Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/122

94 This party had been despatched from Taiporohenui by Rupé, to work inland through the bush to the upper waters of the Patea River, and scour the country for food supplies for the assembled tribes. They were ordered to bring home wild pork and wild honey, and to catch as many eels as they could carry. They travelled far into the heart of the bush, and then divided into small parties of twos and threes for eel-catching in the creeks.

The white man's companion on the eel-fishing excursion was an old Maori from the "King" Country, a Ngati-Maniapoto man, who had joined the Taranaki Hauhaus; he was a short but strongly built fellow, with a big head and of dark and sullen visage, made more forbidding still by the blue-black tattoo with which cheeks and brow and nose were scrolled and lined. The couple, leaving the others after arranging a general rendezvous for the following day, selected a small creek, winding in a slow, brown current beneath the roof of verdure which the outstretching branches of the rata and the pines nearly everywhere held over it. It was a tributary of the Upper Patea above Rukumoana. They fished with short rods and flax lines, with worms for bait, and by the evening had caught between them about sixty good-sized eels.

The eel-fishers bivouacked where the twilight found them, in a tiny nook near Orangimura, where there was just room to build their camp-fire and