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Chapter XXI. The Finding of The Bodies.

The people dispersed into groups of twos and threes, mothers carrying their children on their backs, slaves carrying the chiefs’ children in the same way. The children having learnt from the confusion that something strange had taken place, and being in a state of excitement, half fear, half curiosity, they refused to remain in the settlement with the old and decrepit. Every valley, nook, and thicket were soon alive with human beings, moving about, and pulling and pushing the fern and toetoe aside, looking and peering into every hole or crevice in the sides of the hills or rocks, and nothing could be heard but the crackling of dry or half-rotten wood under the feet of the searchers. Kai, with Moe on his back, followed a party which took the main road towards the inland settlement. After having gone some considerable distance, he sat down, and said to Moe, “I am tired; let us sit down here. We shall hear them when they find your mother.”

Moe asked, “What did the dog say?”

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“What dog?” asked Kai.

“Why, the dog that made you jump over the waterfall,” answered Moe.

“I did not jump,” answered Kai, “but fell over.”

“You said it was a god of your tribe,” said Moe. “Was your ancestor a dog? For you know our ancestors are called dogs; and my grandfather told me that the dog Owa was once a man. Are you his descendant?”

“Perhaps,” answered Kai.

“Then how is it that you were taken a slave?” asked Moe. “As you are part dog, and still look like a man—and you are a large man—how is it that you did not fight two times at once—strike with your meré and bite with your teeth?”

“I could not,” answered Kai. “I have a dislike to raw flesh.”

“Yes,” continued Moe, “and raw flesh, when alive, can at times act; but cowards like to eat cooked flesh, for it cannot strike, or kick, or——” In an instant the boy held up his hands, and looked in the direction from which a loud wailing came. Kai got up and went towards the spot from which the noise came; all the other searchers, who had also heard the noise, ran towards the same spot, and in their headlong pace they soon left Kai behind, who followed in the track they had made in the scrub, and soon reached the clump of trees among which sat the women, with the children still on their backs, who were kept from falling off by a mat tied over their shoulders.

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The women sat crouching on the ground, howling as loud as they could, while the children stared at the different persons who were coming up and joined in the wailing. Kai stood erect, with his head bowed down, and while he wept he sang a song.

For some time Moe could not understand why the people wept here; but seeing a bird alight among the trees, he looked up and saw his mother and father both hanging. In an instant he let go Kai's hand, and was up in the tree, looking into his mother's face, and talking to her. The young children saw Moe's sudden action, and caught sight of the bodies. One of them that could talk cried out, “Do not go near them, Moe; they are dead, and will frighten you.”

The children screamed as they saw that Moe had untied the flax that held his mother, and the body fell amongst the weeping group.

The children's scream caused the weepers to look up just in time to see the body fall. With a yell of horror and dread they rose and fled, leaving a wide circle round the corpse.

Moe descended, clasped his mother's hand, turned her face up, and said, “O mother! open your eyes and look at me. I will not say that I will cry for Koko if you look at me.”

“You stupid boy,” said an old, dirty, fat woman, as she walked up to him and tried to lift him away, “go away from her; she is dead.”

“No,” answered Moe. “If you touch me I will bite you.”

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“Who will feed you,” asked the woman, “if you sit holding your dead mother? You saucy orphan! You will be sacred, and who will feed you and look after you, since your mother is dead?”

“Hold your fat tongue,” said Kai; “I would not let my child come near your fat body. Though I am a slave, I am better than a woman who, in her fatness, let her husband die of leanness.”

“You can be as saucy as you like,” answered the fat woman, “now that your master is dead. If he were alive I would kill you for your words. You know if I were to kill you for your insult in the presence of your master, and he were to see me, I should act according to our custom; but you hide yourself behind the knowledge that we do not know who may be your master, and if it chance to be some one now at a distance, I would have to pay with property for your death. You slave! you live leavings of a chief's feast! Live on, and let your cooked head think that you are a chief.”

“Who told you to say that to Kai,” said Moe, as he jumped up. “He is kind to me, and will feed me, while you are eating at one meal as much as one hundred like me could eat. You are a woman of great throat! You ate the marrow out of Koko's bones! Why do you talk, you living grave and saucy burial-place of my kind old slave, Koko! If you do not go away I will bite your leg.”

This conversation was carried on in the intervals of the wailing. By this time all the inhabitants of the page 299 settlement, excepting Takaho, had assembled in or around the clump of trees. An old man climbed the tree and let down the body of Namu, and laid it by his wife. He then returned to the settlement to Takaho, and asked him, “What are we to do with your two children? Shall we bring them to you?” Takaho answered, “I am dead; I cannot think.” The old man asked, “Who is to pihe over them if you do not come?” “My children are sacred,” answered Takaho, “and need not fear if left in their sleep without the pihe. Bury them where they were found, and at the next hahunga their bones can be removed with the rest.”

The old man returned, and in a short time two graves were dug with sticks broken from the scrub; while the men loosened the soil with the sticks the women scratched it out with their hands. The two bodies were laid in the graves, and while the men were covering them the women threw in boughs of the kawakawa. The sticks used in digging were collected, and with others were used to form a fence round the graves, and after besmearing them all over with redochre, the people returned to the settlement.

When Kai wanted to take Moe back to the settlement, he screamed for his mother, and would not stir from the place. He cried out, “Who told you to bury her? You cannot keep me as she did. Who put her up in the tree when she was alive? I will kill some one if she does not get up and come to me.”

Kai answered, “Your father killed her; she died because he put cooked food on her face.”

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Moe said, “But how could he kill her when he was dead? I saw him hanging in the tree.”

“Yes; but he had two other hands which you do not know of,” answered Kai; “and as he killed your mother with the cooked food, the two hands I speak of lifted him up beside her, and I suppose he died in a fit of ill-temper.

“The two hands belonged to a god, or they could not have put him up in a tree if he had resisted.”

“You know Uhiro is a god of revenge, and the hands were those of revenge; that god lives in this place, and I have seen the hands which put your father up in the tree. If you remain here until the darkness of night cover us and the graves, those hands may kill us. Moe, you like old Kai, and do not wish to have him put in the tree?”

“Yes; you are kind to me,” answered Moe.

“Then let us go with the others,” said Kai.

“I will go,” answered Moe.