Page:Reminiscences of Earliest Canterbury 1915.pdf/33

 name or identity, he escaped punishment. To conclude this incident, whilst citing it as evidence of the loyalty of the Maoris, it may be mentioned that the man Toby Green, when the party were returning by boat, carelessly drew a loaded gun from the bow. It exploded, and the charge entered his knee. For ten months he was under my father’s care. The bullet eventually suppurated out of his thigh, but the wound never healed, and the continued suppuration so drained his strength and affected his health that he died.

The Maoris in those early days had many faculties which have disappeared from the race under the influence of civilisation. They were, for example, astonishingly weather-wise, being able, by methods of their own, to forecast wind or rain. Unless they were confident of a good forecast they did not undertake long journeys by sea or land, and to see them on such journeys was to establish amongst the early settlers a fair inference that the weather would be fine. In such a journey of fifteen to twenty miles (say from Pigeon Bay to Akaroa) the party would start about 3 p.m., and entering the bush by tracks of their own (which they