by Joanna Orwin
‘As you, Owl, were the catalyst, it is your responsibility to complete the pattern you have set in motion. You and Tama must defeat Pouākai.’
‘How could we do that? We’re just kids. What you’re asking needs some sort of hero, like Ruru.’ Hamish couldn’t prevent his despair from showing.
Tāua Gray was unmoved. ‘How is for you to discover,’ she said dauntingly. ‘The pattern is there for you to follow.’ And she wouldn’t say any more.
Hamish took off his glasses with trembling fingers and rubbed the lenses on his jeans. It was all too much. Knowing the full story had made things worse if anything. He wasn’t going to get any help after all.
‘You will receive some guidance,’ she said, once again reading his thoughts. ‘Ruru has left you the key to the pattern.’ She didn’t elaborate.
Hamish realised she was leaving it to him to work it out. She expected more of him than he thought he was capable of. What if he didn’t succeed? He put his glasses back on and looked at her beseechingly.
But she had turned her attention to Tama. ‘The only assistance I am able to give you is to teach you the karakia used by Ruru to weaken Pouākai’s power.’
‘How come?’ asked Tama. ‘I mean, how do you know them?’
‘I too am Ngāti Ruru,’ she said patiently. ‘This knowledge is part of the ancient patterns of our ancestors. It has always been a woman’s role to assist in this way. Many of the legends tell us this.’
‘Oh,’ said Tama. ‘I never knew that.’
‘You have te reo?’ she asked.
Tama met her eye. ‘No, Tāua, I don’t speak any Maori.’ He hesitated, then gestured at his hair and his white freckled skin. ‘They didn’t want me in the kapa haka group at school. I don’t look the part. The teacher of te reo, he didn’t want me either. White Maori, see.’
Despite his own misery, Hamish heard the raw pain in Tama’s voice and winced. It hadn’t occurred to him that it mightn’t be easy in a Maori world for Tama, with his white skin and yellow hair.
To his disbelief, Tāua Gray was chuckling. Chuckling? He saw Tama clench his fists.
‘Little do they know,’ she said. ‘You, Tama Mitchell, come from a line of Maori with fair hair and fair skin. Rangatira line from the earliest days in this land. Certainly, you are part Pākehā, but that yellow hair of yours is a true sign. One every second generation. You have ancient and illustrious blood in your veins, boy. Ruru’s blood.’
Tama stared at her. ‘Yeah?’ He didn’t say anything else, but the old lady just nodded. And Hamish saw, with her, the sudden flash of pride in Tama’s eyes.
‘Even without te reo, it can be done,’ she said. ‘Are you willing to take on this task? Owl cannot do this. He might be the holder of the name, and he has an essential part to play. But he is Pākehā, and some things are not for one of that blood. Only one of Ngāti Ruru can do this.’
Tama hesitated for a moment. ‘Ruru, eh?’ he said thoughtfully. Then he looked the old lady straight in the eye. ‘I guess I’ve got something to prove, haven’t I? Okay then. I’ll give it a go.’
Hamish watched as Tāua Gray took Tama off into another room. He listened to the murmur of voices, first hers, then Tama’s. She was teaching him some sort of chant. As Tama’s voice slowly increased in confidence, the murmur grew to a sonorous rhythmic sound. It rose and fell like the beating of wings on the wind. The sound vibrated in Hamish’s chest. The sound made a lump rise in his throat and the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.
And then, it was over. The chanting ebbed away. Silence filled the room. In the hush, Hamish could hear a blackbird singing somewhere in the small garden, the muted roar of cars on the main road. He blinked. There was no movement from the room beyond. He waited tensely.
It was some time before the old lady and Tama came back to join him. Hamish stole a look at the other boy, expecting him to be somehow changed, marked by his experience. But he looked just the same, a tall gangling youth with strange yellow hair. And yet, and yet, somehow what Hamish saw in him triggered the beginnings of hope. He got slowly to his feet.
Tāua Gray took each of them by the shoulder, one at a time, and pressed her nose gently against theirs. Hamish felt the caress of her warm breath on his cheek as she murmured something in Maori he didn’t understand. Then she was dismissing them and they were ushered out. Before he’d grasped what was happening, they were back on the street. The door closed gently but firmly behind them.
The message couldn’t be clearer. It was now up to them.
≈ NINE
THE FOUR OF THEM sat on Hamish’s bed and stared at the kaitiaki stone. It didn’t look any different, an oval piece of limestone with a few lines scored across it.
‘Not up to much, is it,’ said Tama, his voice flat with disappointment. He made no attempt to touch the stone.
‘No,’ said Hamish. Slowly, he rewrapped the piece of limestone. Nothing had changed. Their visit to Tama’s relatives might never have happened. They’d come back to a basin still shrouded in fog, still gripped by sub-zero temperatures. The sheep killings had continued. Tod reported more lamb losses on their own property, and he’d had phone calls from Phil Coulter and Rod Jamieson. Doug Armitage was on the rampage with some of his mates, all armed to the teeth. And Pouakai was still out there.
‘We’ve gotta do something,’ said Tod. ‘Sitting here won’t achieve anything.’
‘C’mon, Owl,’ said Tama. ‘Where’s all your bright ideas?’
Hamish looked sharply at him, thinking he was being taunted. But Tama was waiting expectantly. He sighed. ‘I dunno. I hadn’t got that far.’ He thought for a bit. ‘Maybe we’ve got to put this kaitiaki thingy back in the rock shelter.’ He hesitated. ‘But it might already be too late for that.’
‘Guess we’ll find out, won’t we?’ said Tama impatiently. ‘It’ll do for starters. You take the thinking too far, bro.’
So the next morning, instead of going back to the house after an uneventful lambing round, Hamish and Tama headed up the hill towards the Seven Sentinels.
As they approached, the tors emerged through the fog, towering over the slope above the rock shelter. Hamish eyed them uneasily. No wonder they’d always disturbed him. They were cloaked figures, but not something out of Star Wars. Something from much closer to home, guardians from the Maori past.
‘Big bastards, eh!’ said Tama irreverently, stopping to stare up at them.
But his bravado evaporated when they reached the foot of the rock face and Hamish pointed out the route up the slanting crack. Tama looked at it dubiously. ‘Geez,’ he muttered. ‘I’d forgotten how steep this was.’
‘Oh … that’s right, you don’t like heights,’ said Hamish. ‘No reason for you to come up if you don’t want to.’
‘Nah, I’ll give it a go,’ said Tama resolutely. He followed Hamish to the start of the climb.
‘Just put your hands and feet where I do,’ said Hamish. ‘This first bit’s a piece of cake.’
But ice had formed a thin glaze over the rock surface in the freezing fog. Each foot and handhold was now treacherous. They made only slow progress. Tama took longer and longer to follow each move. They’d not reached the most difficult stretch when he asked Hamish to stop.
‘I’m not going any further,’ he said, his voice defiant.
Hamish looked up to the shelter edge. They were still a long way from the top. If he was honest, he was struggling too. He conceded defeat. Slowly, cautiously, they lowered themselves back down the rock face to the scrub-filled runnel, then scrambled and slid from bush to bush, their feet losing their grip on boulders slick with ice.
When they stood once more at the base of the rock face, Tama wouldn’t meet Hamish’s eye. Hamish thumped him. ‘Hey! That was a good call,’ he said. ‘It was a bit too gnarly up there. I was being pig-headed.’
Tama shrugged, then grinned ruefully at him. ‘If you say so.’
‘Guess we’re back where we started then.’ Hamish
touched the wrapped object in his pocket cautiously. ‘Reckon we’re stuck with the stone in the meantime.’
‘Perhaps we’re meant to be,’ said Tama thoughtfully. ‘Stuck with it, I mean. It’s a kaitiaki, after all. It might protect us or something.’
That left only the photos of the rock drawings. So that afternoon, Hamish went out to the darkroom. Steeling himself, he picked up the set of contact proofs. When nothing untoward happened, he began to look at them with the magnifying glass, feeling foolish. Tāua Gray had said Ruru had left them some sort of key to the pattern. It had to be here, amongst the rock drawings.
He could make out the figures he remembered seeing in the rock shelter. Most of them seemed to be associated with other birdmen. And there were a lot of concentric circles and what looked like random patterns. But the proofs were too small to see any detail. He would have to make prints.
The familiar routine of setting up the enlarger and calculating new exposure times allowed Hamish to forget his remaining qualms. He used a hard paper to get good contrast and clean edges to the images. By the end of the afternoon he’d printed the whole series. He hung the prints to dry, in the order in which the drawings appeared in the rock shelter.
At first, it was hard to make much sense of the images. Even when he thought he could distinguish separate groupings of figures, he wasn’t sure what to make of them. One lot showed a set of linked figures, humans he supposed, in that typical frog-like stance. The only unusual thing about it was the one figure that seemed to be headless. He peered at it through the magnifying glass, taking care not to touch the still-wet print. It almost looked as though there was a faint outline where the others had solid heads. Well, not heads exactly. Just extensions of the body above the arms, but they served as heads. He’d have to wait until the prints were dry, but that figure seemed to appear in all the groups. It had to have some significance.
Birdmen figures featured in most of the groupings too. He knew now from what the old Maori lady had said that they all had to represent Pouākai. He stared at the drawings, frowning with concentration. Then he drew in his breath sharply. Hang on! That birdman associated with the first group of human figures. What looked like another human figure was sketched in underneath it. It was very faint. But it seemed to be lying prostrate. Being attacked? Suddenly, the images were too close to home. Hamish didn’t want to look at them any more. Not on his own. When the prints were dry, they could all look at them. Later.
Later took on some urgency. They all gathered in the living room after an early dinner to watch the last of the news and see the satellite weather patterns. Before the advertisement break, the newscaster announced a special ‘Close Up’ item. Killer dogs at large in the high country. High sheep losses. The army sniper team had been called in.
The MacIntyres sat bolt upright. Tod turned up the volume. ‘We’ve got to watch this.’
‘… over one hundred sheep and lambs have now been killed,’ the newscaster said. ‘Expert local hunters have so far been unsuccessful in tracking down the culprits.’
A picture of Doug Armitage, festooned with ammunition belts and rifles, his old balaclava pushed to the back of his head, came up on the screen.
‘Expert hunter!’ Tod snorted. ‘That’s a hoot. The silly bugger couldn’t hit a tin can at ten paces.’
‘Shh!’ said Kirsten. ‘Listen to what he’s saying.’
‘… winged him all right, heard the bastard yelp for half an hour or so,’ Doug was saying self-importantly. ‘The leader’s the biggest dog I’ve ever seen. A vicious brute. And cunning with it. Wary as.’
‘So would you be if you had a bullet up your imaginary arse,’ muttered Tod. ‘Geez, Doug’s full of it!’
‘Bionic vision, though,’ said Hamish. ‘He can see things that aren’t there.’
Kirsten shushed them again. Their mother looked puzzled, then shrugged wearily, not interested enough to ask what they were talking about.
The newscaster was asking Armitage what he thought of the plan to bring in sharpshooters.
‘My idea, wasn’t it?’ said Doug. ‘Only problem, there’s some hiccup with the bureaucrat wallies. Something about the army not being able to act on private land. I ask you – what’s the world coming to….’
Hamish’s thoughts were racing. If the army had been called in, they would have to act fast. It’d be hopeless trying to deal with Pouākai with a whole lot of trigger-happy soldiers running around. They might only have a day or two. They couldn’t put off trying to interpret the rock drawings any longer. As soon as he could, he caught the others’ attention and jerked his head towards the door.
‘I’ll meet you upstairs,’ said Hamish, going to gather up the photos from the darkroom. When the others joined him in his room, he handed over the photo of the first birdman and the magnifying glass. ‘Pouākai,’ was all he said.
Tama hesitated, reluctant to look at the print.
‘A bit creepy, eh?’ said Hamish. ‘But it’s okay, honest. It’s just a photo.’
Tama took his first glance at the drawing of Pouākai. He drew the print closer and stared at it through the magnifying glass for a long time. The silence was electric.
‘What?’ Kirsten said anxiously. ‘What’s up?’
Tama stared at the photo for a moment longer. ‘Jesus,’ he said finally, and swallowed. ‘Look.’
He rolled up his sleeve and showed them his tattoo. The one of the phoenix rising from the ashes. Only it wasn’t a phoenix. Hamish could see that now. It was Pouākai. The tattoo was a small version of the photo in front of them.
‘Shit, Tama,’ he breathed. ‘That’s weird, really weird.’ A sudden thought struck him. ‘What’s on your other arm?’
Without a word, Tama rolled up his other sleeve. They stared at the crossed weapons. Only they weren’t spears as Hamish had thought. They were adzes. And in the legend, Ruru and his companions had used adzes to destroy the bird once they’d trapped him.
Hamish gulped, unnerved. He looked cautiously at Tama’s face. ‘You’ve been carrying part of the pattern all along.’
‘Obviously you didn’t know,’ said Tod. ‘How … who did the tats?’
Tama rubbed his finger slowly, tentatively, over the tattoos. ‘Just some Maori dude. No one special.’ Then he added, ‘I remember now. He didn’t really give me much choice. Just said I should have these, that they were trendy, like.’
They stared at the tattoos again, before Tama abruptly pulled his sleeves back over them.
Then something else struck Hamish, an idea he’d been groping towards. That figure without a head, or only the suggestion of an outline. What if the outline had been drawn in yellow? There had been a piece of yellowish chalky stone amongst the drawing things in that kit, hadn’t there? A yellow outline wouldn’t show up on black and white film. He picked up the next print and looked at it. It made sense all right. He handed the print to Tama.
‘Tāua Gray said some of your ancestors were yellow-haired. Well, I reckon these figures represent someone with yellow hair.’ Hamish pointed them out. He explained his reasoning.
‘So this could be my ancestor? This could be Ruru?’ Tama looked closely at the print. ‘That could make sense, eh.’ Then he sucked in his breath. ‘Hang on, this first one’s being attacked, isn’t he?’ He touched the prone figure cautiously.
‘Yeah, that’s what I think too,’ said Hamish. He waited for them to add it all up.
‘So, if you’re right, and this is Ruru … does that mean he was attacked – like Tama was?’ Kirsten was beginning to understand.
‘Well, that’s what I was thinking,’ said Hamish. His brain was working furiously. Another idea had struck him, this time with the force of truth. What if the figure wasn’t Ruru, was someone else altogether? Someone else with yellow hair?
Tod was looking at the next grouping of figures on the print. ‘Is this meant to be a dog or a seal?’
‘Most likely a dog,’ said Hamish neutrally.
&nbs
p; ‘It’s being attacked too, isn’t it?’ said Tama, frowning.
Hamish stared at the prints again, but he was no longer seeing them. His thoughts were all coming to the same unwelcome end point. That headless or yellow-haired figure, now this dog. Both associated with a birdman – Pouākai – figure. What if these first few drawings related to the present, not the past? Not the legend, but here and now? He broke out into a cold sweat.
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Kirsten. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
A ghost? Hamish laughed hollowly. If only. ‘I’m beginning to think that’s not Ruru. It might be his yellow-haired descendant. Tama. And that’s not any old Maori dog, it’s my dog. It’s Storm.’
Tama looked at him blankly. ‘Hang about – I’m not quite with you. You mean these drawings are about us?’
‘I thought they were drawn hundreds of years ago,’ Tod objected. ‘Isn’t that what you said?’
‘They were – drawn hundreds of years ago, I mean,’ said Hamish.
‘You’d better spell it out,’ said Tod. ‘I don’t think I like where you’re heading.’
‘If I’m right, we’re already living the pattern shown by the drawings,’ said Hamish. Then he added in a rush. ‘And that could mean – no, it has to mean – what happened was sort of predestined.’
‘Say that again – in English.’ Tama was impatient.
‘You know – karma, fate, or something. Not chance. Didn’t Tāua Gray say something about that?’
‘Heavy stuff, bro,’ said Tama.
‘It’s heavy all right,’ agreed Hamish. ‘You think about it – what that would mean.’
There was a pause. Hamish waited, watched the thoughts click past behind the others’ eyes, watched the realisation dawn.
‘You’re saying that what happens next is already decided, fixed?’ Kirsten asked.
‘That’s what I’m saying.’ Hamish waited.
‘In which case….’ Tod was catching on now. ‘If these first drawings show what’s already happened, what do the rest of them show?’