On the previous night—as the old warrior Tutangé Waionui tells me—Titokowaru gathered all his men in the big house (wharé-kura), which had now been rebuilt. Then, when the Hauhau prayers and chants were over, the chief arose and cried:
"E Koro ma, kia tupato! He po kino te po, he ra kino te ra!" ("O friends, be on your guard! This is an evil night—a night of danger, and the morrow will be a day of danger!")
This oracular warning seemed to the superstitious people to be a message from the gods, of whom Titokowaru was the living medium. That night was a night of preparation for battle. Armed men slipped out along the trail in front of the stockade, and lay in wait for the expected enemy.
Long the grim old chief sat on his sacred mat that night in the wharé-kura, his enchanted tongue-pointed taiaha lying in front of him. Karakia after karakia he recited in a low monotone, incantations and charms, ancient pagan and latter-day Hauhau karakia, for success in the conflict that he felt was to envelop his pa on the morrow in a ring of smoke and blood.
In his own little thatched wharé that day sat Kimble Bent, the pakeha-Maori. He, too, was busy, squatting there on an old flax whariki mat. By his side were a keg of gunpowder and a bag of bullets, and in front of him a pile of old pakeha newspapers and leaves torn from looted books. He was making cartridges for the Hauhaus. Round a wooden cartridge-filler he deftly rolled a scrap of paper, forming a cylinder, which he tied securely with thread or with fine strips of flax; then, withdrawing the filler, he poured in the gunpowder. The cartridges loaded, he slipped them into the cartouche-boxes and holders, a number of which had been brought to the wharé by the men of the Tekau-ma-rua; when the boxes were full, the remainder of the ammunition he stored carefully in a large flax basket. Most of the receptacles for the ammunition—hamanu the Maoris called them—were primitive affairs smacking of the bush. In size and shape they resembled the ordinary military leather cartouche-boxes, but they were simply blocks of light wood, generally pukatea timber, slightly curved in shape so as to sit well on the body when strapped, and neatly bored with from ten to eighteen holes, each of which held a cartridge. A flap of leather or skin—in the earlier days it was often a piece of tattooed human skin—covered the cartridges; and straps of leather or of dressed and ornamented flax were attached to the hamanu, which were buckled or tied round the waist or over the shoulders. A well-equipped fighting-man usually wore two hamanu, by belts over the shoulders; and at his girdle he carried his pouches for bullets and percussion-caps.
Such was the lone white man's occupation in the forest stockade that day before the looming battle.
Next morning, after the first meal of the day had been set before the warriors by their women and had been quickly eaten, the war-chief came out of his house, taiaha in hand, and walked out on to the village square in front of the sacred praying-house.
"Friends," he cried, as he stood there on the marae, "I salute you! You have eaten and are content; for the proverb says, 'When the stomach is filled, then man is happy and satisfied' ('Ka ki te puku, ka ora te tangata'). Now, rise up and grasp your weapons, for I wish to see you dance the haka and the tutu-waewae of war."