"This is my canoe! Hew it down and carve it out! In it we will paddle down the river to Hukatéré, and you shall look upon the faces of your fellow-pakehas again."
So now behold Bent the canoe-builder. There above him towered the tree—Tane the Forest-god personified. In his hand was his broad-axe; with it he must make his rangatira's river-boat.
He felled the tree, and, lopping off the upper part, began the laborious work of dubbing out the waka. The upper side of the trunk he levelled off with his axe, and then he gradually cut it into hollowed shape, an art he had learned on the Waitara. For this portion of the work an adze was chiefly used, a steel blade lashed to a wooden handle in the old Maori fashion. He trimmed and shaped the ends into bow and stern, and day by day the canoe assumed more shapely proportions, until at last it lay complete—a craft of about twenty-five feet in length and three feet in beam, rough and undecorated, it is true, but still a ship of the Maori, fit to carry cargo and paddlers, and run the rapids of the swift and broken Patea. Ropes were made of stout supplejack vines, and with Rupé and his family the white man lowered the canoe down the high bank to the water-edge. Te Riu-o-Tané lay ready for its crew—the Hollow Trunk of Tané.
Then paddles were shaped out, and Bent and his companions set to work catching and drying eels and gathering wild honey, in preparation for the voyage down the river to Hukatéré village, where the main body of Rupé's tribe resided.
About this time the white man entered upon his third matrimonial experience. His chief's granddaughter, a good-looking girl of about eighteen, came to the little village with a visiting party of Ngati-Ruanui. She had already a husband, but he had quarrelled with her, and attempted to kill her; she, therefore, returned to her old tupuna, Rupé, who now gave her to Bent; and the white man and his young Maori wife lived happily there in well-hidden Rukumoana. [14]
[CHAPTER XXVII]
HIROKI: THE STORY OF A FUGITIVE
Hiroki, the slayer of McLean—Strange faces at Rukumoana—A forest chase—A meeting and a warning—Hiroki's wild bush life and his end.