TALES OF BUSH AND OCEAN.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIV, Issue 92, 18 April 1913, Page 7

TALES OF BUSH AND OCEAN.

No. V. THE MOUNTAIN MAID: A KING COUNTRY MEMORY. (Specially written for the " Star.") (By JAMES COWAN.) There were some picturesquely interesting characters knocking about the little frontier townships of Alexandra and Kihikihi an the very eariy 'eighties. Those were the days when the King Country was really the King Country, when not a solitary acre over .the border line ihad been- acquired by the pakeha, when no police summonses were served south of the Punui River, and when surveyors and gold prospectors were the two particular aversions of the Kingitea. But, although pakeha ofticiak .were not welcomed over the border, .the frontier farmers, not being under the ban, visited the Maori kaingas at will, bringing cattle and pigs—the Kingites considered themselves at full liberty "to cross to th e white side, and the Alexandra and Kikihi and Te Awamutu and Cambi'idge stores and hotels did an exceedingly lively Maori trade.. And then we used to see such "brown notables as the gigantic Wahanui, who always wore a sheet about his waw.fc because lie could never find a pair of trousers big enough in any of the pakeha stores; and old Rewi Maniapoto—or Manga, as he was chiefly called there — the famous warrior, a short lean man with partially-tattooed, keen, clean features; amd TeAo Katoa ("The Whole World"), the dour-faced, white-bearded, black-tattooed Hauhau priest, from whom Lieutenant Meade, R.N., had such a narrow «scape back in •the 'sixties, as he has chronicled in his •'Ride Through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand." There was the orator Te Ngakau, a man of might and weight —especially weight— amongst the Kingites; nnd there was the grand old savage Hauauru ("The West Wind"), and Hopa, of " The Three Sister" settlement, and many another uncompromising opponent of the pakoh-a Government. In 18S1 King Tawhino " came out" and laid down his guns, and then the frontier settlements were peacefully invaded by the war-danemg, gun-firing, Hauhau-chant-singing Waikatos and Mauiapotos; arid one day our good old Scottish schoolmaster, Mr. M , lined us youngsters up by the Kihikihi roadside ■to give cheers for the sulky-vie-aged king as be went past in <his buggy, escorted fore aaul aft by five to six hundred armed mien. (The day previously his Maori majesty hnd been ceremoniously played into Te Awamutu township by the Cavalry Band to the not inappropriate tune of •' The King of the Cannibal Islands.") Not so very long after that pence-making. Te Kooti of evil memory would now and then pass through Kihikihi with a cavalcade of followers and <a revolver-armed Amazonian bodyguard of four of his wives. There was a curious visitor from the Punui banks, an Albino woman whose chintattoo looked ghastly on her colourless white face; she had'jiair the colour of dressed flax, and -her eyes were ecrewed up as if the sunlight gave her pain; -for albinos, like owls, cannot bear the sun. Thoro were stray pakeha-Maoris, ]ike Alec C , an adventurer with a strange history; report said he was wonderfully tattooed Maori fashion on his netSieV J?arfc3,._but w .no amount of- . would induce 'him to display those baric adornments to his fellow-white-skins.

But there was one amongst the Kingites from over the border whom our youthful imagination used to invest with all sorts of romantic and mysterious histories. She was n woman, and a young one; which wasn't extraordinary"; hut what was extraordinary was tlrafc she was a white woman. She would come - riding in twith the Maoris from somewhere "across the river," as we used to call the great wide unknown Maori Country, and do her shopping at the stores, and sit and smoke her pipe awhile on the hotel doorstep or anywhere that was handy, and presently rule off again with a lively "band of her friends singing Hauhau songs. Some mistook her for a half-caste, but she was pure white. Her eyes were undeniably .blue, und her hair was of European f_irn_s., not the ruddy native tinge, sometimes seen, called " urukahu." Sometimes she came in in Teal pakeha style, riding a new. side-saddle; then next time she appeared it would be in the fashion of the Maori waihine, on a man's saddle, and her bare white feet gripping the stirrup-irons in the universal native way, the iron between the big toe and the "next. A man's felt | hat would be perched jauntily on top of her long thick hair, a pheasant feather stuck in the band. Aud the only name by which the pakehus knew her was "The Mountain -laid." *' rom what I can first recollect of The Mountain .laid," she seemed to he a girl not more than twenty. Whether she was married or not, or how she, a white woman, canio to lis living amon'sst the Maoris, no one seemed to know. Some said she came in from Korakonui, a. hill settlement far in at the back of Orakau; others that her real home was with the tribe that inhabited the faToff Maracroa.. tableland, between the Rangitoto Ranges and T_ake Taupo. Again, she was supposed to come from Hikurangi, the big Kingite town of nikau and raupo which Tawhiao and bis people had established on a beautiful commanding elevation on the shoulders of Mount Pirongia, where they could _cc for miles and miles over the Waipa Valley. But no one knew for certain whence she came or whither she went. Sonictimes curious storip. went round after her periodical visits to the township. She would tell a storekeeper, confidentially, that he'd better look out or the Ilauihaus would be down on him •some night and loot his place; or she'd drop a mysterious word or two about, terrible pitfalls—deep trenches covered over with manuka brushwood—which protected her home-village from any pakeha attack. Then she'd say, "E noho," in the Maori way, unhitch her horse and gallop away, pipe in mouth. Probably she spread her wild-goose yarns just for the fun of the thing; jperhaps she enjoyed the Wonderment with which, she filled the pakeha mind. There were endless speculations as to her antecedents and her position amongst the Kingites, but no .one knew anything definite beyond the -act that the "Mountain Maid," although a Maori' in all her'ways, and with but little English on her tongue, was a girl of whitoblood on both sides. About the time that the pakehas first; began to make their way into the King. Country as railway builders and settlers;' and storekeepers—which date we may set down as, roughly, : 1885, we ceased I to see or hear of "The Mountain Maid." ] No one seemed to know what had -become of her. "Aua" —"don't know* 1 -— . was the invariable. Maori reply to any question that concerned the "Strange! white girl.

It was my friend and sometime bußhtutor Hopani whoone day lifted'for mc the veil of myeteiy, or a corner of the veil, which enveloped -"The Mountain Maid." Hopani wae an elderly man. of NgatM3o-and*So, who had seen a thing or two in the wild war days; a merry sort of old fellow, too, with a fondness ■for drawing on. hia imagination, which made him uncommonly likeable as a story-teller, but that rather discounted his value an a reliable border historian. So when Hopani told the moving tale of the "Maid's" origin and infantile adventures, it wne difficult to tell whether it wae fact or fiction. But; though something, of fiction it may.lhave held, there is at least the probability that it wae in the main a matter of actual occurrence. Thie, then was the story Hopani told:— "This pakeha girl, whom you white people call 'The Mountain Maid,' has been with- the' Maoris since she was, I suppose, four or five years old. What her pakeha name wae I know not, nor do any of the Kingite Maoris know. But what we all call her is Hine-kehu, which means 'The Fair Girl.' She hae another name, too, a 'tapu' Maori name, but that name the great tohunga, Te Ao Kato—ihe whom we both saw in Kihikihi the other day—has forbidden to be used except in the sacred ceremonies wherein she takes part as a 'rualiine,' a priestess. For she ie a priestess, although she is but young, and a pakeha in blood. But I cannot say much on that point—l shall tell of 'how she came to be amongst ue. "In one of Te Kooti's first kokiris, his first raids on white settlements on the East Coast, soon after he escaped from the Chatham lelands, a certain pakeba settler's house was surrounded and attacked. The Hauhaus fired through the windows until the men of the house appeared and opened fire. The men—there were but two or three of them —were quickly shot down. Then a.woman ran out with a little child in her.arms, and two others clinging to her dress. The pigs of Hauhaus sprang upon the woman and tomahawked her, and they cruelly slew the two young children that hung weeping to her skirts. But the child that was in her arms, her youngest it was no doubt, sprang up as her mother fell and ran Bcreaming straight towards a group of Maoris who were wntching the tomahawking. And a curious thing happened, for it ran right into the arms of a woman —a Maori woman who was the only female with the war party. She was a matakite nnd a Kuia makutu, a priestess and a witch and a seeress, and that was why she was with the man-slayers.

"Now, whatever possessed the old Kuia to save the white child I know not; but ehe did. When the men rushed up with lifted tomahawks, to split the child's ekull as the others had been split, the Kuia bade them desist. 'This child is mine,' she cried, and she wrnpped her shoulder-mat round the little girl, a 'tapu' mat which none but herself could touch, and then she bound the child on her shoulders with her shawl, and so when the kokiri left, the place of blood ehe went with them bearing the child. This was the only living thing that the Hauhaus ever spared.

"The Hauhaus retreated to the wild back country, to Lake Waikare-Moana, and the mountains of the XJrewera Country. And across the lake by canoo, and •up and over the terribly precipitous Huiarau Mountains the little stolen child, the fatherless and motherless pakeha girl, was borne. The old Kuia's heart went out with love to the child, for she was beautiful, as small and fair as a patuof the At that time ehe was probably five The only one to whom she would speak was the Kuia; to hfcr she told her name and the name of her family, and more; but the old sorceress would tell none of •this to the tribe. She carefully tended :the. girl, so that the child grew strong and healthy, though the ways of living in the mountain land in those days of ■war Were rough indeed. And soon the child became a Maori in all but skin, and forgot most of her English mother tongue.

"Presently the Urewera Mountains became an unsafe hiding-place for Te Kooti'-s Haiihaus. Government warparties, Maoris with but one or two white officers, were in pursuit of them. And early one morning it befell that the camp in which the old Kuia and her little mokai —her pet, the white child —were sleeping was attacked by the Government Maoris, who had surrounded it in the night. There was wild shooting, and all the Hnuhaus who could fled for their lives—there were some who could not, by reason of Government bullets. The Kuia darted into the bush with the little girl, but just as she was disappearing in a thickly-wooded gully a bullet struck her, and she fell sorely wounded. But by a fortunate chance she fell or rolled beneath a dense growth of mangemange and bush,luwyer. with the little child in her arms. There they lay, very silently, listening to the firing and the chase of the fugitives; and as she lay there the brave old Kuia recited to herself powerful charms for the purpose of concealing her from the -eyes of the foe. These charms were 'huna'; they were 'Karakia' for the purpose of obscuring the vision of nn enemy and causing a friendly mist to rise. And there they waited until the Government soldiers should depart. "It was perhaps many hours later that they heard voices, the sound of women weeping Over the dead. The little girl crept out, and ran to the women—-they were Hauhau women who had come to search the battlefield for their dead— and took them to the Kuia'S hiding-place. But she .was dying. She lived only long enough to bid the women be kind to. the little fair.iai.ed 'mokai,' and to press her nose to theirs and-.to. the child's in farewell, and then she died. 'That was"-the end of the war. Te Kooti and those-of bis Hauhaus who were left escaped to the King Country. With one of the Hauhau parties went the woman who had adopted the girl, who was known as Hine-Kehu, 'The Fair Girl.' The child was regarded as 'tapu,' because of her association with the famous Kuia,-and because she had already learned many curious things from the old sorceress. And as she grew up the learned people of the Hauhaus—-the Sgati-Maniapoto and Waikato with whom she lived at Tokangamutu and Orahiri and Hikurangi and other King Country villages—instructed her in sacred lore and in the things which it was necessary a 'ruahine,' a woman of priestess rank, should know. They kept her secluded, until' she wds well oh in young womanhood, and then she began to rifle iiito the pakeha townships with her friends and see for herself the ways of her dead mother's tribe. She is able to foretell'! death, they say; she ha* the gift of second sight. It is she who is sent for to perform the final act in the 'taingakawa whare,' the removing of the tapu from a newly-opened carved house, by crossing the threshold and eating a kumera within the whore. As for her being married, I know *n.6t; 'she may 'have .a husband by now. - But "where -she '■» _iow "I oannot tell, j Never mind where she ia, my boy—the

Maoris' don't want the whites' to know anything more about her, for they treasure their Hine-Kehu, and they are afraid the pakehas may want to take her from them. But she would not go, for she in truly a Maori now." . •

That was Hopani'e story. Whether The Mountain Maid's bones lie in some forgotten grave of the Rohepotae, where white men's dairy cattle graze over the olden homes of the Ngati-Maniapoto and Ngati-Matakore, or whether she survives, under the disguise of chin-tatoo and a Maori name, to pass as a Maori chieftainess and ride in a King Country motor car with the brown lords of the soil, the present narrator knows not. If she livee she is probably Hine-Kehu no longer. And in any case it is extremely unlikely that the full and exact history of The Mountain Maid will ever be made known to the pakeba.