Up with the Tide.

The first bend shuts off the heads, and we are well into the Mokau, the page 14 young flood-tide helping us along, for the river is tidal for some miles, until the first swift runs are met. The river winds in generous curves round woody hills. We open up long, calm reaches as we dig in our sharpbladed manuka paddles and send our dug-out swirling along the quiet river. The water is brown, just the hue for a perfect mirror. Ranges green and ranges blue rise above the river, all forested to the skyline. Soon the timber grows tall. Rata, rimu, and kahikatea trees, tawhero and tawa, crowd to the river bank; their forks are hung with bunchy astelias and the flax-like leaves of the kiekie. A deserted clearing, an old Maori settlement, here and there, a little break in the woods. The river is amazingly sinuous, a succession of S's; I don't know of a more crooked waterway. But the curves and loops add to the charm of the voyage, though they give us more work—and every bend and reach holds a new beauty.

Here is a silent Maori cultivation and village-site, the old kainga of Oika, gone back to the wilds, overgrown with a thicket of young forest and ferns. Let the traveller come here and see the fern trees, the feathery canopy of the ponga and the korau or mamaku, upheld by lofty, slender pillars, each as graceful as the trunk of a tropical coco-palm. Just round Oika, and we paddle up a long glimmer-glass, walled on either side by a soft wall of foliage that dips in the water, concealing every vestige of earth and rock and swelling up in fold after fold of blue-green forest. Every tree, every fern-frond, is painted on the glassy floor. This indeed is the wai-whakaata. the “looking-glass water” of Maori song. There is a frequent whirr of wings in the air, and the deep flute notes and the liquid chuckles of the Iui come in echoing melody from the deeps of the bush.