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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 5 (September 1, 1933)

Home to Nelson

Home to Nelson.

Leaving the Maori eel-fishing party, Brunner and his companions explored the Upper Grey and trudged on through the forest and the ranges to the Buller, and gradually worked homeward to Nelson.

The weather became very wet and cold, and the explorer was ill. It was the middle of June when he and the two Maoris who remained with him—Kehu and his wife—at last reached a sheep settler's out-station near Lake Rotoiti and once more tasted food other than the products of the bush.

It was a period of 560 days since he had last seen a pakeha face or spoken to a man of his own race. “I felt rather astonished,” was his last note in his diary, “to find that I could both understand and speak English as well as ever, page 28 for during many wet days I had never spoken a word of my own language, not conversed even in Maori, of which I was well tired.”