The superstitious old warrior was so insistent that "Ringiringi," to please him, agreed to his wishes; he contented himself with the little he had in his kit, and then, filling his pipe with torori tobacco, lit it, and smoked as he lay beside the camp-fire. His Maori mate squatted smoking on the other side.
The warmth of the fire, and the low, murmurous singing of the little river—the wawara-wai, the babble of the waters, in the musical Maori tongue—pleasantly lulled the tired pakeha. He lay there, with his scanty bush-ranging garments wrapped about him, listening, half-asleep, to the lazy run of the creek, and to the songs that his savage old companion recited to himself in a monotonous chant. War-songs of Waikato, songs that he and his Kingite comrades had shouted in many an armed camp before the white man drove them out beyond the Aukati line, the frontier of the Waikato. In one of these chants the eel-fisher's voice was lifted in a quick burst of passionate remembrance—a defiant haka-song the Hauhaus of Taranaki, too, had adopted as a composition exactly expressing their opinion of pakehas in general, and of the pakeha Governor in particular. It likened Governor Grey to a bush-bullock devouring the tender leaves of the raurekau shrub—a Maori simile for the land-hunger of the whites:
"A he kau ra.
He kau ra!
U——u!
He kau kawana koe
Kia miti mai
Te raurekau.
A he kau ra,
He kau ra!