Chapter Seven

What Gotta Henry Found in the Middle of His Swamp

“Old Gotta Henry,” said Uncle Trev, “he never asks for something without first making sure I’ve got it, the cunning old swindler.”

I wriggled in my bed. I liked Uncle Trev’s stories about Mr Henry.

“Old Gotta came over one morning, trotting sideways like a young dog,” said Uncle Trev. “I took one look and knew he was after something, and sure enough he glances down at his feet and mumbles, ‘Gotta few staples, Trev?’

“‘I might have,’ I say. I’m not going to make it easy for him.

“‘There’s a couple of boxes of totara staples in your manure shed,’ says Old Gotta. ‘Gotta bit of wire, Trev?’

“‘I’m not sure –’ I start to say, but he cuts me off.

“‘Any amount of number eight wire in the shed,’ he says. ‘And the barbed wire’s under the sacks in the barn. Gotta few posts and battens, Trev?’ he asks.

“‘One or two,’ I admitted. Old Gotta knew darned well that I split a heap of posts and battens out of a couple of totaras up the back of my place last winter. The posts should have been worth a few bob, but the price of butterfat slumped, and not a cocky in the district had sixpence to rub on a staple, so I just stacked and left them up there. ‘They’ll come in handy some day,’ I said to myself, but I’d reckoned without Old Gotta.

“‘I was thinking of putting up a fence across the middle of my swamp,’ he says.

“‘Now why on earth would you want to do that?’ I ask him.

“‘A man could lose some stock in there,’ says Old Gotta. ‘The cows get bogged trying to hide their calves in the flax.’

“I knew,” Uncle Trev said, “that Old Gotta kept his herd near the shed for calving, so there was no chance of them getting bogged in the swamp. But once Gotta’s made up his mind, there’s no stopping him.

“‘I wouldn’t put my posts in too deep,’ I tell him. ‘You never know what you might find in your swamp.’

“Old Gotta shakes his head. He knows what he’s doing.

“‘How are you going to shift that wire and the staples?’ I ask him. ‘They weigh a ton.’

“‘Gotta konaki, Trev?’ he asks at once. ‘It’s out under the big macrocarpa.’

“I tell you what,” Uncle Trev said to me, “you can’t beat Old Gotta when it comes to borrowing. He even borrowed Old Toot to pull the konaki, only I had to go over and bring them both home, otherwise I’d have been unable to do a hand’s turn around my own place.

“Old Gotta came over a few days later, and I asked how he got on with the fence.

“‘You won’t believe this, Trev,’ he says. ‘When I dug the post holes, I found an old fence buried in the swamp. I must have put it in years ago, but it had sunk out of sight and I’d forgotten it.’

“‘What’d you do?’ I asked him.

“‘Put the new posts in on top of the old ones. Reckon they should be okay, Trev?’

“‘I’ll come over and have a look.’

“My shovel, pliers, wire-strainer, half-empty box of staples, and a few posts and battens lay where he’d left them. But the wires of the fence he’d just built went down into the swamp and disappeared.

“‘Me new fence,’ Old Gotta shouted. ‘It’s sunk out of sight, too.’

“‘Looks like it,’ I told him.

“‘All me hard work for nothing,’ Old Gotta moaned.

“‘All my posts and battens,’ I said. ‘All my wire. All my staples. What a daft idea, anyway. Anyone in his right mind could have seen a fence would sink.’

“‘Now you’re here, Trev,’ said Old Gotta, looking sideways, ‘I’ve got to tell you what I found out in the middle of the swamp.’

“‘What’s up?’ I asked.

“‘Out there –’ he nodded towards the deepest part of the swamp – ‘I saw an old hat sticking out of the mud. I didn’t remember losing a hat, so I picked it up. It didn’t come away that easy, because of the mud sucking it down, so I gave a yank and up she came.

“‘Now you’re not going to believe this, Trev,’ said Old Gotta, ‘but that hat had been sitting on top of a skull.’

“‘A skull, Gotta?’

“‘A human skull, and under the skull was the skeleton of some old-timer who must have wandered into the swamp and got himself bogged down like a cattle beast.

“‘But that’s not all, Trev,’ said Old Gotta. ‘I dug deeper, and the skeleton was sitting on what was left of a saddle, so I dug a bit deeper, and the saddle was sitting on top of the skeleton of a horse. That mud out there must be all of thirty feet deep.’

“I asked him,” said Uncle Trev, “if he’d dug down to see what the horse was standing on, but Old Gotta was a bit rattled.”

I could feel my eyes grow bigger as they stared at Uncle Trev.

He stared back. “‘We’d better go in and tell the police in Matamata about the skeleton,’ I told Old Gotta. ‘Where’s the hat?’

“‘That’s the trouble, Trev,’ said Old Gotta. ‘I got out of that hole in the swamp and backed away. I was so scared that skeleton might come back to life and gallop after me for its hat, I dropped it and ran.’

“‘Where’s the hole?’ I asked him, and looked out across the swamp.

“‘The hole’s disappeared,’ said Old Gotta, ‘and I’m not game to go out there again and look for it in case the skeleton gets me by the legs and drags me down.’

“It was getting late in the day,” Uncle Trev told me, “with the tea-tree starting to get that dull look, and it was already dark among the cabbage trees the other side of the swamp. I felt the hairs standing on the back of my neck.

“‘Maybe we’d better come up and have a look tomorrow,’ I told Old Gotta. ‘It’s getting on, and we can’t do anything now, even if we could see.’ ”

“Did you go back next day?” I asked Uncle Trev.

He shook his head.

“Something else came up, and I didn’t get across to Old Gotta’s place for a few weeks. By the time I remembered to say something to him, he seemed to have forgotten the whole business.”

“Did you tell the police?”

“Going in there with a cock and bull story about a skeleton sitting on top of a horse in the middle of Old Gotta’s swamp, and not even a hat to show them…” Uncle Trev shook his head. “They’d have laughed me out of the station. Crikey, it’s later than I thought. Your mother’ll be home soon. I’d better get out to the farm. I wouldn’t –”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I won’t say a word to her.”

But as Uncle Trev drove away, I hoped I wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night, screaming about a skeleton on a horse dragging me under the swamp.