"After we deserted Tauranga-ika," says my old pakeha-Maori, "we led a miserably rough life in the bush. We were as near starvation sometimes as we could well be. Kepa's Kupapas and the white scouts were hunting for us, stalking us like wild beasts, and we were hiding in the forest and living on what we could pick up. We scattered in parties. I and some of the Hauhaus selected a safe spot in the deep bush, built wharés to shelter ourselves, and then went out to the edge of the forest digging up fern-root for food. We scoured the bush for the mamaku fern-tree, [13] and cut out the white pith of the tree; it was one of our principal foods at that time. It has a peculiar effect on any one who eats much of it—it makes him strangely drowsy and sleepy. Sometimes, too, we had to eat whara-whara and similar mosses, and the mushroom-like haroré that grew on the tawa-trees, and hakeke, or wood-fungus. We became very weak and feeble for want of food. We did not dare to light a fire in the daytime, for fear the smoke rising above the forest trees would betray us. At night we would kindle a small fire, just enough to keep the pipes going as we sat round and smoked and talked in low voices."
Titokowaru's warriors, too, ran short of ammunition. For his cartridges, Bent sometimes had to use small pieces of hard wood cut to the proper size instead of lead bullets. The natives were also often short of percussion-caps; they used to save the exploded ones, and cut off match-heads and insert them. A box of caps was a great prize to a Hauhau in those days. This ingenious use of match-heads was a common practice in the later days of the war, and many a box of pakeha matches found its way through supposedly "friendly" Maori hands into the rebel camps.
For three or four weeks the Hauhaus concealed themselves in the forests between the Waitotara and the Patea Rivers, their warriors making occasional sorties and laying ambuscades for straggling whites.
Not only was Bent in daily and nightly danger of death at the hands of his enemies, the Government men, during this period of hiding and starving in the bush, but in one of his adventures he narrowly escaped the tomahawks of his own companions, the Hauhaus.
Bent and a party of about twenty Maoris set out one day from their camp at Oteka, away inland of the Weraroa, on a food-hunting expedition into the great trackless forests in the rear of their hiding-place. They travelled half a day's journey into the rugged bush-country, a lone region where no booted foot had ever trod. They fished for eels in the creeks, and climbed for wild honey wherever they saw the bees buzzing round their hives in the hollow trees. They carried with them taha (calabashes made from the hué, or vegetable gourd); these they filled with the honey. When they had collected as much as they could carry, they started on their return tramp to the kainga. Bent's pikau, or back-load, consisted of about thirty pounds weight of honey in taha and two large eels, all in a flax basket.
When the party left their camping-place the white man went on ahead, and was soon out of sight of his companions. After a while he found that he had missed the route by which he had come the previous day.
He pushed on and on, hoping every moment to catch sight of a broken branch or a footprint or a tomahawk blaze on a tree that would indicate the trail. He wandered about, up and down hill, crossing creeks, and tearing what little clothes he wore in the tangled bush, until he had not the least idea where he was.
He was lost in the forest.
Night came on while the lonely white man was still toiling bewildered through the dense woods. He spent the hours of darkness crouched up under a tree, sleeping little, and shivering with the cold, for he was thinly clothed and had no blanket, and no matches or flint and steel with which to light a fire for warmth and cooking.