Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/191

Rh Bird" stockade many accounts have been given, but the many discrepancies in detail that an examination of each account reveals are hardly to be wondered at, considering the confusion and misunderstandings that arose and that largely wrought the defeat of Colonel McDonnell's column. The dense and roadless forest, with its intricacies of undergrowth and interlacings of supplejack, and the inequalities of the ground made it difficult for the Colonial soldiers to keep in touch with each other, and the extraordinary activity and mobility of their savage assailants, who were perfectly at home in their jungly woods, more than compensated for the difference in numbers. The forest trees were the Hauhau redoubts. Amongst these trees, their naked brown skins nearly blending in colour with the trunks, they were almost invisible, and in most cases only the puffs of smoke, or brown arms moving up and down using the ramrods, indicated their lurking places. They darted from one cover to another with the quickness of monkeys, and though their weapons were mostly muzzle-loading smoothbores, they managed to fire and reload with astonishing celerity. Too many of McDonnell's force were newly joined, raw young fellows, who now for the first time met the Maori warrior in the bush, and the hidden foe, with their merciless fire and their terrible yells of hate and defiance, struck terror to many a recruit's heart.