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.
While 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.
“I’m not pretty enough for him,” she whispered to Maren.
Maren had shrugged.
“What good does pretty do in this country? If he knew how you could cook he would come running back.”
But a woman couldn’t be too choosy, and Mette knew she was. She wanted to find a man who would give her healthy babies and make a home for her. But also someone who would enjoy talking to her beside the fire in the evening, someone who would be there when she looked up from her sewing. She imagined a sturdy, fair-haired man with a pipe in his mouth and a twinkle in his eye, a man who would talk to her about books and history and interesting things that were happening in the world. Danish men were not generally talkative types, however, and they certainly didn’t fit the image she had in her head. Not any that she knew at least.
A group of young boys was playing in the dirt near the entrance to the bush. They stopped playing and looked at her with wide eyes.
“There’s a troll in there,” said one.
“In the bush?”
He nodded. His blond hair fell forward and he brushed it back. “We saw him. He was a big troll and he was holding a sack and a club.”
Mette suppressed a smile. She’d seen just such a troll in a book of fairy tales when she was younger.
“And was he green with orange hair?”
One of the other boys jumped in. “No, he was brown and he had marks on his face, dark ones, like wings. And he had a big cloak made of feathers.”
Well, that was a different kind of troll. Not the kind Mr. Anderson described in his stories.
“Why did you think it was a troll then?”
“Because he was angry,” said the first boy. “He looked at us like he was going to put us in his sack and take us away for dinner. We were scared and we ran home.”
Mette had nothing to say to that. But she felt a little twinge of nervousness in her scalp as she walked, as if someone was staring at her from behind. Once or twice she spun around to make sure she was alone. The troll sounded like one of the Hauhau Maren worried about.
The trees on the mountain side of the clearing were massive, larger than the span of a tall man; the bush was dark and full of things that were unknown to Danish people. She’d done her best to explore and understand the plants and animals, but knew she had much to learn. She forced her mind from the troll. The boys had imagined him, she was sure. They were boys. That’s what boys did.
She touched the leaves of a fuscia tree as she went by. Later in the autumn it would be covered with konini berries and she would make jam. Pieter loved her jam, and took a jam sandwich to work with him every day. Too soon for the berries yet, but she longed for something sweet. Savoury would be nice as well, something with taste, or bite, like the pickled herring they used to eat at home. On that memorable trip to Foxton on the tramway they’d visited a small café and she had tasted whitebait fritters, made from the tiny fish that swam upstream in the springtime, cooked in a batter of eggs and white flour. She’d never tasted anything so delicious in her life, and she longed to taste them again.
Perhaps she would find some honey today. Manuka scrub flourished at the edge of the forest and was beginning to flower with small white buds. Bees loved the pollen from the manuka blossom. She stopped to pull off some leaves for tea, just the smallest and softest leaves, and tucked them carefully into one side of her basket in a kerchief placed there for just that purpose. The larger leaves made a bitter tea but the smaller ones were refreshing and you could almost imagine you were drinking real tea. If she could not find any honey she would at least have some leaves for tea.
She could hear the hum of the sawmill in the distance and as she got closer she thought she recognized the voices of Pieter and Hans Christian. Behind the mill a stream surrounded by fern and the occasional kowhai tree, not yet in bloom with its lovely yellow flowers, rose towards the hills and she climbed towards it. She pulled out some young fronds of pikopiko and put them beside the leaves. The roots tasted horrid, but they filled you up when you were hungry. Someone had suggested to her that pikopiko tasted like asparagus, but not to her. You might as well say that huhu grubs tasted like chicken, which they certainly did not.
She wandered slightly off the path, being careful to keep it in sight. People were always disappearing into the bush and not coming back, especially small children, and she knew she must stay within sight of the path. Maren had put the fear of God into little Hamlet, telling him that the troll would get him if he went too far from the cottage. So far it had worked, although it had also made him nervous about going to bed at night, and he often woke in the night yelling that there was a troll under his little truckle bed. When that happened Maren and Pieter would take him into their bed. Maybe the other mothers in the clearing had told the same story to their boys and that was why they were claiming to have seen a troll. It was their name for a scary being who lived in the woods.
Still in sight of the clearing she found a large growth of puha, which would do for their vegetables. The leaves of puha, which was a type of thistle, were quite tasty if they were twice cooked in water—almost like spinach. Beside the puha were some red capped toadstools. She had avoided mushrooms and toadstools so far; you never knew which ones would kill you. She knew for certain that the red capped toadstools were not to be eaten. They made you go crazy, and then they killed you. She’d seen it happen with her own eyes.
A small sound made her turn and look to one side. A pair of bright eyes regarded her through the undergrowth. She stared into them and drew in her breath.
“Hej min lille mand,” she said softly, moving slowly towards the baby pig.
How they would love her if she came home with a little piglet for dinner!
She glanced down, looking for something heavy and spotted a hand-sized rock. Keeping her eyes on the pig, she bent and picked it up. The pig kept looking at her, its head on one side enquiringly. She took a minute to look around. If the mother was nearby she would run like a hen with its head chopped off to the clearing, but she knew baby wild pigs could become separated from their mothers and she would have heard a large wild pig moving through the bush. She hoped so, at least.
The little pig moved towards her slowly, a conspirator in its own death. It was busy nibbling leaves from the very puha she had just harvested when she raised the rock in two hands and brought it down hard on the side of its head. It fell slowly sideways, its eyes glazing over. To make sure, she hit it hard two more times, being sure not to get any blood on her woollen dress and stockings. Then she carefully lifted it and placed it in her basket. It was heavier than it looked and would give them so much meat! She covered it with leaves to keep the smell from the mother if she were nearby, turned, and walked towards home, the pig weighing her down on one side. She had trouble keeping from laughing. A pig for dinner. It would last them for days, and the fat under the skin would sizzle and cook into the most delightful taste. She could already imagine it.
After only a few steps she heard another noise, muffled steps in the leaves. She stopped. The mother pig was behind her. Now she was in trouble. She moved around carefully to see what was there. In the mottled shadows, she could not see well, but the pink skin of a pig would stand out against the green. Instead, she saw something brown. Some legs. Human legs. She raised her eyes and saw another pair of eyes looking down at her from under a blue cap, eyeing her in a way that was not unlike the way she had eyed the pig.
She gasped and almost dropped her basket. The troll.
A huge, dark-bearded man wrapped in a feathered cloak stared at her from the bush; or, more correctly, not at her but at her basket. He carried a bag of something that was moving, wriggling to get free, and she thought in horror of little Hamlet, wondering if he was safe at home. This was one of those Hauhau who ate little children. He was the troll the children had seen. The women in the clearing talked about the terrible Hauhau and scared the children with stories to make sure they behaved properly, often calling them trolls. She had not made the connection.
He raised his arm towards her and pointed at the basket. His face, the part that was not covered by his beard, bore blue markings resembling a large butterfly.
“Poaka,” he said and snapped his fingers at her. She understood what he wanted. He wanted her pig. She backed away slowly.
“This is my pig,” she said. “My poaka. For my family,” waving towards the clearing. “They wait for me, over there. Many men. Big men.” She heard her a quiver in her own voice and dug her nails into her hands to calm herself.
He shook his head dismissively. “My pig,” he said, taking a step towards her. His voice was deep and gravelly, and sounded rusty.
She was still holding the rock she had used to kill the piglet and without thinking she threw it hard at him. He grunted and took a few steps backwards, his hand to his forehead.
Clutching the basket with the pig close to her chest, she turned and ran, screaming loudly as she did so. She heard branches snapping behind her, expecting at any minute he would grasp her by the shoulders and seize the pig, but nothing happened. Even in her panic she realized that running back to the clearing would not help—there were no men there—so she ran towards the sawmill, which was a mere hundred or so yards away. She had the sawmill in sight and could even hear the machines running and men shouting, when a rider on a large black horse appeared in front of her on the track to the sawmill. It was him, she was sure, a big dark man with a blue cap, but for some reason he now wore a long blue-grey greatcoat which came down to his stirrups. She didn’t stop to think about why he had changed his clothes, or how he was suddenly riding a horse, but opened her mouth and screamed as loudly as she could.
“What the dickens…” he said, clutching the reins of his horse as it reared up.