Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/217

Rh The rest of the body was also served round, and the people consumed the whole of it.

"Kāatené and Wairau were two of those who ate the cooked soldier. I saw Kātené squatting there, with a basket of this man-meat and some potatoes before him. He took up a cooked hand, and before eating it sucked up the hinu, or fat, that was collected in the palm just as if he were drinking water. The hands when cooked curled up with the fingers half-closed, and the hollowed palm was filled with the melted hinu.

"Titokowaru did not eat human flesh himself. His reason for abstaining was that if he ate it his mana tapu, his personal sacredness, would thereby be destroyed."

The younger people in the pa were rather awestricken by the preparations for the cannibal feast, and stood together some distance away from the hangi. "I stood with them," says one Te Kahu-pukoro, who was a boy at the time; "I was afraid to join in the eating, but the savour of the flesh cooking in the ovens was delightful!"

When the warriors, a little later on, were enjoying their meal of man-meat, some of the little children were heard calling out to their fathers: "Homai he poaka mou" ("Give me some pork to eat"). They had seen the meat carried up in flax baskets, and thought it was pork.

Now the white soldiers' funeral pyre was set