A camp was made near the banks of the Tangahoé,[2] and here, as soon as it was light, the Hauhaus mustered and reckoned up their losses. There were about three hundred and fifty of them now in camp--men, women and children. With wonderful celerity the forest-men cut a little clearing, and built _wharau_, or rough huts, of saplings, thatched with the long fronds of the _nikau_ palm and the _mamaku_ tree-fern. Here the wounded men were attended to as well as the primitive methods of the bush allowed. Women were sent out to search the river-banks for flax-plants; the flax-roots were dug up, boiled, and the resultant mucilaginous juice poured over the gunshot and bayonet wounds. This was the Maoris' most favoured method of treating injuries of this character, and it generally bore good results. "Ringiringi" himself took a hand in the bush-surgery, for he had watched army surgeons at their work, and the Hauhau wounded, though most of them preferred their own people's doctoring, were grateful to the white man for his efforts to ease their sufferings. A picked band of the fugitives scouted back through the forest and cautiously reconnoitred their captured fort, which had been set on fire by the troops, and was now a heap of blackened ruins. The Government force had by this time passed on to the attack of other _pas_, and the scouts re-entered their destroyed fortress and searched for their dead. The scene in the camp by the Tangahoé waters when the war-party returned from Otapawa was one that "Ringiringi" never forgot. It was the first great _tangihanga_, or wailing over the dead, that he had witnessed. The people gathered in the middle of the little clearing, and for hours the sound of lamentation rang through the forest, often rising into a wild, heart-breaking shriek as some blanket-draped or mat-kilted woman, her long hair unbound, and her cheeks streaming with tears, cried her keening song for her slain. The chiefs _taki_'d up and down, weapon in hand, and told of the deeds of those who had fallen; each ended his mournful speech with a chanted dirge. When the song was a well-known one, the whole tribe would join in and sing the lament with an intensity of feeling that made their very bodies quiver. It was the full and unrestrained outpouring of the soul of the savage. CHAPTER VII BUSH LIFE WITH THE HAUHAUS Wild days in the forest--The Hauhau hunters--Maori wood-craft--Bird-snaring and bird-spearing--The fowlers at Te Ngaere--The slayer of Broughton--Another runaway soldier, and his fate--The tomahawking of Humphrey Murphy.