Dreamhunter

by Elizabeth Knox

  Eleven

  Excerpt from A History of Southland by Dr Michael King(1904):

  It is difficult to convey to anyone beyond our shores the extraordinary influence of dreamhunting on the life and culture of Southland. Since the arrival of the first settlers nearly two hundred and fifty years ago much has been made of the tyranny of distance, the fifteen hundred sea miles between ourselves and our nearest neighbour, and five thousand between us and the great centres of civilisation. Ours is a productive but isolated country.

  Southland can export wool and leather, but not meat or milk; wine, but not fruit; grain and linen, steel, tools and machinery — but not dreams. Dreams are a highly perishable commodity and are yet to be sent offshore.

  Dreams are found in a territory in the north west of our country, a territory known simply as the Place. Certain facts about the Place have been hard to establish — for example, when did it first appear? Southland is a landmass without a native people, and so there are no songs or legends for us to consult. Has the Place always been there, its borders concealed in the rugged terrain of the forested Rifleman Ranges? Did it remain secluded because only a very few people were able to go there? For dreamhunters and rangers, those able to enter the Place, represent only a tiny proportion of the population — perhaps one in every five hundred people.

  We do know that Wry Valley, the fertile land between the Heliograph and Rifleman mountain ranges, was first settled in 1750. Sparsely settled, but I imagine that were the Place present there would be some record of it, if only of the occasional ‘disappearance’. Timber has been cut in the Rifleman Ranges since first settlement. In the 1790s the bullock trails used by foresters to haul timber linked up with the road from Founderston to the Wry Valley. And yet I have found no reports from that time of the kind of mysterious disappearances that would indicate that the Place was there.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century Sisters Beach in Coal Bay had become a summer retreat for the wealthy. The Bay’s visitors arrived mostly by sea, but the road from Founderston was improved, and in 1860 the Sisters Beach stagecoach made its first run from the capital. And still there were no disappearances. It wasn’t until 1886 that the Place first made its presence felt — for that was when Tziga Hame vanished from the Sisters Beach stagecoach.

  TZIGA HAME, a seventeen-year-old violinist from Founderston, was making his first journey outside the capital. He and his elder sister Marta had been hired to play at the summer assemblies at Sisters Beach. The Coal Bay railway was, at that time, still only a plan on paper — a plan that had to undergo a radical alteration after the discovery of the Place. The young Hames chose to travel overland, so booked seats on the stagecoach.

  It was early summer, 15 November, and the weather in the mountains were wet. Tziga Hame gave up his seat inside the coach for his sister’s cello, which was particularly vulnerable to damp. Hame rode up on top of the stage, on the box seat at the back.

  Halfway through its journey the stage made its usual stop in Wry Valley, at the village of Doorhandle. Marta Hame got out to stretch her legs. When she climbed back into the coach moments before it departed from Doorhandle, Marta Hame saw that her brother was in his place on the box. Yet, when the coach arrived at Sisters Beach four hours later, Tziga Hame was missing. Marta Hame, desperate with worry and sure that her brother had fallen, tried to raise a search party at the stage post. She was still making her arrangements when a summons came from Doorhandle for a surgeon. A farmer from that village had discovered the young man lying on the road.

  Marta Hame travelled back to Doorhandle with the doctor, a holidaying Founderston physician, Dr Walter Chambers.

  Tziga Hame had broken his left leg. It was a serious injury and a cause of grave concern to Dr Chambers. The doctor knocked Hame out with ether and set the leg as well as he was able. And, while Hame was unconscious, he had a dream. In fact, Tziga Hame repeated the dream he had first had when he fell from the back of the stage.

  The road through Wry Valley had been wet and green, but the ground on which Hame landed when he fell wasn’t even a proper road, he later said, only a track, a streak of bald earth showing through parched grass. Hame said that he fell because his seat suddenly ‘wasn’t there’. One moment he was on the box at the back of the coach, the next he was apparently sitting in the air, and the next he lay on the dry track with his thighbone shattered. ‘At first I didn’t understand that I was injured. But when I sat up and looked I saw a tear in the cloth of my trousers and the broken bone jutting blue against my skin,’ he said. Hame fainted at the sight. He lost consciousness and had a dream.

  All famous dreams have names. The dream that came to be known as Convalescent One can be found in a stable dream site directly across the border of the Place beyond the village of Doorhandle. For the first seven days of Tziga Hame’s convalescence in Doorhandle he repeated Convalescent One till, eventually, the whole village had managed to sleep when he was sleeping and share his dream. Its effects were noticed. A girl who had coughed all winter finally had a good night’s sleep and woke with colour in her cheeks. A troubled man woke feeling the dark haze lift from his mind. The people of Doorhandle felt invigorated and at peace. Eventually, comparing their experiences, they realised that, over the course of the week, they had all had the same dream, and many had had it several times.

  Hame’s dream faded. He was on the mend. His sister Marta was paying their board by playing her cello in the inn parlour. The Hames’ father sent money for their passage back to Founderston — they were to make the journey once Tziga’s leg had healed well enough for him to travel.

  Tziga Hame was distressed by his father’s orders, for he and Marta had failed in their plan to spend their summer earning their fees for a final year at Founderston’s Music Conservatory. Without their fees the brother and sister would be unable to attend.

  Dr Chambers passed through Doorhandle in late January on his way back to the capital. He removed the plaster from Hame’s leg and told the young man he must exercise it to unthaw its stiff knee joint.

  Tziga and Marta Hame returned to Founderston. Throughout late summer and autumn Hame exercised his leg. He climbed up and down the six flights of stairs from the family’s rooms in their tenement in the old town. He walked the streets. When a number of weeks had passed he visited Chambers in the doctor’s rooms at the front of his residence on the west bank of the Sva River. Hame showed Chambers how, when he planted his feet to play reels, his bad leg would tremble. Chambers told Tziga Hame that although he could still expect some improvement his limp was with him for life.

  Hame was cast down. After seeing the doctor he took to his bed for a time, using the winter’s first cold snap as an excuse not to exercise. Hame lay in bed and did some thinking. He thought about the dream he had had, night after night, in the first week after his accident. Hame felt that the dream had helped him to heal. He reviewed what had happened to him. He’d had a fall and had broken his leg and, while unconscious, he had caught a dream as one catches a cold. When he’d caught his dream, he’d seemed to be in another place — somewhere dry and silent, a place whose trees had bark that was peeling in sooty strips; somewhere unlike the road through lush Wry Valley.

  Hame later explained that he would never have known that he had gone into another place had the farmer who found him come from the Doorhandle direction. Fortunately the farmer was coming from the coast with a cartload of seaweed for compost. Hame, crawling back the way he had come, slithered from the dusty trail on to the muddy road and heard a cart coming up behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the farmer coming around the bend of a road he hadn’t crawled along. The farmer stopped and looked Hame over, then picked him up and tried to carry him to his cart. But Hame simply dropped out of the farmer’s arms and fell back through what he called ‘a fold in the map’.

  ‘I’ve always imagined the Place is a whole territory hidden in a fold in a map. Everything on the map apparently joins up, the roads, rivers, mountain
range — but the map can open wider, and show a whole concealed country.’

  The farmer, finding his arms empty, to his credit did not immediately decide that Hame was a ghost and flee. A calm and practical man, the farmer waited on the spot at which Hame had disappeared until the young man managed to collect himself and crawl out again. The farmer saw Hame’s arms break through the air. He said later that it was like watching a calf born from an invisible cow. When Hame appeared the second time, the farmer led his horse past the spot where Hame lay and only then picked the young man up, and put him in the cart.

  Hame, lying in his attic room in Founderston’s old town, discouraged and in pain, thought about his fall and came to a conclusion. He concluded that he had caught his dream in a place he might be able to find again. A place on the road beyond Doorhandle. And so he pawned his violin, and bought a seat on the Sisters Beach stage as far as Doorhandle. He found the farmer and asked the man to accompany him to the point on the road where they first met. The farmer was quite clear about the location of the spot where he’d found Hame — a section of road shadowed by a mature hawthorn tree.

  It was late afternoon when they reached the spot. The road was narrowed by drifts of fallen leaves. There was a cloud of midges under the hawthorn — but the road was otherwise an empty, everyday road. Hame and the farmer crept under the tree, their hands held out before them. Then Hame disappeared — and the farmer walked on a little alone. A moment later Hame reappeared out of the air and asked the farmer to build a cairn by the tree to mark the border. And then he went back In.

  It is possible that, having injured himself on his first arrival in the Place, Hame had been pushed into a certain kind of adaptation to its weather. I will use that word ‘weather’. Sailors talk of winds, of Trades and Variables, Doldrums and Roaring Forties. Just as different vessels are adapted to different weather conditions, so each dreamhunter is adapted to sail down different winds of sleep. Directly over the Doorhandle border is a band of ‘dream weather’ full of powerful, beneficial dreams. Tziga Hame emerged from his second, deliberate excursion into the Place with the dream now known as Starry Beach. Starry Beach is a less effective dream than Convalescent One. It is soothing rather than healing. The dream did make Hame feel better, but it wasn’t enough in itself. Hame decided to use it to somehow bargain for better medical treatment. He hoped to persuade Dr Chambers to do something more for him.

  Tziga Hame took the dream back to Founderston and to Chambers. He asked the doctor if he might spend the night in the doctor’s house. Hame attempted to explain, but Chambers wasn’t of a mind to listen. It was totally out of the question, Chambers said, preposterous — what was the young man thinking?

  Hame left the doctor’s residence, but returned at nightfall and camped on the area stairs. He went to sleep with his head resting on the back doorsill.

  Walter Chambers later reported what happened that night. He said that he had a wonderful, refreshing sleep and a blissful dream. The following morning over breakfast his wife told him about her dream. The doctor recognised his wife’s description of the warm sea, golden beach, the fish baking in crumbling white coals, the sunset, kind friends, campfire singing. Chambers recognised the dream’s air of languid wonder, and its mysteries he’d marvelled at, like the sight of a line of lights moving through the forest behind the beach. He and his wife had had the same dream. And, it turned out on further investigation, the couple’s daughters, and their household staff, had all shared it. The whole household was in a gentle mood so that when the butler appeared to tell the doctor that the young man from yesterday was back, and refused to be seen off, Chambers was welcoming. He hurried out to Hame and the young man explained what had happened to him.

  Chambers was amazed, but could immediately see advantage for himself in Tziga Hame’s gift. The doctor took the young man on an overnight visit to one of his wealthy spinal patients. Chambers later gave an account of this first experiment. He said that, as he sat by his patient’s bed he’d watched something in the sick man’s sleep, but more effective than sleep, smoothing the man’s tense face.

  Hame spent a week in the rooms of several of Dr Chambers’ chronic patients. Much to the families’ puzzlement the doctor turned up when no crisis was anticipated, but in the morning the patients were better, one even saying she felt she’d been bathed in a whole summer overnight.

  When the dream faded the doctor gave Tziga Hame money so that he could return to Doorhandle, and the strange territory it seemed only he could enter. This was Hame’s first commission — his third dream, for which he was paid only expenses and meals. The young man was still proving what he could do, and neither he nor Dr Chambers had yet thought to put a price on what they regarded as a miracle and a gift.

  But, of course, a cure is a saleable commodity. Two years after his fall Tziga Hame had subscribers — sanatoria, and private and charitable hospitals. He was taking his dreams to any sizeable town within two days’ travel by sea or rail.

  He had given up his violin, but paid his sister Marta’s way through the Conservatory. He had bought himself and his family houses. He was a wealthy man.

  NEWS SPREAD QUICKLY about the help Tziga Hame was bringing to the suffering. And of the fortune he was making. Others were inspired to try to see if they too could cross over into the dry, silent Place and catch dreams. These early adventurers came alone to face their failure privately: that moment when they turned on the road to look back at the piled stones of the border marker. Some came in groups, egging one another on. A group of clerks from a bank. A group of weavers from a textile factory. A mixed group of philosophy and divinity students. They arrived noisy, and stayed noisy if none of them passed through, or were quickly silenced if one of their number was swallowed whole by the innocent air.

  All who came to Try and found themselves able to enter the Place assumed that, like Tziga Hame, they would be able to follow the remains of the road a few hours In from the border, lie down and catch a dream. This was not the case. Most caught a little sleep, but nothing else. But some went In often enough to be able to give their friends — or the newspapers — a better description of that territory so few were able to see. They reported that the Place was vast, much larger in its interior than the territory it seemed to encompass in the Rifleman Ranges. They reported that it was never dark in the Place, although no sun could be seen in its luminous, white sky. There, they found, no flame could be kindled. Only humans could cross the border, so no one could take In a horse and cart, and any supplies had to be either carried, or wheeled In on hand barrows. And, because no flame could be kindled, machines driven by steam power or internal combustion didn’t work.

  The explorers boasted, or complained, about their hard rations, the dry, cold food and cold beverages on which they lived. They reported on the uselessness of compasses. Some were so curious about this uncanny, exclusive Place into which they — special people — had been admitted, that they carried in surveying equipment and began to make maps. They formed a club, first meeting in the big parlour of the inn at Doorhandle. Some, poor and keen to work, offered themselves as porters to those others who, like Tziga Hame, could catch and carry dreams.

  The people of Doorhandle were probably the first to notice the changed appearance of those who made repeated trips into the Place. The mapmakers, trailblazers, porters got the look that anyone who kept going In did. They grew thin, rangy, dry-skinned. The dreamhunters took on this look too, but their eyes changed as well. Whereas the ‘rangers’ — as the mapmakers and porters had begun to call themselves — developed crow’s feet from squinting into bright distances, the dreamhunters gradually all came to wear a strange stare, as though the distances into which they looked exhausted them, were full of terrible battles or tormenting mysteries.

  The dreamhunters were making their own discoveries. Many had begun to emerge from the Place with dreams for which there was no existing market. They began to advertise these dreams in the classified section of Founder
ston’s daily newspaper. Some pooled their resources and rented one of the small hotels on the Isle of the Temple, a city district of Founderston. These small consortiums of dreamhunters would dream to paying, sleepover audiences — audiences that were growing quickly as more and more people sampled and were enthralled by these astonishing shared dreams. Dreams as coherent, full and physical as lived experiences — but in which no one was ever themselves, so that the timid could be brave, the infirm could be well, men could be women, and women men, and the old could be young again.

  Dreamhunters organised themselves for their growing market. They printed posters and flyers. One might describe his dreams as outdoor adventures; another, in a careful code, as ‘Dreams for Sporting Gentlemen’. One might offer battles and football matches; another dreams ‘soothing to the mind’.

  An industry had begun.

  WITHIN EIGHTEEN YEARS dreamhunting has become central to the domestic economy and cultural life of Southland. To any historian, the activity has even more the appearance of an apparition than those other appearances that can make the past seem not quite continuous with the present: the invention of the printing press, the discovery of the New World, the invention of the steam engines that drove the Industrial Revolution and — if for a moment I can play prophet instead of historian — those fragile flying machines that are now literally casting their makers’ fortunes to the wind. But, unlike all these world-expanding inventions or discoveries, dreamhunting is a discovery itself based on an apparition, the apparition of the Place, which was in one historical moment not there, then there.

  In fact, it has often seemed to me that the Place appeared in time to welcome its discoverer, to welcome Tziga Hame and give him his crippling injury. Hame is still indisputably the greatest dreamhunter. He has the widest zone of projection, a four hundred-metre ‘penumbra’, to use the language of the profession. He can ‘overdream’ any other dreamhunter — if he and another have freshly caught dreams, his will cancel theirs and erase it from their systems. Can it be a coincidence that Hame is both the first and the greatest dreamhunter, and that the Place first appeared to our knowledge when Hame first entered it? It is as if the Place was locked, and Hame was the key that unlocked it. It is as if the Place appeared where and when it did because that was where it happened to find Tziga Hame.