The utmost caution was observed on the march. No fires were lighted. So that there should be no clue to the direction of the flight, care was taken to leave no broken branches or other bushmen's signs; not a leaf was turned or a twig displaced if the refugees could help it until they were well into the ranges. Wherever possible they took to the creek-beds and walked in the running water, so that no trail should betray them. They could have spared themselves that anxiety and trouble, however, for the Government troops had at last abandoned the chase.
Two days Bent and his friends spent on that terrible trail—the roughest, wildest part of the Taranaki hinterland. Fording rivers, pushing through matted jungles, climbing wooded precipices, lowering their swags down perpendicular cliffs, and swinging themselves down by forest vines and creepers—they emerged at last, a weary little band, on the banks of the Waitara, about thirty miles from the mouth of that river. All around towered the densely forested blue ranges; the high banks of the winding Waitara fell precipitously to its rapid-whitened waters.
On the cliff-top where they left the forest there was a little Maori camp. Here the fugitives were ordered to the main Hauhau camp, the Kawau pa, where Titokowaru and his followers had established themselves, weary of war, but nevertheless resolute to die "fighting like the shark," as the Maori has it, if attacked in their last hiding-place.
The Kawau pa stood in an admirable position for defence, in a great bend of the Waitara River. The winding rapid river here swept round a long tongue of steep-banked level land, protecting it on three sides; in the rear was the dense forest. The banks of the river were from twenty to thirty feet high, and could be climbed only in a few places. On this high tongue of land, about a quarter of a mile long, there stood a large village of well-built raupo and nikau thatched houses; between the village and the forest were the cultivations of potatoes, kumara, and taro. On the opposite side of the river, in the direction of the Taramouku Range, wild horses and cattle abounded in the bush. A short distance below the village there was a large pa-tuna, or eel-weir, consisting of two rows of stout manuka stakes set closely together and sunk into the river-bed and converging in a V, at the lower end of which hinaki, or eel-baskets, were set for the purpose of catching the piharau, or lamprey, which abounded in the Waitara, and which were a great Maori delicacy.
As Rupé and his pakeha Bent and their companions marched slowly into the marae of the war-chief's camp, their eyes on the ground, they were welcomed with the ancient ceremony of the powhiri. The village women and girls waved green branches and shawls as they retired before them, singing all together the famous old greeting song, "Toia Mai te Waka!" ("Oh, haul up the canoe!") likening the guests to a canoe-party of visitors arriving from a distant shore.
Then as the women fell back the whole force of Titoko's warriors leaped to their feet, and swinging their firearms this way and that, threw themselves with martial fury into all the thrilling action of the war-dance. The ground shook under the mighty tread of many scores of brown feet, and the forest rang with the chorus of the war-song and the reverberating volleys of many guns. And then, when the dance was ended, the hongi of long-severed friends, the pressing of nose to nose, and the pitiful weeping for the dead. For quite two hours the great tangi lasted. When it ceased one of the head-men of the river-tribes sent the new arrivals to his own camp, close by the Kawau; the village women came in procession, to the lilt of the tuku-kai song, bearing their baskets of food, steaming hot from the hangi, and the half-starved white man and his friends were soon enjoying a bountiful feast after their long-enforced existence upon the meagre rations of the bush.
Kimble Bent lived in this securely hidden place of refuge, and at Paihau village, near by, from the end of 1869 until about 1876. He was now a Maori in all his ways; he planted food-crops and harvested them, snared birds, fished for eels, cut out canoes, and paddled his canoe on the river, joined the Hauhaus in their songs and their sacred chants, and danced with them in their hakas; he wore as little clothing as any native in the camp.
Life did not go too easily with the white man during those days on the Waitara. He was still Rupé's bond-servant; and his master and owner sometimes took fits of ungovernable passion. In one of these paroxysms of anger Bent had a narrow escape.
Rupé one day ordered his white man to go down to a creek, which ran into the Waitara near the Paihau pa, and clear out the little dam in which the household were accustomed to steep their Indian corn, their kaanga-pirau. Bent was working away cleaning out the steeping-pool when his chief came up and found fault with him because he was not working hard enough. "I made him some answer which didn't please him," says Bent, "whereupon he flew into a terrible rage and rushed at me like a tiger. I stooped and caught him by the leg, and he fell into the muddy pool. Up he jumped in a foaming passion, and ran to the pa, got out his gun, and loaded it to shoot me. But his wife rushed at him, took the gun out of his hands, and told me to hurry down to the other village, where I would be safe. So I ran to the river-bank, loosed a small canoe, and paddled down the river to the lower pa, where I was kindly received and taken into my old friend Hakopa's house, and I lived and worked there for some months."