Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/98

70 camp-fire, when the white man learned from his Hauhau comrades many a wild legend and folk-story, hair-raising tales of witchcraft, and mournful tangi-songs and love-ditties without end.

Powder and shot were too valuable to waste on the birds of the forest in those days. One of the Maori snaring methods, as practised by "Ringiringi" and his companions, was to cut out wooden waka, or miniature canoes or troughs, fill them with water, and place them in some dry spot in the forest where pigeons and tui were plentiful. Just over these troughs flax-snares were arranged, so that when the birds, thirsting for water after feasting on the bush-berries, flew down to drink, and stretched their heads through the running loops, they were tightly noosed. Other snares were set on the miro-trees, of whose sweet berries the pigeons and tui were particularly fond. "Ringiringi" quickly learned the art of setting snares of flax or cabbage-tree leaf with cunning slip-loops in the branches of the fruit-laden miro; in a clump of these pines he sometimes caught in a single day as many as three hundred or four hundred birds—kaka parrots, tui, and pigeon—for the forests were alive with feathered creatures, and in the autumn time, when the wild fruits were ripe and abundant, they were to be taken with little trouble; the noisy kaka parrot was the most easily lured of all. The only forest bird that was not welcomed by the hunters was the owl, or ruru; should