Page:Fairytales•Tregear•1891.pdf/138



The South Island of New Zealand is said to have been inhabited ages ago by a race of giants; fierce cannibal creatures of enormous height and bulk. Their heads touched the clouds when mists were drifting low above the hills, and they could stride from ridge to ridge across the valleys. They could drink up the rivers into the vast recesses of their thirsty stomachs, and worse than all could transform themselves into different shapes at will. Luckily they were not very numerous, or the race of human beings must have disappeared altogether before foes as rapacious as they were powerful.

A small tribe of the Maori people lived near the mouth of the river now called the Molyneux. They were greatly afflicted by continual loss of their numbers in some mysterious way; hunting parties of ten would go out to look for game and would not return, parties of twelve or fifteen would go and would return no more. The survivors gathered together and exhausted every means of conjecture in their efforts to arrive at the truth but all were futile. When their