Show Me a Huia!

by Chris Barfoot

  How could two such opposite personalities be drawn together?

  From his earliest childhood David had been abnormally shy. Whether this had its origins in being a too-much loved only child or whether there were other factors, it could not be known. As he grew up, his sporting ability earned respect but he still found it difficult to form close relationships. As a compensation he had devoted himself to excelling in sport and his school and university work.

  Nevertheless, he needed friendship.

  Soon after Tane arrived at the University David saw how quickly the new lecturer became unpopular in the Department. Perhaps it is easier to befriend an outsider, and in his egotism David may have thought of himself as a benefactor.

  Tane for his part was glad to have a colleague on the staff who did not cold-shoulder him. Whatever the cause, and motives are never entirely altruistic, these two lonely people became friends as well as flatmates.

  That was how David got to know Tane’s story.

  His brother’s death at the age of sixteen had had a profound effect on Tane. Hone’s illness and death had haunted him as he grew up. But the older Tane grew, the more he had wanted to ask questions. The mountains which Hone had visited on his last trip had held a secret which he felt he owed it to his brother to investigate. The conviction had grown in his mind that he would be a scientist, and geology seemed the logical choice. But his upbringing in Maoritanga still lay at the heart of his thinking.

  To David there were depths in Tane, strange contradictions which he could not fathom and which he had neither time nor inclination to explore. This was a potential source of weakness in the friendship. David basically accepted things as they were, following uncritically his father’s conservative values. He tolerated – or perhaps endured – Tane’s ideas, but never understood them.

  Tane misinterpreted David’s toleration as acceptance.

  When Tane had resigned three years ago, it was not surprising that there were some in the Department who were personally relieved.

  Yet there were unusual circumstances about his departure from the University. Tane had not just resigned – he had completely disappeared.

  Since Tane had left, David had not tried to find another flatmate. Instead he had tried to fill up the gap in his life by total absorption in his work. His research increasingly took over his life. Once or twice it had crossed his mind that Tane would not have approved of his present project, but he was no longer around to ask questions. David had always been close to his father and looked upon him as a role model, though he was nearer in nature to his gentler mother. After she had died of cancer, and even more after Tane disappeared, he drew closer to his father. John Corbishley, who by then had his own real estate business, encouraged him, especially in his research, and helped out with funds where necessary. He even cherished the hope that one day his son, who was an only child and seemed to have business ability, might leave his University position and take over the business he was working hard to build up.

  The radio announcement had brought it all back. He glanced at his appointment book. Was it just a coincidence? January 12th. It was this day, three years before, that the incident had occurred.

  That November Tane had planned a major trip. Although he did not usually give any indication of where he was going, David knew that because of his brother’s death the Raukumara Ranges behind Te Kaha were of absorbing interest. He had come into the sitting room quietly early one night and found his friend sprawled on the floor on top of what appeared to be a series of NZ inch to the mile Topographic maps. David estimated six sheets and, seeing the shape of the East Cape and the far eastern Bay of Plenty coast, he knew that it was indeed the Raukumara Ranges. But Tane did not notice David at first for he was peering intently at a point near the middle of the maps. Suddenly he tapped with his finger excitedly. “There it is,” he said almost to himself.

  “What is?” said David.

  But Tane seemed displeased at his interruption, quickly folded up the maps and left the room.

  On January 12, Tane returned from his trip. David sensed that he was more than usually unsettled but, again knowing his friend, did not question him on his trip. He surmised, however, that it had been in the Raukumaras. After David had prepared the dinner, they sat down together. Tane did not eat but sat abstractedly gazing out the window, moody and morose. Suddenly, he banged his fist on the table, and looked at David with those fiery eyes under the tousled mass of dark, curly hair.

  “Why did he go there? He was mad. He should have listened to the elders.”

  “Are you talking about your brother?”

  “He broke the tapu, don’t you see. That’s why there was a curse on him. But he didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “But surely that’s only a superstition.”

  “Superstition!” The word was screamed at him. “Is that what you call it? Do you not know that the land itself can suffer? You Pakeha don’t understand. You think you can do with it whatever you bloody well like.”

  “Oh yes,” said David. He had chosen and cooked the steak medium rare to his satisfaction; he cut it meticulously with his steak knife and ate it slowly, savouring each tidy, tasty portion.

  Tane was on his feet now and had started to wave his arms as he sometimes did when he was excited. He made up for his short stature by his swift movements and his dark, animated features. His voice also was rising. “You Pakeha governments and your bloody filthy-rich corporations are just like children playing with toys. You just want to prove that you are men by the number of your fellow human beings you can blow to pieces at one time.”

  “I can’t quite follow you.”

  “Can’t you see that it is you and I that are really to blame?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Tane was pacing the room now, his voice annoyingly strident. “You and I are geologists. We give them their toys, the resources to build their weapons of mass destruction. But these minerals don’t belong to us. They are part of the mauri, the life force of the earth. They are taonga which we must respect. They all have their own tapu. We are kaitiaki, guardians for them.”

  David was by nature calm and unemotional. He usually just listened and let Tane’s diatribes wash over him. Tonight, uncharacteristically, he felt himself getting angry. It might have been Tane’s lack of appreciation for the meal he had so carefully cooked or the totally unscientific and superstitious way he was using the Maori words or the swearing at the development corporations whose contacts he found so useful in his research. He put down his steak knife. “Don’t you think you’re getting a bit carried away?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Though he had never argued with Tane before, the question goaded him. “Geologists are only doing their jobs,” he replied. “It’s not for us to question what the minerals we discover are used for. Every geologist has a duty to be loyal to his country.”

  Tane thrust his face right in front of him. The sweat of a long tramping trip assailed David’s nostrils unpleasantly. “Duty! Loyalty! You can’t be a proper scientist unless you think! Your loyalty means not thinking about what you are doing.”

  David was hot now and controlling himself with difficulty. “I can’t understand why every time you think you have to be disloyal.”

  “You don’t even think! You just copy your father’s opinions.”

  The attack on his father was the last straw. The friendship had always been under tension on this level, and now the long smouldering fire burst into flame.

  He completely forgot his steak and stood up. “Thinking! Thinking! You’re ruining your career. Listen, Tane, you’re not a politician. You’re a geologist. For God’s sake, keep to rocks!”

  Tane had looked up at him in surprise.

  David had been remorseless. He even pointed with his finger as he did sometimes when he was lecturing. “My advice to you, Tane, as your friend – and I’ve been anxious about you for some time – is this.” He was a mild man but his voice s
hook with a white-hot anger which he had never known before. “Forget your ideas and get on with your job!”

  Tane had not replied. He had drawn back from David and stood quite still, his hands hanging limp and helpless at his side. His face was pale, and he had looked, just looked. It was almost as if he was seeing David for the first time. Then he had gone out of the room and closed the door.

  For a long time David remembered that look and the sound of the door closing. Although he had never before lost his temper like this, he was too proud to take back his words. From that time, although they were flatmates, he and Tane ceased to be friends.

  Soon after this there was a change in Tane. He became increasingly secretive and seemed to lose interest in the fieldwork that he had always loved. He hardly spoke to the other members of staff, even to argue. One day he told David he was resigning his lectureship and leaving Auckland. David made some inane comment about sacrificing all his training and his gifts.

  “We’re just on different wavelengths,” Tane replied.

  Had he heard from Tane? He remembered one postcard, but he had never made any attempt to find out where he was.

  The quarrel had been a disagreeable episode in his life. He needed to forget it. In fact, he had been trying to forget it for three years. He had work to do. The project he had started just before Christmas was vital to him and to the Department. It was to be the defining point of his career. He turned to his notes again and tried to concentrate.

  But it was no use.

  Suddenly he realised how lonely he was. He lifted his eyes beyond the native trees that lined the drive outside the Geology building, beyond the old Chemistry buildings on Symonds Street. In his mind’s eye a great bushed range shimmered in the summer’s heat. He saw a dusty, worn pack and boots hastily thrown down on the verandah at the Grafton flat.

  The anger he had felt at the disguised greenie just before Christmas had surprised him with its force. He had recognised it as the same anger that had welled up in him on that fateful evening to cause the quarrel, the anger that had ended his friendship with Tane. Why had he felt so angry? There had been no reason for it.

  He had never felt this kind of anger before. Was it the attack on his father? Whatever it was, he had over-reacted.

  In his mind’s eye he was back in the flat again, and Tane was looking at him after his attack. And in that look was no anger, no reproach and no retaliation. Only the look of a child who was surprised and hurt.

  Tane, in his rebellious lonely paths and his abrasive argumentative manner, had trusted him. That was why he had started talking to him. He had mentioned his brother and had already opened his heart to him on his history as he had done to no one else. Perhaps there was something more that he wanted to talk about. He had cause to think that David would listen and understand. True, typically enough he was slow in getting to the point and had been diverted into provocative language.

  But what had he done? He had allowed himself to retaliate angrily about what Tane had said and to get into an argument about what were probably side issues. He had closed his mind. He had been judgmental. He had refused to listen to what his friend really wanted to say.

  Then Tane had gone out and the door had closed.

  No, he was not emotional. But he couldn’t help it. The tears started running down his face as he saw once again that face, the face of the one friend he had had. The friend whom he had failed at the very time his help was needed. The friend that he had called a friend but had never made the effort to understand.

  “Tane! I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing!”

  David continued to act strangely.

  Acting almost blindly as his tears continued to flow, he reached for his prized research project papers and swept them together into one file. Then he took the file, placed it in the lowest drawer of his metal filing cabinet, slammed the drawer shut and locked it. There was a finality, a satisfaction, a determination in the sound of that slam. He was deliberately closing a part of his life, a self-centred addiction to work which since Tane had left had acted like a drug to deaden his memory and all that had been true in that friendship.

  Then with unusual agitation he began to search. It was not until his office looked as if it had been ransacked that he paused, holding up in triumph a postcard with a picture on it of Gisborne’s Wainui Beach. Tane had sent only one, shortly after he left Auckland. There had been no address, but right at the bottom he saw through his tears the familiar scrawl that was Tane’s handwriting.

  “They’re wanting someone at Waitehaia Station”

  Was it just a coincidence that Waitehaia bordered on the Raukumara Ranges, where he appeared to have made his last trip?

  CHAPTER 8

  If you go about as far east as you can go, and about as high, you come to a land that the rest of New Zealand has forgotten. It is the great empty expanse of the high backcountry between Gisborne and the East Cape.

  Here snow lies sometimes in the winter, and, even in summer a chill wind blasts out from the strange pinnacles of rock that guard the approaches to a great mountain range. High up on the bare ridges, the charred stumps of rata still stand, forming ghostly patterns in the mist with the moss-encrusted fence posts and rusting wire.

  Man, in his brief glory of axe and fire, established his hold, built his homesteads, sheltered them with macrocarpa, and covered the denuded hills with sheep. He was too greedy. The hills, over-burned and then over-grazed, fell off into the valleys, transforming the watercourses into wide seas of shingle. The forest fought back with its vanguard of bracken and second growth. In a softer age labour could not be enticed to live forty miles from the nearest pub. The homesteads decayed among the macrocarpa. Even the run-holders preferred to stay in town, making seasonal sorties for shearing and lambing, and for the rest of the time setting tank traps to deter rustlers.

  Now there was profit in pine trees rather than sheep. The run-holders had not been reluctant to sell. A dark green sward began to move like a tide up the eroding hillsides where once stood in verdant splendour the triple canopy of the Raukumara.

  ***

  WAITEHAIA STATION

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

  HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF THE LAST TRESPASSER.

  David gazed with some anxiety at the little wooden cross on the mound beside the notice.

  “It’s those larrikins in the forestry camp out for free meat. Most of them are bloody townies. They’ve got no respect for anything.” The run-holder looked at David’s dusty Honda Accord. “Where are you from?”

  “Actually, I’m from Auckland.”

  “You haven’t got a gun, have you?”

  Quickly David explained the purpose of his visit. It turned out that the notice belied Toby Wilson’s real character. It was only after more half-pints than he could really take, a dirge on the state of the economy, especially wool prices, and a recitation of the exploits of former All Blacks from Poverty Bay, that David was able to broach the subject again.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, Tane Ngata was a colleague of mine at University.’’

  “University, eh?” A long, searching look as the run-holder helped himself to another drink and drank it reflectively.

  “I understand he used to work here. It would have been about three years ago.”

  “Maori boy, eh. Pint-size with curly hair?” He nodded. “Never picked him for a professor. Lived in the whare at the end of the road, and did odd jobs round the station. Kept to himself. The missus and I didn’t see very much of him. He didn’t stay long. Not more than a month or two as far as I can remember.” His weather-beaten face looked out the window.

  “I’d really be grateful if you could help me. I’m worried about him. He could be in trouble.”

  “Trouble, eh?” The voice had that Maori drawl which Pakeha acquire if they have been long on the East Coast.

  “No one has heard from him for three years. This station was the last contact.”

  “There’s
all sorts of bloody goings-on you read in the papers. Blokes getting chopped up into little bits. International gangs and the like.” David was being eyed in a curious way. “We wouldn’t be wanting that carry-on here.”

  “I realise he might have been a difficult employee.”

  “Difficult, eh?” He poured David another drink. “OK, I’ll tell you. I thought he was a crook.”

  David looked at him in surprise.

  “The police told me some bastard was growing cannabis round here. I had my suspicions when this bloke spent so much time up the back and he didn’t shoot pigs or possums. So one day I followed him. I didn’t see any plant, but I saw him.”

  Toby held out the bottle towards David’s glass, but David shook his head energetically.

  The run-holder pointed to a long bare ridge which ran up from the farm buildings. “He was squatting up there beyond the last gate. You look out on the big range from there. At first he didn’t see me. Then he turned round and shot off so fast that I couldn’t see where he went.”

  “What was he doing when you first saw him?”

  The reply was slow in coming. “I couldn’t believe it at first.”

  David waited.

  “He was bawling.”

  There was another long pause. “I like my hands to be happy. They work better. So next time I knew he was home, I took a couple of bottles with me. You see I yak a bit with them and he never used to come up to the house. I went down to ask him if he’d care for a drop. Well I knew he was there, but he didn’t answer. So I opened the door. He starts yelling at me. “Leave me alone!”

  “After that, I couldn’t get him to work any more. I think he used to go off out the back most days. If I saw him he’d clear off in the opposite direction. I thought he was on drugs. Watery eyes, never shaved or washed his clothes. Once I asked the doctor to call, but he never let him in. The police kept on asking me about him, and one day they came up, and demanded to search the whare where he lived. I went up with them. He was out, and we broke in. Didn’t realise it leaked. I wouldn’t have let a bloody dog sleep there if I’d known. No sign of any drugs though. While they were searching, he showed up. They called out to him, but he backed away and hid behind some logs, just like a bloody animal. They went after him and he lit off. We never saw him again. The police put a search out for him and a warrant, but no one round here has seen him since.”