[CHAPTER XXVIII]
OUT OF EXILE
Canoeing on the Patea—The voyage to Hukatéré—The white man's world again—Bent the medicine-man—Makutu, or the Black Art—Bent's later days—The end.
All was ready for the voyage, and the pakeha-Maori and his companions loaded their canoe and embarked for Hukatéré—thirty miles down-stream, not far from the sea-coast. The Patea was a very winding stream, flowing between high forest-covered banks; its course was impeded by frequent rocky shoals and accumulations of sunken logs, which formed rapids. Aboard the canoe, besides Bent, were Rupé, Hakopa and his niece, and a man named Te Rii, who was an urukehu, or "fair hair."
The white man and his Maori companions paddled along merrily for seven or eight miles, lightening their labours with canoe-songs. Then, in shooting a rapid, the canoe struck a rock, swung broadside on to the swift current, and immediately capsized.
The crew reached the shore safely, and hauled the canoe up on to a shingly bank. Fortunately all the cargo—the baskets of dried eels and the calabashes filled with honey—had been made fast to the thwarts, as a precaution against such an accident, and so was saved; but old Hakopa lost a little kit—his bush savings-bank—containing a sum of money which he had acquired at the Waitara. On the bank a fire was kindled by means of flint and steel—commonly used amongst the Maoris in those days, and still occasionally seen in use in remote forest districts, such as the Urewera Country. By the blaze of the great fire the wrecked canoeists dried themselves and their garments, and they camped there that night.
At daylight next morning they embarked again, and another day and a half at the paddles took them down to the Hukatéré kainga, a large settlement of raupo-thatched houses, standing on the left bank of the Patea, in a beautiful bend, with the lofty, forest-fringed cliffs of Pariroa jutting out abruptly on the opposite shore.
The approaching canoe, its four paddles flashing in the sun and dipping again all together, was seen from the kainga while still some little distance up the river, and the men and women of the Hukatéré gathered on the water-side and cried and waved their welcome to the long-absent people of the bush.
"Kumea mai te waka!" they chanted, and the women waved shawls and green branches in the poetic greeting of the powhiri. "To-o-ia mai te waka! Oh, haul up the canoe! Draw hitherwards the canoe. To the resting-place—that canoe! To the sleeping-place—that canoe! Oh, welcome, welcome, strangers from the forest-land! Urge swift your paddles, for home darts your canoe!"
So, chanting their ancient song, the villagers received the new arrivals, and, still waving their garments and their leafy branches, retired slowly before them as they landed and walked up the sloping banks until the open marae in the centre of the kainga was reached. There the guests from Rukumoana were received by a dignified chief, white-bearded old Nga-waka-taurua (Double-canoe). Now the powhiri was succeeded by the doleful sounds of the tangi, and one after another the Hukatéré tribespeople pressed their noses to those of Rupé and his household; and they wept long and unrestrainedly for the dead, for those who had passed away since they last met.