Sound

by Sarah Drummond

  Smidmore climbed up the hill stepping over the tussocks and stones. He stood, as he always did, with Billhook on the side of his good eye and ear. “Movin’ on tomorrow, Billhook.”

  “Yes.”

  “You seen a big old Noah hanging around?”

  For days, small sharks had been slicing around the island, sniffing out the bloodstained rocks and frightening off the herring.

  “No. No big ones. Just those whiskeries. A few bronzies.”

  “I saw ’im this morning … Christ …” Smidmore breathed and squinted. “That Dancer down there?”

  Dancer dived again and disappeared. Billhook watched Sal shout to Bailey, who was working the boat into shore. Bailey looked startled, out to where Dancer was diving.

  “Fuck,” said Smidmore. His neck muscles tightened as he watched the water intently. “Fuck. There ’e is. Big bastard.”

  As each wave rose, the shark appeared in the window of water, its ghostly belly white and the rest of its body shadowy. It did not look to be in a hurry but intent, circling the area where Dancer was diving.

  “Where is Dancer?” Billhook called, panic rising in his belly.

  “She’ll be hiding.” Smidmore gave a short laugh.

  The shark slid beneath the water, flicking its tail with a splash, almost a salute. Billhook could hear Sal shouting now. Jimmy and Bailey hopped across the rocks towards her and the three stood dark and ragged against the waves. Minutes … hours passed. Smidmore growled deep in his throat when he saw Sal throw up her arms and turn her face away from the sea and onto Jimmy’s breast.

  “Dancer!” and he started the run down the hill.

  Dancer.

  Billhook watched Smidmore’s black hair flying around his shoulders, his wallaby-clad feet leaping from stone to stone. Smidmore was half the way down when Dancer crawled out of the sea. The waves scraped her over the barnacles. She grabbed at them and hung on as a wave sucked back. She lost consciousness as her face dropped against the stone and razor-sharp shells.

  In the evening they lit a fire of dried grasses and fuelled it with penguin skins, bones and dried kelp to keep warm. Sal packed seal fat and ash into Dancer’s wounds and spoke to her swiftly in a creole of Vandiemonian and English.

  “She was hiding!”

  Smidmore nodded to Billhook. “See, Billhook?”

  “Dancer hide under the weed. She pull that kelp right over her, like a skin. She lie on her back and watch the shark,” Sal waved her arms in circles above her head, “swim all around over top her.”

  Dancer spoke to Sal in a low voice.

  “If she go up, he get her. She don’t breathe long time. A bubble and that shark would see her so she not breathe.”

  Dancer’s back and arms were lined with deep gashes, scored by her landfall upon the barnacles. Her body shook with shock and her feet and hands twitched. She said her chest was hurting too. Sal held Dancer’s hand and looked at it. “Squeeze,” she said. Dancer couldn’t move her hand. Sal shook her head. She tore off some canvas and bound Dancer’s hand. “She broke her hand. On the rocks.”

  “No good for nothing else,” said Jimmy the Nail, staring at Dancer’s bare breasts. “Not ’til she heals.” As he did every night when the fire died down, he flicked his finger at Dancer. “Come with me now.”

  Dancer groaned and rolled her eyes. Silence fell upon the small group as they waited to see if Dancer would defy him. Smidmore and Bailey looked on with interest. Sal and Billhook both shook their heads and then Sal eyed Dancer with resignation. Dancer didn’t move.

  “Come, I said.” Jimmy grabbed at Dancer’s bandaged hand and jerked her to her feet. He was still clenching her hand, with Dancer’s whining pitched almost to a whistle, as they disappeared into the night.

  10. DOUBTFUL ISLANDS 1826

  The black easterly wind strengthened through the day. Sometimes they sailed close enough to land for Billhook to see the stain of grey-blue bushes spreading like clouds across the coast hills. By afternoon the land was misted over with dust and spray and the wind beat at their backs until the boat was hurtling down waves and broaching at the bottom.

  As the day wore on and the crew wearied, it became a given that they would not make landfall that night. Though they were close to the Doubtful Islands, the onshore winds meant the breakers would be too big. It was safer to head back out to sea and spend the night away from the rocks. The little boat surfed wave after wave with white foam leering at their peaks when Jimmy the Nail gave the order to go about before the next set came through.

  The crew knew what it meant. The sails must be trimmed and they would have to beat into the wind just to hold their position. There would be no sleep. A night of listening for the sounds of the sea changing, listening for the reefs and the bommies, watching for the glint of whitewater in the distance, in a sea that was already a knife-like swathe of cold wind and flying spray and the sound of roaring water in their ears.

  As the sun set, the sea turning silver with the horizontal light, Dancer pointed her bandaged hand towards a wave on their port side.

  Sal started yelling too. “That big old boy, he’s after us!”

  The shark surfaced near the boat and turned its head up to them so they could see its glossy black eye, then sank beneath the waves again.

  “Put that mutt on as bait,” laughed Bailey. Sal hugged the little terrier to her breast and glared at Bailey. “We’d get ourselves a good feed.”

  Throughout the night, the shark followed them. Sometimes all they saw was the flick of its tail or its snout rising from the water. Once Dancer saw the shark, she stopped vomiting overboard. Instead, she heaved her stomach into the boat and Sal’s dogs licked it up.

  “Can you take an oar?” Every hour or so, a tired rower would call to be replaced. They would fall back into the belly of the boat and soon be shivering with the cold and pulling skins around themselves, trying to steal a short nap. Another would row then, or handle the mainsail, their oars sometimes missing the choppy sea, skimming through wind and spray. Sal bailed out the boat until she was scraping the tin against the wooden boards.

  The men and women were silent except for the occasional, “Can you take an oar?” or “Can you rest me now?” They stared mutely into the darkness, watching for reefs and the shark. Nobody sang, as they often did on their long journeys. They spoke little.

  In the middle of the night, the wind changed. Jimmy looked at his compass, squinting, slanting it towards the light coming off the water. “Sou’-west.” Billhook could smell the rain before it arrived. A chill roared through the air. He sighed, glad that the rain would flatten out the sea a little but when it started, it blew sideways. It was a stinging rain that soon turned to hail. Small shards of glassy hail hit his face. The crew pulled their caps as far over their eyes as they could and kept rowing. Billhook could no longer feel his fingers.

  The hail blew over and out to the north and the rain followed too. Over the flapping of the sail, Billhook heard a knocking sound around the boat. He nudged Jimmy, who started upright from his slumber.

  “That bastard,” said Jimmy. “He’s gettin’ cocky.”

  The shark knocked again.

  “I will put out a line,” said Billhook.

  “Then what’ll you do? Bastard’ll scuttle us.”

  “We’ll tow him dead.”

  The rope twanged against the mast an hour later, rattling Billhook from his reverie. He stowed his oar and checked his knots on the line. Thirty yards away, the water bulged and churned with the fighting creature.

  “You’d better get on two oars now, Billhook,” said Bailey. “Makin’ us tow the bastard. Givin’ him a free ride, you are.”

  The rope slackened as the shark swam towards the boat. Then it ripped tight again. For the rest of the night, until the sky whitened with the new day, the rope flicked and loosened and hummed with the might of the great shark. Billhook played, guessing what the shark would do next. His only thoughts were of the shark and the rope
and the oars.

  The wind dropped just before the dawn. Around Billhook, the crew lay or sat, their faces lined and etched with salt. The oars lay with their handles starred into the centre of the boat. The dogs slept with Sal, the lurcher almost the same length as her body and the piebald terrier lying across her throat. Billhook’s hands were crimped into pincers and he could hardly use one to loosen the other. His fingers tingled. He tried to force them straight against the wooden thwart and winced.

  Jimmy raised the headsail and they headed for the coast again. Smidmore awoke as the boat’s motion changed under sail. “How far off are we?”

  Jimmy pointed to the thin strip of land on the horizon. “Morning tea, sir,” he said in a toff’s voice, then laughed. “Dunno where the Doubtfuls are, though. We could have blown back to Bass Strait in the night.”

  They sailed along the coast until the sun was above their heads. The Barrens, a long range of black mountains, stayed on their starboard. Finally Billhook sighted the islands hunched against the red cliffs of the mainland. As they drew closer, he could feel the air from the previous night’s storm, a cool chill, creeping from the land. It was always warmer out to sea.

  The wind had freshened again but they were able to sail around through the channel and into a sheltered cove on the north side of the island. The six of them swung their bodies over the gunwales and into waist deep water, their feet hitting hard white sand, and they pulled the boat into shore.

  “This is a good place,” said Sal, looking around. “Plenty fish. Trees. Water.” She pointed to the green seam of reeds running through the bush down to the beach.

  “Let us get this Noah in, hey,” said Bailey. “Before all his mates come to the funeral.”

  As they hauled the fish towards the shore, Billhook saw it was still alive. “We should have tied off its tail and towed it dead,” he said. The shark was tired and close to death anyway. It rolled lazily on the beach, twisting the rope around its body, the sand covering its glossy grey skin.

  “Must be twelve foot,” said Smidmore. “But look how fat! Nearly as round as the bastard is long.” He whacked an oar against its nose and the fish slumped, stunned. “That smell …”

  The stench of the dying shark was terrible. When they cut open its belly, the smell became intolerable. Even Jimmy the Nail turned away, his hand over his mouth in a failed effort to staunch his vomit.

  With the gaff, Billhook delved into the shark’s stomach and reefed out a young seal, bitten in two, a native’s broken spear still sticking out of her greasy pelt.

  11. ARAMOANA 1817

  “What fate brought you west?” Smidmore asked Billhook one night.

  “The Sophia,” he answered. “I was looking for the ship,” and said no more, for he did not know whose ears were pricked for their mate Captain Kelly.

  The sealer William Tucker had washed up on Otakau shores one year before the massacre. Wiremu Heke must have been eleven, a boy, yes, when the Australian whaler Tucker managed to ingratiate himself with Chief Korako and taken a local wife. It was Tucker who one year later led negotiations between the ruddy captain of the Sophia and the Chief. Suddenly the Chief suspected Tucker’s translation as devious and the deal went awry in the meeting house. Whisperings in the room turned to a rising murmur, then the angry hum of a disturbed hive.

  The boy Wiremu remembered Tucker and the day that he was no longer an honorary Otakau. He saw him on the beach screaming, “Captain Kelly! Please! For pity’s sake, don’t leave me!” as the New South Wales crew and the captain fled to their ship, fighting off the toa, the furious young warriors consigned to battle. Wiremu later saw Tucker hatchetted, and his pieces carried away.

  Overnight, the still water shone with the moonlight and the Sophia remained at anchor in a dearth of wind to get away, her rigging and ramparts holding men with guns. All night, shots echoed against the sides of the inlet.

  At daylight the Australians stormed back through the village armed with guns and crosscut saws. Chief Korako, dead from a bullet through the neck during one of the night’s many failed ambushes, was not there to see forty-two of Wiremu’s father’s boats sawn in half. Even as Kelly’s men laboured over the cross saws, covered by guards, their countryman Tucker was being thrown in pieces into an earth oven several hundred metres away.

  The crew of the Sophia took flaming torches to the end of the village where the warm nor’-easter blew in, and razed the houses. Within an hour scarcely a single dwelling was left standing. Wiremu’s father was suddenly smaller, older amidst the screams of the women. He lay on the beach badly injured, his power as master artisan leaching from him, shuddering and bleeding.

  Gunpowder won that war, like so many others. Eight days later, fifty warriors washed onto the beaches from the Sophia battle. The bodies caught in the brothy corners of the harbour, snagged on trees, bloated in that strange manner of drowned men. Knees bent, legs and arms spread, their bodies plump with water and gases, bullet wounds and cutlass splits marring the faultless etchings on their warrior skins.

  No one fished the waters of Aramoana or Whareakeake for a long time. His mother repeated the mantra of tapu waters to Wiremu, weeks later when he was hungry and asked her why they’d not yet harvested the eels.

  “He kete kai nga moana katoa.”

  All the oceans are a food basket.

  “Na reira I te wā ke mate tatou, e tika ana kia hoki atu o tatou Tinana ki a Papatuanuku.”

  We are all born of Rangi and Papa, the Sky Father and the Earth Mother. When we die it is right that our bodies return to Papa.

  It was a thin year.

  Captain Kelly and his ship were marked. Any ship under his name entering the quiet stretches beyond Aramoana, past the sand spit where the octopus traps lay in shallow waters, did so knowing the grievance, knowing the risk. The Ngāi Otakau knew that Kelly grew fat in New South Wales on the proceeds of his trade, and that he did not feel any pressing need to return.

  For the boy, Kelly’s blood spilled would have renewed the honour of his broken father but the captain never returned. In late life, his father sat on the marae, watching the young men prepare their waka for this war or that battle. There was anxious talk of the Ngāti Toa coming down from the north after pounamu and power but that was yet to pass. Wiremu’s sisters grew into beautiful young women and, with their friends, married or cooked for the tide of sealers and whalers who sailed into their town. Wiremu, the son of a master boatbuilder, he wanted to go to sea and his father knew his hankering.

  “You don’t say much, do yer?” Samuel Bailey picked at his teeth, threw the twig in the fire and looked curiously at Billhook. Behind Sal, the big dog sighed in its sleep.

  12. DOUBTFUL ISLANDS 1826

  Billhook and Samuel Bailey took the boat to the mainland to set fishing nets from the shore. It was early but already the wind had freshened. They rowed towards the rocks, crossing into a windward slop. Bailey stood and steadied himself against the waves. He pointed for the shore and Billhook took his oar. Bailey started flicking directions at Billhook with his fingers, directing Billhook to the place where he wanted to drop the net but Billhook was having none of it. He didn’t need navigating. He knew where to go. He worked the boat along a bit until he got to the crevice where water was sucked and spat out again. Closer to where the paperbark trees grew almost to the water. The morning sun turned them a naked-white-man pink. Billhook rowed forward to the north-east, then went astern to the southeast and backed the boat right into the shore. Bailey fiddled with the nets, sorting through the stone anchor and corks.

  Their wake arrived after them, swishing into shore. Billhook heard the cawing of the crows and the thump and crack of waves further along the beach. The nets smelt mushroomy as he rowed away, and Bailey played them over the side, the little floats bumping over the gunwales and spilling into the sea.

  When he’d thrown over the last float and stone, Bailey looked around and lined up where the island folded into the last saddle of the land,
got a bearing on the net’s position. Then they rowed the boat back to the shore to wait while the fish meshed.

  They found a crescent of stones built facing the sea. Billhook removed a tattered piece of canvas sail that must have been a roof for the shelter, stuffed it into the wall of black basalt, redlichened rocks and brown granite.

  “Whalers,” said Bailey, kicking at a glass bottle. “Whalers bloody everywhere.”

  Billhook sat on the flat stone in the centre of the lookout and thought how in the winter the wind would be at his back and in the spring the water and skies would be clear and bright, not hazy with smoke and dust like it was now in late summer. When the south-westerly would blow at his back, a man could sit here for weeks watching for whales.

  Bailey muttered, “Having a look around,” and Billhook watched his figure wade through the dense shrubs of fading blue fan-flowers and balls of bright pink against the grey-green bush. Waves curled into the rocks and nudged the boat against the rocks. The breeze blew light spumes of spray and arcs of rainbow across the water. He slapped at a stinging fly, saw the massive sand slips on the hills opposite the bay, rolling fields of stark white dunes. The clouds parted to let the sun in. At his feet lay a midden of paua shell. Ahh.

  Once he was out of his pants, he tied off the legs to make a bag, crept along wet rocks until he was able to glide out into the sea with a knife between his teeth. It had been weeks since he’d dived for paua, for anything. The cold hit his chest. He struck out for where the lump under the waves made a flat footprint on the surface. Dived down, spilling his hair behind him, found the rock. He could feel the mossy mounds under waving fronds. He knew how to find paua, or muttonfish as the sealers called them. He made his way over the rock, sliding back and forth over the weed with the surge, levering away the shellfish with his blade against stone and felt the sure suck away from the stone. Then he could see the clean oval shape where the fish had been clamped.