being ordered about by sergeants and corporals. Fighting would have been a relief, but there was none yet. He endeavoured to get his discharge from the regiment, but without success; and his impatience of discipline led him into various more or less serious conflicts with the regimental authorities.
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So opened Kimble Bent's life in the new land, the land in which he was to roam the forests an outlaw for more than a decade.
In those war-days of 1860–70 dense forests covered the wide plains of this Taranaki province, where now most of the dark old woods have been hewn away, and have given place to the pastures and homesteads of dairy farmers. It was a wild but beautiful land. The coast curved out and round in a great sweeping semicircle from Waitara in the north to Wanganui in the south; the intervening region of forest, hill, and plain was the theatre of war. High and central, Taranaki's great mountain-cone, which the pakeha calls Egmont, swelled to a height of over 8,000 feet, its base hidden in the forests, its snowy peak glittering far above the broad soft swathes of clouds, the sailor's landmark a hundred miles out at sea. Remote from all other high mountains it soared aloft—"lonely as God and white as a winter morn," as Joaquin Miller wrote of his beloved Mount Shasta.
