A Canoe In the Mist Read Online Free

the boat had steadied itself Dr Ralph stepped carefully aboard.
    ‘Whew! That nearly caught me!’ he said.
    ‘I thought it had. Are you sure you’re not wet? We don’t want you getting chilled,’ fussed Mrs Fazackerley.
    ‘No, I’m not wet,’ snapped Dr Ralph.
    ‘That’s new to me, a wave on a lake,’ said Mr Hensley.
    ‘You can never guess what’s coming next in this weird country,’ said Mrs Hensley.
    The Maoris were talking together, excited and anxious. In the end Guide Sophia faced the tourists and said, ‘I am sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but we do not wish to go on.’
    ‘Not go on!’ exclaimed Dr Ralph. ‘When I’ve come all the way from Melbourne and the Hensleys from England! Why ever not?’
    ‘There was another such wave before you came down. None of us have ever seen this before. We don’t know what it portends.’
    ‘But it did no harm, and it’s a beautiful day,’ protested Mrs Fazackerley. ‘You couldn’t ask for better weather at this time of year. We’ve paid our money and we want our trip.’
    ‘So we do,’ said Eleanor.
    ‘A wave twice as big shouldn’t bother a sturdy craft like this,’ said Dr Ralph. ‘She’s as good as a whaleboat.’
    ‘She is a whaleboat,’ said Sophia. ‘It is not the boat that we question.’
    ‘Oh Sophia, please !’ Lillian burst out, throwing caution to the winds. She had waited so long for this day and it was doubly precious to her because of Mattie.
    Sophia sighed, and then she smiled and spoke again to the boatmen. It was easy to disappoint a party of tourists—she’ddone it often when bad weather threatened—but not this eager child of her own village. After a little more talk in Maori the boat was cast off.
    By now the dawn had come. With six oars expertly handled they moved swiftly out of the inlet on to the broad waters of the lake, glassy smooth, with wisps of fog here and there. Dr Ralph, who had a bent for science, took note of the wave marks on the edges, and declared that the water must have risen all over the lake.
    ‘A small earthquake, I expect,’ he said. ‘Nothing unusual in these parts, don’t you agree, Guide Sophia?’
    ‘We have many earthquakes that do no harm,’ she said, and put the subject aside by going on to her regular commentary. She told how the first explorer Ngatori-i-rangi had thrown a tree into the lake and it splintered into a thousand living fish.
    ‘And Mr McRae says this hamper is full of fish bait so we can catch them,’ said Mr Hensley, pretending to be serious.
    ‘Then you must tell me when you see a thousand fishes coming,’ said Sophia. She liked to play along with the hotelkeeper’s jokes.
    Mattie would have asked more about the legend but Mrs Fazackerley interrupted: ‘Oh look, here’s the sun, isn’t it beautiful? It puts a blush on those hills like the bloom on a rose!’ And she continued her romantic chattering while the sunshine crept down towards the water.
    ‘It doesn’t need her to tell us,’ whispered Lillian.
    ‘We’ll close our ears,’ Mattie whispered back, and so they did.
    The scene cast its own enchantment. Green bays nestled between massive cliffs of clean-cut rock. Wherever there was a root-hold, the creamy plumes of toetoe hung over the water and brightened the reflections. To the north, the shores were softened by distance; to the east rose the face of Tarawera mountain, dark with shadow.
    ‘D’you like it, Mattie?’ asked Mr Hensley in that keen voice which showed how much he liked it himself.
    ‘Yes, Papa,’ she said truthfully. ‘Oh, what’s that bird, Lillian—is it a cormorant?’
    ‘We call them shags,’ said Lillian.
    ‘It’s floating double, one head up, one head down. What a perfect reflection! Oh—it’s gone under.’
    ‘Let’s guess where it comes up again. You can never tell.’
    They made their guesses and watched—but what they saw next was not a bird.
    ‘Oh look, Papa, look ! A canoe, and a big one too!’
    All eyes followed