But the warrior's braggadocio received a sharp check from Titokowaru. The war-chief disapproved of this sort of thing on the part of irresponsible young free-lances. "No man must bring white man's flesh into this pa," he said, "unless he is one of the Tekau-ma-rua, the war-party sent out by me. Take that pakeha leg back again at once and place it alongside the body." And soon thereafter the disgusted scout, his ardour for "long-pig" so unexpectedly damped by Titoko's code of cannibal etiquette, was to be seen trudging back along the track to the pakeha farm, with sulky visage and reluctant gait, and a white foot and leg—raw—protruding from a flax basket strapped to his shoulders.
By day the scouting parties of the Hauhau "Twelve Apostles" scoured the country; by night the people gathered round the fires on the marae or in the big sleeping wharés, and talked and sang and danced the hakas of which they never wearied. Wild night-scenes those on the stockaded marae, with the crowds of blanketed or flax-cloaked men and women, their wild faces illumined by the leaping flames, squatting in great circles round the camp fires, while more than half nude figures leaped and stamped and slapped their limbs and chests with resounding slaps, and expelled the air from their lungs in wolfish "Ooh's!" and "Hau's!" as they trod the assembly ground in all the fury of the war-dance. A warrior orator would rise, weapon in hand, and throwing off his blanket for freedom of action, go bounding along the marae in front of the assemblage, shouting short, sharp sentences as he taki'd to and fro, his athletic figure untrammelled except for a waist-shawl or short dangling mat, fire in his movements, and ferocity in every gesture and in every cry—the embodiment of belligerent Maoridom in its savage prime.
Like defiant replying shouts from some hidden foe in the blackness of the forest that rose in a solid wall above the rear stockade came the clear echoes of the roaring haka choruses.
And so the wild night passed, until the camp fires died down, and the tribespeople sought sleep in their packed wharepunis and their rush-strewn burrows; and the melancholy "Kou-kou!" of the "hundred-eyed" ruru, the bush-owl, was heard, as the bird-sentry of the night hours cried his watchword from the forest or a perch on some tall palisade-post. Yet not all eyes were closed in the pa, for the Hauhaus, grown wise by much hard experience, did not neglect the posting of sentries, and a sentinel watched from the platform in the angle-tower. At intervals he cried his watch-cry, or raised his voice in a night-song that rose and fell in measured cadences like a tangi wail.
The most dreaded hour in Maori warfare was the dark, dank hour just before the dawn, and then it was well to be on the qui vive, for Kepa's dusky forest-rangers and their white comrades the A.C.'s had a truly unpleasant fashion of attacking their enemies at most unholy, shivery times, when man slept soundest. So the watchmen in the tower were enjoined to extra vigilance in the early morning hours. And, as in the olden Maori days, out rang the voice of the high sentinel, chanting his ancient "Whakaara-pa," his "All's well" song, to Tarioa and Kopu, the first and morning stars.
This is one of the songs he cried, an old watch-chant of the Ngati-Toa tribe of Kawhia:
Late one night, as the Hauhaus lay behind their palisades, Colonel Thomas McDonnell—a man who spoke Maori like a native—rode boldly up to the pa wall with his escort, and asked for Titokowaru. He called out in the native tongue, "O Titoko—where are you?"
Titoko, summoned from his tent, went down to the stockade. "I am here!" he shouted.
The white officer cried: "Titoko, I have been trying to discover your atua, the god which guides you in your battles. Now I have found it—I know the source of your mana. When the wind blows hard from the whakarua (the north-east), I know it is the breath of your god, the wind of Uenuku! But your atua is only a tutua—a low fellow!"