Sole Survivor

by Derek Hansen

  Red leaned forward expectantly, his nervousness forgotten. Mickey found himself pinned by the most startlingly intense eyes he had ever seen. He forced himself to continue.

  ‘You may have read recently that the Navy was throwing additional resources behind the problem of poaching. I am those resources, or, should I say, Gloria and I are those resources. We have been assigned to the fisheries protection squadron to gather intelligence and formulate strategies to counter incursions by foreign vessels. I have some control over the operations of our patrol boats, but in reality I can’t actually do anything without informing my superior, Staff Officer Operations, who in turn reports to Commodore Auckland. This particular Staff Officer is a button polisher and social climber. Rumour has it that he’s never actually set foot aboard a boat. It’s also fair to say that nailing poachers is not the Navy’s highest priority. Nor is it necessarily the government’s. There are plenty of people in power who don’t want us to catch the Japanese, fearing the effect incidents might have on our trade relations. They’re worried the Japanese might stop buying our beef or our wool. The government talks big but isn’t prepared to back their words. Yet, despite this, we believe we can have some impact. With your help.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Gloria will draw some binoculars and a radio from stores. We want you to report every sighting you make of foreign fishing boats. What can you get out of your boat? Eight knots?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘Do your best to get a solid identification, but call us anyway. If you don’t get the name, hopefully someone else will. You won’t be alone in this. We’re establishing a network of spotters up and down the coast.’

  ‘What happens when you catch poachers?’

  The Lieutenant Commander’s shoulders sagged. ‘You want to tell him, Gloria?’

  ‘If we’re lucky enough to surprise a foreign vessel fishing in close, we still have to gather evidence so we can mount a successful prosecution. If we can get close enough to photograph a mother ship taking dories back on board, identify it and hopefully gather some of their longlines, we can put together a case. Similarly, if we catch a trawler at work or hauling aboard nets filled with fish. Then we can make an arrest and use the fish they caught as evidence of poaching. Even so, we have to make the arrest within the twelve mile limit or, in the case of the licensed longliners, the six mile limit.’

  ‘Once they’re in international waters there’s not a lot we can do,’ cut in Mickey. ‘If we can’t get them to court we can’t fine them. Instead, we send a complaint to their embassy and the vessel is usually withdrawn temporarily from New Zealand waters. I say “temporarily” advisedly because give them a couple of months and they’re back again and up to their old tricks. By the way, do you know what the maximum fine is for a skipper of a boat caught poaching? Tell him, Gloria.’

  ‘Fifty pounds, and twenty pounds per crewman. Technically, they can take out thousands of pounds worth of fish all at the risk of a fifty pound fine.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Red. He could feel his anger rise and fought to suppress it.

  ‘Gets worse,’ said Mickey. ‘The way the laws are written, the only thing our courts can get them on is fishing without a licence in an unregistered boat. That’s the irony. They can invade our waters and the only thing we can do is fine them for not having something they’re not allowed to have in the first place.’

  ‘So why do you bother?’ asked Red.

  ‘It’s my job and someone has to do it. Look, the fines themselves mean nothing. It’s the time the boats and crews lose in port waiting for the case to be heard. Meanwhile, our fearless Prime Minister sends an official Note to Japan which usually results in the vessel being withdrawn to Japan in disgrace. That costs the fishing companies a lot of money. It’s the big stick we wave.’ Mickey leaned back in his chair and opened his arms expansively. ‘We don’t pay, the hours are long and the conditions lousy, but will you join our little band anyway? Be our eyes and ears?’

  ‘If you think it’ll help.’

  ‘Good man! So look and don’t touch from now on?’

  ‘What if the dories are fishing in close?’

  Mickey took a long look at Red and surrendered to the inevitable. ‘Check with me first. If there’s no operation planned I guess there’s no reason why you shouldn’t rip into them. But be careful. We don’t want anyone getting hurt. I guess if that bastard Shimojo Seiichi tries another crack in close it won’t hurt if you keep him on his toes.’

  ‘Shimojo Seiichi?’ The name came easily to Red’s lips, his accent near flawless. It had been so long yet still seemed like yesterday.

  ‘He’s the skipper of the Aiko Maru, the longliner you frightened off.’

  ‘Shimojo Seiichi,’ Red repeated softly, committing the name of his enemy to memory. ‘When do I get the radio and binoculars?’

  ‘Gloria?’

  ‘Might take a while, sir. You’ve promised quite a few lately.’

  ‘We’ll do our best.’ Mickey stood. ‘Now how about that beer for your mate? I come off duty in five minutes.’ He picked up the package on his desk and handed it back to Red. ‘Guess you’ll be lonely up there now.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Red. ‘With any luck.’

  Mickey put Red and Archie on a tender that was taking officers’ wives across the harbour to the Admiralty Steps. Red carried two packages, the second one containing his jacket and tie which Gloria had offered to wrap up in brown paper. She’d guessed correctly that Red would rather be cold than wear the dreadful jacket again. The flight back to Great Barrier wasn’t due to leave for another three hours, so Red decided to walk to Mechanics Bay where the amphibian was based. He knew there was no point trying to find a taxi driver who was prepared to carry a dog. He tried to ignore the thunderous diesel trucks and their foul-smelling exhausts as they hauled cargoes on and off the wharves. He glanced up at the steel bows of the giant cargo ships. Everything was something Maru. It hadn’t been so very long ago when every ship in port had boasted British registration. What had happened? How had everything gone so wrong? He turned his attention to Archie to calm him down. The dog was spooked by the trucks and fork-lifts whizzing around him, and pulled at the rope leash Red had made for the visit. They couldn’t get out of Auckland fast enough.

  He thought about the Lieutenant Commander. He seemed a good man, the type that did well in Burma. It buoyed him to know that others felt the same way about the Japanese fishing fleet as he did, and wanted to do something about it. It gave him hope. The Lieutenant Commander’s young assistant troubled him, but he knew he’d get over it. Despite the fact that she had light brown hair and hazel eyes, she made him think of Yvonne, and he’d managed not to think of her for such a long time. She made him think of what he’d lost, what the Japanese had taken from him. He could never forgive. They were always one step ahead, always taking away, always destroying. His hands began to shake. Two Japanese sailors heading ashore walked out through the wharf gates ahead of him. He automatically checked his stride so that he wouldn’t walk in front of them and stopped.

  ‘Konnichi-wa,’ he said, head bowed. Twenty-one years had passed but nothing had changed.

  ‘Konnichi-wa!’ the sailors replied, surprised that someone spoke their tongue, and even more surprised that it was a quivering tramp with a dog. They laughed and walked on. Just past them a newspaper boy was selling an early edition of the Auckland Star. The headlines trumpeted the good news. Japanese wool buyers had pushed prices to a new high.

  The flight back to Tryphena at the southern end of Great Barrier took thirty minutes, five minutes longer than scheduled because Captain Ladd had spotted a whale and its calf and swooped low to show Red. They’d managed to get close enough to see the barnacles growing on the mother. There’d been a time when whales were a common sight, but the whaling station at Whangaparapara had put paid to that. The Japanese weren’t to blame for everything.

  Red decided to call into Fitzroy
on the way home to refill his tanks. He slipped through Man-of-War passage on the south side of Selwyn Island with barely twenty yards of water either side. Both shores were fringed with giant pohutukawa trees which had insinuated their way into every niche in the rocks and seemed to thrive in the barren ground. Once around Selwyn Island he found shelter from the prevailing wind, the south-westerlies which were the bane of the island and the reason why Port Fitzroy was so popular with yachties. Up on the ridges, the surviving kauris and totaras shook their heads as if warning all sailors against taking to sea. Red was glad he had his sweater, work trousers and parka. He was going to need them.

  Col was waiting for him on the wharf and tied off his painter. Red handed back the clothes and accepted two four gallon tins in exchange, which Col had filled and ready.

  ‘How’d it go?’ asked Col.

  ‘As Bernie wanted.’

  ‘Think I’d rather be planted myself.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘My way the worms get a feed. Oh hell, I forgot. There’s a letter for you up at the shop. Help yourself here. I’ll go fetch it.’

  A letter. Red couldn’t remember when anybody had last sent him a letter. His spirits sank. There’d been a time when letters promised hope, life and an afterwards. It hadn’t even mattered if the letter had been written to someone else. News from home had been proof that the rest of the world still existed, still cared. But letters had since come to mean something else, and he didn’t relish receiving them. Red had no reason to expect this letter to be any more welcome than the others. Maybe some government department wanted to move him off his land. After all, there’d been talk of turning the north end into a reserve. He sought diversion in work, but the fuel poured too slowly into his tank and all that was required was patience. Why couldn’t the world leave him alone? Archie sensed his distress and nuzzled up close.

  Col returned and handed him the letter. Red examined it cautiously and distastefully, as if it might explode. The envelope was white and his name and address typewritten. The name of a market research company was printed in orange on the back. He didn’t even know what a market research company was. It made no sense to him.

  But it would soon enough.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Angus McLeod was as happy as he’d ever been. He stirred and thought briefly about pulling his bed covers up over his head to try to block out Bonnie’s insistent miaowing. It was time for breakfast and both of them knew it. The first rays of the morning sun had pierced his window and lit upon his bed, warming and seductively indolent. He had no reason to rise other than his ingrained sense of discipline, but that was reason enough. Angus was one of those dour Scots to whom happiness always carried with it a suspicion of sin and was never acknowledged without due caution.

  He followed Bonnie to the refrigerator. The shiny new Kelvinator was one of two additions to a rather primitive kitchen. The other was a new Stanley wood-fired cooker imported from Ireland. Only the Kelvinator looked out of place, a proud and incongruous acknowledgement to progress alongside a chipped enamel sink with two brass taps, a kauri benchtop, table and chairs.

  ‘Here you go, you spoilt thing,’ he said as he gave Bonnie a saucer of fish pieces. ‘Look at you now, fatter than butter, like a sheep with the bloat.’ He slipped a couple of pieces of hakea into the Stanley’s firebox and opened the flue to boost the flame. With nothing to do but wait until the hob had heated sufficiently to boil water for his tea and fry his fish, he strolled out onto his veranda to greet the day. Like so many of his countrymen, Angus had left home with the solemn hope of recreating it in some other part of the world. It wasn’t until he retired from the New Zealand Police Force five years earlier at the age of sixty that he finally realised his aim. He gazed over a landscape that was as wild, rugged and inhospitable as his birthplace on the slopes of Mt Conneville on Scotland’s far north-west coast. Of course his house was a castle compared to the crofter’s hut that had been his home, with its thatched roof, cold stone walls and pounded dirt floor. And the vegetation bore no resemblance other than that it clung to the poor soil in equal desperation. But he’d found heather upon the slopes around Wreck Bay, not the true heather of Scotland but a species he’d grown up calling ling. Still, it was heather enough for him to collect and dry and hang in bundles from the kitchen’s exposed beams. It helped make him feel at home.

  Angus took advantage of the morning sun to eat his breakfast out on the veranda, where he could look down over the tree tops to his boat moored in the bay below. Now that he was up, he was anxious to get to work. Angus had two secrets. The first was that he wrote children’s books. He did his best to conceal the fact because he didn’t think it was a fitting occupation for a retired police officer. It concerned him that others might interpret it as weakness or a softening on his part, and he couldn’t allow that. Nevertheless, his writing gave him great pleasure and satisfaction.

  He noticed Red’s boat back on its mooring when a wind shift brought it into view. So the madman had returned. A few years earlier he would have arrested him for indecent exposure or for causing a public nuisance and had him locked away in the Carrington Road mental institution. He didn’t doubt that Red meant well but, equally, it was clear all was not as it should be inside his head. Insanity troubled Angus; it was something beyond his ken.

  He was just about to sit down at his typewriter and return to the story of the boy who tamed the fierce griffin and saved his village when movement caught his eye. It was the madman and his dog coming up the trail to his house. He looked for Bonnie, thinking he could throw her inside before they arrived, but she had also spotted the visitors and run along the veranda rail to greet them. He felt a surge of anger build up as he waited for Red to appear through the tea-tree arch that marked the head of the trail.

  ‘What is it you want this time?’ he snapped. ‘Can you not leave me alone for five minutes?’ His eyebrows bristled and face flushed with indignation.

  ‘We need to talk,’ said Red.

  ‘We need do no such thing! Away with you, now. Stop pestering me!’

  ‘Angus, we need to talk.’ Red had learned to be patient with the belligerent old Scot, but controlling his temper had not come easy. There’d been a time when his temper had cost him his freedom, when he’d exploded for no reason and could do nothing to control it.

  ‘If it’s about the old man, I’ve nothing more to add.’

  ‘How can you add to nothing?’ Red’s hands began to shake.

  ‘Don’t you play smart with me! I contributed to his funeral.’

  ‘You should have contributed to his life.’ Red felt his patience slip and his anger flare. He didn’t want to talk about Bernie, but now that Angus had raised the subject there were things that had to be said. Responsibilities that had to be faced. ‘You had a duty to attend his funeral.’

  ‘I don’t attend funerals.’

  ‘He was your comrade.’

  ‘He was no comrade of mine. He was my neighbour, an acquaintance and distant at that!’

  ‘No!’ Red began to shout back, his voice growing shrill. ‘He was your neighbour and your comrade. He would have stood by you if you’d needed help. Bernie would never have turned his back on you like you did to him. You had an obligation.’

  ‘I have obligations to no man. I did not want him as my friend. I did not want him as my neighbour. I don’t want you as my neighbour and I certainly don’t want you as my friend.’ Years as Police Spokesman had taught Angus how to use words to maximum effect, and his precise highland accent turned them into bullets. He watched them strike home with satisfaction.

  ‘Like it or not, we’re neighbours and that carries obligations.’ Red stuck doggedly to beliefs which had been shaped in Burma and had enabled men to survive.

  ‘I don’t want neighbours. Can’t you get that through your thick skull? I don’t need you. Now, would you kindly get off my land and take that mangy animal with you.’

&nbs
p; Red took a deep breath to calm himself. He couldn’t leave without raising the matter he’d come to discuss. Angus glowered at him and he glowered back. Finally, Red turned away. He looked at Archie and Bonnie, one purring and the other wagging his tail. How could natural enemies like a cat and dog get along so well while their respective masters were at each other’s throats? ‘I didn’t come here to discuss Bernie,’ he said softly. ‘I came to tell you about the woman he left his bach to.’

  ‘What!’ Angus nearly tripped off his veranda.

  ‘Bernie wrote a will and left his bach to a woman.’

  ‘To a woman!’ Angus could hardly conceive of a greater blasphemy. ‘How do you know about this will?’

  ‘He asked me to help him write it and witness it.’

  ‘Then you’re a bloody fool, man! A bloody fool!’

  ‘What would you have had me do, Angus? Deny a dying man? Lose his letter overboard? Is that what you would have had me do?’

  ‘Don’t you mock me!’ Angus wrung his hands in frustration. ‘Bonnie, get inside!’ Bonnie took no notice. ‘A woman, you say? Here? In Wreck Bay? Was the old man mad?’

  ‘She sent me a letter. She wants me to pick her up from Fitzroy next Saturday.’

  ‘You’re not going!’

  ‘No choice!’

  ‘Of course you’ve choice, man! Have you lost your senses altogether?’

  ‘Angus, if I don’t fetch her she’ll just pay someone else to bring her. The question isn’t whether I pick her up, it’s what do we do when she gets here.’

  ‘Dear God, a woman here at Wreck Bay!’ A thought occurred and gave cause for hope. ‘She’s not young, this woman? Perhaps she’s one of Bernie’s old flames?’