A Pakeha Voice Again.

When the weary little party reached the junction of the Motupiko and Mapou rivers they caught twenty-five wekas. It was a glad camp that night, a square meal for all hands once more.

Sore-footed, scratched and scarred, and shaggy as an Antarctic explorer, Brunner stumbled into a white man's hut at ten o'clock the next night. It was the shepherd Fraser. He wrote in his diary: “It is a period of nearly 560 days since I wished Fraser good-bye on the bank of the Rotoiti River to my seeing him at his house this evening. I have never during this time heard a word of English since, but the broken gibberish of Kehu and the echo of my own voice and I rather feel astonished to find I can both understand and speak English as well as ever, for, during many wet days, I had never spoken a word of my own language, nor conversed even in Maori, of which I was well tired.”

Brunner expressed himself satisfied of one thing; he had shown that it was possible to live in the bush entirely independent of any food, but that which the country provided. (But it was mighty hard living.) He also had proved it possible for a white man to go without boots for a long period. He had travelled long distances barefooted, or with flax or ti leaf sandals for the rougher places.