Tales of Bush and Ocean.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 22, 28 May 1913, Page 7

Tales of Bush and Ocean.

The Mountain Maid: A King Country Memory.

By

JAMES COWAN.

THERE were some picturesquely Interesting characters knocking about the little fron-

tier townships of Alexandra and Kihikihi in the very early ’eighties. Those were the days when the King Country was really the King Country, when not a solitary acre over the border line had been acquired by the pakelia, when no police summonses were served south of the Punui River, and when surveyors and gold prospectors were the two particular aversions of the Kingites. But, although pakeha officials 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 the white side, and the Alexandra and Kikihi and Te Awamutu and Cambridge 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 waist because he could never find a pair of trouserk big enough in any of the pakelia 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; and Te Ao Katoa '(“The Whole World”), the dour-faced, white-bearded, black-tattooed Hauhau priest, from whom Lieutenant Meade, •R.N., had such a narrow escape 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 Kingates: and there was the grand old savage Hauauru ("The West Wind”), and Hopa, of “ The Three Sister” settlement, and many another uncompromising opponent of the pakeha Government. In 1881 King Tawhiao “came out ” and laid down his guns, and then the frontier settlements were peacefully invaded by the war-dancing, gun-firing. Hauhau-chant-singing Waikatos. and Maniapotos; and one day our good old Scottish schoolmaster. Mr. M , lined us youngsters up by the Kihikihi roadside Ito give cheers for the sulky-vis-aged king as he went past in his buggy, escorted fore and aft by five to six hundred armed men. (The day previously his Maori' ma jesty had 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 peacemaking, 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 <«n her colourless white face; she had hair the colour of dressed flax, and her eyes were screwed ■up as if the sunlight gave her pain; for albinos, like owls, cannot bear the sun. There were stray pakeha-Maoris, like 'Alec C , an adventurer with a strange history; report said he was wonderfully tattooed Maori fashion on his nether parts, but no amount of persuasion would induce him to display those barbaric 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 romant ie and mysterious histories. She was a woman, and a young one; which wasn’t extraordinary; but ■what was extraordinary was that she was a white woman. She would come riding in with 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 ride off again with a lively band of her friends winging Hauhau songs. Some mistook her for a half-caste, but she

was pure white. Her eyes were undeniably blue, and her hair was of European fairness, not the ruddy native tinge, sometimes seen, called “ urukahu.” Sometimes she came in in real 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. And the only name by which the pakehas knew her was “ The Mountain Maid." From what I can first recollect of “The Mountain Maid," she seemed to be a girl not more than twenty. Whether she was married or not. of how she, a white woman, came to be living amongst the Maoris, mo 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 faroff Maraeroa tableland, between the Rangitoto Ranges and Lake Taupo. Again, she was supposed to come from Hikurangi, the big Kingite town of irikau and raupo which Tawhiao and his people had established on a beautiful commanding elevation on the shoulders of Mount Pirongia, where tlijssL could 'see for miles and miles over the Waipa Valley. But no one knew for certain whence she came or whither she went. Sometimes curious stories went round after her periodical visits to the township. She would tell a storekeeper, confidentially, that he’d better look out or the Hauihaus would be down on him some night and loot his place; or she’d drop a mysterious word or two ajiout 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: (perhaps 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 fact that the “Mountain Maid." although a Maori in all her ways, and with but little English on her tongue, was a girl of white blood 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 to see or hear of "The Mountain Maid." No one seemed to know what had become of her. “Aua”—“don't know”: — was the invariable Maori reply to any question that concerned the strange white girl. •/ ’ ’ It was my friend and sometime bushtutor Hopani who one day lifted for me the veil of mystery, or a corner of the veil, whieh enveloped “The Mountain Maid.” Hopani was an elderly man of Ngati-So-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 his imagination, which made him uncommonly likeable as a story-teller, but that rather discounted his value as a reliable border historian. So when Hopani told the moving tali' of the “Maid's" origin and infantile adventures, it was difficult to tell whether it was fact or fiction. But, though something of fiction it may .have held, there is at least the probability that it was in the main a matter of actual occurrence. This, 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. Whit her pakeha name was I know not, nor do any of the Kingite Maoris- know. But what we all call her is Hine-kehu, whieh means "The Fair Girl.' She has another name, too, a ‘tapu’ Maori name, but

that name the great tohunga, Te Ao Kato—-he whom we both saw in Kill kihi the other day—han forbidden to lie used except in the sacred ceremonies wherein she taken part as a ‘ruahine/ a prieste&s. For ohe in a priestess, although she in 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 Islands, a certain pakeha 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 w’ere 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 screaming straight towards a group of Maoris who were watching 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 and 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 she did. When the men rushed up with lifted tomahawks, to split the child’s skull as the others had been split, the Kuia hade them desist. ‘This child is mine,’ she cried, and she wrapped 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 she 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 Urewera Country. And across the lake by canoe, 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 patupaiarehe. a fairy of the woods. At that time she was probably five years old. The only one to whom she would speak was the Kuia ; to her she told her name and the name of her family, and more; but the old sorceress would tell none of this to yt-he 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 Hauhaus. Government warparties, Maoris with but one or two white officers, were in pursuit of them. And early one morning it befell that the camo 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 Hauhaus 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 mange mange and bush lawyer, with the little child in her arms. There they lay, very silently, listening to the tiring ami the chase of the fugitives; ami as she lav there the brave old Kuia recited to her-self-powerful charms for the purpose of concealing her from the eyes of the foe. These charms were ‘huna*; they were ‘Karakia’ repeated f.»r the purpose of oltscuring the vision of an enemy ami 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 billy long enough to biU the women be kind td the

little fair-haired ‘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 his 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 Ngati-Maniapoto and Waikato with whom she lived at Tokangamutu and Ora hiri and Hikurangi and other King Country villages instructed her in sacred lore and in the things whieh it was necessary a 'ruahine,’ a woman of priestess rank, should know. They kept her secluded, until she was well on in young .womanhood, and then she began to ride into the pakeha townships with tier friends and see for herself the ways of her dead mother’s tribe. She is able to foretell death, they say; she lias the gift of second sight. It is she who is sent for to perform the final act in the ‘taingakawawhare,' the removing of the tapu from a newly-opened carved house, by crossing the threshold and eating a kiimera within the whare. As for her being married, I know not; she may have a husband by now. But where she is now I cannot toll. Never mind where she is. 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 is truly Maori now." That was Hopani’s story. Whether The Mountain Maid's bones lie in some forgotten grave of the Ruhepotne, where white men’s dairy cattle graze over the. olden homes of the Ngati-Maniapoto ami Xgat i-Matakore, or whether she survives, under the disguise of chin tatoo and a Maori name, to pass is 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 lives she is probably Iline-Kehu no longer. And in any case it is extremely unlikely that the full ami exact history of The Mountain Maid will ever be made known to the pakeha.