The Warrior's Moko.

He had the keen shrewd gaze of the vastly experienced, the wise eye of the sage and the mystic. His face was closely and deeply carved with tattoo lines; the moko was so pigmented that his face seemed almost black. I have never, indeed, seen a Maori face more artistically and carefully and deeply moko'd than that patriarch of Owhatiura. His hair was white and long; he wore a long but thin straggly white beard. Yet for all his years that the snowy hair indicated, his tall square-shouldered body was still erect. He looked the old soldier, without a pound of needless flesh.

When I first met him he was working away quietly and alone in his potato garden; when he straightened up for a talk he told me all the younger ones were away at a football match. He lived in the past. He had long outlived all his old comrades. He told me of great chiefs of the past under whom he had fought in the cannibal wars. He had fought against the celebrated Te Waharoa, when that famed and feared warrior invaded Rotorua with his army from Matamata and Waikato. That was in 1835.

But long before that, even, Te Araki had seen fierce battle. He was a boy of nine or ten when Hongi Hika and his Ngapuhi musketeers descended on Rotorua from the North, bringing their canoes up from the coast with ferocious determination and tremendous toil. That was when Mokoia Island was captured, in 1823. Boys went on their first war-path at twelve or thirteen in Maoridom; and Te Araki's fighting expeditions ranged from the South Taupo country to the Bay of Plenty coast.

The good old man had a curious pagan philosophy of his own, and his stories shed for me some new light on the ethics of the primitive polity.