ABOUT A MOUNTAIN

Otago Witness, Issue 3195, 9 June 1915, Page 84

ABOUT A MOUNTAIN

By James Cowan

KAKEPUKU AND ITS STORY,

(Written for the Otago Witness.)

There is a lone mountain standing on the northern boundary of the King Country, just where the Main Trunk train passes out of the ferny plains of the Kohcpotae into the well-settled green farm country of the Upper Waikato, a peak whoso bold simplicity of outline, sweeping down in classic lines of repose from a saucer-like crater ton, takes the traveller’s eye while yet far off. Not a lofty mountain; its altitude is but a matter of 15 hundred feet or so, but its sharply cut commanding form, its obvious volcanic origin, and its isolation from other heights give it a character and dignity of its own and make the greater ranges to the westward seem but shapeless jumbles by comparison. Kakepuku the -Maoris call it, or in full Kakcpuku-a-Kahurero, the ■•Swelled Neck of Kahurcre,” and the story goes that it was so named nearly six centuries ago by Rakataura, the priest and magician of the Taiuui canoe, who, with his wife Kahurere, explored all the wild, new country from Kawhia eastward and southward, giving names to the features of the landscape as ne travelled. The name alluded to its shape, but in truth it deserves a more poetical one, as for example that of Tauranga-Kohu, “ The Resting-place of the Mists,” a beautiful and appropriate place-description belonging to a mountain a few miles to the eastward. It is a good many years since I last rode along the old Maori track which winds round the foot of Kakepuku, but memory hooded no aid of picture when I read lately in the New Zealand Gazette a concerning the Kakepuku Mountain Scenic Reserve under the Scenery Preservation Act “ All that area in the Auckland land district, containing 210 acres 3 roods 3 perches, more or loss, being section la, block TX, Puniu survey district.” and so on, with a minute description of boundaries, has been set apart as a natural reserve, an area which apparently includes the upper parts and summit of the cone. And when 1 read that dry, formal notice, old Kakepuku rose before me, and I blessed the thoughtful survey official, or whoever it may be, who was responsible in the first place for the saving of the ancient mountain-top and its remnant of forest from private hands. For I have come to look upon that lone mountain with very much the kind of affection in which it is held by the ..ative people who lived around the base, whose focal folktalk and poetry enshrine many a reference to Kakepuku. The fair blue hills of boyhood ! Once upon a time when I rode in from Orakau daily to the .ittle frontiertownship school at Kihikihi, the peak of Kakepuku, looming a few miles across tho valley to the westward, seemed an enchanted mountain, holding infinite suggestion of mystery and adventure. Pirongia, Kekepuku, Kawa, the “ Thi;ee Sisters of Tokanui, and then Tauranga-Kohu and the Maumra-tantari ranges curved sickle-wise along “the Maori frontier—a romantic line of volcanic saliencies which seemed to mount guard over the whole wild Maori country, just as they formed a belt of awful blazing lava-mouths in the remote past. Pirongia, its westward neighour, was twice its altitude, and built up a noble rugged western skyline, but Kakepuku s purple cone, with a curiously regular hollow scooped out of its top, was tho peak that held the eye. On clear days every line of the deep ravines which scored its sides stood out as bold and sharp as the wonderfully scarped terraces of Kawa’s irippled hill, our nearer neighbour, and Kakepuku seemed shaped and hewn from the landscape by human hand, so regular symmetrical was its outline, truly a " picture mountain. It was our weather-glass. When Kakepuku put on his fog-cap and tho mists filled the long-dead crater-up and crept down the upper slopes, the countryside knew that ram was at hand. The other mountains might cloud themselves with mist and the sign go unheeded, but Kakepuku’s ‘ tohu ne\ei far back, indeed, do the Maori legends take Kakepuku. There is a story which I hoard long ago from an old NgatiManiapoto friend, a tale of the days when the world was young, a curious Natme myth, that seems dimly, to reveal the geological past of those volcanic high places. There was a time, long, long ago, said the leo-end-keepcr, when this mountain did not stand on the Waipa Plains. “He came from the south, searching for his father. ‘lie is correct, because he is a man mountain. Know you that there is sex among mountains, even as among human beings. There are man mountains and there are women mountains, and, in proof thereof, give heed to this “whakapapa.” Karepuku came along, and, as he reached this place, where the Waipa wound down in silvery coils, through tha flax and fern, he beheld the soft, fanform of Kawa Hill, the lady mountain, tho daughter of Mount Pirongia and Taupiri (tile graceful peak to the northward, beside the Waikato River), resting there on the plain. He tell in love with Kawa, and remained near her side. But he had a rival. This was Ivarewa, a man mountain, which in those days stood near by the two, and Ksawera, like Kakepuku, made fierce love to the fair Kawa. In their fiery jealousy they quarrelled and fought. It must have been a Titanic , battle, for Kawera was so badly beaten that he uprooted himself and fled the place. Pursued bv Kakepuku’s rocks, he took flight westward, striding across the ranges and out past Kawhia Harbour into the ocean. It was evening when ho began his mountainous retreat. He fled all night, and then the sun rose, and he remained fixed .where the morning rays found him, for mountains travel only by night. And in the deep ocean he set his roots again, and there he stands to-day, a lone, rocky islet, and the pakeha calls him Gannet Island. So Kakepuku gained Kawa, and there he guards her to-day, a grim old husband, truly. But Kawa has not forgotten her lost lover, and when the wet fog steals down over her head and drapes hoi- ferny shoulders, the old Natives say : “Behold ! Kawa is weeping for Karewa.” Songs there are, too, —war songs as well as love songs—clustering about this dead volcano. There is a song of Ngati Maniapoto’s which was often chanted in the old days when a fighting column paraded in the village marae before setting out on the warpath. The chief, facing the lines of more than half-naked men, waved his “taiaha” and shouted, as he pointed to the mountains above the village: ”Ko whea, ko wheo— Ko who-a tora maunga, E tu mai ra ra ?’*

(‘'What, O what Is that mountain height

Standing above us yonder?”)

And with one voice the warriors would yell, as they burst into the ferocious stamp and weapon-thrusting of the “Tutungarahu”:

“ ’Tis Kakepuku, ’Tis Pirongiu! Ah, draw claso to me ! Aii, draw close to me I That 1 may embrace you, That 1 may hold you to my breast. A-a-uh !”

A similar chant, applying to Mount Egiuont, was used by tile Taranaki tribes. In each case the mountain was regarded as a lover, and symbolised nationality and clanship, and a reference to it never failed as a patriotic st.mulus. The forest which aforetime clung to Kakepuku’s base and summit, as wen as the ranges of Pirongia, formed a retreat for many a broken hapu in tho years of war. One of the earliest historic traditions, given me by by NgatiManiapoto “Kaumatua,” tells of a vanished tribe which once held their fertile plains. “Ngati-un,” ho said, “was tho tribe which owned the land over there from the eastern .side of Kakepuku to the Puniu. Now, a certain tribe came from Tauranga, right across the island, and the name of that tribe was Makino. They* marched to the foot of Kakepuku and there they found Ngati-Unu, whom they had sought in satisfaction of a feud. They fought there; tho buttle raged round the foot of the mountain. And Ngati-Unu were defeated; they fell; they died. Their chief Motai fell with them. The survivors fled to the Pirongia, to the refuge of Nehenehe-nui. the great forest. As for the slain, they were oaten by the Makino. But tha victors soon became the defeated for Ngati-Maniapoto set out against them and fought and vanquished them. And so Kakepuku remained in the hands of its owners, my ancestors.”

Of love songs there is, for one, a mournful lament of Puhi-wahinc, a comparatively modern ditty, for it was composed in the middle seventies when King Tawhfao and his Waikato following lived in semi-savage state on the beautiful slopes of Hikurangi, that hill below, the misty heights of Pirongia, where the track from Kakepuku and Te Kopua goes over the ranges to Kawhia. Puhi-wahino was a voting chieftainess from Taupo, and she loved Tawhiao’s cousin (who was also her one cousin), one Mahutu To Toko, a deeply tattooed veteran who died not long since. ‘ The course of love d : d not run smoothly; the fickle Mahutu took another fair one, whereupon Puhi-wahine sorrowfully took horse and rode back over the hills to Take Taupo. She crossed the broad Waipa Valley, and as she slowly ascended the steep hill at Anatitaha, noar the Maunga-tautari Range, she halted and took her last lookback ai the distant peaks of Kakepuku and Pirongia. And as she gazed on the blue cone of Kakepuku, just beyond which her old lover dwelt, her anger died within her, and womanly affection bubbled forth in a farewell song: “I up I climb from Wairaka I pause upon the mountain side For one last long look back, My farewell gaze! Cease, oh rny sorrow! My love for the lost companion Far off by Kakepuku’s side. Yet, would that I could fly, Soar as a bird to Pirongia’s crest, For there below thou dw'ellest, O Toko! my cousin lover, Ah! still my love goes forth To thee, with whom I fondly rested.

Cease, oh my sorrow! I turn me now to my own land, To the land where the hot fountains Bubble up in places of enchantment, And I’ll return no more !

Dr Ferdinand von Hochstettor, the famous Austrian geologist, on his expedition through the interior of the North Island in 1£59, when all this Waikato and Maniapoto country was in Maori hands, made an ascent of “the beautiful regular conical Mount Kakepuku,” the altitude of which he fixed at 1531 feet. He set out from the Wesleyan Mission Station at Te Kopua, on the Waipa. “A gentle slope,” he wrote, encompassed the cone like a wall, and was separated from the mountain proper by swamps.” “ This outer wall,” says Hochstetter in his “ New Zealand,” “may be justly considered as a tuff cone and a tuff crater, like those occurring with the Auckland volcanoes. The cone itself rises at an angle' of 20dcg. Blocks of a trackydolerite, containing numerous pyroxene crystals, are scattered along this declivity. A convenient footpath leads upwards through the fern bushes past a spring of 64deg Fahrenheit temperature. The top is said to have been formerly fortified and cultivated; only on the S.W. side is there a small tract of forest remaining, which the chief who is the owner of the ground had ordered to bo spared. This sylvan grove welcomed us to its cooling shade, and was found to be rich in small, but also rare, land shells. The prospect from the top is grand. ... In clear weather the Ruapehu, Tongariro, and Taranaki mountains, the three gigantic cones of the North Island, are said to be visible. The beautiful richly-cultivated country about Rangiawhia and Otawhao lay spread out before us like a map. I counted ten small lakes and ponds scattered about the plains. The church steeples of three places -were seen rising from among orchards and fields. Verily I could hardly realise that 1 was in the interior of New Zealand.” Since Hochstotter’s day the old mountain has seen many a change in the countryside. If Kakcpuku could speak it would tell us of the ruin of the peaceful Maori cultivations by the war, the coming of regiments of British soldiers, the frontier fighting, and the thrusting back of the Kingite warriors, to dwell in sullen isolation to the southward for many a year. The tents of Cameron’s army whitened the ferny plains a few miles from its foot, and the boom of his cannon before the ramparts of Paterangi and Orakau was borne to it on the wind. Now the scene has changed, and a far more richly cultivated country than that which the wandering Austrian geologist saw in 1859 stretches to the northward, and the railway engine trails the smoke banner of the pakoha past Kakopuku’s foot, between him and his gently-rounded hill-wife Kawa. But one or two relics of Hochstetter’s day remain: the picturesque spires of the little English Church at T© Awamutu and the English and Catholic churches at Rangiawhia still rise above i.he tree groves, heaven-pointing fingers that carry a suggestion of antiquity all too rare in man’s work ip New Zealand. They were built in the mission days before the war, more than 50 years ago, and though the span of 50 years is but a trifle as time and events go in old countries like Britain, it sees many

and wonderful changes in Now Zealand. And the next few years will see more wonderfid changes around Kakopuku’s foot. Much of this fine country, on the Rohcpotae sido of the Puniu. still wears the face of the old King Country. The wild pig and the wild horse ream the fern, and the bush conies low on the spurs of misty Pirongia. But the settlors' homesteads are creeping up, and to the south and cast, as well as the north, green fields and fat cattle are replacing the fern and the fern root-hunting porker; and from a score of points on the ranges of Hauturu and Te P.au-a-moa and the “ Skv-arch ” of Hikurangi the blue columns of smoke go up in the burning-off season, the sign and token of the all-con-quering colonist. Soon the Waipa and Kawa levels and the lower slopes of Kakcpuku will be as closely cultivated as the pains of Taieri or Waikato, and the comfortabo homes of the well-off farmers will cover the kumara grounds of Tawhiao’s Etauhaus. But the old volcano will remain, as graceful and inspiring a Nature-carved monument as it is today ; and let us hope that its poetry and folk-lore, no less than its beauty of form, will make the pakcha come to look upon it with something of the affection .which the Native feels for “my ancestor the mountain.”