“Te Peehi” in his Bush Camps.

It was in January of 1898 that I first met Elsdon Best, spare, sparsewhiskered, hard-faring student of the Maori and lover of the bush life. It was at Ngaputahi, a half-cleared valley a few miles beyond Te Whaiti. His camp was a half-slab, half-canvas whare by the roadside. Burnt logs strewed the clearing; there was a small enclosure with a potato garden surrounding the whare. There the white ruanuku—as he came to be called by the Urewera—lived all alone, visited every now and again by some of the old people of the Ngati-Whare tribe, I was on my way through the country on horseback from Rotorua and the Rangitaiki, bound for Ruatahuna, to see something of the Urewera there; from Mataatua I walked over the ranges to Waikaremoana. After a talk with “Te Peehi,” I went on, and at Ohiramoko, a most secluded little hamlet a couple of miles from Mataatua, I met his great friends, old Paitini te Whatu and his wife, Makurata. Paitini it was who guided me through the bush trails—where often the only way was the river-bed—to the Lake, the first of many such rough journeys through the Urewera ranges. Ohiramoko was Best's headquarters during the years he spent in the Ruatahuna district. Later on he lived at Haukapua above Ruatoki, where the Whakatane River emerges from the mountain gorges.