Kepa arrived, and his advent was the occasion of the most tremendous war dance I ever saw in my life, but it is quite impossible for me to describe it. Only one man has ever been able to picture with a pen an old-time Maori war dance, and as I can’t pretend to in any way approach his gift of description, I won’t try to do so. Anyhow it was a very wonderful sight, and was, I suppose, the last real war dance ever danced in New Zealand. Of course a few years back, when our present King, God bless him, visited Rotorua, the tame natives round about got up a burlesque haka, but although I was not present I will gamble it was not an old-time war-dance, as, had it been only a fraction of one, every white female and most of the white men then present would have fled off the ground overcome with horror and disgust. While we looked on an officer said to me: “I wish to goodness, Dick, some of the infatuated idiots who for the past forty years have subscribed to the New Zealand mission funds could only see this ruddy lot of Christian natives dancing their war dance, for I ’ud bet my bottom dollar it would open their eyes and close their pockets.” To these remarks I fully agreed. We scouts had by now located Te Kooti, who at Pourere had built a strong redoubt after the European fashion, but without kaponiers or any other flanking defence. It stood fairly in the open, close to the foot of the burning mountain, Tongariro, while Papakai, the village of the great Taupo chief, Te Heuheu, was within two miles of it. Here Te Kooti, with the three hundred ruffians who had rejoined him, determined to make a desperate resistance, and as soon as McDonnell was aware of the fact he moved forward to deliver what he and the rest of us devoutly hoped was going to be the _coup de grâce_ to the foul gang of murderers we had been so long in pursuit of. The Colonel’s plan of attack was excellent, and I have no doubt we should have succeeded in surrounding and destroying the whole hive of vermin had it not been for the old image Renata, whose pet prophet chose to dream a dream just at the wrong time--_i.e._ the evening before the attack should have taken place, which said dream caused Renata and his three hundred Napier Maoris to squat down and refuse to budge. The attack therefore was made anyhow, it culminating in a race between the Wanganuis, St George’s natives and ourselves as to who should first get to hand-grips with the enemy. When old Renata found we were attacking without him he got into a terrible fluster, and with sixty of his men following him ran after us, screaming to us to wait for him, lamenting that he was disgraced for ever, and cursing his pet prophet for all he was worth. His penitence, however, came too late, as a number of the Hau Haus had already got out of the place, breaking through the gap he and his men, through their confounded folly, had neglected to stop.