by Jack Lasenby
Tobik had been standing back, listening. He gave his slow smile and said, “You can’t think of everything, Selene. Why don’t you take Ansik, and I’ll go with Jenek? Between us, we’ll manage.”
Tobik was calm and unexcitable in a boat; our father had made sure of that. Larish frowned, but Jenek and Tobik were already friends. I wanted to keep Lorne with me, and Peck, and that meant Ruka. And Ansik was old enough to spell me at the tiller. As he became more confident, he learned quickly. All the same, I felt uneasy about Larish with the older boys. And why had she given Tobik that look?
I must have seemed worried, because he smiled again, and Jenek said, “We’ve got food and water; you showed us how to catch water from the sail; and we’ve got lures.”
It was Larish who worried me, but I could not say that. Besides, we had no choice: we were going to manage because we had to. I nodded.
“Twelve days north, and three days east sailing time.”
Ansik was excited when I told him he was going to have to help sail our boat.
“Can I steer, too?” Peck asked.
“When it is safe, you can take turns. You all have to know how.”
Peck and Ruka grinned at each other and raced off after rabbits again.
The southerly lost its violence. If it followed the usual pattern, we could run ahead of it for several days of fine weather. On a hard, bright morning we topped up the last breaker from the waterhole and launched on the high tide, excited. We had a set of knucklebones, each of us, smooth, evenly-shaped stones. The last thing I put aboard was a kitful of shells, stones, sticks, bones, a few feathers, and several strings of black seaweed pods.
Keeping close, we ran north all that first day, the southerly over our right shoulders to stop a gybe. Ansik took the tiller while I rested in the afternoon. From where I lay, I saw he kept the mainsail full, and there was no snapping from the jib. He sat glancing up at the leech, hand light on the tiller.
He is more sure of himself without Larish around, I thought. She must have made him afraid of me.
In the other boat, Jenek steered while Tobik rested. Tobik and I took over as it turned dark. We reefed and sailed on, the wind steady.
“Did they keep sailing all the time in the old story?” Ansik asked from where he lay with the others on the net.
I smiled down at the four of them huddled together under sacks, and tried to sound confident. “If they hove-to, the story did not say so, but they had lots of experienced sailors.”
“See,” Lorne’s voice said. “Selene knows.” There was a grunt from Peck.
“Time you all had some sleep.”
Much later I found myself nodding, waved to Tobik, and we came up into the wind, dropped our sails, lashed the boats together with a fender of sacks stuffed with seaweed, and nobody woke.
“Were you getting sleepy?”
“Those stars you told me to sail by, they started disappearing, then they’d pop up again. I realised I must be going to sleep.”
“Next time we will heave to earlier. Like reefing, better early than late.”
In the early morning, we caught two silver kingies on lures. It took Ansik and me all our time to pull the second one over the stern and into the bottom where it leapt and thumped till I hit it on the head. We sailed close enough to throw one across to the others.
“Eat it raw.” Ruka popped a strip of flesh into his mouth. “I do.” Larish pulled a face, and I remembered she had been unwilling to suck the moisture out of the karfish earlier.
Unable to stop myself, I yelled, “Save the water for when you need it,” and saw Larish say something to the others.
Three days we sailed fast in front of the southerly. Once or twice Ansik called me to the tiller, but it was reassurance he needed, that was all. I watched him grow surer by the day. Tobik and I sailed reefed through the nights till we tired, then heaved to, lashed the boats side by side, and slept till the cold hour before dawn.
A couple of days of westerlies. On the sixth morning, grey clouds raced up from the south, hid the sun, and dragged down the sky. We reefed and ran, and put in another reef. Before evening we turned up into the wind and took down our masts, but even with the fenders it was impossible to lie together. I held up a breaker, pointed at the sail and shouted.
“Run off the first shower. Too salty.”
Larish looked away. Jenek waved.
In our boat, I told the children to put on their extra clothes and rigged a shelter. The lowered mast made rowing difficult, but I ran out a pair of oars and tried to keep in sight of the others till dark. Tiller lashed over, we drifted, but it was not rough enough to use oil, the boat picking its way.
We woke to a dark-grey, empty sea.
“Where are they?”
“Just out of sight,” I told Lorne,
About midday, cold and our tunics sodden, Ansik and I got the mast up again. With only the heavily reefed mainsail, we ran on in front of the southerly.
“You did that well.” Ansik smiled. “Jenek and Tobik are strong,” I told the children. “They will put up their mast and reef their mainsail, too.”
“Why can’t we see them?”
“They are just out of sight,” I said again, “sailing in the same direction as us. They will be all right. If you keep a lookout, you might see their mast.”
We sang, and I chanted old whale songs. We took turns to tell stories and we played knucklebones.
To Peck’s disgust, Lorne was better than him and beat Ruka as well. She made up new tricks for herself every day. While Ansik steered, she tried to teach them to me, her little fingers dancing in and out, keeping the stones floating in midair, catching, snapping them down. She looked so pleased with herself I laughed.
Several times we thought we saw something that might be the others, and I shoved Peck or Ruka up the mast, but no luck. Twice we thought we saw the spout of one of the gods keeping watch on us.
Lorne covered the forward thwart with shells and began setting the seaweed pods in rows in the bottom of the boat. When Peck and Ruka tried to join her, she cried then let them help arrange all the bits and pieces out of the kit, chattering as they did so. Sometimes they talked to themselves, sometimes to the stones and pods and shells and sticks, intent, deep in their complicated game. As Ansik and I checked the sails and rigging, they were in our way but busy, occupied.
There were days when the game went on from morning to night. Now and again, the children might lift their heads above the gunwale, glance at the great waves, and go back to their rearranging and talking. While they played the game, they never laughed, never cried.
Even though Ansik and I kept a lookout for the shelf of cloud that sometimes warned of their arrival, there were times when squalls hit us unexpected. There would be cries as we leapt to round up into the wind, drop the sails, and ride out the blow, the children less worried by the danger than by the disturbance to their game.
Sometimes they used different voices to speak to their shells and stones, and even replied in other voices. It was impossible for Ansik and me to penetrate the language of the game, not that the children tried to keep it to themselves. They were too absorbed, living it. With bits of rope, scales, and fish-bones, as well as more feathers and bones from a dead gull, their collection soon filled another kit.
On the morning Peck and Ruka counted seventeen notches in the tiller, twelve full days of sailing, and with two of our breakers almost empty, we turned and steered east into the growing light. It was like finding Rabbit Island for the first time. I felt something through the bottom of the boat and thought: I used to call the gods, now they are calling me.
“Do you feel anything different about the waves?”
“I can feel something!” said Lorne, trying to please me.
“What’s it like?”
“A tingling in my feet,” I told Peck. “Like a message coming through the water.” And I told him about the whales calling us.
On the fourth day into the east, we s
aw a cloud that did not move, but grew higher and longer. Was that something dark and solid bulking through it? Night, and the cloud drew away.
I woke to Lorne crying, “Selene. Look.” She stood on the thwart, holding onto the mast, pointing. Along the horizon, piled white-topped and gold-rimmed, mountainous clouds that hardened as the sun rose behind them. Land uplifted high, summits, ridges, spurs, blue gullies.
“Is it the land of the old story?”
“Is it the place we’re looking for, Selene?”
They were all standing, pointing, asking questions. I swallowed hard, afraid of crying and scaring them.
“Why did they leave it?” asked Peck. “Our ancestors.”
“The story only talks about how long it took, and how they found the Horns and sailed between them into the little harbour.” I coughed. “It does not say why they left.”
“Will we find a harbour?”
“We might have to make do with a beach, but we will not take any risks.”
“I can remember Hornish,” said Lorne. “The harbour was rocky, but the beach on the other side was good to run on.”
I had noticed already that our earlier life seemed far away to her.
“The water was warmer for swimming on the beach,” said Peck. “And it had waves.”
“Little ones,” Ruka told him. “Not like the ones out here.”
In amongst playing their elaborate game, between the storytelling and singing, the children had sometimes sat silent and stared as wave after wave came up behind, lifted, carried, and set us down.
“Where do the waves go?” Peck asked now. I tried to describe how a wave passes through water, and he looked so unsure I was confused myself.
“I think the wave’s the water, and it’s running past us, towards wherever we’re going to,” said Ruka, and Peck nodded.
“It must be. When you see a wave run up the beach, it’s a different wave each time, because it runs out and then another wave comes in over the top of it.”
“What about,” said Ansik, “when you’re swimming and you come in on a wave? It’s carrying you with it, isn’t it? So it must be moving, the water, I mean.”
“The water stays in the same place,” I told them, “only the wave moves through it and carries you with it. The first time I found Rabbit Island, there had been a big southerly, and I could feel something through the planks of the boat, maybe the waves crashing on the south end of the island. I could feel it through my feet when I was still a day or so away.”
“Aw,” said Peck, and Ruka laughed. “Selene’s got special feet.”
I was grinning at him when Ansik said, “Remember when the waves crashed against the bottom of Skull and Dis, you felt them shaking — through your feet, and you’d see the shudder run back out to sea, waves rocking backwards against the others coming in? Maybe that’s what you were feeling through your feet, Selene, that tingle.” He had described what I felt, perfectly.
I looked at the land ahead and thought of the nights when I would wake one of the children, just to have someone to talk to, let them steer if the wind was light. There had been days when they fought and squabbled, and I longed for the journey to be over so they could run and play and not whine complaints about each other. Now they had forgotten all that, pointing and calling out what they were seeing. The sun rose higher, and below the mountains we saw hills shrugged dark with trees. If there were cliffs lower down, we could not see them yet.
The first time I found Rabbit Island, it seemed as if the boat was pulling it up out of the sea, but now my hand felt something through the tiller, something drawing us in. All day we sailed through schooling fish, gulls gorging, gannets skidding down the air, as the new land declared itself.
North, a high peak swam out from the mainland, became a mountainous island. A small one lay ahead; Table Island Lorne named it because it was flat-topped. Before dark we sailed around it, looking for any sign of the others.
North, south, and west, Table Island was lined with cliffs. The south-eastern side facing the mainland was lower. A steep shingle beach ended in a boulder spit. As we watched, a wave crashed and swept up the beach, tossing shingle, and we heard its pebbly roar. A strong current carried us around the boulder spit. The children were disappointed when I sailed on and hove-to for the night.
“We couldn’t land on that beach,” Ansik told them, “except in a calm. What if we smashed the boat?”
“Selene could fix it,” Lorne said.
“We’ll reach land in the morning,” said Ansik, “and Selene will find us a better place.”
“My feet want to run,” Lorne told him.
“My feet,” said Peck, “they’re not going to stop running for two days.”
“Three.”
“Four.”
In the first light, I memorised the shape of the hills in case we ever had to find our way back, and told the children what I was doing. The incoming tide should have carried us towards the mainland, but conflicting currents threw up a chop of short, savage waves.
“In sight of land,” I said to Ansik, “and some of the roughest water we’ve seen. It must be a shallow bottom.”
From closer in we saw only cliffs, then a beach that boomed and smoked. We felt the ride of mounting waves, wings of spray torn back off their crests, and turned out to deeper water, working north past more cliffs and into a deep bay. Lorne wanted to land on every beach we passed.
“Too open.” I shook my head at each. “We want protected water.”
A channel behind rocks opened a long arm of the bay. I shook my head again. The southerly would blow right down its length. A passage to the left looked more promising. The wind dropped, but the tide carried us through and we found ourselves on a broad inlet tucked behind a spit of sand dunes and mercy trees. Between protecting hills, clear water brimmed calm, spreading wide and level, reflecting the pink and gold morning sky, our boat suspended in it.
Ansik let down the sails, and the oars creaked as I took a few strokes towards a beach on our right. The morning air so still, drops from the blades rang on the water; we heard the patter of sprats leaping in the shallows, the churning splash of karfish feeding on them, the rich crunch of sand under our keel.
A warm beach lying into the sun. driftwood and a terrace at the foot of low cliffs. Flax for string and ropes, for baskets, for weaving, mending the sails. Somewhere, the splash of falling water.
Peck, Ruka, and Lorne scrambled over and ran shrieking for the pool below a little waterfall, gulping, splashing, washing off the salt, running up and down the sand, pretending to fall as they swayed and staggered still to the sea’s motion. Ansik came to give a hand.
“Have a run. I could not have managed the journey without you.” He grinned and ran.
I should have hushed them, but the place was perfect, so still, and I was busy carrying the anchor up the sand, tidying the sails. I closed my eyes and thanked the gods.
“We got here.”
I sniffed the seaweed lying at the high water mark, stretched my legs and arms, and yawned. I would have liked to run, but felt heavy. We had all day to look for mussels, even to set the net. First, though, a fire. Cook something for the children. Put up a shelter.
Curled to the tiller’s shape, my right hand felt as if it would never open again.
Chapter Fifteen
The Old Man’s Story (1) Catching a Kahawai in the Garden
My name’s Jim Rotherham, for what that’s worth, and I’m getting on a bit now, so decided to write it all down while I can still remember what happened, and try to make sense of it.
To begin with, the whole business was strange, then I got used to the idea and in a limited sense became part of what I was seeing, all mixed up in my notions of time: past, present, and future.
It helped, perhaps, that I’ve always liked Eliot’s Four Quartets, the first two and a half of them anyway. Living in a nation of would-be pragmatists soon teaches you to see through their limbic respect for what they
call hands-on learning: I’ve learned many of my hardest lessons through poetry.
I was digging a few late spuds in my garden on top of the sea wall, the tide was nearly full, and I heard the hush and patter of sprats leaping and falling back on the water: kahawai feeding on a school they’d rounded up. I flung my garden fork into a churning swirl, the handle bucked, and something flashed on the tines. As I jumped after it, I heard children laughing and yelling. The hullabaloo came from a shabby boat that dropped salt-bleached brown sails, ran out oars, and rowed in, keel crunching the sand along from my cottage.
Kids spilled over the sides and ran yahooing. They looked and sounded like a whole mob as they rolled, tripped each other, and scampered up to where a trickle down the cliff fell into a pool of fresh water, and they filled their mouths and squirted it over each other, yelling, wriggling, kicking their feet in the air like foals rolling on grass. In fact, there were only four of them: a little girl, two boys of seven or eight, and another a bit older again.
A woman clambered out of the boat and lugged the anchor up the beach. I said she clambered, but there was still something subtle about the way she moved. The older boy ran down, but she shook her head, and he danced back screaming with the others.
I waded along to offer a hand, but the woman ignored me, looked around the beach and said something like, “We got here.” I couldn’t be sure because it sounded like English and yet was different; besides, I heard another voice, a familiar one.
Mac had been across to the shops and was coming home along the top of the sea wall. I climbed back up, the fish still kicking blue, green, and silver on the fork.
“You’re not going to try and tell me you speared that in your garden?” Mac twitched his bristly eyebrows.
“Keep it to yourself, Mac, but ever since I buried some fish guts, I get these kahawai coming up among the spuds. They do a pretty good job keeping the weeds down. Got time for a cup of tea?”