Cowrie

by Cathie Dunsford

  As if called, she enters the ocean. A lone turtle is up her end of the beach. Cowrie lies floating, waiting to see if it comes near. The turtle approaches tentatively. Cowrie can see its eyes just below surface level. The turtle suddenly swims under her, emerging at her feet. Cowrie turns and it dives again. The turtle is playing with her. She dives beneath its belly. Its eyes follow her, swivelling around like a tuatara. Ancient eyes. Knowing eyes.

  By now, they have drifted out beyond the breakers. Realising this, Cowrie starts a strong breast-stroke inland. The turtle swims alongside. She sees an incoming wave and strikes out to catch it. She pounds the water with her strong arms, lashing and kicking her fins to create a backwash behind her. The wave lifts her up and she lunges into its concave belly. The turtle is right beside her, coasting in on its crest. She thrusts her fins outward for balance. The water draws her under as it gathers momentum to power her to shore. Cowrie holds her breath until she thinks she will burst. Then she surfaces, skimming across the glassy waters at the edge of the black sand. The turtle is no longer with her.

  Cowrie struggles to stand in the swirling water as the wave slurps outwards. She searches the sea, scans the horizon. Nothing. Scrambling up the beach, she sees a nob out beyond the breakers. It floats and dips in the swell, hanging in the balance, waiting. Then it disappears beneath the surface.

  Further up the beach, at Punalu‘u museum, visitors stream in from the buses. The guide begins telling them about the 1868 tsunami. Cowrie walks towards the museum. She decides she should see it before leaving. She is elated. At least she can tell Mere the turtle really does swim back out through the wave. She touches her coconut shell carving, knowing she will return to Hawai‘i and enters the museum just in time to hear the guide explain about the twenty-foot wave that swept over Punalu‘u beach in 1975, destroying everything except Kane’s mural which depicts the beach and heiau as it might have been two centuries ago.

  Cowrie looks past him to the rounded mural. At the far end of the beach Kane‘ele’ele rises up out of the sea spray like a vision. It is exactly as it was in her dream. She can hear the laughter, smell the sea air, taste the poi being pounded in the bowls on the sand. A coconut is split open. She rolls its sweet milk on the tip of her tongue, lets it drift down her throat. An old man stands in the middle of the beach waving a fan of fresh leaves in welcome as he guides a waka safely through the breakers.

  “But how could a tidal wave splash up the walls and miss this mural?” a tourist asks.

  The guide shakes his head, as if expecting the question. “Punalu‘u is protected,” is all he says. He remembers his grandmother telling him how a turtle’s head was seen at the tip of the tsunami, how it guided the wave in and then swam back out and watched over the beach protectively before diving deep and disappearing from sight.

  Cowrie smiles to herself and walks out on to the hot lava sand. She glances back towards Pele steaming up out of Kilauea and follows her hair-line to the foot of the mountain where she meets the crashing ocean. She faces south towards Ka Lae. Next week, she will sail her waka back to Aotearoa. The black sand of Punalu‘u will still be visible between her toes when she arrives. And in her body, a new power, a new knowledge about survival. A connection with her creativity that no one can crush.

  At the end of the beach, she imagines Kane‘ele’ele rising up out of the stones, canoes moored in the lagoon behind her. A waka leaves from the shore, bound for a distant land in the far south seas. A land no one has dared yet imagine. A land of incomparable beauty. Islands that are connected to these beneath the water. Islands that draw their spirit from the same family of gods. Land of the awakening dawn. Aotearoa.