Four Days with Paddle and “Pole.

We made two starts from the punt-side landing-place at Mokau Heads before we finally got away on our long-projected canoe cruise to the head of navigable waters on that great bush stream. The first canoe we tried, after my pakeha companion and I arranged for two Maori mates and a waka for the inland voyage was dubiously low of freeboard when we had stowed our gear and ourselves aboard. The old man Taniora, grey and tattooed veteran of the Hauhau wars, who had come to see us off, looked it over and condemned it. “It won't do,” he said. “You'll be swamped at the first rapid.” Our mates Piko and Hauraki, too, had their doubts, after we had pushed off. So we put back, and Hauraki crossed to his own landing-place and returned with a more substantial and river-worthy craft. This was a new canoe, cut out of a rimu log the previous winter, thirty feet long and four feet beam amidships. Heavy yet, too new in fact. Really, as we discovered, it would have needed six paddles at least to get a move on her, or it. We worked our passage that cruise. But you could stand on her gunwale, almost, without capsizing her. That's the craft for the rapids of the Mokau.

We set out at last, four of us, with our blankets and camp gear and axe, a billy and a frying-pan, a stock of tea and sugar, bacon and sundry hard tack. Our point of departure was the spot where the Maoris gathered in 1869 when the Government steamer Luna, commanded by Captain Fairchild, stopped long enough off the Heads to fire some shells into the Hauhau villages. Old Taniora Wharauroa was there then. He saw us off with the cheerful prediction that we might safely climb every taheke—the rapids—if we were careful, until we came to the Panirau, but that at that notorious spot we would be sure to come to grief. “Haere ra!” he said, with a grin; “farewell; and I'll come down and catch you, maybe, as you go drifting past to sea!”

Piko, lean, muscular, black-bearded and saturnine of visage, had the bow-paddle; Hauraki, round-faced and big-bodied, happy and good-natured, squatted in the stern with his steering-paddle. (We found that Hauraki preferred steering because he could doze sometimes in the calm reaches, while we three paddled like warriors, Piko setting the pace. But when we came to a rapid Hauraki slumbered no more; he was a tower of strength.)

Above us on the left, where the road went up to Mokau's township was the tapu burial-hill Puke-Kiwi, where Wetere te Rerenga lay; he and his brother Te Rangituataka were the last of the great chiefs of Mokau. There was a price on Wetere's head until the amnesty of 1883, because of his share in the Pukearuhe or White Cliffs massacre. But he was a good Maori after his lights, and he made his people work. In Wetere's life-time the Ngati-Maniapoto resident here cultivated largely and industriously, and in the summer time the beach-side was covered with great stages of fish, drying in the sun. The Mokau mouth was a famous place for netting fish with the long flax-seine—the “Kupenga - a - Taramainuku” of Maori proverb and song. But as old Taniora put it: “The industrious days have gone, and so have the great chiefs who ruled their tribes well. We are but a remnant now, and I and all of us here are insignificant—we are but as the torori that grows in my garden yonder.”

On the beach we had seen the smoothly-polished rock, shaped like a dumbbell, that was reputed to have been the ancestral canoe Tainui's anchor. It was the stone to which the canoe was moored here; it was far too large and heavy, of course, to have been carried in the canoe. “It is our mauri [talisman],” said Hauraki; “it holds the fish here, otherwise they would desert this river-mouth. When I was young we never failed to take the first mullet or kahawai we caught when we were out fishing in our canoes and offer it with a prayer to the atua. the god who sent us the fish. We laid those offerings on the tapu sandbank, between the Stone of Power and the Heads, the holy place Te Naunau. But now no one makes offerings and first-fruits. We are like the pakeha; we don't trouble about the tapu now.”

But I fear Hauraki doth protest too much; for only an hour before we left the beach, when he showed me the enchanted log called “Te Kauri” (it is not a kauri but a totara), which lies there, the log which used to sail along the coast, between here and Kawhia, working wizardry as it went, he was careful to take the pipe out of his mouth and hold it behind his back as he approached, for fear of offending the tapu. And he would not touch the magic tree, but stood off and bade us mark that axe-cut in its side and beware, for the young man who made the cut in impious defiance of the tapu. died the very next day. His body was found here on the beach close to the vengeful tree!