by Lee Murray
Toa intervenes, ‘We were too many on the journey back from the island. My magic isn’t strong enough to lift so many people into the sky.’
‘So we all sing!’ Kahurangi insists.
‘But what if Kakama’s crying upsets the spirits? What if that’s the reason the balloon toppled from the sky?’ Toa says.
‘Well, we’re not leaving her behind!’ Moana is adamant.
‘No, of course not! I suggest you three fly ahead to Taupō in the balloon. I’ll follow on foot carrying Kakama. She doesn’t like the basket anyway.’
‘I agree with Toa,’ Kahurangi says.
Moana rolls her eyes. As if there were any question. ‘Well you can’t go jumping out of the basket every time the balloon starts to lose height, Kahurangi. Next time you might not get a soft water landing!’
Before separating, they enjoy a meal of salty fat tuatua, cooked in their shells on the open fire. Moana and Annie had wriggled the molluscs out of the wet sand with their toes, while Kahurangi was learning the lyrics of Toa’s balloon song. The meal over, Toa helps them inflate the balloon, and with the girls safely on board, slices the guy ropes.
Kakama waves her chubby fingers as the trio sails over the treetops.
Ambush
Annie, Moana and Kahurangi glide effortlessly across the treetop sea. This is how Annie imagines it would be like flying with Peter Pan to Neverland: peaceful and enchanting, with just a sprinkling of fairy dust. She could be in Neverland. Or Disneyworld for that matter. Who’s going to believe that a fifth grader could fly a hot air balloon several hundred years before they’re invented?
Annie looks down over the bush canopy. The earth resembles green polar fleece with its pleated hills, pocket valleys, white zipper rivers and the occasional tree button. There’s even a small rip in the landscape, which on second look, turns out to be a green lake. Birds have such a lovely view of the world. Way in the distance she can see the lofty volcanoes: Ruapehu and Ngāuruhoe and Tongariro. Although she can’t see it yet, Annie knows from when she lived here that the lake is nestled at the base of the mountains.
‘The wind’s taking us in the right direction,’ she tells Moana. ‘The lake’s over there.’ Annie keeps one hand tightly on a flax rope as she points.
Moana squints into the distance. ‘You’re right. The Great Lake lies at the foot of those mountains. But you must have good eyesight, Annie. I can’t see anything.’
‘Um…I caught a glint of silver,’ Annie fibs again. She really must be more careful.
After a time, the balloon slows and saunters across the sky, carried along by currents of air. More than once, the gentle to and fro of the basket and the regular cadence of Kahurangi’s quiet singing have nearly sent Annie into a hypnotic sleep. She’s in danger of nodding off again when Moana prods her sharply with her elbow.
‘Ouch! I’m awake!’
‘Shhh, look,’ Moana whispers. Not wanting to let go the ropes, Moana tilts her head, indicating the horizon. Glancing over, Annie spies a flock of harrier hawks bearing south. Goose bumps rise on Annie’s arms.
‘They’re not the first; I’ve seen others,’ Moana says.
Kahurangi stops chanting now and joins the conversation. He keeps his voice low. ‘Predators. I saw a horde of cormorants in the east.’
‘Which way were they going?’
‘South.’
She nods. ‘I thought so.’
‘What’s going on?’ Annie demands, her spine tingling.
‘I don’t know, Annie. Some kind of mass migration.’
‘Do the birds normally migrate at this time of year?’
‘Not that I’ve noticed. Anyway, wherever they’re going, they must have seen the balloon.’
‘Yes,’ Kahurangi agrees. ‘We’re not exactly inconspicuous. And it’s not like Te Hōkioi’s lot to turn down a chance to bully us.’
‘Perhaps they’re frightened of the balloon.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. They could be,’ Kahurangi says. ‘But perhaps they have other, more important things to do: following Te Hōkioi’s orders, for example.’
‘Yes, but what orders?’ Moana whispers. Annie’s feeling of unease intensifies. Her stomach churns. On the stays, her palms are sweaty.
‘Just so long as they leave us alone,’ she says, hopefully.
‘Too late!’ Kahurangi gasps, as a gang of kea burst out of the sun towards them.
They’re surrounded.
The gang leader descends, his vibrant red under-wing visible, and his powerful talons extended. It’s Toka, Te Hōkioi’s lieutenant. Annie recognises the gap in his beak. Toka grabs the flax rope where Kahurangi’s fingers are curled, and perches there boldly.
The rest of the kea swarm closer. They’re like sharks: orbiting the balloon in lazy, slicing movements, venturing closer and closer with each pass. If they’re trying to intimidate, it’s working. Annie is terrorised. For some weird reason, Moana’s silly kea joke pops into her head. She comes quickly back to herself when Toka speaks.
‘What have we here then, boys?’ he trills through the crack in his beak. ‘I do believe it is our little Speaker and her pesky friends. Imagine finding them up here, all alone in the sky, and with no scary warrior to save them. Now, that isn’t very smart, is it?’ He sneers.
‘Go away!’ shouts Kahurangi. He doesn’t understand the words, but there’s no mistaking the kea’s sinister tone.
‘Leave us alone. We haven’t done anything wrong,’ Annie says, more forcefully than she feels.
‘But you have, little Speaker. That is Te Hōkioi’s hostage, is it not?’ He lifts his horny beak towards Moana. Instinctively, Moana shrinks back. Annie can’t blame her. The jagged rotten gap doesn’t make the bird any prettier. The hovering kea gang guffaw, delighted to see Moana flinch.
‘Te Hōkioi didn’t have any right to take Moana,’ Annie retorts. ‘He already had a hostage.’
‘Oh, so you left the child on that stinking little island, did you?’
Annie bites her lip and says nothing. Of course, they didn’t leave Kakama on the island by herself; she’s just a baby. Where Annie’s from, it’s against the law to leave kids like Kakama on their own.
‘Hmm, I thought not,’ the kea snorts. ‘Anyway, this is Te Hōkioi’s kingdom now. I think you’ll find he can do anything he likes.’ At that moment, Toka plunges his craggy beak into the aute cloth, slashing it. The sound of his laughter is sickening, the tearing fabric, terrifying. Annie gropes hopelessly at the stays. It’s no use.
The punctured balloon drops out of the sky.
Triage
Annie wakes with a throbbing ache in her shoulder. She sits up awkwardly and tests it out. Nothing broken. She casts her eyes about her.
‘Moana? Kahurangi?’
A few metres away Kahurangi lies on his back in the brush. Annie clambers rapidly across the gap to her friend. Phew! His chest is moving up and down, so he’s still breathing. Relieved, Annie takes a breath herself. A jagged gash traverses Kahurangi’s thigh. He must have snagged himself on a branch in the fall. The wound is raw and a bit gruesome, but at least it’s not bleeding. Still, Annie feels a frisson of alarm. What if Kahurangi needs stitches? Out here in the bush, there’s no medical centre with straight-backed chairs and a stack of dog-eared magazines to read while you wait for a friendly nurse to see you.
Moana appears beside her. ‘Annie, are you hurt?’
‘No, but Kahurangi is. He needs help.’ She shuffles over to make room for Moana.
‘Kahurangi, it’s me, Moana. Try not to move.’
Kahurangi groans. ‘Believe me, Moana, Te Hōkioi could swoop down here himself, and I wouldn’t move.’
‘Don’t joke about things like that,’ Moana scolds. To make her point she biffs him on the shoulder.
‘Hey! Be gentle with me; I’m injured, remember.’
‘Just checking you’re not paralysed.’
In spite of their situation, Annie can’t help giggling. Moana is more
like Kuia than she thinks.
Like an expert triage nurse, Moana examines Kahurangi. She slips her fingers under the hollow of his back and checks along the length of his spine. She makes him wiggle his fingers and toes. He flinches theatrically.
‘You’ll live,’ she says, eventually. ‘I don’t think you have any broken any bones. You do have some wicked bruises, and I need to deal with this cut on your leg. Can you stay with him, Annie? Make a fire if you can. I’ll be back soon.’
Annie doesn’t like that Moana has gone off by herself. Not when there are hordes of malicious predators passing overhead. But there’s nothing else for it. Someone has to stay with Kahurangi. Annie busies herself collecting dry firewood, taking care not to stray too far from her patient. She chooses a good spot in the undergrowth for a fire. It’s well-hidden by the forest canopy, and hopefully safe from predators on the move. She borrows Kahurangi’s fire sticks. She’ll use the rubbing technique he and Toa used to make the fire on the beach. Kahurangi insists on calling out instructions. Annie thinks he’d make an excellent back-seat driver. Starting the fire is a strenuous job, and it takes her a while, but at least it gives them both something to think about while they’re waiting.
The fire is crackling well when Moana returns with a branch of grey-green mānuka. Annie inhales the aromatic scent as Moana strips the leaves and bark. She works quickly. When she has a good pile, she breaks the foliage and bark into small pieces and drops it into the water in the drinking gourd at her waist. She boils the mixture over the fire, and in a few minutes has prepared a strong tea. She hands the gourd to Annie.
‘This should help with the pain,’ she says.
Annie helps Kahurangi to sit up. He takes a long drink of the warm broth. Meanwhile, Moana searches in the nearby trees. Soon she finds what she is looking for: a curly new ponga frond. Scraping away the hairy covering with a stone, she reveals a layer of nasty green slime. Scooping it up, she smears it on Kahurangi’s gash like an ointment. Yuck! It’s definitely not as appealing as the tube of antiseptic Mum uses on Annie’s scrapes and grazes. Fortunately, Kahurangi isn’t too grossed out. Moana covers the gash with a large flat leaf and ties it firmly with a length of flax.
‘There,’ she says. ‘that’s the best I can do. It’s time to eat.’
Annie helps Kahurangi get comfortable, while Moana sets to work preparing a meal from ingredients she has foraged in the bush. There are young bean-flavoured pikopiko fern fronds, which she roasts on a stick over the fire, toasted flax seeds, and a handful of rimu berries, all washed down with more of her mānuka tea. The warm food makes Annie feel a bit less like a refugee. For a moment, she wonders what Mum’s cooking for tea at home. She massages her aching shoulder. No point thinking about it.
Later, while Kahurangi snores softly, the two girls huddle by the fire, glad of its cheery flames. They try not to think about tomorrow. All around them the wind worries the trees, pulling roughly at the boughs and whispering its dark secrets.
In the morning, Kahurangi gets up and declares himself better.
Boys! It’s obvious from the careful way he’s moving that he’s still sore. They’re all sore. Skydiving from a balloon without a parachute isn’t normally recommended! Annie watches Kahurangi take a long swallow of Moana’s therapeutic tea.
‘I’m a bit stiff, that’s all. I’ll be fine as soon as I warm up.’ He changes the subject. ‘Did you girls find the balloon?’
They scout around, looking for the damaged balloon. It’s found draped and mangled over a clump of flax. The basket has a gaping hole in the side and the precious aute cloth is torn in a clean rip straight down the middle.
‘Can we mend it?’ Moana asks.
Kahurangi shakes his head. ‘It’ll take too long.’
‘Let’s fold up the aute cloth and bring it with us anyway,’ Annie says. ‘It could be useful.’ She wades into the flax clump. One of the balloon stays has caught on a dried out flax seed stem. She unsnags the offending stay and spreads the fabric out on the ground as best she can. ‘There’s only this big rip. The rest of the cloth looks fine.’ They work quietly, salvaging the balloon materials.
After a while, Moana says, ‘Hey, listen. I can hear the falls…’
Crouching, Annie is untangling a muddle of flax ropes. She straightens up, listens, and realises there isn’t the slightest birdsong. Then she hears it: the distant crash of water, like the fuzzy static you get when the car radio is not quite tuned to a station.
‘Is that the Huka Falls?’
‘Yes…’ Moana looks up sharply. ‘I didn’t know you’d seen them, Annie?’
Whoops. Annie’s still unsure about revealing she’s from the future. It’s unnerving. What if telling people jinxes her chances of making it back to Mum and Dad?
‘Uhm,’ she improvises, ‘I must’ve heard someone mention them. Ahuru, perhaps. I can’t remember exactly. But I do know the falls are only a short distance from the lake.’
Moana looks over at Annie, a flash of suspicion in her eyes. Then she seems to think the better of it. She shakes her head, as if chasing away an annoying mosquito. Annie relaxes.
‘The falls are close to Taupō. We could get there before lunch,’ Moana says. ‘That is, providing Kahurangi doesn’t hold us up too much.’
Kahurangi rolls his eyes. ‘I said I’m fine — honestly.’
Ducks
They say it’s the last five kilometres of a marathon that are the hardest. What an understatement! The short walk to Taupō is tough going. Weighed down by the bulky aute cloth, and further hampered by Kahurangi’s injury, the sun is high when they finally reach the shores of the crater lake.
It doesn’t take long for them to realise they’re too late.
Everywhere, the grass is squished flat. Patch-worked between the levelled grass and the hollowed out remains of cooking pits, the earth is bald and dusty. Limp trees sag at the fringes. The whole place is lonely and abandoned.
A group of ten elders have remained behind, including Ruānuku, the respected matakite from Moana’s village. Annie suspects the elders are too old, and too important to the tribes, to risk the long journey to the bottom of the island. The old folk are pleased to see them. They’ve been waiting for the children to arrive, charged with messages from Ahuru and Tama.
‘The people couldn’t wait any longer. Your uncle says to hurry and join them,’ says one old man with so few teeth remaining it’s difficult for him to speak. He reminds Annie a bit of Lauren’s older sister, Jennifer, when she got her new braces.
‘That’s right. They didn’t want to risk angering Te Hōkioi,’ says another.
‘Ahuru and Tama have already reached the far side of the lake, at Tokaanu Bay. We saw the glow of their fires last night,’ explains Ruānuku.
‘Let me tell you children, I’ve never seen so many moa in one place in my life, and this is my fifty-fifth year. There were hundreds and hundreds of moa. The noise they made! Like an earthquake. Look how they’ve trampled the ground with their big feet,’ says one man, pointing a bony finger at the ground.
‘Stop exaggerating…’
‘I’m telling you, there were hundreds…and other birds, too: pūkeko, kiwi, weka, kākāpō, even some pelican. I’ve never seen so many birds in one place in my life, and this is my fifty-fifth year…’
‘Something bad is happening. Those birds were on edge, tense.’
‘Everyone’s making for the south — even Kuia.’
‘Everyone but us…’
‘She misses you, Moana.’
As the trio sit at the lake edge, Moana buries her toes in the pebbly sand. Annie takes her shoes off and does the same. Warm water seeps in around her feet, oozing between her tired toes. She gives them a wriggle. It feels lovely. Hair licks around Annie’s face. She brushes it away. She breathes in the lake’s lemonade scent, and sighs in contentment.
Next to her, Kahurangi, frustrated, throws a pebble into the water. There’s a loud plop. Where the stone sinks,
concentric ripples spread and disappear. ‘Too late,’ he moans. ‘With my sore leg, it’ll be days before we catch up.’ He picks up another stone and judges its weight in his hand — then flings it as far as he can across the surface of the water.
‘If we had a waka we could paddle across.’
‘Forget it! There won’t be any,’ Moana says. ‘The people will have taken them to transport the flightless birds over the channel to the South.’
‘Well, it won’t hurt to look.’ Annie puts her shoes on again, and they head back into the village to search for a waka.
They’re surprised to find Ruānuku is on his way down to the water to meet them. He gestures to the children. Puzzled, they follow him to a shabby hut. He motions to Kahurangi to enter. The narrow door is low to the ground so Kahurangi ducks under the wooden lintel. In an instant, he is out again, his twinkly eyes blazing with excitement.
‘I don’t believe it! Look!’ This time, Annie ducks her head through the door. It takes a few seconds to get used to the light. Then she sees them. Pushed to the back of the hut are two small waka.
Annie backs out of the hut, astonished. ‘How did you know?’ she asks the tohunga.
Ruānuku replies, ‘Two nights ago, in a dream, I saw three ducks fall from the sky. I ran to where they fell. When I looked at their faces, I saw they were yours: you, Moana and Kahurangi. I knew then you would take your duck form and go over the water. So when the people left, I saved these two small waka. I thought perhaps you would need them.’
Annie, Moana and Kahurangi are delighted. Crossing the lake by waka will save them a long detour. They thank the tohunga, telling him they will take just one waka, and leave the other for Toa and Kakama. While they’re pulling the waka out of the hut, the tohunga stops them.
‘Wait! There’s something else. It’s for Ahuru…’ he says, clearly agitated.
They wait patiently for Ruānuku to speak. But the seer is troubled. He scratches his head and scuffs his bare feet in the dust as he searches to explain his message for the chief. Eventually, he sighs.