Not the Faintest Trace

by Wendy M Wilson

  The two Irishmen laughed loudly and Frank felt the tension ease from his shoulders.

  They played on, the Irishmen in a happier mood but still losing.

  Eventually they ran out of money and left to return to the Oxford Hotel, where the Armed Constabulary were temporarily billeted. Hop Li had fed them and served them his watered-down whisky all night, so they were poorer but happier and not as drunk as they might have been.

  Hop Li fussed around, cleaning off the chairs they had sat in with carbolic soap and a hard rubbing. “What they wear under those shawls?” he asked Frank. “Sitting on my chairs with bare bums I bet. Next time I make them wear trousers, or no game.”

  He counted out the winnings. “Fifteen bob for you,” he said, handing a pile of coins to Frank. A quid for me.” He always took extra to cover his expenses.

  You have a good eye for a dupe,” Frank said, scooping up his winnings. “Almost too easy, those two.”

  “Could be setting us up for next time,” said Hop Li. “Better be careful.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Frank.

  “You’re not deserter, are you, boss?” asked Hop Li.

  “No,” said Frank. “Not me. My brother was though. Went across the Tangahoe River and vanished. Didn’t know what happened to him for a long time.”

  “Like those Yaya,” said Hop Li. “Went across the river and gone with no trace. Same story.” He scooped up the cards and put them in a drawer. “What happened?”

  Frank had not told the story to anyone, but he sensed Hop Li would not condemn his brother for what he’d done. It would feel good to talk about it to someone. It was in his mind now, with the discussion on bounty heads.

  “My younger brother, Will, was also a Die Hard,” he said. “He wasn’t a strong man; couldn’t even stand the sight of a horse with a broken leg being put down. Read a lot though. He imagined himself with a bayonet and a sword charging down a valley towards Russian guns. A glorious death. The poets have a lot to answer for.”

  “He wanted to die in glory,” said Hop Li. “Seems silly to me. Better to live scared and careful, right boss? Watch out for yourself? That’s the best.”

  “Just so,” said Frank. “My father couldn’t talk him out of it. Told him our mother would have hated it. Didn’t stop him though. He got into trouble up near Patea. Had a run in with a corporal and would’ve been sent to the brig for a long stretch. Lashes as well.” He paused for a minute, thinking about it, then continued. “He took the coward’s way out. Deserted to the enemy. The Hauhau rebels.”

  Hop Li shook his head and sighed. Frank watched him bustle about, preparing for breakfast the next day, running the shillings through his fingers and thinking about what had happened to his brother, the memory now forced to the surface.

  They were encamped beside the Tangahoe River in South Taranaki waiting for the battle to begin after a long, forced march from New Plymouth. The cold turned exposed skin blue, and the rain left their woollen uniforms permanently damp and smelly. And always it rained, unrelentingly.

  Will suffered more than most of the men, who complained loudly but did their best to keep each other’s spirits up. He scowled and complained, and refused to have much to do with the other men. One night, with everyone huddled around the fire trying to keep warm, Will’s corporal had ordered him to go out into the bush and cut more wood.

  “It’s your turn,” he’d said.

  “You can’t send a man out to chop wood in weather like this,” Will had said. “I won’t do it, and that’s all there is to say. I won’t be treated like a dog that must always obey its master.”

  The corporal had looked at him coldly, knowing he was the brother of a non-commissioned officer.

  “Refusing an order, hey? You get on out there now or there’ll be hell to pay. And don’t think your brother will save you.”

  “I won’t do it,” said Will. “And you can do what you like about it. It don’t matter to me at all, what happens to me. I’m done with it all.”

  The corporal refrained from doing anything to Will immediately, but reported him the next day to the officer in command. Will was arrested, confined to the prison tent and sentenced to twenty five lashes on the triangle. After the lashing, he was to spend a year in gaol in Wanganui Town in the Rutland Stockade on half rations, with the worst kind of men to be found in her Majesty’s Imperial Forces. Frank went to visit him in the prison tent to implore him to recant.

  “Listen, Will,” he said. “I can get them to reduce the number of lashes, maybe even get you sent home in disgrace. But you must apologize to the corporal and beg Colonel Hassard’s forgiveness. On your knees! On your belly if necessary.”

  Will had shrugged. “I’d die as soon as apologize to that miserable bastard. I’ll take what’s coming to me. Glad to be away from this hellish place.”

  That night, under cover of darkness, Will had escaped from the camp and crossed the river to join the Hauhau. Frank was fortunate he’d spent the night drinking and playing cards with the Captain Porter and two other men, or suspicion would have fallen on him. But he dreaded what might happen to Will with the Hauhau.

  Nothing was heard of Will for several weeks. A scout came back saying he’d seen a young pakeha sitting at a campfire with Hauhau warriors, but they could not tell from the description if it was Will or one of several other deserters who’d crossed over in the weeks following Will’s desertion. Waiting and wondering had been hell.

  “I changed my mind,” he said to Hop Li, letting the coins drop to the table one last time. “My brother disappeared without a trace for weeks, and I could hardly bear it. I should help Nissen. Maybe the outcome will be better for him than it was for me.”

  “That’s what I think,” said Hop Li. “You like to do good things for people. I know you. You’ll feel better about your brother if you help the Yaya.”

  Hans Christian Nissen was extremely happy Sergeant Hardy was now willing to help him. Frank rode out to his cottage in the small Scandi community on the edge of Palmerston to tell Nissen he’d changed his mind. The community lay in an area of cleared totara and rimu trees, surrounded on three sides by dense forest, with solid-looking little cottages set along the side of a rutted dirt track, looking almost like a German village, although much wilder. The Scandies had burned down the trees first, then cleared most of the stumps away. The cottages sat behind neat vegetable gardens. Hens and goats, penned in by the surrounding bush, roamed freely.

  He found Nissen and Sorensen sitting in front of one of the cottages smoking pipes together. They rose to greet him, their faces bright with hope.

  “I’ll search when I can,” he told them. “And I won’t take any money for it. I’ll report to you from time to time, let you know where I’ve searched, in case you have time to search yourselves.”

  As he spoke to Nissen he could see a pair of young women talking in front of the next cottage. They had their backs to him, and one was carrying a small boy on her hip. Every now and then, the other would clutch at her sister’s shoulder, laughing. At one point, she half-turned and he saw her face in profile, a strong mobile face with pale golden skin and expressive features. She was tall and slender, with golden hair that caught the sunlight; he couldn’t take his eyes off her. It was if the clouds had parted, the sun had started to shine again and spring had arrived.

  Nissen saw him staring and said, “They are sisters. Maren and Mette. Pretty girls, yes?” He gave Frank a hard look, which Frank interpreted as meaning keep your hands off them. He looked away from the girl regretfully.

  “I was noticing their cheerfulness,” he said. “You have a small paradise here I think.”

  Nissen’s habitually gloomy face lit up. “We’re happy here,” he said. “In Schleswig, it was not so good for us, with the Prussians…and the war…”

  “War is never good,” said Frank. He almost meant it.

  He rode back towards town, his mind on the young woman, wondering whether he would see her aga
in. He distracted himself by thinking about the matter at hand, the disappearance of the boys who had crossed the river. Then, as so often happened, the story of his brother returned.

  Will had been gone for weeks, with no news. They did not know if he’d deserted successfully, been drowned in the Tangahoe River, or even killed himself somewhere. Then, one morning a Hauhau warrior had ridden up on the other side of the river. He was a huge man with a full black beard, bare-chested but with a flax cloak over his shoulders, wearing European trousers, but shoeless, with toes tucked around the stirrups in the Māoristyle. Over his shoulder, he was carrying something that looked like a sack—a dark rope with a round object below it. He dismounted from his horse and plunged a forked stick into the soft sand, hanging the object from it. Looking towards the soldiers across the river from him, he made a sign with his hand across his throat, pointed at them and rode away grinning.

  Silence for a few minutes, then someone said in a choked voice, “By Christ, it’s young Hardy.”

  The head had hung there for days. He was drawn to it with a horrible fascination. What had it felt like for Will? Had they killed him first, or was he still alive when they had started hacking at his head, knowing what was about to happen.

  Eventually, he went out early one morning with his Sider-Enfield and a box of cartridges and sat on the banks of the river tearing open the packets with his teeth, pouring in the powder, wrapping the paper around the shot and ramming it into the muzzle, shooting towards the terrible disembodied head, without thinking about what he was doing. He was a dead shot. He’d been trained to hit a four-foot by two-foot target at 600 yards, but that day his hand shook so much he’d used a full box of cartridges before the shot blasted away his brother’s head in a red cloud. Afterwards he’d sat with his head in his hands, his mind in turmoil, his guts roiling.

  Colonel Hassard said nothing. Frank’s men looked at him sideways, as if he’d murdered his own brother. But he knew if he had to look at that head for much longer he would have turned the rifle on himself. He almost did anyway, sitting on the bank of the river with his Enfield at the ready, staring across at the smoke from their fires, fingering the trigger, his mind unable to cope with the horror.

  Later they heard stories about cannibalism among the Taranaki Hauhau. How they cut out the hearts of the first enemy killed in battle, and burned and ate them; or how they decapitated enemies and smoked the heads to preserve them. The Hauhau leaders began carrying around the severed heads in sacks, as recruitment tools, using them to convince Kupapa Māori, those who felt showing loyalty to the Crown was the best way to keep their lands, of the rightness of the Hauhau cause. Frank was glad, then, that he’d obliterated his brother’s head. At least it would not be carried around like an obscenity for the bastards to look at and joke about, or to pull in recruits for their evil cause.

  For the next few weeks Frank had slept with difficulty, waking every night from nightmares, sweating in his cold tent. The nightmares were always the same; Will screaming as the madmen hacked at his neck with tomahawks. In his dream, he never saw his brother die. But he awoke with the image of his brother’s head on the pole seared on his vision. He was ready to kill the man who had killed his brother, or to kill any man who would do what that man had done.

  Eventually, the Land Wars were over. The 57th Regiment returned to England with the rest of the Imperial Army and he stayed behind, joining the Armed Constabulary to fight in the Taranaki Wars. It was all he knew how to do.

  4

  The Forager

  At last, after four days of unrelenting rain, the skies had cleared and a thin spring sun had started to dry the mud. Mette Jensen took the opportunity to do some washing in the iron tub in front of the cottage, enjoying the warmth of the sun as she did. Days since Paul Nissen and her cousin, Jens, the boy she had grown up with and loved like a brother, had gone missing, and no one had any idea where they might be. She was awash in sorrow.

  What could have become of them? She missed them terribly. They were the only two other young people she could talk to in Palmerston, and now she had no one except her younger sister Maren, whose family preoccupied her. Everyone had thought Mette would marry Paul Nissen, although he was three years younger than she was. He was tall and strong, and nice to look at, but a boy. She preferred to wait for the right man, and she knew Paul was not that man, as much as she liked him.

  Maren came out of the cottage and called to her.

  “Mette, what are you doing?”

  “I’m finishing the washing,” she said. “Then I’m going into the bush to find some fresh greens.”

  Maren waddled towards her, one hand on her growing belly, looking anxious.

  “I wish you wouldn’t go into the forest,” she said. “I’m scared for you.”

  Mette smiled. “Maren, there’s nothing to worry about. The bush is beautiful and I love to go there.”

  “I’m afraid a pack of wild Hauhau will catch you and kill you and eat you for dinner,” said Maren.

  “I’m sure I’ll be delicious,” said Mette. “I’ll make sure they save a piece for…” She stopped as Maren’s eyes filled with tears. “Please, don’t worry about me, Maren honning. I’ll be quite safe and will stay on the path where I can run home quickly. If I scream loud enough the men will hear me from the mill and come running.”

  Maren sighed and returned to the cottage. Mette wrung out her apron and hung it to dry over a knot of scrub that sprang to life in place of the trees the men had felled. The apron was getting thin as she had brought it with her from Haderslev two years ago, but she loved the red and gold embroidery that her mother had stitched so carefully on the two aprons, giving one to her and the other to Maren. Holding it made her feel like she was home again, sitting in her mother’s kitchen eating aebleskiver, her lips coated with sugar. Sugar! If she could have some real sugar just once, that would be wonderful. Powdered sugar would be even better. She might kill someone for a taste of powdered sugar on her fingers.

  In Schleswig, there were no men. The Prussians had taken many of them for the army, or else they had fled from the Prussians to different parts of the world. A representative of the New Zealand government had travelled all over Denmark recruiting farm labourers for their skills with the axe. “You will clear the land first, then become farmers,” he’d promised them. “And the women can work as servants, although they will most likely marry as there are many more men than women.” The men left, and eventually the women realized if they wanted to find a husband they would have to follow them to the places they had gone if they were to find one to marry.

  When the war had taken the lives of her father and brother, she and Maren had accepted an offer of free passage for young single women. Maren had wasted no time, meeting and marrying Pieter Sorensen on the boat between Hamburg and Napier, already pregnant with Hamlet by the time they disembarked in Napier.

  She was still living with her sister Maren and Maren’s husband, and a second baby was on the way, a sister or brother for Hamlet. Pieter had built her a little lean-to against the back wall of his and Maren’s cottage, beside the lean-to where they kept the milch cow, but she knew with babies coming at great speed they would soon want her to leave, even if they didn’t say so. They were kind, but it was time for her to find her own life.

  Perhaps she could go to Wellington and find work. But she didn’t want to work as a maid and she had no useful skills other than finding food in the bush, food that none of the other newcomers considered food. She didn’t imagine anyone in Wellington eating huhu grubs or wetas when they ran out of meat.

  Not that they ran out of meat these days. Mutton had become so cheap that even they could afford it—sixpence for a whole leg of mutton that would last them for most of a week, because all the sheep’s wool was sent to England and something had to be done with the meat. But Pieter was saving every penny to put towards his farm, clearing the land and working at the sawmill as well. It was a hard life.

  W
hile the apron was drying, she’d planned to go into the bush behind the sawmill and find some food to supplement the cabbage, carrots and potatoes the settlers grew in among the tree stumps at the end of the clearing. They stored the vegetables in a covered pit, eking them out through the winter, but the store was almost empty, with planting about to start. Time to find another source, as much as Maren wished she would not.

  Before she left, she prepared the camp oven, the heavy three-legged iron pot they used for cooking, building wood up under the flat pot and partly filling it with water from the butt. She would light the wood when she returned from the bush with food. The milch cow she had already milked this morning, and a fresh bucket of milk sat in the two-sided cupboard beside the front door, covered in a piece of heavy cotton cloth weighted down with stones sewn into the hem at the corners.

  She tightened her bonnet around her head, pulling the strings into a slip knot under her chin, called out to Maren to tell her where she was going, stepped into her clogs and set off along the path through the bush to the sawmill. The path had been trodden down by the men from the clearing who walked to the sawmill every day at first light and back again as the sun was going down. She carried a large woven flax basket that she hoped would be full when she returned. The sun was nice, but she felt hot in her woollen skirt.

  She was tall compared to most women she knew, too tall, with white blonde hair tied in two thick plaits, and hazel eyes. She knew she was not pretty, like Maren who had fluffy golden hair and enormous blue eyes. Once she and Maren had taken the tram over to Foxton to buy cloth for dresses, back when bullocks pulled the tram and it took forever to get to the coast. A young man in a dark suit had stared at Maren for a long time, and then had come up and said she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and would she marry him?

  Maren looked calmly at the young man and told him she was already married, but suggested he might like her sister who had not yet found a husband. Mette had blushed, as she always did, and looked at the man, smiling. Although she was embarrassed, she was prepared to treat the whole thing as a joke. But she was hurt and humiliated when the man looked back at her, dropped his gaze to the floor, and walked silently back to his seat.