9

‘THAT WAS KURANGAITUKU,’ Sean said to Frank.

‘Kura who?’ he replied. For a moment his puzzlement overrode the horror of the memory.

‘Kurangaituku,’ Sean repeated. ‘She’s been a part of the local folklore for years. Pity you didn’t learn about her at school.’

Frank was silent. Edith clutched his arm. Then he collected his thoughts and spoke.

‘Forget the folklore. That thing was real. So was my dead horse.’

It was Sean’s turn to be silent. What could he say that wouldn’t make him sound like a fool? The problem was a familiar one and in the end all he could suggest was that in the morning Frank seek out some of the old people, tell them the tale and wait for their reply.

Then Edith spoke, her first words since Frank told his tale. ‘So that’s why you don’t like chooks.’

At the marae next morning, two old men and an old woman were sitting in the morning sun, watching everyone busy around them. One of the men wore overalls, the other had a rust-coloured blanket over a yellowish tracksuit. He looked more Asian than Maori. The woman was dressed in ceremonial black. They all knew who Frank and Edith were. When Sean introduced himself, the man with the blanket nodded and smiled, like he’d been expecting him.

‘I suppose you’ve got a story to tell us,’ the woman said to Frank. ‘We’ve been waiting to hear how you got here.’ Frank and Edith raised their eyebrows at each other. The man in the overalls laughed and patted the form beside him, motioning for Edith and Sean to sit.

‘There’s a chair over there,’ he said to Frank. ‘Take your time.’

To Sean, the old man was saying ‘Get on with it.’ But Frank took his time, moving the chair about and shifting around to get comfortable, before dispensing his thoughts about the weather and the progress of the communal veggie gardens. The three old people listened politely and Frank eventually started talking about his Reporoa farm and the events that had sent him fleeing northward. Edith clung to Sean and he didn’t blame her. The tale sounded even more frightening under the mid-morning sun. The old people were impassive. When Frank finished there was a long silence, then the man in the overalls said just one word.

‘Kurangaituku.’ He spoke to Sean then, but the words were meant for Frank. ‘Nothing to stop her now, but she won’t be moving far. We needn’t worry about her up here.’

Then he spoke to Frank directly, and Sean watched his words hit home.

‘You’re lucky to be here. You didn’t know about Kurangaituku, and there are a lot of other things you don’t know about either, but you have learned one important thing — ignorance is no protection.’ He laughed then. ‘Why don’t you get yourself some chooks? Always good to have a few eggs.’ Sean watched Frank. The man didn’t even blink.

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said, ‘but I’m allergic to feathers.’

When the laughter died, the man in the rust-coloured blanket, who’d been sitting next to Sean, turned and spoke in rather strained and correct English.

‘You had better go to meet Kurangaituku. It will be good for your practice.’

Meet Kurangaituku? Good for his practice? Practise of what? Sean felt like he’d been king hit. He looked at the old man, perfectly bald, round eyeglasses, easily in his seventies but poised like an athlete on the hard wooden form. He smiled at Sean and spoke again.

‘Just you be happy,’ is all he said, and with that the three of them rose, thanked Sean, Frank and Edith for the news, and vanished into the building they’d been leaning against. The trio looked at each other in surprise and no small amount of bewilderment

Sean didn’t set out right away. He wanted to help Frank construct a chook run. But Frank insisted on doing it himself.

‘Good for me,’ he said. ‘And that old man’s right about the eggs.’

Edith laughed, but Sean was busy contemplating the blanketed man’s words, delivered with a smile, but carrying all the weight and force of a command. It would be easy enough to disobey, but Sean suspected that ignoring the instruction would bring on a slow and wasting expiry, a withering regret, a sickness of secrets just out of reach and opportunities missed — even worse than being torn apart by Kurangaituku. He felt he didn’t really have any choice.

After lunch he loaded up, thanked Frank and Edith, and once again rode south. He looked at their faces as he left. Did they think he was a little touched? But Frank, at least, seemed unsure. The whole business had got to him and Sean’s departure made a sense he knew he wasn’t far from understanding.

As Sean rode he pondered his predicament. Rationality said one thing, instinct another. Actually, rationality said two things, both conflicting, and so did instinct. By late in the day, just north of Hamilton, he was still some distance from a comfortable solution. He camped by a creek flowing near the old Te Rapa dairy factory, silent and hulking.

He looked in Hamu’s trusting eyes. How could he endanger him and Bojay? What gave him that right? They both depended on Sean and here he was considering a course of action that seemed, the more he thought about it, insanely dangerous, purely suicidal. He decided that night, moths fluttering around the fire and a morepork calling off in the distance, to revert to his original plan, to travel through Taranaki. He might have to live with regrets, but at least he’d live, and so would Hamu and Bojay.

A good night’s sleep firmed his decision and in the morning the three of them headed into Hamilton, ready for the turn-off to Te Awamutu and down to New Plymouth. It was a cowardly step, Sean knew, a soft option, but as he took the road to Taumarunui his confidence grew. He remembered Taumarunui well. He’d lived there for five years, up to his early adolescence. He wouldn’t be travelling that far, though, before turning off near Te Kuiti and coming out on the coast at Mokau, with its black sands and wild west coast surf and, inland, the startling ice-cream peak of Taranaki, rising out of the chequered plains.

Sean’s thoughts wandered off to his childhood in Taumarunui, digging pumice caves with Graeme Carter, attending the local convent school at Rangaroa. He had lived in terror of the school hood, Willy O’Hagen, with his reverse-handlebarred pushbike and his leather jacket with the upturned collar and HELLS ANGLES written on the back in white paint.

Sean used to catch eels in the drain at the bottom of the section, but he’d only brought them home once. His mum had thrown a real wobbly when she’d found a sink full of eels writhing in the chlorinated water. Sean took them back to the drain and let them go. What was wrong with her? Couldn’t she see he was just trying to do his bit? Some years later it dawned on him that the meal of fish fingers they’d had that night constituted some sort of statement, but he wasn’t sure if it meant a genuine acknowledgment of his well-meaning act or simply an assertion of civilised ways. Sean had always been aware that his mother was big on civilised ways, many of which conflicted with his natural leaning towards wild places and the creatures that inhabited them. Eventually he’d realised she was a bit of a wild thing herself, urges sublimated in an effort to accommodate her husband’s public service career, but even so she never was too keen on the eels and wetas, whose company her son so enjoyed.

When Sean was twelve they’d sent him away to boarding school in Auckland, making some arrangement in which he played no part whatsoever, promising him as a Marist brother in return for a good cheap classical education. He’d hated it. He was hungry for two years and caned regularly for very little that he regarded as a good reason. They’d parted company at the end of the fourth form when, overcome by adolescent lust, he’d poured out his feelings and intentions towards Grace Kingi in a letter that was intercepted by Brother Lawrence, known to the boys as ‘Snoop’. Next year Sean had spent a term at Taumarunui High School where he achieved such social pinnacles as helping to talk Brian Newman into peeing on an electric fence — ‘It won’t hurt a bit. It just shorts out.’ — before his family moved yet again, this time to Paeroa.

He had been in the sixth form, employed on weekends as a waiter with Mrs Browning who did catering for weddings and the like. A fellow with the unlikely name of Gladstone Albright was working with Sean one day, both of them slicked down with knife-edged creases in their trousers, natty black bow ties and shoes polished to perfection. Their duties included clearing up and dishwashing, and one of the perks of the job, apart from claiming any leftover food, included drinking any wine left in the bottles they imagined they’d been wielding with such ease and grace. This day there was a lot of wine left following the nuptial festivities of two well-heeled Hauraki Plains farming families, who were no doubt looking forward to the continuation of their dynasties. Gladstone and Sean got thoroughly pissed, so pissed in fact that much of the afternoon became a wine-sodden blur. Several years later, Sean’s sister, Emmy, reminded him of the sight that had confronted her that evening. There he was — black trousers and shoes apparently intact, but his bow tie askew, and in his arms a large cut-glass bowl of fruit salad and trifle — weaving his drunken way home.

‘I’m taking a peace offering home for the olds,’ Sean had apparently told Emmy.

He was just thinking that perhaps he should have spent more time listening to her sane and intelligent commentaries on their circumstances when his thoughts were brought to an abrupt halt by a shout of ‘Oi Oi!’

There in the road, just emerged from a nearby driveway, were four young men, shaved heads, tats, all on foot and all armed. One of them had an assault rifle, three of them had crossbows. Two of then wore ANARCHY RULES tee shirts. Unaware of the irony of both the sentiment and the juxtaposition, they stood next to each other, pointing cocked crossbows at Sean and deploying scowls and grimaces he felt would have been better suited to Sesame Street.

The guy with the rifle called out, ‘Where have you come from?’ The four of them seemed to Sean about as threatening as the Auckland petrolheads.

‘Ngaruawahia,’ he said, his voice instinctively quiet and even. He noticed a sign over their heads showing the distance to Te Awamutu.

‘S’pose you’ve been staying with the niggers,’ the guy said. That’s when Sean’s mouth got away on him.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was staying with a couple of honkies.’

All four of them did a classic double take at that. He would have laughed but for the weapons still trained on him.

‘Get off your horse and kiss the road!’ screamed the fellow with the rifle. He was apoplectic with rage at having his authority so casually dismissed. Sean could see the rifle shaking in his hands. The others, especially the anarchy rules pair, looked nervous. Below them, over the railings and through the trees, he caught a glimpse of the southern motorway.

‘Kiss my arse,’ Sean said to the group and wheeling Bojay he cleared the rails and skidded down the bank towards the motorway. The rifle cracked as they leapt. He felt the shot whistle close to his ear. At the same time, there was a sharp pain in his left arm, in the back of his biceps. They crashed through the trees, but Sean was still mounted on Bojay when they emerged at the bottom. Overhead, he could see his four ambushers peering down at him. A rifle shot spanged off the tar seal and Sean trotted a hundred metres, out of sight, before slowing to take stock.

Only then did he realise that he had a crossbow bolt sticking in his arm, not right through, but the head buried deep in the muscle. It was starting to hurt and without thinking he tried to pull it out. The pain made him black out for a moment. He had to dismount before he fell off, and he sat on the kerb, visions of Matapihi’s panel saw surgery running through his head.

‘Dickhead,’ he said to himself. ‘You should have picked up a medical kit.’

But the bolt still had to come out. In the end he held a slip knot on the shaft, tied the other end of the rope to a telegraph pole, and ran.

He came to under a State Highway One sign. He was on the main drag, the road that would take him through Putaruru and Tokoroa, and all the spooky pines that grew so close to the road. He thought briefly of retracing his steps and getting back on his old route, well away from the haunts of Kurangaituku but he hurt and he didn’t feel like facing another ambush. With a sickly feeling of inevitable doom he mounted up and rode down the highway.

The country outside Hamilton was just like the rural landscape elsewhere. It had always exuded an air of wealth and substance, horse and cattle studs, two-storeyed brick houses and avenues of English trees like oaks, London planes and elms. The trees were still there and so were the signs announcing notable racehorses and prize-winning bulls, but other than that everything was the same as elsewhere with flattened fences and thistles growing in what used to be lush pasture. Sean couldn’t have cared less. All he felt was pain and dread.

In Cambridge, cleaned up like Huntly but nobody in evidence, he rummaged through the backroom shelves of a chemist shop, looking for a medical kit and anything he could identify as an antibiotic. A bottle of disinfectant helped clean the wound and he found a large jar of pills with a name that sounded suitable. Thinking what the hell, he gobbled a handful, hoping they were antibiotics. He imagined gangrene and blood poisoning and a painful and ugly end on the roadside — if Kurangaituku didn’t get him first.

A supermarket had been well picked over but Sean managed to find a packet of dog biscuits. He stuffed them in his bag. Later that day, camped by Lake Karapiro, he tipped them out on the ground for Hamu while he dined on some of Frank and Edith’s pork with rice. His arm was hurting badly and his head was aching too. He took some more pills from the jar he’d picked up. When they didn’t make him hallucinate or give him the shits, his confidence rose slightly. Maybe he wouldn’t get too crook. He went to sleep by the fire, wrapped in Bojay’s saddle-blanket.

In the morning he felt worse. His arm was throbbing and so was his head. He was hosting an infection. As he rode through Tirau and then Putaruru the pain got worse and so did a feeling of disorientation, a near-hallucinatory dizziness. Who was he? What was he doing? Why was he riding this horse? Where was he going anyway? He swallowed some more pills. Half an hour later his head had cleared but he still felt like he was dreaming.

When he rode into Tokoroa he found branches laid out in the form of a vee, pointing to the bypass road that ran down the western side of Lake Taupo. Someone was trying to tell him something. Who? Why? He turned right and followed the sign past the side entrance to the Kinleith pulp mill. In the pine forest, thick and looming, he rode in near darkness with occasional shafts of dazzling light. Was this real or a feverish nightmare? He knew that he didn’t want to be caught among the trees after dark, so he kept up a good pace, alternately cantering and trotting for as long as his arm and his throbbing head could stand the jolting.

They were still among the trees when Sean couldn’t take it any more. They’d been pushing themselves for what seemed like hours. Bojay was all lathered up, Hamu’s head drooped and his tongue hung out. The light said it was probably mid-afternoon and they’d have time for a cup of tea and an hour’s rest. They stopped by a creek. Sean made a fire and boiled the billy while the animals drank their fill. Bojay grazed on some toetoe growing at the edge of the pines.

Sean sat on the pine needles, soft as any cushion, and leaned back against a tree trunk. His whole body ached. His head felt like a puffball. He wanted to throw up. No way could he mount Bojay again and keep riding. Not without a little rest anyway. He’d just shut his eyes for a moment.

When he woke up it was completely black, or at least it was till he ungummed his eyes and staggered to the creek where he dunked his head. Dusk. The light was fading fast. He didn’t feel at all rested, he felt even worse than before, sick, weak and dizzy. He looked around, realising that night was almost upon them and he had no idea how far they’d have to ride to find clear country. No time for anything else. He whistled for Hamu who was following smells in the undergrowth, mounted Bojay and headed down the road. Bojay’s trot threatened to dislodge his pounding head.

Within a kilometre it was dark enough for Sean to see stars in the narrow gap where the road divided the trees. But it wasn’t so pitch-black that Sean didn’t see the shape that leapt from the trees with a screech that nearly paralysed him.

Bojay shied, jumping sideways. Sean saw the creature land beside them in the road. He fought to stay mounted. It was big, and it recovered its balance even as Bojay, not waiting for any command, broke into a gallop down the centre of the highway. Sean held on as best he could.

Just as Frank had described, Sean could hear the ‘Thud! Thud!’ of the creature’s pursuit, not gaining but not falling behind either. He crouched over Bojay’s neck, all thoughts of illness forgotten. He urged the horse to greater speed and prayed for Bojay to keep his footing on the potholed surface. Bojay did but he couldn’t maintain the pace. Sean felt Bojay slowing and as he did the creature sprang. This time it landed square on Bojay’s back, right behind Sean. The horse stumbled and began to go down. Sean felt the creature’s claws grip him and something struck him a glancing blow on the head.

Sean and the creature, it could only have been Kurangaituku, were thrown clear as Bojay fell and they landed side by side. Kurangaituku was first to her feet and in the gloom Sean saw Kurangaituku sizing Bojay and him up. The moment of indecision allowed Sean to draw his sawn-off. When the creature stepped towards him, beak raised for a killing blow, Sean shot her right in the head.

Kurangaituku fell just as Hamu arrived, panting and giving the fallen monster a wide berth. Again, Sean remembered Frank’s tale. Frantically he remounted Bojay, praying that the horse was none the worse for his tumble. They galloped off down the road in the dark, hoping to get clear before Kurangaituku came to. Bojay needed no urging either. He kept up his gallop for what seemed like hours.

When they were well clear of the pines, Sean stopped and dismounted to let Hamu catch up. They’d escaped. There was no sign of Kurangaituku and, apart from low scrub, they were in clear country, half a moon shining over rolling hills, with here and there clumps of trees and shelter belts.

They all needed to stop, a chance to still their pounding hearts and collect their scattered wits. Sean gathered wood and lit another fire. Bojay munched half-heartedly and Hamu ignored the rest of the dog biscuits when Sean tipped them out. Sean couldn’t eat either. He just sat there in the firelight with a cup of tea and a smoke feeling miserable, sick and sore. He could smell the carrion stink of Kurangaituku all over himself. The moon told him they were about four hours from dawn, but at least they were clear of the pines.

Hamu growled. When Sean looked at him his teeth were bared and his hackles were up. Sean followed Hamu’s gaze. To his horror, he saw a looming shadow, not ten feet away Kurangaituku stood there, not moving. Sean had all the time in the world to get a clear picture. The beak and claws stood out in the flickering firelight, but the most horrible thing of all was the eyes. They were black pits, alien and merciless, and they stared unblinking, while the claws clenched and unclenched. Sean leapt to his feet, expecting to be attacked and torn apart as he moved. But Kurangaituku was still.

Sean became aware of the manaia nestling against his chest. It was alive. It gave him back the strength he thought he’d lost. His head cleared and his body tingled all over. Forgetting his pain, he waved his arms like he was shooing chooks.

‘Haere atu!’ he yelled, as loud as he could. ‘Fuck off!’

Hamu gave a booming bark and from right beside Sean’s ear Bojay made a noise like the Muscle Shoals horn section blasting a bridge into the chorus. Kurangaituku recoiled. As they watched, the monster shrank, nearly half a metre. No longer was it towering overhead looking like it was about to leap and devour them, cleaving Sean’s skull with its massive beak, its shiny black eyes strange and terrifying. It was Sean’s height now and it looked directly at him. Sean saw what it was feeling. Maybe it was his feverish state, maybe it was his fright-fuelled imagination, but there was a being, just like Hamu or Bojay, just like another human. What Sean saw was a deep unhappiness. Kurangaituku was lonely and confused, gripped by unwanted passions. Sean and the creature stood there looking at each other and then it slowly backed away, lifting its great clawed feet and placing them with deliberate care like a dancer or a gymnast, like the formal movements of a warrior delivering a wero, a challenge. Despite his terror, Sean felt a sudden rush of sympathy for it. Where were its friends and family? Who could ever love it? Without thinking he spoke to it, just as it turned, about to vanish into the night.

‘Take it easy, sis!’ Sean called, and if he ever meant anything said he meant those words. Kurangaituku stopped. Sean had time to think that perhaps he should have kept his big mouth shut. To his horror he saw the firelit beast grow again, and turn its horrid gaze on him. ‘Oh no!’ he said to himself. He was reaching for the sawn-off when Kurangaituku sprang.

Kurangaituku’s leap knocked Sean over and, just as he dodged a wicked blow from the creature’s beak, he felt a claw go into his eye. Hamu hurled himself at Kurangaituku and, even though he was plucked off and thrown to one side, his attack gave Sean time to rise and seize the monster around the neck, immobilising the beak and toppling Kurangaituku. The two of them fell right into the fire.

Sean felt his hair crisp and sizzle and the stabbing pain of the hot coals searing his skin. At the same time he heard a screech of terror from Kurangaituku. When the creature leapt to her feet, he saw through his one-eyed daze that she was on fire. All down one side feathers were burning. Frantically she beat at the flames with her claws, but the tongues of fire spread. Ignoring the nearby stream and the long grass she could have rolled in, Kurangaituku fled.

Sean came to with Hamu licking his face. He lay on his back feeling his wounds. One eye was blind. His head and his arm throbbed. His nostrils were full of the unbelievable stench of the burning monster. Sean was too weak to move and he stayed on his back, the front of his swanny pulled up and held against his eye. Bojay was eating grass again and Hamu, unhurt after his encounter, had started picking his biscuits out of the grass. Sean struggled to his feet and rebuilt the fire, one-handed and one-eyed.

As he sat half blind, wondering if he was going to live or die, he noticed Hamu. The dog had stopped rootling in the grass for his biscuits. He was sitting with his head on one side, gazing enraptured at a point beside the fire. Again Sean followed his gaze. This time he saw a little creature, less than a metre high, warming himself by the flames. He was gnarled and misshapen with a high forehead and reddish curly hair. He was one of the little guys out of Cally’s paintings — one of the Maeroero. Hamu and Sean were entranced. Even Bojay had stopped munching. Sean could smell his grassy breath as he moved up behind them. The Maeroero turned to them and spoke, and the sound made Sean forget anything he’d read about the clear and piping voices of the little people. The Maeroero sounded like Tom Waits on a bad day, like cutlery caught in the waste disposal unit, and he spoke in a dialect full of g’s and k’s, grunts and clicks.

‘Tena koutou,’ he said.

The barely comprehensible formal greeting sounded more like ‘tinna goat.’ A noise like three metres of concrete mixing in a truck followed. Sean strained to make sense of the noise.

‘Ko Uruao ahau.’

Uruao? Sean had never heard the name before. It wasn’t from anywhere he’d been. Then the little guy started smiling and nodding, just like the blanketed man at Ngaruawahia.

‘Tatou tatou!’ he said to Sean, though the noise was more like a motor mower running over tin cans. Tatou tatou? All of them together? Uruao continued smiling and nodding. Sean wondered what he meant. Then Sean heard a strange noise, like a mixture of grinding gears and a punk rock drum solo. The noise was coming from the little guy. He was shaking with what looked to Sean like laughter. As Sean fought to focus, he saw the Maeroero lift one arm and point, right at his face.

That was about the last straw for Sean. He felt crook as hell. In the past couple of days he’d been ambushed, shot, chased, frightened half to death, and, to cap it all, he’d probably lost an eye.

‘And you can fuck off too, you crater-faced little dipstick!’ Sean yelled at the diminutive creature, sitting there by the fire, wrapped in a cloak made from some spotted hide and sounding like the old Cresta had just thrown a rod.

And he did. He rose, still laughing and pointing, took a step backwards into the darkness and vanished, the collapsed-bearing graunch of his laughter taking a few seconds to fade.

Sean was way beyond shock and surprise. He’d been attacked and nearly killed by one mythical creature, and laughed at by another. Big deal. He had his own problems. For a start he was having trouble standing upright. He tossed the remaining wood on the fire, wrapped himself in the saddle-blanket, lay on the ground and passed out from pain and exhaustion.