Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/342

222 sugar and cups, and piles of "billies" and bottles. Here my Maori guide and I halted for tea—and gooseberries. Beside the tree was a gooseberry bush, and a very popular bush it was, according to my pilot.

"Everybody has a go at the gooseberries," said he as he helped himself.

We did not stop here to "boil the billy," as we had at first intended; instead we each plucked a Mountain Lily leaf, and dipping it into a cold, swift stream, we quenched our thirst, then pressed on to Ball Hut for supper. When we got within sight and hail of the hut the guide stopped and loudly hallooed. It was a call for "tea," and in answer thereto a porter appeared at the door. When we arrived, we sat down to canned meat and beans, canned milk and fruit, and bread baked at the hotel.

That night only these two men and myself were at the hut, but, nevertheless, ours were not the sole voices there. Other voices there were, and they were loud and harsh. They were the calls of the kea, the mountain parrot, of the South Island, which has a cry that sounds very much like its name. The kea has a strange history. Once it lived on berries and grubs, but years ago it became fond of mutton; and now, according to widely credited accounts, it is very destructive to sheep. Alighting on the back of a sheep, the kea fixes its claws in the wool or flesh and quickly makes an opening with its two-inch beak. Its cries attract other keas, and beneath their combined attack the sheep soon collapses.