The night was mostly clear with cloud, high and light, carelessly spilled across the sky. The moon was out, but its light was softened by the haze of clouds.
Moana stopped the outboard motor a kilometre or so from the shore, in case the noise carried to the tiny settlement of Te Mata, just to the south. The motor was a Yamaha. It was small but quite powerful, and almost new.
In the meagre, silvery light she unclamped it and pushed it off from the rear of the boat. “You are a good motor, but I have no use for you,” she said, as it sank with barely a bubble.
She rowed the long boat the rest of the way, straining on oars that were really there just for emergencies, while the baby lay on the blanket in the stern, one arm still lightly bandaged.
The shore approached and Moana, peering over her shoulder in the darkness, aimed for the gap in the vegetation that she knew was the mouth of the inlet. She rowed for hours as the inlet became a river, then a creek. Finally, the hull scraped on the mud and she could row no more.
She tied the boat to a tree then rigged a block and tackle between the boat and a stout rimu on the first bend in the creek. She found a place to brace herself, and began to pull on the rope.
The twin pulleys – one attached to the boat, the other to the tree – lifted and strained as the rope tightened, but they did not moan or squeak. She had oiled them well the previous day.
The boat, the supplies, and the baby, shifted a little then began to move, a few centimetres with each palm-blistering pull on the rope. She fed the loose rope into the boat to keep it from getting wet. Wet rope was rough on hands, and did not run as easily through the pulley.
The creek was her friend and her enemy. The flow of the water pushed against the hull trying to send it back down towards the inlet. But it also provided a small amount of floatation. Not enough for the boat to float in that shallow part of the creek – it rested on its keel – but enough to take a little of the weight.
Her hands were red and sore from the rope before she had gone ten metres, and some people would have given up at that stage. But Moana was not ready for that.
She began to talk to the baby, telling him what was happening. She did it in a low voice, because although there was nobody around to hear, there could be people hidden in folds of the hills and sound has a strange way of moving through gullies and ridges at night.
“See, little one?” she asked. “See how easy this is? If I had to pull the boat by myself then I could not do it. But this is my friend, the pulley. He helps me move the boat. He does half the work for me so really I am only pulling half a boat, and that is much easier than pulling a whole boat.
“I will succeed because I have determination. And because, if I fail, then we will be discovered and then I will never see you again, little one. So for that reason also, I will succeed.”
The baby did not speak back to her. But he did not cry either. Perhaps he knew that the sound of his wails would be heard around the dusky hills and bring disaster.
Each pull on the rope moved the boat forward. Sometimes just a few centimetres, sometimes more. There were kilometres to go.
When the boat reached the tree, Moana untied the pulley and took it forward, lashing it to another stout tree. Then she started all over again.
And as she pulled, and as her hands bled, she thought of her husband and his rich family and their powerful lawyers who had declared her an unfit mother.
“See me now,” she said to the lawyers who were not there. “See what I can do. See what I will do – for my son.”
She hauled the boat over trees that had fallen in the water. She hauled it over proud rocks in the creek bed that rose up, gouging at the aluminium hull. She hauled it beneath the branches of low trees that stretched clawed hands down towards her baby.
“You see how easy this is, little one?” she lied. “I have strong arms and a strong back and strong legs. A gift from my father and mother, who made me, and from my brothers, who beat and chased me. Perhaps they did it knowing that one day I would have to pull you and this boat up this creek.”
How simple it would be, she thought, to leave the boat in a quiet bend of the stream. For that was what it was now, just a stream, having branched off into tributaries. She could cover the skiff with branches and hope that no one would find it. But hikers and hunters used this stream, and they would find the boat. And in the morning, when the alarm was raised, there would be people looking for her and the boat would be too close to the hut. They would find her, and it would all have been for nothing.
So she moved the block and tackle to the next tree and started all over again.
The rope had been white, flecked with blue, when she started. A woven nylon cord thicker than her thumb. Now the rope was blotchy and red, although it looked dark brown in the moonlight.
She cursed her hands for being so soft and she cursed the rope for being so brown and she cursed the boat for being so heavy and she cursed her husband who had played rugby for New Zealand and she cursed the lawyers with their shiny ties who had gone to school with her husband and she cursed the judge who had probably been to school with all of them.
Then she came to the rapids.
She always knew they were there. Just as she knew the old cottage was there, so she knew she would have to pass the rapids to get to it. It was not a high fall, just a rise in the stream where the water bubbled as though it was boiling hot, even though it was icy cold. Where green, moss-covered rocks were scattered haphazardly. Where sheer rock faces on both sides rose higher than her head.
As far as rapids go, they were not spectacular. A kayaker would barely notice them. Going up them with a heavy boat was a different matter.
Moana rested below the rapids where the stream widened out again and soothed itself on a wide blanket of flat pebbles. She tethered the boat to a tree. She fed the baby, then drank some water. She refilled her bottle, taking the lifeblood of the stream to replenish her own.
She ate from a bag of nuts, chocolate and dried fruit and rested some more.
“Come on you, lazy one,” she said to herself. “This boat will not climb by itself.”
She stood and looked at the short section of rapids.
“I am not afraid of you,” she lied to the stream. “I am stronger than you.”
She clambered onto the green and slippery rocks on one side of the stream and crawled on all fours in the moonlight until she got above the rapids. There were no trees here to tie the pulley to, so she made a loop out of rope and secured it to a large rock in the middle of the stream. There was no longer any hope of keeping the rope dry. It lay in the water, winding through the boulders.
She climbed carefully back down, untethered the boat, then climbed into it.
The baby slept, full-bellied and content.
Moana stood in the bow, bracing herself against the gunwales. She began to haul in the now wet rope. It was harder than before. Harder because the slope was steeper and the stream bed rougher. And harder because the wet rope did not run as easily through the pulley.
But the boat moved. The bow lifted as it ground its way across a concealed rock. The boat rocked, tilting to one side.
Still Moana pulled on the rope, ignoring the burning pain from the wet rope scraping on the raw flesh of her hands. The baby murmured in his sleep.
“Ha,” she said. “You think this is painful for me? I gave birth to you, little one. I squeezed you out into the world. Now that was pain. This is just a shower against the rainstorm when I gave birth to you.”
The whole way she had been hearing the call of the native owl, the Morepork, echoing through the trees. Now one landed on a flat rock to the side of the stream, with something in its claws. Perhaps a mouse. It watched her for a moment before pecking at its prey. The meal squawked and feathers fluttered.
“You, Morepork, leave that bird alone,” Moana said.
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The owl glanced at her briefly before tearing again at its food.
She looked away.
Fish ate fish. Birds hunted birds. And people preyed on people. It was nature’s way.
In the distance the moonlight danced across the top of a row of low hills. Round-tops without names, just great scoops of the Earth laid in an untidy row.
Moana hauled on the rope and the boat slid upwards between two large green boulders.
Another large boulder divided the stream near the top of the rapids. Moana had taken the rope around the wider side, but even so the boat would only just fit between the boulder and the sheer rock face of the cliff.
The boulder scraped the side of the boat. Moss dislodged and fell onto the plastic tarpaulin that covered the stash of supplies. The bow wedged for a moment, then came free as Moana rocked the boat from side to side. The owl stopped eating and watched.
In the distance, filtering through the trees, she heard voices. Hikers or hunters. If she was close enough to hear them, then they were close enough to hear her. But there was nothing she could do about that.
She pulled and the bow rose high into the air, trembling as it topped the rise in the streambed, then came crashing down as the centre of gravity of the boat shifted. One side of the hull landed on a steep rock, invisible beneath fast-rushing water, tipping the boat sideways.
Moana fought for balance with one foot up on the gunwales. She teetered, holding the rope with one hand, waving her free arm wildly for balance. Then she fell.
She landed in the stream, gashing her knee on a sharp stone. It sent jagged splinters of pain up through her spine. A hand that would no longer do what it was told, let go of the rope.
The free end whipped upstream towards the pulley, cracking like a whip. The boat fell backwards. The stern hit a rock which shunted it sideways, tilting it up again. The supplies jolted and slipped from under their cover and fell into the stream.
So did the baby.
Moana clamped her lips together, stifling a scream, not from the pain, that was terrible enough, but from the sight of her child, her first and only born, disappearing into the dark and rough waters of the stream.
She scrambled after him, slipping and sliding over rocks, tumbling through churning water.
But the gods of the forest were kind. The water shielded the baby, turning him carefully away from sharp rocks that would have cracked open his soft skull. He landed in the calm at the base of the rapids in water no more than knee deep. And as babies do, through some strange innate baby reflex, he began to swim.
Arms, strong with desperation, plucked him from the water and held him for a long time, not minding the red rivulets that ran from the hands, staining the baby clothes.
The baby stretched out his good arm and put his finger up Moana’s nose. He blinked away water and laughed.
Eventually those strong arms laid the baby on a flat rock, well away from the water, while they rocked the boat back and forth, quietly unwedging it from where it had jammed. The voices in the distance had faded. Night hunters passing by, Moana hoped, their voices brought to her by a freak of the geography of the hills.
Those same arms, now shaking with fear and pain and exhaustion, collected up all the sodden supplies she could find, even the ruined bags of sugar and flour and salt, securing them firmly back under the tarpaulin.
Then with the baby this time strapped to her back, Moana re-rigged the block and tackle and started all over again.
It took three tries to get the skiff up over the rapids. The hull of the boat was damaged. Supplies were lost or damaged. Moana’s body was battered in ways that her mind would later erase from her memory.
But she made it.
And she made it the rest of the way to where she had to leave the stream and drag the boat across the dirt floor of the forest, to the gap in the foliage where the old hut sat patiently, waiting for them to arrive. At times she had to empty the boat and tilt the hull onto its side to ease it between trees.
After she reached the hut, and made the baby safe inside, she went back, retrieving lost packages and erasing the marks of their passage with a leafy branch, broken from a tree. Then she returned to the hut, picked up her child and held him tightly and tenderly.
And, as the dawn broke gently over the hills that had no name, she began to cry.
She wept for what was lost.
And she wept for what was found.
* * *
(That’s pretty much how it happened, even if I am nowhere near as good as Hemingway at telling a story.
Over the coming days, using the block and tackle, attached high on a nearby tree my Moma raised up the boat, flipped it over, and laid it back down on the top of the hut to create a roof.
Whenever I get angry or frustrated with Moma, I just think of how she once hauled a 5-metre skiff up rapids, at night, with a baby strapped to her back.)
December 7th
Nothing much happened today. One of our chickens got killed by a stoat, but that’s about it. So instead of writing nothing I am going to write about the CSC.
I am a member of a club. I started it a few years ago. It’s called the Coromandel Spy Club (the CSC) because we live on the Coromandel Peninsula and we are spies. And we’re a club.
There are only two members. I am the founder and president, and Crackerjack is the vice president. Chunder was the other founding member but he isn’t allowed to be a member anymore because he’s dead.
We do cool club activities like exploring places we haven’t been before, and spying on campers to make sure they don’t come anywhere near the cottage.
Once Jack and I saw four campers, two men and two women, and they weren’t wearing any clothes and it wasn’t even raining. I didn’t spy on them because that would have been invading their privacy, which is a kind of breach of rule #6.
This afternoon I painted a cover for my story. I have a book of famous paintings and there are some amazing pictures in it. I especially like the pictures of John Constable, who painted landscape pictures set in England. I tried to paint a picture of Moma hauling the skiff up the rapids, in the style of Constable. But it didn’t really come out the way I saw it in my head.
I might need a better paint set. Mine only has ten colours and came with a free colouring-in book.
Book I am reading:
‘Of Mice and Men’ by John Steinbeck.
Thought for the day:
There are some things I don’t talk about in my diary. Like when I pee or when I poo, and other stuff that is no business of yours, and of no interest to me. Sorry if you were expecting something more intimate or revealing or salacious.
Another thought for the day:
I think I should have a word of the day. A new word that I have learned, or like to use. It should be an interesting word.
Word of the day:
SALACIOUS
Meaning: Scandalous or sensational
Moma’s Code #6
Treat other people the way you’d like them to treat you.
Whenever you are confused about how to act, ask yourself, how would I want them to act towards me? Show them the same respect you want them to show you.
December 8th
Only six days till the solar eclipse (partial)!
Some exciting news: the CSC has a new member! J.T. is now officially a member of the Coromandel Spy Club. I told him about the club and asked him if he wanted to join and he said yes. We had a swearing in ceremony (that I made up) and he is now a member so is sworn to secrecy about everything.
J.T. says words like ‘awesome’ and ‘gidday’. He calls me ‘mate’. He laughs a little when I say things like ‘howdy’ and ‘swell’, although he tries not to.
Still, I don’t mind. I think he’s awesome.
I really like J.T. I wonder if he and Moma could
ever get together.
I know my Moma is terribly lonely. It makes me sad to see how sad she is sometimes. A woman needs friends – and a boyfriend. But Moma gave up all of that for me.
It’d be cool if J.T. met Moma and liked her, and she liked him too. Then he’d be like my dad. That’d be awesome. I’ll have to find out if he is single.
I told him about our next club activity, which is to watch the partial solar eclipse. He was really interested, so on the 16th I am going to get up early and head up to his campsite so we can watch the eclipse together (and Jack too, of course – the other member of the club.)
He said you can’t look directly at the sun, even during an eclipse, because you will damage your eyes. He showed me how to make a pinhole projector eclipse viewer using two sheets of cardboard. J.T. knows lots of stuff, he is awesome.
I also told him about writing a story, which was dumb because now he wants to read it, and I can’t let him read it. Then he would know everything. I might write another story, about something safe, and let him read that.
I told him that I tried to write the story like Hemingway. He said that was good, as long as I didn’t shoot myself in the head.
I asked him what he meant. Apparently, Hemingway killed himself.
That is seriously not awesome.
Word of the day:
AWESOME
December 9th
J.T. is single. I know because I asked him. I asked him if he was married and he said no. So I asked him if he had ever been married, and he said nearly. Whatever that means. But it still means no. So I asked him if he had a girlfriend and he said no.
Now if only I could find a way to get him to meet Moma. That will be difficult because if Moma finds out about him she will kill me. She won’t understand that he’s a member of the CSC and sworn to secrecy.
I think he’s a little younger than Moma but true love should not be thwarted by age.
I am going to have to think on this.
Ernest Hemingway is no longer my favourite author. I could never respect anyone who killed themselves, no matter what their reasons. I still like his stories but I have lost respect for the man who wrote them.
Shooting Stars Page 4