A BATTLE IN THE FOG
The surprise of Otautu--An early morning attack--Kimble
Bent's dream--"_Kia tupato!_"--A gallant defence--Brave old
Hakopa--Flight of the Hauhaus.
A misty morning in the forest. A little Maori hamlet, just a collection
of thatched huts, in a small clearing enclosed on all sides by the
dense woods. In the rear a deep ravine, jungly with thick undergrowth,
then the winding snag-strewn Patea River. This was Otautu, Titokowaru's
refuge-camp. It stood on a plateau--now a richly grassed farm;
scattered over the clearing were potato-gardens. There was a frail
stockade of stakes, but there were no trenches or rifle pits; it was
an ordinary residential _kainga_; the fugitive Hauhaus trusted to the
tangled forest as their best defence.
Grey dawn. The raw morning fog hung low on the sleeping village--a
mist so thick that it shrouded from the view objects even a few
yards distant. It lay like the winding bank of smoky mist that marks
the course of a forest stream early on a summer morning; the black
tree-tops stood out clear above the white pall of damp, cold vapour.
Not a sound from the slumbering _kainga_, where some three or four
hundred Hauhaus--Kimble Bent amongst them--lay packed in their
_nikau_-roofed huts.
At the edge of the clearing a solitary Maori sentry, a man armed with a
revolver, sat, keeping a semi-somnolent guard.
Suddenly, out of the dark forest, appeared a body of armed men. They
came in Indian file; they broke into a stealthy run as they left the
shadow of the trees; their bodies were bent eagerly forward; they
carried their rifles at the trail; they uttered not a sound.
They were the Maori advance-guard of Colonel Whitmore's expeditionary
force of four hundred A.C.'s and _Kupapas_. After weeks of
bush-scouting a Government column had at last happened on the Hauhau
hiding-place.
The Maori sentinel--he was a man of the Puketapu tribe named Te
Wareo--was all in an instant wide-awake. The moment he jumped up he
was fired on by the advance-guard. Leaping into cover he raced for the
village, firing his revolver as he ran.
The discharge of the rifles rolled crashing through the forest.
Startled _kaka_ parrots flew from their tree-perches, screaming
discordantly at their rude awakening. The clear notes of a bugle rang
out--it was the "Advance" and "Double!" The active little colonel
rushed his men up at top speed, extended them, and advanced on the
hidden camp, and a strange combat began.
At the first crack of the firearms the _kainga_ was awake; and what a
scurry there was! The Maoris poured out of their _wharés_ just as they
leaped from their sleeping-mats--some wearing only a shawl or ragged
mat; others entirely naked. Some of the women rushed out of their huts
without a shred of clothing on, screaming and shouting, and running for
their lives. The men snatched up their guns and tomahawks, and their
cartouche-belts; and quickly took post to defend their position, and
give time for their women and children to retreat in safety.
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.
At last all Hakopa's cartridges but two were gone. A prudent warrior
would have retired at this stage--but not Hakopa. He did not like the
idea of retreat while he had a shot in his locker, and he determined
to bag something in the way of a _Kupapa_ or a _pakeha_ with his last
charges. He waited until the leading men of Kepa's party were within
close "potting" distance, and, as one of them unsuspectingly approached
him, he quickly threw up his gun and put a bullet into his enemy, then
turned and bounded into cover, and rejoined his comrades in the defile,
unhurt, hugely delighted with his exploit.
"You young men waste your cartridges," he said reprovingly, after the
fight, to some of the youthful braves of Ngati-Ruanui. "Look at me! I
know the worth of good powder and lead too well to fire them away for
nothing. For every cartridge I used I hit a man!"
It was a determined, plucky stand, that defence of the Otautu clearing
by Titokowaru's warriors. Every minute they held out, they knew, was
giving their women and children and old people a better chance of
safety.
At last the fog lifted, swept away from the clearing by the morning
breeze, and the sun shone out.
Now for the first time the Government soldiers saw the village. The
bugle sounded the "Advance" again, and at the double the A.C.'s swarmed
into the empty _kainga_, to find, to their astonishment, that it was
neither rifle-pitted nor parapeted.
The Hauhaus, their resistance broken, took to the forest, racing down
the steep gully in rear of the village and up along the banks of the
Patea. Kepa's Maoris went in hot pursuit, and shot two or three of the
fugitives. The main body crossed the Patea safely, and rejoined their
womenfolk and children, camping, hungry, weary, and with limbs and body
torn and bruised in their flight, in a well-hidden nook deep in the
forest on the north bank of the river.