That night I packed up my few things. I was leaving in the morning. Yes, leaving my girl, my home-town because my grandmother was a Maori. I would go to Auckland, to the big city where a man could lose himself in the crowd. The journey by service-car took nearly all day. The rain was coming down steadily as the bus arrived at the depot. There was a crowd of people waiting to greet their friends, but I knew there was nobody there to meet me. I stepped out, left my cases at the luggage place and walked until I came to Queen Street. My home-town was just a back-block settlement compared with this hustling city; the traffic roaring past, dwarfed by the tall buildings, and the newsboys' raucous shouting, like the cries of seagulls above the surging sea of humanity. What a varied moving procession hurried along the sidewalk under the bright fluorescent lights. Samoans and Rarotongans mingling with prosperous businessmen and smartly dressed typists, sailors, drunks, clerks and labourers, Maori and Pakeha, even an occasional Chinese, all members of that great community called Auckland, New Zealand. Yet everybody I passed was a stranger to me as I was pushed and hustled up Queen Street. At last the crowds thinned, and I discovered I was standing outside the People's Palace. I booked in for a week and found a job at the freezing works. Later on I shifted into a room in a dingy street in that decaying borderland between Victoria Park and Ponsonby. Desperately lonely I felt too, my neighbours were friendly enough, but that could not take away the feeling that I was in the wrong place, wasting my time. Sometimes the Islanders would ask me over for a feed at their place, then I would be happy for a while as we gorged ourselves on taro, chop suey, and boiled bananas. After the meal, out would come the guitars and then the plaintive songs of the Islands would while away the hours, for they were home-sick for their islands, their care-free islands far away from the harsh city life of the ‘palangi’, but I was homesick for I knew not what. Perhaps they thought it queer that I did not go out with the sheilas as they did, but I think they understood. On Saturday afternoons I would get drunk with the boys. This particular day there had been plenty of ‘shouts’ in the pub. I remembered crossing the street, a car swerved to miss a motorcyclist and came whizzing towards me. I tried to run, but tripped and there was a crunch and a sudden agonising pain and then and then … A man's voice penetrates my foggy mind and gradually I discern the features of a middle-aged man with glasses. He tells me that I have been very sick but that I am going to recover. The doctor explains that I have suffered grave injuries, but there is nothing seriously wrong now. All I have to do is to use my willpower to make myself better. How can I explain that I could not care less if I live or die. Perhaps something in my eyes tells him my feelings, for he gazes at me intently, then goes outside. The routine of the hospital is pleasant enough, but I seem to have a sort of paralysis. They call in other doctors to see me, but still there is no improvement. The fellow in the next bed to mine is a Hori from the bush. He is dying of leukaemia and yet he appears happy enough. As we grow to know each other better, he unfolds his life story to me. He comes from the bush-clad fastnesses of the Urewera Country, where the mists seldom leave the mountains, where the wild pig and deer roam, and where the Tuhoe tribe, the ‘Children of the Mist’, still cling tneaciously to their ancient way of life, hardly seeing a Pakeha from month to month. He speaks English hesitantly, because at home they only speak Maori. I am ashamed to tell him of my Maori blood and not being able to talk a word of Maori, but he says many of the young Maoris in Rotorua cannot speak Maori and are only interested in pictures and the Pakeha way of life. Soon we start Maori lessons. I pick it up quite quickly but Rua tells me one morning there can be no more lessons. He describes his dream to me in his sing-song voice, ‘I was back in my home pa at the edge of the bush. I was with my grandfather catching kouras in the creek behind the meeting house. As we wandered along the bank I noticed an old log caught up in the clumps of toitoi, rising and falling with the water. “Don't touch it,” yelled my grandfather, “it is the rakau tipua, the haunted log bringing death to this place!” Sure enough that very night old Aunt Wiki died and we had a big tangi’. Thus he ended, ‘I saw that log again in my dreams last night, I have not long to go. I am not worried for I know that my spirit is O.K., it is just my body that is sick. I have found the inner meaning of life and that has given me peace.’ He became worse very rapidly, they do not have time to send for his family. He is whispering away to himself in Maori, I think it is a prayer but then I catch the words ‘I shall never again see Tama-Nui-Te-Ra, but Jim will hear the call of the Urewera.’ He turns to me, ‘E Hoa, I am dying, promise me you will go to my home village near Ruatahuna, when you arrive there ask for my kuia, Mrs Ihaka, tell her I gave you this greenstone tiki. Kaua e wareware. Do not forget.’ This is my last sight of him; a couple of nurses wheel his bed out of the ward. As the wind gently shook the brittle leaves of the palm trees beneath the hospital windows, how could I describe my feelings? I had come to look upon this Maori boy as my only friend. He had known the truth about life, more than many educated city-dwellers. While I lay deep in thought, I became conscious of something hard by my head. It was a Maori grammar. I was just about to toss it out, when I realised Rua must have put it there. The Maori blood from my grandmother stirred within me, I would make Rua's people my people, I would study their history and dedicate myself to their welfare. Now that I had a mission