CHAPTER II.
THE AGED CHIEF.
It was dawn when I opened my eyes and saw Kahikatea stooping to get through the doorway, so as to stretch his limbs outside, where there was no danger of knocking down articles stuck up among the rafters. Soon afterwards I joined him in front of the hut.
“Ha!” he said, greeting me with a smile full of early morning freshness, “I always turn out before the sun gets up, so as to see the lovely colours on the hills—look!”
He pointed to the roof-tree, the very tip of which was glistening like velvet in the first crimson flush of sunlight. The wooded hill beyond was bathed in splendour, and the birds were gliding down umbrageous slopes, chasing the early dragon-flies and filling the place with song. The storm of the preceding night had left no trace, and Nature had emerged all fresh and smiling. Kahikatea walked about enjoying it, while slowly the sunlight crept lower and lower down his roof-tree until it flooded on to the top of his log hut, and finally touched his own head before it reached mine.
“It’s glorious living all alone in the bush,” he said; “I get more solid satisfaction out of it than out of London, or Paris, or New York, or Sydney, or—hello! there’s my korimako—my little bell-bird—he always turns up as soon as the sun gets on to his fuchsia tree.”
I followed his outstretched finger and saw his fellow poet of the sunrise brushing the dewdrops from among the flowers and scattering them around as he trilled out a rain of melody quite as liquid as the many-tinted shower that fell upon the moss beneath.
“His song is sadder than it used to be,” said Kahikatea; “the bees get most of his honey now, and he is doomed to extinction.”
I had almost made up my mind before that this man was a poet, and one who could be trusted to catch Nature’s higher meanings from her birds and flowers and trees, from her dawns and sunsets, and her mid-day hush, when the bell-bird, assuming the rôle of a solemn, mysterious clock, strikes one in the lofty, silent spaces of the bush. Now, as I watched his face under the influence of the morning and the korimako’s music, I conceived a picture of his nature which has remained with me to this day—the picture of a clear-souled poet, who could dream and yet act, who was mad and yet sane.
The sun was not far above the horizon when we made a start for Te Makawawa’s pa. Through the silent grove of palm ferns, along the well-worn path that I had discovered the night before, and finally by ways that were new to me, I followed my tall friend down out of the bush to the sea, where the silver-crested waves were rolling in upon a grey gravel shore.
After traversing this for some distance we struck inland to avoid a steep rocky promontory, with bluffs, against which the spray was dashing high. Then, after several hours’ tramp through flax swamps, along precipitous ridges, over flooded streams, and through open dells, where all the rarest ferns in the world seemed to be growing together, we reached a broad river, and, following it down to the sea, saw ahead of us, on the summit of a high and bold cliff, the palisading of Te Makawawa’s pa.