saga of the far-away past, when bare Motiti wore a very different face, more than five hundred years ago.

* * *

Ngatoro-i-rangi, the high priest of the Arawa, a very aged man, lived in his small palisaded village, with a party of his people, on Matarehua, a cliffy point of Motiti. There he dwelt with his old wife and a few tribesfolk; looking out over the great ocean which he had sailed long before, the tohunga of the Arawa. He gazed out with day-long patience over the heaving sea, scanning the northern quadrant of the horizon for a sail rising over the blue like a seabird’s wing.

* * *

This is the story of Ngatoro-i-rangi’s feud with Manaia, a feud that was Pacific-wide; a truly wonderful story of Polynesian long-sailing voyages, in the days when the ancestors of our Maori were the most skilful and daring sailors in the world. It is the tale of a thoughtless curse and all the trouble it caused. My narrators were two high chiefs of Arawa descent, the late Te Heuheu Tukino, of Taupo, and his venerable uncle, Tokena Kerehi, both of them direct descendants of Ngatoro-i-rangi.

Kuiwai, one of Ngatoro’s sisters—one of the two to whom he addressed his cry in his dire need, when he was all but perishing of cold on Tongariro mountain—was the wife of a chief named Manaia, in the distant Hawaiki—either Tahiti or Raiatea, in the Society Islands. There she and her husband and her sister Haungaroa remained when the Arawa and other canoes sailed for New Zealand. And trouble befell her one day because of an old, old trouble not peculiar to the Maori—bad cookery.

Kuiwai was cooking food for a feast, and when the earth ovens were opened her share of the kai was found to be underdone. Whereupon her incensed husband gave her a thrashing, and cursed her soundly as well with horrid Maori curses, which have a potency and vigour all their own. He compared the logs of firewood to the bones of her brother, Ngatoro-i-rangi, and vowed that if ever she cooked so badly again he would roast her brother’s flesh on the hot stones of the ovens.

It seemed a safe threat, for by this time Ngatoro’ was two thousand miles away over the ocean. But Kuiwai took her punishment and her cursing very much to heart. And she (another Maori said it was her daughter, who bore the same name) and Haungaroa crossed the great ocean by some supernatural means (that is to say, the name of their canoe is forgotten) and came to New Zealand, and travelled a long way, until at last they found Ngatoro-i-rangi. To him they told the story of the cursing.

Ngatoro’, in his anger, called down the vengeance of the gods on Manaia, and, moreover, he gave orders that a war party should go to Hawaiki and exact utu (revenge) for the kanga, the oven curse, a very frightful one to the Polynesian mind.

Accordingly, the men prepared for their ocean voyage. They made a new canoe from a totara tree which they had found lying fallen, partly buried in the earth, near the pa at Maketu, and in this canoe (called Totara-Keria) they sailed all the way back across the vast Pacific to Hawaiki. There, by stratagem, they defeated Manaia’s people and captured their fortress, and avenged Ngatoro’s grievance to their satisfaction, and then they sailed back to New Zealand.

Manaia himself had escaped from the slaughter, and he now set about continuing the vendetta, even across those countless leagues of ocean. He equipped a fleet of canoes, and, with a large body of sea warriors, set sail for New Zealand.

Ngatoro’, now a very old man, was living with his followers on Motiti; most of the tribe lived on the mainland at Maketu. At last Manaia and his canoe fleet hove in sight. The Island ships sailed down on the island before the north-east breeze, and rounded the point at Matarehua. Ngatoro’, when they had come close in shore, was challenged by his brother-in-law, Manaia, to “come down and fight.” But the wise old man cried in reply: “Anchor off the shore for the night, because it is now nearly dark; it is perfectly calm; and we shall fight in the morning.”

This the seafarers did, dropping their stone anchors in the quiet water near the white sands of Motiti.

Then the wizard of Motiti set to work. He betook him to his prayers, and he recited his most powerful karakia to Tawhiri-matea, the god of storms, and to the gods of thunder and lightning; to all his atua of sea and land and air. And in the black midnight, when Manaia’s weary sailor- warriorssailor-warriors lay asleep in their canoes, the storm burst forth—a fearful storm, with a hurricane of wind and rain, and dreadful lightning. And in that midnight hurricane, with its terrible surf, the canoe-fleet was utterly destroyed.

Next morning the old ariki and his people went forth to see what had befallen their foes. All, all had perished! Not one escaped. Manaia’s body they found on the sands; of the others many had been partly eaten by the sharks and the barracouta and other fish, so that the remains lay upon the sands in variously mutilated shapes. Some had one side of the face eaten away, some had hands and feet bitten off, and others lay there with their tongues lolling grotesquely out of their sand-filled mouths. And when the Maketu people came paddling and sailing across—in response to a signal fire kindled by Ngatoro-i-rangi—they were so amused at the appearance of these distorted corpses that their wood-carving artists perpetuated the memory of Manaia’s rout by imitating the attitudes of the dead in their carved figures. So it came that the Arawa—the fathers of artistic wood-carving in New Zealand—carved images and effigies with out-lolling tongues and grotesque and variously distorted shapes, with heads on one side. When you behold some of the more grotesque figures on the carved houses of the Maori, know that in this way is memorised the miraculous avengement of Manaia’s curse. And Manaia himself—his body, the people saw, was wonderfully carved, beautifully adorned from head to foot in scrolls and bars and all manner of handsome designs; some of these are preserved to-day in our wood-carving patterns.

* * *

“Ha!” said Tokena the tattooed—an old man indeed, for he had fought in the long-ago cannibal wars—”that was a good story! Truly Ngatoro’, our priestly ancestor, was a god in himself! Little have I to say as a tail to my mokopuna Heuheu’s narrative; only this: Ngatoro-i-rangi died in New Zealand—I have heard of Motiti. But he had a younger brother called Tangihia, who sailed away from these shores for Hawaiki, and we never heard of him again. Perhaps he reached that distant isle of perpetual summer; perhaps he perished in the vast ocean. Who can say? But when he sailed from Maketu, he left a wife there, and she was at that time with child. When the canoe sailed out into the ocean, the wife climbed to the top of a hill and there she watched her husband’s canoe-sails fade out of sight, and as she watched she bitterly lamented, and wept many tears and chanted sad songs of sorrow. Presently her child, a boy, was born, and to commemorate the last hill-top view and her great sorrow, she gave him the name of Tangi-moana, meaning ‘Ocean-Weeping.’ And that man, Tangi-moana, was one of our ancestors.”

Huge earthworks, scarped, trenched and terraced, crown the steep hill above the giant pohutukawa trees on the Powewe beach on Kawhia Harbour, a castle carved out of the mount by the vanished people. When I first explored those great earthworks many a year ago and tried to plot out the fortification scheme the deserted pa was in almost perfect condition, except for the disappearance of the palisades, which defended the successive terraces. On one of the broad terraces directly above the Maori village on the beach, a pioneer pakeha trader had built his house, and a beautifully snug little home it was, with its fruit trees and its flowers sheltered from the ocean winds by the hill scarp behind it.

The story of this hill-pa, called Motu-Ngaio, goes back centuries before ever a pakeha sail appeared off Kawhia Heads, and this is an incident of its history, gathered in a rather curious way. Down at Porou-tawhao, in the Manawatu country—it is a little settlement in the reclaimed flax swamps between Levin and Foxton—there lived a big, very tall, black-bearded man of the Ngati-Toa tribe, by name Tatana Whata-upoko. It was said of him that he closely resembled in burly figure and great physical strength his famous warrior kinsman Te Rangihaeata. Tatana now lies close by Rangihaeata, on the tapu burial hill above his old home. From him I heard many stories of Ngati-Toa’s conquest of the Manawatu-Horowhenua country, under Rauparaha, and a question about the origin of his conjecture-provoking name brought far-away Motu-Ngaio pa into the picture. A pakeha-Maori combination, like many a Maori name, Tatana was the Maori form of Turton, a pioneer missionary and Government official family of the early days. Whata-upoko means Stage of Heads—that is, an elevated platform on which the heads of the slain were of old set up for the public gaze. And this is the tale of the five tattooed heads of Motu-Ngaio.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Tatana narrated, Motu-Ngaio, the great fortress of Kawhia, was held by Ngati-Toa, and their kin. A day came when all the able-bodied men and many of the women of the pa launched their canoes, and crossed the harbour to Rakaunui and Waiharakeke, on the south side of Kawhia, to attend to their crops of kumara. Besides the women and children in the hill stockade, there were five old men. Two of these were high chiefs, Tuhaha and Kimihia.

The Ngati-Toa had been at war with the Waikato tribes, over the ranges, but peace had come, and the tribe of warriors toiled happily in their food patches, all unsuspicious of danger. But their departure from the great fort had been watched by savage eyes in the bush at the head of the harbour. Scouts from the bush cautiously reconnoitred the pa and found it all but defenceless. It was a war-party of Waikato that lay in secret there, awaiting the report of the scouts. A warrior with the high-sounding name of Te Aho-o-te-Rangi led the army.

“The fort lies open to us,” said the scouts. “There are but a few old men and some women and children. We lay in the ditch outside the big house, and we heard them talking and singing, and the children crying, and the mothers scolding and soothing them.”

To Aho gave the order to march. Under cover of night, the warparty silently surrounded the pa, listened a while, and then stole up to the topmost terrace and, with a horrible battle-yell, burst in with patu, stone axe, and spear. It was easy work. Tuhaha and Kimihia and the other old men were killed; the women and children were made captive.

The dead chiefs were decapitated and the five tattooed heads, hastily smoke-dried, were set up on a whata, or staging, just outside the pa. Before the trophies Te Aho-o-te-Rangi paraded, bragging of his victory, deriding the dead, taunting the weeping women, who would be led away as concubines and slaves to the Waikato.

The bodies of the dead were the warriors’ feast, and the women and girls were portioned out among the warriors as slave wives. In the way of armies from time immemorial, women in old Maoridom were the most prized of all booty.

Next evening, the war-party set out on its return march, by way of Aotea, on the north. Te Aho-o-te-Rangi refrained from setting fire to the captured village, lest the absent Ngati-Toa should come paddling furiously after them.

Under the blanket of night, as before, they marched along the waterside and toward the eastern hills of Aotea. Their prisoners bore on their backs the loot of the captured fort.

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That night’s march was short. The war-party halted a short distance from Kawhia’s head waters; the prisoners served their masters with food. The lustful men of Waikato, each with a woman in his embrace, enjoyed the choicest spoils of war.

In the dead of night, when the sated warriors all slept, a young woman of Ngati-Toa heard a strange low voice in the bivouac close by her. She listened intently; she rose noiselessly; she knew it must be what she had hoped for desperately, a scout of her people.

“Be cautious,” said the man, “make no noise. You will be saved.”

As you come out of the fragrant twilight bush on the southern side of the Ponanga ridge, where the short-cut track goes from Lake Taupo’s shore to the mountains of the Tongariro National Park, you have before you as fair a picture of unspoiled beauty as this island has to show. There lies the calm, soft-blue lake called Roto-a-Ira, rounded of outline, dreamy as a lake of fairyland. Its surface is seldom ruffled, except for the fanlike wake left by the black swans as they sail about its glimmering surface. It is nearly always calm at Roto-a-Ira. The great hills have it in their keeping and Lady Pihanga and her companion mountains look down on their unmoving blue and green shadow pictures the livelong day.

A long low peninsula, terminating in a green mound of a hill, projects into the lake on its north-western side. This island-like peninsula, a wooded place of silence and tapu—it is a tribal burial ground—was once a populous home of the Maori. Its name is Motu-o-Puhi, or literally, Isle of the Virgin. Puhi is often a personal name but the story is that the island was so named because of its security as a fortress isle, a maidenrefuge camp unconquered. On one memorable occasion, however, fire and slaughter overran the Virgin Isle, and Taupo took grim revenge on the invaders, a cannibal band from the North.

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It was a hundred years ago, according to the old men of Tokaanu, that a war-party of the Ngati-Maru tribe from the Lower Waihou (Thames) and the Hauraki shores, marched down to the South Taupo country. The intention of this taua, which consisted of a hundred and forty men—the favourite number for a swift-moving expedition—was to deal a deadly blow at the power of Ngati-Tuwharetoa, the Taupo tribe, who had not hitherto been attacked successfully by any outside tribe, and who had always been able to retain their territory, though surrounded by warlike neighbours. The proud boasts of the very independent Taupo folk had, in fact, been taken as a challenge by Ngati-Maru, though in their distant Hauraki and Thames homes, more than a hundred miles away, they had no friction with Ngati-Tuwharetoa, and no excuse for a proclamation of war. But the invaders did not proclaim their intentions; their only chance of success was to resort to treachery, to take Taupo unawares.

Now, Ngati-Maru had become possessed of firearms, the new and wonderful weapon of the pakeha, while Ngati-Tuwharetoa, by reason of their isolation and their distance from the sea-coast, had not yet been able to obtain any. Ngati-Maru, a few years before this period, and before they procured muskets from the traders, had been given a fearful lesson in military unpreparedness, when Hongi Hika and his conquering Ngapuhi had descended upon them and captured many forts and villages, and had slain hundreds upon hundreds of people and carried away hundreds more into captivity. The Hauraki people never rested after that until every warrior had been able to procure by barter a gun, and powder and lead for it. Now they must try their weapons on some tribe less well armed, and the Taupo people were an inviting, unsuspecting target.

The Hauraki warriors (who were accompanied by several women of rangatira rank) marched through the Patetere forests and down across the plains and over the ranges to the west side of Lake Taupo, passing through the territory of the Ngati-Raukawa tribe. These people, although closely allied by blood with Te Heuheu’s tribe, were persuaded by some of their chiefs to ally themselves with Ngati-Maru. They led the way on the march through country to which the Northerners were strangers, and gave information as to the strength of the various fortified villages in South Taupo.

On the advice of the Ngati-Raukawa leaders, the Ngati-Maru chiefs sent forward messengers, declaring that they were visiting Taupo in a friendly manner, as kinsmen of Te Heuheu—the ancestors of all three tribes had come to New Zealand in the same canoe, the Tainui—and that they were carrying arms, not for the purpose of attacking Taupo, but for making war upon the Hawke’s Bay and Wairarapa tribes, who were the hereditary foes of Ngati-Tuwharetoa. They therefore asked Te Heuheu for a promise of safe conduct through his land.

So the Taupo clans living on the west side of the lake offered no opposition to the march of the Ngati-Maru musketeers, and actually assisted them with canoes to cross the lake to Waitahanui, the great palisaded pa a little to the north of the Tongariro River mouth. On arrival there the war-party was received with the customary dances and speeches of welcome, and with the usual rites of hospitality accorded to friends and relations. In their speeches, the Ngati-Maru leaders reiterated the assurances given by the heralds, that they were on their way to the East Coast to attack the Ngati-Kahungunu people. They made avowals of peace and goodwill, and as a pledge of their friendship, they would, they told Te Heuheu, leave with him four of their women—the chieftainesses who accompanied them—to hold as hostages until they returned from their war excursion.

Te Heuheu and his tribe gave Ngati-Maru of their best, treated them as honoured guests and kinsfolk. After several days’ halt at Waitahanui, the warriors continued their march. As they were near the south end of the lake, they would naturally take the Rangipo track towards Waiouru, thence the trail through the Murimotu country. That was the belief of their hosts.

But Ngati-Maru, as soon as they had rounded the base of the Pihanga range, dropped all guise of friendship. They turned in by the south short of Roto-a-Ira, towards Tongariro, and marched along it (parallel with the present motor road) for about four miles until they came to a small village called Mapouriki. Here they surprised the inhabitants and slaughtered them, among them an old chieftainess named Te Maari (whose memory is preserved to-day in the name of the craters and hot springs on the north side of Tongariro Mountain). Their objective was the large village on Motu-o-Puhi, where the chief Te Wharerangi lived with his hapu. This place had been described to them fully by their Ngati-Raukawa allies, and they were desperately bent on capturing it.

Te Wharerangi was the son of Te Maari, the woman killed at Mapouriki. (His son Matuahu, who escaped the Ngati-Maru weapons, was living at Taupo forty years ago; he married the youngest daughter of Te Heuheu Tukino.)

Now, Te Wharerangi, so soon to meet a fearful fate, had been warned by Te Heuheu some time before this not to trust to his semi-island village at Motu-o-Puhi as a defence against Waikato and Ngati-Maru. The paramount chief of Taupo had heard that such attacks were contemplated; it was only the treacherous alliance of Ngati-Raukawa with Ngati-Maru, and the repeated avowals of friendship, that had lulled his suspicions. When the chief of Motu-o-Puhi was thus warned by his kinsman, he was disinclined to take the advice to leave his Roto-a-Ira home and join forces with Te Heuheu at Waitahanui. Te Wharerangi declared that he could defend himself, whereupon Te Heuheu told him that if he were so small-minded, because of jealousy or false pride, as to refuse his protection, he deserved to perish with all his hapu.

“What you have said is true,” Te Wharerangi admitted; “nevertheless Motu-o-Puhi is my own pa. If my neck is to be twisted, let it be in my own home.” So saying, he returned to his lake village at Roto-a-Ira.

On the most beautiful part of the east coast of the South Island, in a district where the curving bays and rocky headlands and warm blue seas have reminded European travellers of the Riviera, there is a green hilly peninsula crowned with the crumbling ruins of an ancient fortification famed in the word-of-mouth history of the Ngai-Tahu people. This is a projection of the Otago coastline just to the south of the Wai-kouaiti (properly Waikawa-iti) harbour or river-mouth, a peninsula usually called Karitane, but the original name of which is Huriawa. Near by, on the gentle slopes and levels richly grassed that go down to the sea, are the small farms of Maori folk; here are the Karitane and Puketiraki settlements, the headquarters of the Ngai-Te Ruahikihiki and Ngati-Huirapa sections of the Ngai-Tahu tribe.

Here on the slopes and knolls of Huriawa once stood the fortified town of Te Wera, a chief whose exploits in war are the theme of many a South New Zealand tradition. He was born some two hundred years ago; the events here described occurred probably about the time Captain Cook was exploring and charting these unknown coasts in 1770.

Te Wera, who was the warrior head of the Ngai-Te-Ruahikihiki and kindred clans, had a nephew named Taoka, who lived further to the South. Taoka, ambitious and quarrelsome, raised a feud against his uncle—the original také or cause was some trivial grievance—and he organised a large force, sailed up the coast and laid siege to Huriawa Pa.

When Taoka’s army arrived in their war-canoes (some came from Timaru and elsewhere northward as well as from Otago Heads) and invested the parapeted and palisaded hill-fort, they found the garrison fully prepared for them. In anticipation of attack, Te Wera had laid in a great stock of food, sufficient, it is said, to last his followers for nearly a year. Preserved birds (pigeon, kaka, weka), fern-root, and dried fish were the principal articles of food. The place was rich in kai-mataitai, the food of the salt sea, which includes mussels, pipi and edible seaweeds, as well as moki, hapuku and other fish which teemed in the surrounding waters, and even during the siege the people were able to go out on fishing expeditions under the shelter of the southern and south-eastern shores. The garrison must have been a large one in order to have held the great pa so successfully. The defences were of unusual strength for a South Island pa, which seldom displayed such a formidable array of parapets and terraces as those of the North. When I saw them first some thirty years ago the maioro, or scarped walls of the pa, were still well preserved, particularly on the eastern side facing Puketiraki, where the Maori engineers had taken skilful advantage of the steep fall of the land towards the sandy isthmus.

The main entrance to the pa, the inland gateway, was called “Te Kutu (Ngutu) a Toretore” (“The Lips of Toretore”). Taoka’s army pitched their camps on the long island-sandspit called Ohinepouweru, just to the north of the pa. Here they lived for many months, also occupying at times portions of the mainland. One camp was the cultivation ground at the Taumata-o-Puaka terrace, above the beach at the head of the harbour; an other was Tauraka-a-waka (The Landing Place of Canoes), near the present Merton Railway Station. Sometimes assaults were led against the great fort; these were always repulsed. Sometimes the attacking force cut off stragglers from the pa; these went into the cooking haangi.

The weak point of many Maori pas was their deficient water supply. The defenders exercised the utmost labour and ingenuity in building up massive defences, but were often very quickly reduced to sore straits for water, having no supply beyond that they were able to store up in canoes and calabashes. Huriawa, however, was well provided in this respect, for there was a small but always flowing spring in a dimpled hillside on the northern side of the peninsula. This spring is still to be seen, trickling out from the grass and rushes in its little green nook. Long after Te Wera’s day it was the water supply for Tamé Parata’s nearby whaling station—his crews chased the “right” whale. The little spring to this day is called Te Puna-wai a Te Wera (Te Wera’s Well). A trench or covered way led to it from the village above, so that the water-carriers might not be observed by the enemy. A short distance eastwards, further along the northern side of the peninsula, is a little horseshoe shaped, rocky bay called Te Awamo-kihi (Raft Cove). This baylet faces the opposite head of Waikouaiti Bay (Cornish Head, or North Head, Okuraero), and well commands the entrance to the harbour. Here Te Wera kept his canoes, the larger ones housed in reed-thatched sheds. This well-sheltered bay, its waters beautifully clear, was a famous place for pawa shellfish.

Close by is a cliff face called Maukoroa, where the Huriwai people obtained horu, or red ochre, which was mixed with the oil expressed from the shark’s liver and used as a paint to decorate their canoes and their carved posts and houses, and themselves.

The siege continued for six months. One strange and dramatic episode relieved the long-drawn, wearying investment. It is a story in which authentic tradition is given a touch of the supernatural.

Taupo Moana lay spread out before us, a smooth plate of blue and turquoise and pawa-shell pearly glimmer, in its mid-afternoon siesta. Fifty miles away Ruapehu’s snows glittered and flashed like a helio; just a slender curl of dark vapour rested on Ngauruhoe’s steep cone to remind us that Ruaimoko, the volcano god, was not dead, but fitfully slumbering. In the far reaches under Motutaiko Island and Karangahape heights the lake was dark blue in hue, almost the cobalt of deep ocean. Calm Moana, soft, calm sky, soft wash of smoke grey over wooded ranges. Blue and grey and pearl; the white pumice cliffs of Kai-Miromiro and Kowhai-a-Taku glistening like snow in the water-mirror; peace and sunshine and bird-song on the ancient shore.

Paora Rokino and Tamati Kurupae, old-timers of Taupo, talked of scenes and episodes of the past that summer day when we took it easy under the trees on the pumice-cliff top at Nukuhau, where the Waikato goes out of the lake in a greenstone-hued strong current. Out on the lake there were here and there motor-launches and a dinghy, with their fishermen. A long Maori canoe from the Tapuwae-haruru beachside opposite was slowly moving, paddled by two girls. The waka seemed uplifted; it looked to float in air above the glass-smooth water, an effect of refraction often seen on these lakes in calm weather when the flooding sunshine steeps land and water.

Tamati told of the big war-canoes and the fishing flotillas of other days, and talk turned to swimming exploits. And there it was that I heard the story of Rau-whato’s great swim across the wide bight of the lake in front of us. Like that famous chieftainess Te-Rau-o-te-rangi, who, a century ago, swam from Kapiti Island to the mainland at Te Uruhi, near Waikanae, to escape her enemies, she bore her little child to safety on her shoulders.

There lived in a stockaded village on this north shore of Lake Taupo, two hundred years ago—Tamati’s story went—a young chief woman whose name was Rau-whato. She was the wife of Turiroa Tuwharetoa—not the great founder of the Ngati-Tuwharetoa tribe of Taupo, but a descendant—and there was one child of the union, an infant boy. Rau-whato was probably about twenty-five years old at this time, a good swimmer, an expert canoe-paddler, and as beautiful as she was strong of frame. This was her second marriage; her first husband, a young warrior, had been killed in battle.

The home of Rau’ and Turiroa, with their little clan, was Poniu Pa, a steep, cliffy mound on the eastern side of Rangatira Point, that hilly peninsula which we saw as we looked south-west across this northern bay of the lake from Taupo township cliff-front. Fern-grown, long deserted, the high maioro, or scarped walls, and the trenches of Poniu fort can still be traced. Not far away, at the headland, there is a lakeside cave, an overhang of rock, at the foot of the cliffs. This, too, is a scene in the story.

Rau and her husband lived happily there in their lakeside home until one black day there came a war-party of Ngati-Raukawa from the Waikato. This was a man-slaying and man-eating expedition, led by the chief Whiti-patato—a name of renown in those parts. Whiti’ was an ancestor of the Paerata family, of Orakau Pa fame.

The leader of the war-party cautiously scouted the place and reconnoitred from the high hill the approaches to the village. His warriors lay in wait behind the hill until darkness came. Then, in the evening, he led them to the surprise attack, and the peaceful village was all in a moment a place of slaughter. The invaders fell like a hurricane on the helpless lakemen, yelling, spearing, clubbing. Most of the men were killed, the women captured; such of the children as were not killed were reserved for captivity.

Rau-whato and her husband escaped from the ravaged village to the beach below, where they took refuge in a shallow cave near the point. This, however, was no place of security; the victors were scouting for them, and Whiti-patato knew of the cave.

Turiroa realised that he would not escape death, but he was determined that his wife and little son should not share his fate. There was no canoe there, and none could be reached by his wife, but he knew how powerful a swimmer she was.

“Wife of mine,” he said, “take you our child and swim to yonder shore, to your mother’s home.” He pointed through the gloom to the opposite shore-line, the eastern coast of the lake.

“You will reach it, for you are strong, and I shall fasten the child on your shoulders.”

Hurriedly the mother’s woven-flax waist-mat was bound upon her shoulders as a thick pad on which the child could rest high and keep its face above the water, and a broad flax belt tied about the boy and under her arms kept him secure.