page 47

“Lord of Ulva's Isle.”

There is a wonderfully pleasant isle of trees and birds to which Mr. Arthur Traill, old settler of these parts, took me in his whaleboat to see. His brother is the lone-handed habitant. It was a little Eden of a place, with its dense woods and its sweet birds. We landed on a beach of whitest sand between two-tree-crowned points. There was a store there, the whare-hoko where all the native folk of The Neck and thereabouts did their shopping, and there was a little post-office where you could mail a remarkable letter, the leaf of the puharitaiko tree, a senecio. A letter could be written on this thick, leathery, glossy-green leaf and sent off through His Majesty's mails. But this privilege no longer exists, I believe; summer visitors would soon have posted away all the puharitaiko leaves in the island. Ulva is its pakeha name; there is a Scottish flavour about a number of these Stewart islets. Settlers from the far-north Shetland Islands, too, have given names to skerry and voe.

It was a pretty sight that Saturday afternoon, all the native folk sailing in to Traill's island to do their week-end shopping. Sails of all degrees of white and tan flecked the waters of the inlet. They lay over to the piping breeze, some cannily reefed down before they started, in readiness for little squalls that now and again sweep down even on this sheltered sheet of water.

In and out of those coves and bays, cruises of delight, we saw creeks that came stealing in from the recesses of the island, from the long forested slopes of Mount Rakiahua. Away in yonder there are deer for the rifleman, and there was a time when it was a grand place for the man with the shot-gun, but pigeons and kaka and all their kind are now strictly protected; all that up-and-down land, with its perpetual twilight of shade, is a sanctuary for the native birds. The sea is the best hunting ground here. You can catch amazing quantities of blue cod and a dozen other kinds of delicious fish, if you are one of those whose delight is baiting and hauling in lines and getting hooks stuck in your fingers.

Bravo Island, near Glory Cove in Paterson Inlet, is a place with a queer story. It is said that it was so christened by an early settler there, a Cape de Verde Islander, of Portuguese blood, who was one of the crew of a whaleship. He died on the island, and his spirit was supposed to haunt the house he built.

And there are the three rocky mound-islets, all foliaged to water-edge, called Faith, Hope and Charity, and as is proper, the greatest of these is Charity.

(To be continued next month.)