A Pakeha-Maori Story.

The sawmill down the river and a little coal-mine twenty miles from the Heads were the only breaks in the forest. The coal mine settlement on a shelf of land at Wai-ngarongaro (“Hidden Creek”) was a sylvan place all among its ferns and rata trees. Small steamers used to come up here and load at the staiths that were overhung by tropic-looking korau ferntrees. But the rapids made the upper parts of the river out of navigation bounds for them.

Unusual characters, original types we shall not see again, one met in these semi-primitive corners of New Zealand. At the little coal-mine camp I came across a man of whom I had heard some strange stories. He was an old bushman, with bowed back, deep-sunken furtive eyes and overhanging bushy brows. He had lived for forty years with the Maoris, ever since he deserted from the Colonial forces in the war-time (1865) and took to the page 15 blanket with a native wife. Like that other renegade I knew, Kimble Bent, who ran away from a British regiment after a flogging for offences against discipline, his place in Maoridom was that of a slave; the chief Wetere made him his taurekareka or servant. His name was David Cockburn. The Maoris called him “Rewi” (Davy). He told me something of his bush life. This now lonely waterway was lively enough in his day. He came up the Mokau once with a flotilla of five war-canoes, packed with Maoris of the Ngati-Tama tribe from south of the Mokau, bound for King Tawhiao's great camp at Tokangamutu, where the town of Te Kuiti now stands. The largest of the great carved canoes held forty or fifty men each. Those waka crews cut out the pace with paddle and pole; they went right up from Mokau Heads to Totoro, the head of canoe navigation, in one day. Good going that; forty-five miles and nearly two score rapids to climb. It took us four days of hard work.

The old pakeha-Maori died a few years after I met him, and he was laid beside his chief Wetere on Pukekiwi, that woody hill above the Mokau landing. In death, as in life, he was Wetere's attendant. But when the Maoris removed their chief's bones to the tribal cemetery at Maniaroa they did not trouble to shift the taurekareka Davy's. It wasn't worth while.