Kimble Bent lived in this securely hidden place of refuge, and at Paihau village, near by, from the end of 1869 until about 1876. He was now a Maori in all his ways; he planted food-crops and harvested them, snared birds, fished for eels, cut out canoes, and paddled his canoe on the river, joined the Hauhaus in their songs and their sacred chants, and danced with them in their _hakas_; he wore as little clothing as any native in the camp. Life did not go too easily with the white man during those days on the Waitara. He was still Rupé's bond-servant; and his master and owner sometimes took fits of ungovernable passion. In one of these paroxysms of anger Bent had a narrow escape. Rupé one day ordered his white man to go down to a creek, which ran into the Waitara near the Paihau _pa_, and clear out the little dam in which the household were accustomed to steep their Indian corn, their _kaanga-pirau_. Bent was working away cleaning out the steeping-pool when his chief came up and found fault with him because he was not working hard enough. "I made him some answer which didn't please him," says Bent, "whereupon he flew into a terrible rage and rushed at me like a tiger. I stooped and caught him by the leg, and he fell into the muddy pool. Up he jumped in a foaming passion, and ran to the _pa_, got out his gun, and loaded it to shoot me. But his wife rushed at him, took the gun out of his hands, and told me to hurry down to the other village, where I would be safe. So I ran to the river-bank, loosed a small canoe, and paddled down the river to the lower _pa_, where I was kindly received and taken into my old friend Hakopa's house, and I lived and worked there for some months." Another incident of those wild old days on the Waitara, narrated by Bent, is worth the telling, as an illustration of the whimsically variable temper of the Maori and of his truly Hibernian love of a "free fight." The war had long been over, and some _hapus_ of the tribes on the upper river talked of selling their lands to the whites. Certain of the chiefs had been down at Waitara township and in New Plymouth, and there they had been approached by the agents of the Government. In the end they sold their lands for eighteenpence an acre. But the more conservative of the Hauhaus stoutly held out against land-selling, and against any dealings with the hated _pakeha_; and the difference of opinion led to frequent quarrels. One day a council of the people was held on the _marae_ of the Paihau village for the purpose of discussing the land-selling proposals. Long and bitter were the speeches; speaker after speaker _taki_'d up and down the _marae_, and worked himself up into a fury of excitement.