Page:Reminiscences of Earliest Canterbury 1915.pdf/34

 were scrupulously careful to conceal from strangers) they would camp at sundown, and resume their journey the following morning in time to enable them to end their journey about the same time they had begun it on the previous day.

When a boy I can well remember two double war canoes and a large sealing boat coming into Pigeon Bay from the North Island. There were over twenty Maoris in the party, and they remained in the Bay for about a week, when they put to sea again to go to Dunedin. After a while they returned to the Bay, and this time they stayed longer than they had intended, owing to an accident to one of their number, who got a severe wound in his heel whilst in the bush. Fortunately for him he was only about a quarter of a mile from my father’s back door, but by the time he crawled thither he was almost done for from loss of blood. My father stopped the bleeding and dressed the wound, and then had the Maori carried to his friends’ camp on a ladder. Every day afterwards, for some three weeks, my father visited the camp and dressed the foot, and when, at the end of this time it was healed, the man came to my father, and with the most touching