[CHAPTER VII]
BUSH LIFE WITH THE HAUHAUS
Wild days in the forest—The Hauhau hunters—Maori wood-craft—Bird-snaring and bird-spearing—The fowlers at Te Ngaere—The slayer of Broughton—Another runaway soldier, and his fate—The tomahawking of Humphrey Murphy.
For some weeks the fugitives remained in their well-hidden camp by the Tangahoé's stream. When the wounded were able to travel, "Ringiringi" and his Maori companions took them a few miles through the bush to a place called Rimatoto, the overgrown site of an olden village. All the able-bodied men of the tribe now set to work to build a new settlement. Thatched nikau-palm houses were quickly run up, and the forest rang day after day with the axes of the bush-fellers, clearing the ground for potato-planting.
As it was intended to make this a permanent kainga—always providing Kepa's dusky forest-rangers did not find their way to it in their scouting expeditions—a large clearing was made. The felled trees were allowed to lie for about three months until they were dry enough to be fired; then the potatoes were set in amongst the half-burned stumps and logs. In the meantime the forest was scoured for food, and foraging parties were sent out to Turangaréré and other villages on the outskirts of the forest and returned laden with pork and potatoes, strapped across their shoulders in the usual Maori pikau fashion.
Four miles away by a rough bush track, a track hardly discernible to any but a Maori, was the Maha village. There the white man was taken by his rangatira Tito, after the bush-felling work was over, and three or four peaceful months were passed, varied only by occasional armed scouting expeditions to the forest edge, and by long fishing, birding, and pig-hunting trips into the great wilderness of jungle-matted timber that hemmed in the lonely village on every side.
Bent had now been a year with the Maoris, and had thoroughly settled into the native life. He had quickly picked up the language of his adopted people, and there was nothing of the pakeha about him but the colour of his skin, and that was browning with constant exposure and outdoor labour. A waist-shawl or a flax kilt was his single article of everyday clothing; in cold weather a shoulder-mat or a blanket was added. In this village of the woods there were few emblems of civilisation except the weapons of the warriors. Stories of battle and skirmish now and again reached the bushmen by messengers from the plains; and the white general's great march through the forest from Ketemarae by the Whakaahurangi track around the eastern side of Mount Egmont to Mataitawa and New Plymouth—when the soldiers fell so short of food that they had to shoot and eat their pack-horses—was discussed many a night in the village wharepuni, the communal council-room and sleeping-house.
Bent's half-Indian temperament soon adapted itself to this wild life in the forest. No drill day after day, no parades, no sentry-go, no buttons to polish, and no uniform to mend—surely this savage life had its compensations. When the Maoris had urgent and laborious work on hand they worked like fury, and compelled—with the spur of a tomahawk—the white man to toil with equal industry, if not willingness. Fort-building, trench-digging and timber-felling were undertakings in which the whole strength of the community laboured from dawn till dark, and the chiefs as hard as the common men and slaves. It was warrior's work. But there were periods of halcyon, lazy days in Maoridom, when "Ringiringi" and his ragged comrades of the bush, their work over, could just "lie around" and smoke and eat, and take no thought for the morrow so long as they could procure a pipe-full of strong torori (tobacco) and a square meal of potatoes and pork. Tito proved a not unkind master, when he found that his white man neither attempted to escape from the tribe nor shirked the often heavy tasks imposed upon him.