Tree-to-Tree Fighting.

In the bush skirmishes in the South Auckland country before the Waikato was entered, the Rangers and the settler-bushmen had their first taste of fighting in the tree-to-tree manner of the old adventure tales. There was a particularly sharp bit of work of this kind in which the Rangers under Jackson and Von Tempsky fought in company with the Forest Rifles Volunteers of Mauku under Lieut. Daniel Lusk, afterwards Major Lusk. Von Tempsky gave a lively description of this fight, which took place at Hill's Clearing; the scene is skirted by the present main road from Pukekohe to Mauku. It was in such encounters as these that the Rangers learned the art of taking cover skilfully and of darting from the shelter of one tree to the next after delivering a shot. Jackson and Lusk developed into very accurate shots with carbine and rifle. Lusk in after years was a champion shot at rifle meetings in the province. Jackson was mentioned by Von Tempsky in his reminiscences of Orakau as having done some execution with his carbine from the sap that the British regulars dug towards the north-west angle of the Maori entrenchment. In the fight at Waiari, on the Mangapiko, a few weeks before Orakau, Jackson shot a Maori in a close encounter in the river, and took his double-barrel gun as a trophy.