In their powerful repose, only betrayed by a lingering
Twilight in the hooded ravines.
Behind our quickness, our shallow occupation of the easier
Landscape, their unprotesting memory
Mildly hovers, surrounding us with perspective,
Offering soil for our rootless behaviour.
(1948)
The Anti-Myth
John Mulgan, from Man Alone
He woke to a morning that was just light underneath a sky still black with the storm. The gale had strengthened so that it had reached its height. He knew well from experience the course that it would take. This was the third day of its fury, with heavy rain in the wind now. It would blow like this all day and another night, and rain heavily, with a steady drenching rain, for two days after that, until the wind went round to the west again. He was chilled and wet through and foodless, but the wildness of the weather gave him a chance of escape.
As he went on in the early morning, fearful of losing all direction, but trying to judge the slope of the land as it ran down to the plain, he came to a strange and desolate country. What he saw was a waste of scarred and pitted desert, bare of all growth for long stretches, loose scoria and pumice powdered to sand by years of weathering, and lifting now, as the gale came violently, so that it rose in swirling clouds that wrapped him round and blinded him. Here and there stunted shrubs clung desperately in the shelter of breaks and hummocks in the sand, and the ground was strewn with the charred fragments of old forests wasted by volcanic fire. He had heard men speak of this, too, of the Rangipo desert, the waste area where long before the volcanoes of the mountain had burned and embedded the forests, and the loose volcanic sand, played on by years of driving winds, had given no home for anything to grow. It was a legend-haunted country, dreaded by the Maoris. He could remember them telling him how long ago the first natives of the country had been driven down here by invaders to die and after that there were stories of Maori tribes caught by snow and starved to death in these same deserts. There had been times when the desert held packs of savage and wandering dogs until they, too, died away in that lifeless area, and it was left as barren and desolate as ever. As he went blindly forward, going doggedly, his head down, barely seeing the ground beneath his feet, he came at length to what he knew must be the heart of it all, Onetapu, the place of the shivering sands. And there he seemed to be caught in something that was wild and furious and stronger than himself. The wind came no longer directly against him, but eddying and whirling in gusts of sand and storm so that he could hardly stand or go forward in any direction. The quiet and silence of the mountain-side was gone and in its place came a sighing and moaning of wind and sand as it stirred in the corridors of the desert, more mournful and more frightening than anything human that he had known. He fought this for a long time, both the feeling of terror and the force of the storm, baffled and angry, going sometimes forward or being swayed to left and right, stumbling and falling, going on his hands and knees, until at last he caught the shelter of a pumice bank and stayed there, burrowed into it, with his back against the shelter and the rain and sand blowing over him. He was exhausted and if snow came, he told himself, ready to die. Night fell and no snow came, but only rain and sand. He ate a little raw flour and oatmeal, moistened into a gritty paste in his hands, and did not sleep, stirring uneasily to keep the circulation in his limbs. With the grey of the morning the wind died and rain came down heavily and gloomily: the day was dark and remained dark with heavy clouds. There was almost no visibility, but it was possible to go forward now and to strike a rough line against the slight drift of the rain. He went on until he came out of the sand and on to tussock again that seemed by comparison alive and healthy.
About midday he came to the coach-road that crossed the plains. It was a lonely road and little used so that it seemed more strange to him to hear, as he came to it, the sound of a motor. He waited, crouched in a ditch by the side of the road while a service car went by. The two days that he had been alone on the mountain had already made a difference to him so that he watched this car go by with curious and hostile eyes. In the silence, after the sound of the car’s running had died away, he crossed the road and went eastward over the plain. There was no need for him to wait for night: it was difficult enough by daylight covering this tussock country, where the appearance of flatness was deceptive and hid great hollows and billowing undulations. With the grey rain falling it was impossible for anyone to see him a quarter of a mile away, and he guessed that if they were after him they would not be searching these barren plains, but waiting by bridges and road-heads for an attempt on his part at food and shelter. He felt strong still and, so long as he was moving and warm, able to turn his back on them.
The clouds lifted a little in the late afternoon and showed him, for the first time, the shadow of the mountain range ahead that was his goal. The steep bush-hills rose up grimly and darkly out of the plain. But they were still farther from him than he had hoped and he spent the night again on the plain with rain still drenching down. He woke this time before it was light with his limbs shaking and his jaws twitching uncontrollably, his head burning as if with fever. He was frightened then of falling ill, but the feeling went away as he forced himself up and on again, though his head was light; he felt giddy, and the movements of his legs seemed un-coordinated and unreal. He chewed tobacco as he went forward to keep himself from thinking of his hunger and cold.
Later in the morning he came to the edge of the bush and, as the rain ceased and began to dry in rising mist and fog, he stopped to rest. There, in the first edge of the real bush which closed heavy and damp and dripping, he made a fire, breaking open a dead log with his axe to find dry wood inside it. He cut bits of this into thin shavings, the size of match-sticks, with his knife and, lighting them, built the fire up carefully until it would take great sodden branches in its flames. There was a risk in fire so near to roads and humanity, but he was resolved to take it, and could rely still on the mists and haze of the day which the sun was only just breaking through. He made tea first and drank it black and strong, and then cooked a damper of flour and oatmeal which he ate slowly, drying himself all the time as much as he could, and feeling warmth come back into his body. Afterwards he rolled and smoked two cigarettes—extravagantly, for his store of tobacco was small—and then slept a little while by the side of the fire. He stayed there all day, looking out once or twice, but seeing nothing except the yellow plain and the last clouds rolling back from the mountain, and spent the night there as well, putting the fire down when it grew dark so that its pin-point of flame should not attract attention across the plains. He felt better now and slept easily, unmindful even of a sharp shower that rustled the leaves overhead during the night. With morning, the wind was in the west and blowing freshly.
This was real bush that he was going into now, not the mountain-bush of birch-trees that he had seen on Ruapehu, but deep, thick, and matted, great trees going up to the sky, and beneath them a tangle of ferns and bush-lawyer and undergrowth, the ground heavy with layers of rotting leaves and mould. To go forward at all was difficult, held back all the time by twining undergrowth. The air was dark and lifeless; it was rich with the sweet, rotting smell of the bush, and only stray glimpses of light came through the leaves above. He had only a general and limited sense of direction, but followed the path of a bush creek which wound its way through the bottom of the valley into the heart of the range. He was going deep into this, so deep, he told himself, that he might never come out again. Following the creek bed was difficult and exhausting, but gave some hopes of progress with its occasional short stretches clear of over-growing trees. As he followed it in, going for five days laboriously forward, making at best not more than eight or ten miles each day, the hills seemed to close round and over him until he felt himself to be further than anyone could ever follow him, surrounded and drowned in the hills and bush, safe and alone and submerged. He had to climb after that to get over the first heigh
ts of the range that ran up six thousand feet high, and he did this after two weeks of journeying, going up again to a country of bare rock and lichen and down again to a great valley beyond that fell steeply two thousand feet. The day that he came down again into bush country, snow fell. It lay heavily on the heights behind him and would stay there, he knew, through the winter months that were on them now. Even lower in the valley it covered the trees and lay in patches on the ground. He decided then, that if he were to endure through the next three months he must have warmth and shelter for himself, and stopped then, when he came to the depths of this great valley, to find it.
Chapter XV
Life in the Kaimanawas, while winter lay over them, wasn’t dull, it was too uncomfortable to be dull. Later, when he became weak with exposure and lack of food, there came on him a settled apathy which stopped him from feeling the conditions in which he lived, but this was not dullness; it was a sickness against which he had to fight.
He made his home in a small rock shelter which was barely a cave, by the river at the foot of the valley. The sides of the cave dripped with damp, but after a time he plastered them over with mud and lined the floor with wood and dry stones and leaves on top. The cave was a suitable place to camp because, above it, the river curved and made a bar of drift-wood which was good fuel and more likely to burn than anything that he could find in the bush. He tried once cutting into standing white pine for the resined timber that would be inside it, but the task was hopeless with his small axe. Once, after two days of torrential rain, the river flooded and washed into his cave, driving him out with all his possessions and his rifle, to sit wretchedly on the bank above through the night. But he would not give up his cave and, instead, cleared timber and boulders away from the pool above so that the river could not flood again so easily. When the leaves on the floor of his cave had dried again it remained moderately comfortable.
He lived mainly on what birds he could shoot and this often took a great part of the day because of the care with which he used his ammunition. There were about two hundred shells in the two packets which he had brought. He reckoned to use not more than two a day: if he missed he went hungry. He had never been a good shot. With the little .22 it was easy to miss and he would spend long hours stalking wild pigeon or parakeets, or the insolent and more easy bush-hens, to get shots that no one could miss. He had heard that there were deer in this country, certainly there were in the ranges farther south, but he saw no traces of them in the valley where he lived. He tried several times to devise traps for birds to save his ammunition, but without much success. Pigeon was the best food. For variety he experimented with all ways of cooking, from baking them in clay to boiling them whole. It was a thin and monotonous diet. He had used all his flour and oatmeal in the first three weeks of his journey across the range, when he had not stopped to hunt birds. He found himself now hungering, with a desire that he had not dreamed of, for bread or starch food of any kind. He had heard men talk of eating fern-roots, and tried this, but could not find anything that seemed like food. He guessed that someone who really knew the ways of the bush could have found them, but he was unsuccessful himself. The tea that he made in the mornings before he did anything else was his great comfort. He made it strong and black, boiling the same leaves over and over again, and drank it luxuriously. His tobacco, doled out scrupulously, lasted in all six weeks. After a while he ceased to miss it.
Johnson lost all real count of time there in the dark loneliness of the bush. There was sound all the time, of the river running, and birds from early morning to the owls calling at night, but he felt within himself a great solitude, a feeling which had never troubled him before in the long periods of his life that he had spent alone. There was a heaviness of the bush that pressed upon him, and weighed him down, until the sound of his own voice was startling to him.
He watched the moons go by and when the third full moon, from the day when he had left the farm, began to wane, judged it was time for him to move on. Rain and winter lay as heavily on the country as ever. There was still snow upon the heights above and he knew it would be a long time yet before the real spring or summer came. But he knew also that if he were ever going to move it must be now. He had grown thin so that the bones of his hands and arms showed through the flesh, but he was not yet really weak. What he had to fight was a desire never to move from where he was. Arguing with himself, he guessed it was partly fear of the world outside and the troubles that he had to face, and partly the tiredness of semi-starvation that had weakened him. Whatever it was, he found himself now accepting the discomforts that had at first disturbed him and in a way interested him, so that he would sit for hours by the smoking fire outside his cave in dreams that were half sleep, and then even to go and hunt birds was an effort to him. He fought this weakness until he knew that he could only fight it by going on, and, if he could come through, emerging into the world again. When he had decided this he hated leaving the cave. In his weakened condition it was a hard thing to do. Its rough shelter was more comforting to him than most homes had been. He put off the journey, waiting for the rain to break, and when the sky cleared one day was still hesitating until suddenly, in a fury with himself, he got ready his few possessions and began his journey down the valley.
He had little to carry now except his rifle. The clothes he stood in were torn and a rent in one trouser leg had been roughly mended with flax. He had discarded one pair of boots; the pair he wore were rotten with damp. His beard and matted hair had grown dirtily together, and his eyes were sunken and bloodshot with the smoke that he had allowed to fill the cave continually in an effort to warm it. The bones of his body stood out thinly underneath his clothes; the winter had left its mark on him.
He planned now to follow the river down rather than to lose himself in trying to fight a way through the crossed ridges of this range. The river flowed, as near as he could judge, south and east, and would lead him out somewhere in the eastern province of the island, where, he could not tell, and it did not much matter. For what would happen when he had to rejoin the outside world he did not greatly care. What had passed at Stenning’s farm seemed to him already to have happened a long time ago. The effort of driving himself to make this journey out of the hills was as much as he could reckon with.
He followed the river down for days that lengthened into weeks. Journeying in the darkness of the bush he could not tell what progress he was making and seldom the direction that he travelled. His only measure was a gradual, insensible broadening of the river from the creek that he had known at the head, to a torrent whose pools were often too deep and difficult for him to cross. Often, when it ran under steep banks, he would have to leave it and fight his way through the undergrowth on its banks, to rejoin it again, guided by the sound of its waters, and go forward over its water-worn stones until in time he came to identify himself with it and its progress with his own.
He shot birds now when he saw them and often at night would find no energy to light fires, particularly when it rained. He would sleep then, taking what shelter he could from trees. He had none of the strength now that he had once had, but depended on a purpose that moved him slowly and painfully forward. He could not afford long rests in case this purpose failed. He came, in this journey, to hate the heavy silence of the bush and the dense obstructions that it offered to him, where before he had welcomed it as a sanctuary. His joy now was in a stretch of river, where it opened out for perhaps as much as fifty yards with a clear sky overhead.
The journey became desperate in the end as the bush-hills wound on endlessly. He wondered if he could be travelling south and not east, going down the entire length of the range. He told himself that the hills must end, but each day showed him a new curve in their line against the sky, and then there came a day on which he met with real disaster. The river dipped down on this day, as it sometimes did, and he followed it, scrambling along on one bank and clinging to trees for support. He stopped, hearing above the noise of the river
a deeper roar as of rapids or a waterfall ahead. Trying to see what was in front of him he swung himself up by a small tree that bent and broke with his weight. He fell and hit against a small boulder that rolled over, throwing him into the river, and he was swept down off his balance. The dark mud brown of the river was icy-cold and terrifying in its strength. His hands caught desperately at a rock, slipped, and caught again while water poured over and past him. He hung there catching his breath until he found strength enough to pull himself up. Then he jumped for a rock above and got back to the bank again, where a last effort pulled him up, and he sat cold and trembling. He was unhurt, but his rifle had gone; it had been broken from his back when he fell. After a while he worked his way along the bank, hoping for a chance that might allow him to recover it, but the chance was not given, and fifty yards on he stopped, seeing the ground drop away and the river fall over rocks in a fury of yellow foam to deep pools a hundred feet below. Somewhere down there, he guessed, his rifle lay; its loss meant that he would be foodless now.
The incentive for a final effort came from his belief that he must already have come a long way and that a break in the hills could not be long delayed. He left the river now that it had brought him misfortune and struggled up the side of the valley in an effort to see which way the country lay.
It took him a long time, working his way across the steep side of the valley to the east; it fell steeply in places where the ground dropped to the waterfall in the river and at times he had to pull himself up from sapling to sapling, digging his heels in loose clay. Near the top there was a chalk fall which had taken trees with it and so gave him a chance of seeing down the valley. There was no break anywhere that he could see in the sky-line, but only the curve of bush-hills as the valley swung left away from the setting sun. He sat there resting for a time and then, finding a trickle of water by the clay bank, made tea, lighting the fire laboriously with one of the last of his small stock of wax-matches. He drank the tea, which was now his only food, and felt it warm and revive him. Then he got up and pressed on to use the last hour of daylight that was in the sky.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 50