WHERE THE WHITE MAN TREADS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 13948, 2 January 1909, Page 1 (Supplement)

WHERE THE WHITE MAN TREADS.

THE KAHU-HAWK.

by W. 8., te KUITI.

[ALL eights reserved.] Sacred To the memory of That was all; the rest of the script, Time, the erosion of alternate summer scorch and winter storm had obliterated for ever! Even these few mementos, that beneath slept one of my kind, would have been illegible, but that they were rudely incised on the weather-worn totara slab. Overgrown ..s it was with a meshvvork of lawyer-vines, 1 might have passed it unnoted, had not a mother-hawk, who, as if she knew that ibis was sacrosanct ground, where ramblers do not willingly intrude, chosen to build here her nest, but in a panic at my sudden approach thus disclosed her maternity home. Taking the hawk first in series, I wondered thereat, for she usually selects the crown of a tall toe-toe tussock— colonial slang called a " niggerhead"—in tho heart of some impassable swamp, where to brood on her two to three grey, brown-mottled eggs, and so secluded that the old Maori declared that few, if any, had yet seen it: fence his proverb of miscredence: "Me to kopae karearea!" (Like the nest of a hawk! —syn. Anglice; very much like a whale.) Tradition also avers that imbedded in the bottom of the nest lay a circular flat, slig??iy convex stone, of such phenomenally transcendent virtue, that, if found, and tho eyes of the blind bo touched therewith, mstant sight would ensue. But as the Maori had no use for the hearts of impassable swamps, it followed that he found no hawks' nests. Or, if peradventure such were discovered, but no stones therein, tho tohunga, by previsions he kept to himself, at once announced some tangible reason why not. Tradition further aesevers, that the hawk accompanied the great exodial Hawaikian migration, and in its beak carried the twig of a tree, which, to speak of without previous placative incantations, was a. portent of blindness; hence they gave it no name and spoke of it by proxy, as: "Tana rap kau." (That tree!) When the migrants landed tire father hawk planted the twig beside hie wife's nest, where it grew, ~nd grew, until when the hawklings were hatched, lo! it was a tree, from the ends of whoso branches perpended tassels of fine hair so omnipotent of occulisi niana that, when the winds swayed their shadows into the eyes of the hawklings they became shriven of all sight imperfections; hence the great distance a hawk can detect ratholes in the earth and small birds' nests. "Like a whale," eh? But not so to the Maori, for, as the finder of the tree will be stricken with a blindness which 'only the remedial stone can cure, it was found strictly undesirable to search for it. Taking things by and large then, we may discard as unscientific the Maori ornithological traditions of hawks' nests, and dismiss the unconfirmed assertion that one hawkling out of every maternity home must, and does, return to Hawaiki to report progress, as distinctly not proven.

And thus, in the centre of the North Island I discovered this over 60 years' old phrenotype, that here in the wilds one, ir. whom possibly the blood of my kin once flowed, had gone to his rest. So I musingly took up various positions, that by chance of some stray sidelights I might trace this by the world forgotten wanderer's name. But no profit accrued; so I went back to the village and singling out its oldest inhabitant asked: " That memorial up on the knoll yonder, whose is it?" And the wrinkled white-bearded man answered : 'Na Hoani." Now Hoani means John, it also might mean Sloane, etc. For the Maoris used no stem surnames; so when the pakeha entered with his assemblage of appellatives, the Maori selected the most suited for abbreviation, and by that he was known. "And who was Hoani?" "He mihinare pea?" (A missionary probably.) But I was athirst, and asked further: "Of what creed?" And he replied, without interest: "Wai ka mohio?" (Who knows?) Again I agitated his senile brain with questions, upon which he remembered in his own way, disjointed, and with wide interspaces, that when a stripling, there came one day a white man, carrying a knapsack, leading a wife and child daughter by the hand, followed by three strange natives, also carrying packs; that they hud journeyed thus many days over hills and through valleys, over high fern uplands by ancient paths, deeply guttered by ages of bare feet, where the Maori chieftains led their hosts in war and tribal visitors came in peace. Through forests, pristine, as yet untouched by the white man's axe and elashhook; now upon a sinuous passage winding among Nature's cathedral colonades, whose capitals and groined arches fill the space beneath with a monochrome of solemn twilight, while from the upper galleries vocal jubilations declare that despite croak and cavil, the search for worms and their capture, and in springtime the love of a mate, are worthy tie prcans the parson-bird tui recklessly flings to the winds ; anon, emerging upon a wrack and raffle whore lawyer-vine and supplejack compel obeisance of bended tfaek and toilful stoop; across morass and sour level kneedeep raupo squelches; across unbridged rivers and riverlcts, out, out, into a further virgin wilderness. Not in t.hcso words; they are mine ; but I knew.

Then I ask-nl: "Did not the strangers fear when gear-distorted, tatooed warman stood forth in ranks to sec the road-soiled pilgrims pass?" "Fear? Why should they? One fears not what one loves!" 1 had my answer; but I asked again: "Were they stern and lank-jawed, gloomy, aloof, or taciturn of speech? Did their nostrils search the upper air when dried shark and steep-ed-corn delicacies were set as relishes beside the lesser foods?" For such it was the simple unsophisticated custom of this hospitable people to offer their choicest best. But ho answered : " No ; they seemed always first to note a, joke disguised in every casualty; and when the meal was spread upon the guest-mat, and lacking knife and fork accessories, thought it no sin to reach for and convey the food with the surer naked finger-grip, and ate, or left uneaten, with gracious oversight what was not to their liking ; and thus beshame not the conventions of their generous hosts." 1 saw it all, but pressed him hard for further information. "Yes, vedettes of lung-sound runners watched the coming of the friendly aliens, to spread the tidings, as spreads the unseen wind and anguish scourged every wayside housewife lest the travellers pa.« by other roads, and thus be denied the revelry of hoarding up memories for finelyminced comment at future winter firesides!" This also I saw. " And when importuned to sojourn and rest a day or two: ' Kaia e nacre a tahi ra" (delay your departure until

next day and one), a swept earthen floored and new-matted house was assigEfid them, whose privacy was sacred up to tne doorway, at which the population of the districtand we were many in those days detailed itself in solid block detachments, and took it in formal turns to exclude the light, and so gratified a curiosity cherished by the Maori with ungovernable appetite." This, bethought, was witty, for he cackled a shrunken, desultory, old-age, reminiscent laugh. "And when the white folk, by divers wiles, tempted the Maori youngsters to cease from silly shaine-ambushings, and approach to have their faces touched with hps of love, which habit ueing absolutely unknown to them, the mothers furtively wiped the spot, and neutralised the virus of with fervent incantations, lest their children be infected by a malison of witchcraft."

Also he told how the brown man's little daughters, shy, but richly sapped with the courage of it, fearless ancestry—also by divers wiles—coaxed the white maiden unto an exchange of raw courtesy with the finer sex-modest lessons, ' early impressed upon the white man's child, and by a scries of tentative advances decoyed her into chumships, and, sex-fashion, "prattled an endless jargon of confidences, in a language not understood by her, but by some obscure dialectics accepted to mean tributes of abounding admiration: an _ encyclopedic cognisance of their own inferior gifts, -nd that feminine sex-admonition which seeks by blandishment to develop usufructs Tor profit later; which the observant " Mihinare" and hir, tactful wife co-noting, shed thereupon unqualified approval, seeing therein presages of willful work in their adopted task. Presently he drew his blanket closer round his person, and resting his chin upon his crossed arms, looked into the void of retreating distance, and ignoring my palpably suggestive by-words, yodeled a stave or two of ancient folksong. Then remembering that one person may lead a horse to water but forty cannot make him drink, I sliced with pregnant ostentation >at tin uncut cake of Welcome Nugget, which he, interpreting aright, passed me his empty pipe, and pointing to a deeply rust-pitted anvil to which a calf was tethered, continued: "All else but that is perished! There, see, where that clump of willows thickens, stood his house. Our people built it ; dressed ponga laid lengthwise between uprights of ponga outside, find adzed totara posts within, lined with " kakaho" (Arundo conspicua, reed stalks), fastened between the uprights in pannels, with an ornamental cross-stitch of narrow flax strips, stained black; divided into two rooms, one for bed privacy, and the other for house usages; thatched as to roof with toe-toe, a sod chimney, and floor of hard-tamped clay, oiled calico for windows; there they lived for three pigeon seasons. But the nights! Cough! cough! cough! like the distant barking of a dog. Until the grey, which from the east calls: 'Lo! I come,' his lamp of mixed pork and pigeon fat, into which a burning strip of rag dipped, told that the white woman held him in her arms, and softly wiped away the blood which oozed from --s mouth—as my brother and I saw when we returned from eel bobbing, and twisting a searching eye into where the oiled calico refused to meet the frame, beheld that which our women told with insufficient currency to satisfy."

"And in mid-whiles? Oh, yes. But this was later. This was before his cough quenched his smithy fire ; before it ordered him to cease from making wood shavings, and teaching us naked rascals the white man's inscrutabilities. When our elders advised him to return to his people, lest they be charged with his undoing, he cried : ' You are my people!' So he sat in the sun where our most rapid speakers congregated, to learn of them their fluency of language, against the day his lungs should bo healed and he return to his in-broken labours. His white wife? Thus then it was with her: From the day she came among us, until the nursage of her man refused her lengthened absence, she was amidst our women, if so be, there might cling to their wastrel brains some vestiges of how white wives preserve the stomachs of their husbands from rebellion. This, together with other knowledge, our women thought supeifluous and fastidious. Nice? 0, yes! Elegant? Of course! Necessary? Also, yes; but only to people of white skins and incredible inventions. Nay, of such insatiable hunger for eupererogative novelties, the common mind must wrench its sanity to collect a capable prehension of.

"So one soggy autumn the end came. Our people would have carried him into the outside world, but ho begged us hard not to mind himwas he not among his friends? If we would extend the same assistance to hie wifo and daughter he was content. Then he got us to 'dress a totara slab, on which he carved some words, and when all was ended, his wife painted thereon other words, which she told us were his name and age, but which the long seasons of God's tears have washed away. Fill my pipe again." I saw it all—and more. Up there on the knoll where the mother-hawk circled rn swift decreasing spirals, hovered an instant to see that her final swoop was unobserved—and dropping, snuggled her eggs under her breast.