Whero began to sing one of the wild and plaintive native melodies. But his voice was almost drowned by the roar of the whirling stones, and his passage was continually impeded by the masses of drift-wood—great arms of trees, and uprooted trunks—striking against the boulders and threatening him with an upset.
Yet he still sang on, until a low, sweet echo answered him from the bank, and he saw his mother gathering fern by the water's edge.
The canoe was quickly run aground, and he leaped ashore to join her. Then he saw that his grandfather Kakiki Mahane was sitting on a stone not far off. Whero walked up a little ashamed of his behaviour; but for him Marileha had no reproaches, for he was the bitter-sweet which changed her joy to pain and her pain to joy continually.
She hailed his return, for her heart was aching for her baby, which could not survive their terrible entombment. She pointed to the bend in the ravine, where one or two small whares had been hastily built. Two uprights in the ground, with a pole across, had been walled with mats, roughly and quickly woven from flax-leaf and bulrush. Every Maori had been hard at work, and work could get them all they wanted here, except the hot stone and the geyser-bath.
With her own hands Marileha had cooked them what she called a good square dinner.
But the ideal life of the Maori is one of perfect laziness, and as a Maori lady Marileha had enjoyed this from her birth. Her old father was trying to comfort her. She should go back with him to her own people. She should not stay where the fish had to be caught, and the wild duck snared, and the wild pig hunted, and then brought to her to kindle a fire to cook them, when he was a rich man, who could live like his kinsmen at Hawke's Bay, hire a grand house of the pakeha, and pay white servants to do everything for them.
The prospect was an alluring one, but Marileha did not believe anything would induce Nga-Hepé to abandon his native hills even for a season.
"Have I not sat in the councils of the pakeha?" argued Kakiki. "Do I not see our people giving place to theirs? The very rat they have brought over seas drives away our kiore [the native rat], and we see him no more. Have I not ever said, Let your young lord and first-born go amongst them, that he may learn their secret and hold his own in manhood against them?"
"I have learned it," put in Whero: "it is 'work.' Was it for this, mother, you sent a pakeha to dig up the bag we buried by the white pines?"
Marileha hushed her son as she glanced nervously around, for none of her Maori companions must know of the existence of that bag.