Bent, fortunately for himself, was not in the pa; he had gone over to the Turangaréré settlement, a few miles away, to procure gunpowder and paper for the manufacture of cartridges, and most of the other men were out cattle-shooting in the bush. Titokowaru retired to his praying-house when the firing began, and sat there muttering incantations, and it was only with great difficulty that he was persuaded by his people to leave the wharé and retire. The great house was set fire to by Colonel McDonnell when the pa was captured, and the sacred wharé-kura, where the high-priest had so often exhorted his people and with enchanted taiaha told off the warriors of the Tekau-ma-rua, was soon a mass of flames. The Government troops lost four men killed and eight wounded in the engagement. Most of these casualties occurred in the march back to Waihi, which became a heavy rear-guard action, for the main body of the Hauhaus came up in time to attack the troops briskly as they retired through the thick bush. Then they drew off and returned to their half-demolished pa, to weep over their dead and the ashes of their great wharé-kura and rebuild their ruined homes.
The troops had placed a number of hand-grenades, small shells filled with powder, in the thatch of the wharés when they fired the village; but some of the houses were not destroyed, and on the return of the Hauhaus, they found some of these grenades unexploded. The dangerous shells were given to Bent to handle. He pulled out the fuses—which the Maoris called wiki, or wicks—and emptied the precious powder into flasks. In this way a sufficient quantity of powder to make eighteen gun-cartridges was obtained from each hand-grenade.
[CHAPTER XV]
A BATTLE IN THE FOREST; AND THE DEATH OF VON TEMPSKY
The second fight at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu—Titokowaru's prophecy—Tutangé and his sacred war-mat—Bent's narrow escape—Government forces defeated—How von Tempsky fell—A terrible retreat—Colonial soldiers' gallant rear-guard fight.
Early one warm spring afternoon in 1868, when the vast forest lay steeped in calm and Taranaki's sentry-peak rose like a great ivory tent out of the soft blue haze that bathed its spreading base, the sharp, cracking sound of rifle-shots broke the quiet of the wilderness.
The shots came from the mountain side of "The Beak-of-the-Bird," the opposite one to that by which the white troops had advanced the previous month. Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu was being taken in the rear this time. Colonel McDonnell had set out from the Waihi Redoubt before daylight in the morning, with a force of about two hundred and sixty whites, composed of three divisions of Armed Constabulary (many of them ex-Forest Rangers), the newly joined Wellington Rifles and Rangers, and a few veteran volunteers, besides about a hundred Kupapas, the friendly Maoris from the Whanganui and Ngati-Apa tribes under Kepa te Rangihiwinui. Fording the swift Wai-ngongoro River (the "Waters-of-Snoring"), the Colonel's force, guided by the woman Takiora, marched through the native village of Mawhitiwhiti, which was found deserted, then turned into the dense forest, searching for the Hauhau stronghold, which was now reported to be at Te Rua-ruru ("The Owl's Nest"), situated somewhere in the rear of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu. A disastrous search, for it ended under the palisades of the "Bird's-Beak," the savage beak that closed savagely on many a gallant pakeha before the sun went down in the western sea that day.
McDonnell had hoped by his early start to take the Hauhaus by surprise. But wary old Titokowaru was seldom caught napping.