According to Kimble Bent the attack was not entirely unexpected. At any rate, it had been foreshadowed in Maori fashion by one of the Hauhau "medicine-men."
"The day before this attack," says Bent, "I had a strange dream, which Titokowaru's priest and reader of dreams interpreted as an omen of misfortune. I dreamt that I saw a strange Maori village in which each house was cut in two length-ways, leaving only half the dwelling standing, in the shape of a shed or lean-to, such as we called tiheré. I described this vision to the Hauhau seer. He gathered the people in the meeting-house that night, and after speaking of the dream I had had, he cried in a loud voice to them these words of caution and warning:
"Kia tupato! He po kino te po; he ra kino te ra!" ("Be on your guard! This is a night of evil and danger, and the morrow also will be a day of evil!")
"The prophet then said to me: 'Be ready for flight in the morning! Get your belongings ready packed in your kit, and, if you hear a suspicious sound, fly from the pa at once.'
"So, when the first shots were heard in the early morning, I was ready to make a bolt for it. The moment the alarm was given I jumped up from my sleeping-place in one of the huts, grabbed my kit, and bare-footed and with nothing on but my shirt and an old piece of a tent-fly girt round my middle, I ran to the bank at our rear, and jumped down the cliff. I went tumbling and scrambling down to the river, and then travelled up along the banks for a considerable distance as fast as I could go. All I had saved from Otautu was what I had in my kit—some papers, a little money, needles and thread, and so forth. As I ran up along the river banks I fell in with some of our people. We went on until we found a canoe tied up on the bank, and we crossed the Patea in her, ferrying four across at a time until all were safely over. Those who were with me were non-combatants, like myself, mostly women."
While the unarmed people of the camp were making good their escape, the Otautu clearing was the scene of severe fighting. The Hauhau warriors took post just at the edge of the little plateau where the thickly timbered ground suddenly fell away to the ravine at the rear. Sheltered by the fall of the ground, they swept the clearing with their rifles and smooth-bores. Some of them climbed into the branches of the rata-trees and delivered their fire; some extended in bush-skirmishing order on either flank; and both sides—pakeha and Maori—peppered away briskly at each other for half an hour or more.
It was a singular skirmish, for the dense fog still shrouded the hill-top; and the Government men, who were being punished severely by the Hauhau fire, could for a long time see nothing of their enemies. Many A.C.'s dropped, some shot dead.
The Government Maoris, the Kupapas, under the celebrated Kepa, advancing from tree to tree round the edge of the clearing, came to close quarters with the Hauhaus. One of Titokowaru's veteran warriors performed a deed here which is still told and retold with loving admiration by the old Taranaki Hauhaus.
He was the old man Hakopa (Jacob) te Matauawa, the Maori who had taken a friendly interest in Kimble Bent at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu, and saved the white man from the two savages who stalked him there, as narrated in a previous chapter. Hakopa was a tall, athletic man, of spare frame, and well tattooed. He was about seventy years of age, a true type of the olden Maori toa—the hero of the war-trail, the brave. He was a curious figure, in his military cap, tunic, and trousers—stripped from a dead Constabulary man after the fight at Papa-tihakehake.
Hakopa dodged from tree to tree out on the flanks of the clearing, making good use of a recently captured carbine. In the uncertain light it was difficult for the Government men to tell friend from foe, and Hakopa's pakeha uniform seems to have completely deceived some of the Kupapas. As he leaped from tree to tree and stump to stump, he shouted "Raunatia! Raunatia!" ("Surround it!") to induce the belief that he was one of the Government force.