Long-handled and pointed at the end, these implements resembled stilts with a cross-bar about eighteen inches from the ground on which the digger's foot rested.

Two men worked them together.

The women did not dig the fields, but theirs was the labour almost as severe of carrying on their backs the heavy baskets of gravel to scatter over the soil of the plantations.
Almost the only staple article of Maori vegetable food which grew wild and profusely was the fern or bracken _( pteris aquilina_ var.
_esculenta_), which indeed was found on every hill and moor and in every glade, at any rate in the North Island.

But the preparation of the fibrous root was tedious, calling as it did for various processes of drying and pounding.
Fishing involved not only the catching of fish, but the manufacture of seine nets, sometimes half a mile long, of eel-weirs, lines made of the fibre of the native flax, and of fish-hooks of bone or tough crooked wood barbed with human bone.

The human skeleton was also laid under contribution for the material of skewers, needles and flutes.
The infinite patience and delicacy requisite in their bird-snaring and spearing are almost beyond the conception of the civilized townsmen untrained in wood-craft.