The white man's companion on the eel-fishing excursion was an old Maori from the "King" Country, a Ngati-Maniapoto man, who had joined the Taranaki Hauhaus; he was a short but strongly built fellow, with a big head and of dark and sullen visage, made more forbidding still by the blue-black tattoo with which cheeks and brow and nose were scrolled and lined. The couple, leaving the others after arranging a general rendezvous for the following day, selected a small creek, winding in a slow, brown current beneath the roof of verdure which the outstretching branches of the _rata_ and the pines nearly everywhere held over it. It was a tributary of the Upper Patea above Rukumoana. They fished with short rods and flax lines, with worms for bait, and by the evening had caught between them about sixty good-sized eels. The eel-fishers bivouacked where the twilight found them, in a tiny nook near Orangimura, where there was just room to build their camp-fire and spread their bush-couches of fresh-pulled tree-fern fronds, between the buttressed _ratas_ and the creek-side. "Ringiringi" had a little cold food in his _pikau_ kit, potatoes and _kopaki_ corn; that is, maize in the sheath. He was about to grill some of the fat eels on the fire when his Maori companion stopped him. "_E tama!_" he said. "Don't you know it is unlucky to cook the _tuna_ in the night-time? Do not touch those eels until the morning; should you disobey, it will surely bring heavy rain." The superstitious old warrior was so insistent that "Ringiringi," to please him, agreed to his wishes; he contented himself with the little he had in his kit, and then, filling his pipe with _torori_ tobacco, lit it, and smoked as he lay beside the camp-fire. His Maori mate squatted smoking on the other side. The warmth of the fire, and the low, murmurous singing of the little river--the _wawara-wai_, the babble of the waters, in the musical Maori tongue--pleasantly lulled the tired _pakeha_. He lay there, with his scanty bush-ranging garments wrapped about him, listening, half-asleep, to the lazy run of the creek, and to the songs that his savage old companion recited to himself in a monotonous chant. War-songs of Waikato, songs that he and his Kingite comrades had shouted in many an armed camp before the white man drove them out beyond the _Aukati_ line, the frontier of the Waikato. In one of these chants the eel-fisher's voice was lifted in a quick burst of passionate remembrance--a defiant _haka_-song the Hauhaus of Taranaki, too, had adopted as a composition exactly expressing their opinion of _pakehas_ in general, and of the _pakeha_ Governor in particular. It likened Governor Grey to a bush-bullock devouring the tender leaves of the _raurekau_ shrub--a Maori simile for the land-hunger of the whites: "_A he kau ra. He kau ra! U----u! He kau kawana koe Kia miti mai Te raurekau. A he kau ra, He kau ra! A----u----u!_"