chapter23

Chapter Twenty-three

Wrapped in a blanket and keeping myself warm in front of the stove, I reached down and crinkled Old Tip’s ears between my fingers.

“He likes that,” said Uncle Trev. “You know animals can hear things long before us?”

“Like Mum. She’s got remarkable ears.”

Uncle Trev looked uneasy, as if Mum was going to pop out of nowhere and send him off home. “The other day,” he said, “I was riding Old Toot up the back paddock, and Old Tip was trotting in front of us when he stopped, pricked his ears, and looked up to get my attention. Old Toot stopped and swivelled his ears around, too. I listened, but for the life of me I couldn’t hear a thing.”

“Old Tip and Old Toot are just like Mum.”

Uncle Trev looked over his shoulder. “I don’t know that I’d go comparing your mother with a dog and a horse. You could land me in trouble.” He poured the tea out of his cup into the saucer, took a gulp, and smacked his lips. “You’re sure you don’t want one of these gems?”

“Mum says she doesn’t know why she bothers to make them. She says she’s sick of lugging the heavy old gem-iron out of the cupboard and over to the stove.”

“I’m very partial to them,” said Uncle Trev. He split another gem and buttered it. “Squeaker Watson’s missus bakes a good gem, but nothing to match your mother’s. Just look at the colour, will you?”

“Does Mrs Watson let Mr Watson drink his tea out of his saucer?”

“Women don’t like a man drinking out of the saucer, but they all do it themselves when they think nobody’s watching.”

“Not Mum.”

“She’s just too fly to let you catch her doing it.”

“What about Mr Henry?”

“Old Gotta’s drunk his tea out of the saucer all his life, except when he’s drinking it straight out of the billy. Somebody once gave him a teapot, and he poured the hot tea straight out of the spout and down his gullet. Next thing, he’s clamping his mouth around the cold tap. ‘Me tongue,’ he said, when he could speak again. Ever since then, he puts the milk into the teapot and pours his tea straight into the saucer.”

“Doesn’t he pour it into the cup first?”

“He worked out how long it takes to wash a cup, multiplied that by the number of cups of tea he drinks in a day, and reckoned, if he lives to ninety, he’d save himself about five hundred hours by pouring it straight into the saucer.”

“Gosh.”

“I told him there must be something wrong with his arithmetic, but Old Gotta insisted his figures were right, so I tried putting the milk into my own teapot and pouring it straight into the saucer. But it’s a funny thing: I don’t really enjoy drinking out of the saucer out at the farm; I only do it when I come in to Waharoa, to annoy your mother.”

Uncle Trev could be very brave when Mum wasn’t home. Here he was taking the polish off her lino with his boots, wearing his hat inside, drinking tea out his saucer, and gobbling one gem after another. Worst of all, he’d brought Old Tip inside.

“What did you and Old Toot hear in the back paddock that day?” I asked Old Tip, but he looked at Uncle Trev.

“I heard a skylark singing away up out of sight,” said Uncle Trev, “and Old Satan gave a bellow, but that wasn’t what the pair of them were listening to. I giddupped Old Toot, and we hadn’t gone more than a chain when I heard something myself.”

“What?”

“A spooky noise like, ‘OOO-ooo-OOO-ooo!’ Old Tip trotted over and stood close to Old Toot and me. He’s a bit of a coward.”

Old Tip barked as Uncle Trev said his name.

“Mum’ll hear that when she gets home, and she’ll know you brought him inside.”

“I’ll open the window and let out the echo. There.” Uncle Trev sat again. “I giddupped Old Toot, and he took a few steps, stuck his head down, and I shot forward over his neck and landed on top of Old Gotta, who was lying on his back in the long grass, counting out aloud the number of thistle seeds he could see floating up in the sky. That was the strange noise Old Tip and Old Toot had heard.

“‘Trev,’ Old Gotta says, ‘some of them thistle seeds are drifting this way, and some are drifting that way, and some are drifting another way altogether.’

“‘Everyone knows that,’ I told him. I lay down and counted thistle seeds, too, and Old Tip lay down and pretended to have a go, but he can’t count more than about a hundred before he gets lost and has to start all over again. I tell him if he’d only learn his times tables, he’d be much better at arithmetic, but he won’t listen to me. Anyway,” said Uncle Trev, “I was telling you about Old Gotta.

“‘How can the wind blow in different directions at the same time?’ he asked.

“I started to tell him, but saw he had one eye on a harrier hawk circling up the hill.

“‘I was watching that old hawk going round and round till I got dizzy and fell down,’ Old Gotta said. ‘That’s when I started counting thistle seeds and saw the clouds. Why don’t hawks get dizzy and fall down, Trev?’

“‘They’re built so they can circle without getting dizzy. There’ll be something dead up the hill. A rabbit maybe.’

“‘He’d have landed and eaten a rabbit ages ago. No, there’s something else that’s got him interested, and I think I know what it is.’

“‘What?’ I asked, but Old Gotta shut up, and several times after that I saw him lying in the grass, watching the old hawk circle in the same spot over the hill. ‘There’s a swag of rabbits up there,’ I said to myself, but one day it clicked. A few weeks before, we’d both seen a big rainbow that came down and finished on the side of that hill. Old Gotta reckoned it was the brightest rainbow he’d ever seen. Now I realised he was looking for the pot of gold, and he thought the hawk had got on to it.”

“What pot of gold?”

“You must know about the pot of gold that’s always buried at the foot of the rainbow?”

“I suppose so.”

“Course you do. Everybody does. Well, Old Gotta came over one morning after milking and asked, ‘Gotta shovel, Trev?’ I didn’t let on I knew what he was up to, but shinned up into the top of my big macrocarpa and watched him sneak up towards the hill with the shovel.

“He spun round a couple of times, as if he felt he was being watched, so I slid down the macrocarpa, ran up the back paddock, climbed the other side of the hill, crawled to the edge, and peeped over. Sure enough, Old Gotta was digging below me, where the hawk had been circling. I snuck right down almost on top of him.

“‘You’re after that pot of gold, aren’t you?’ I says.

“‘Yeek!’ Old Gotta leapt twenty feet in the air. When he came down, he babbled some yarn or other about digging up rabbit burrows. I just grinned and spelled him with the shovel, and we dug a hole about ten foot deep and several yards across.

“‘You might have got the wrong place,’ I told Old Gotta.

“‘That hawk hasn’t been circling up here for nothing, Trev.’

“‘He’s circling because of the rabbits,’ I said. ‘Next time we see a rainbow, we’ll stick in some pegs and take proper bearings on it where it touches the ground. That way we won’t have to dig up half the farm.’ ”

“Did you find the pot of gold?” I asked.

Uncle Trev shook his head. “We’re still waiting for a rainbow. Look at Old Tip’s ears. He can hear your mother coming.”

When Mum came in, she sent me to bed and threw the windows and doors open to get the smell of Uncle Trev and his dirty old dog out of her kitchen. She noticed at once that he’d eaten the gems, and she asked if he’d taken off his hat and his boots.

“I think so.”

“He’d better,” Mum said, “or I’ll straighten him out. What did he have to say for himself?”

“He and Mr Henry tried to dig up the pot of gold at the foot of a rainbow.”

“What sort of nonsense is that?”

“You told me about it when I was little.”

“I wasn’t talking to a couple of grown men. Looking for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, indeed. Next thing you’ll be telling me they’ve been lying on their backs in the paddock, looking up in the sky and counting thistle seeds.”

Even though Uncle Trev had opened the window to let out the echoes, Mum’s remarkable ears must have heard everything he’d said. I lay still and held my breath, crossed my toes, and wondered when she was going to say Old Tip had been barking in her kitchen.