Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/452

 in spirit land, with peace restored, and with Tom, the half-caste Opotiki constable, at my side, it was quite safe to go where the doughty Hauhau once had trod. We were bound for Waioaka, a former stronghold of Te Kooti's, and now a shiftless-looking spectacle at the base of foothills, seven miles from Opotiki. It was Saturday, the Hauhaus' Sabbath, and we hoped to reach the pa in time for church.

Many years ago, an old Maori told me, Waioaka was the largest of four pas that then stood in the immediate neighborhood, and had three thousand inhabitants. As Maoris are not noted for accuracy in furnishing census returns, that number of inhabitants probably was an exaggeration. Perhaps it included dogs and cattle; for the Maori loves a joke, and census enumerators not infrequently have learned that heads of native households have represented canines and livestock to be human beings, and they have been so entered. At any rate, the settlement's population was now little more than one hundred persons.

There was nothing formidable in Waioaka's appearance as we drew near it. Only low, grass-grown sections of the demolished ramparts remained. There were no ditches to cross, no closely-set tree-trunks to scale, to reach the group of small one-story houses built around the carved house of worship. Still there was a barrier, a sort of mongrel affair. It was a diversified fence, a fence in evolution. Tree-fern trunks tied with supplejack were succeeded by barbed wire, and that by smooth