“I’ve bought you a new suit!” his wife persisted.
“Good,” Ernest grumbled. “You can bury me in it if the taniwha gets me before I get him.” Ignoring his wife’s protests he strode out to the garage and lifted his tackle box – an old wooden swapa crate filled with meat hooks, a hatchet, various knives, and coils of cable and thick rope - onto the back of his ute, along with his rifle and pack.
“You pig!” she yelled after him, following him out into the chilly pre-dawn air, still dressed in her nightgown. “If you leave now, Ernest, this time I won’t be here when you get back!”
Ernest no longer cared. Not out of any lack of love, but out of a sort of tiredness and grim determination. He’d stopped feeling bad for his wife years ago. She simply didn’t understand. The more Ernest had lost over the years – his reputation, his career, and now it seemed his entire family too – then the higher the stakes had become. No matter what the outcome, he had to hold on until the final round. If he gave up now, he’d lose everything including his dignity. Raw stubborn pride was all he was running on, coupled with an obsessive hatred for the monster, the monster that had taken so much from him already. If only he could catch it and bring back its head! Then they’d have to believe and forgive him. Then he’d be redeemed, and only then could he rest.
It was a long drive from Dunedin to Fjordland. The wind-silvered fields became wild and uneven, inhabited only by hardy sheep that huddled for shelter amidst lichen covered boulders. Ernest ascended onto what his ancestors had named the Maniototo – the plane of blood. It was a wide open place full of ghosts. High above sea level, whenever he crested a hill Ernest saw the barren wave-like ridges receding into the distance on every side, fainter and fainter until they seemed only smoke, mere apparitions. He thought of those deep green lakes beyond and the bottomless pond that was home to his quarry. The pond was located less than a kilometre into the bush on the western shore of lake Manapouri. The locals called it ‘the puddle’, due to its relatively small size. And Ernest, being such a frequent visitor to this unremarkable, water-filled sinkhole, had become a renowned eccentric to them. Much to his annoyance, they’d laughingly begun to call him Ahab.
Ernest couldn’t bear it. It was a while before he realised the noise he heard was the grinding of his own teeth. The taniwha had made him a pitiable laughing stock, a humorous tale for affluent tourists who arrived every summer in their over-sized, boat-towing jeeps. He drove on stubbornly - to hell with the kehua of the plain of blood. He felt instinctively that the ghost of his father was with him, protecting him and willing him to succeed. Ernest would make his father proud. Eventually the familiar saw-tooth mountains of the Fjords stood before him, blocking the western horizon. He’d arrived at last.
Ernest pulled into the Manapouri campsite around mid morning. He pitched his tent quickly. He wouldn’t be sleeping at the campsite but would use it as a base. He’d carry only what he’d need, and head for the puddle immediately. Even then it’d still take several hours walking along the Monument Track before he’d find the first marker of the trail: a steel grey boulder with a taniwha carved into it - a fat-bellied, pukana-faced taniwha. A feeling of dark premonition suddenly made him giddy and nauseas. For some reason, this time Ernest felt he couldn’t wait. He needed to get to the puddle at once.
Ernest looked over at his neighbour in the next camping space along. He was an athletic-looking, balding middle-aged man in a blue fleece top, board shorts and sandals. His friends had just headed off to the lake for a swim, and he’d been left to start the barbecue. He owned all the fancy gear: a bright red kayak, life jackets, fishing rods, chilly bins, a three room tent and fold away chairs and table. Most impressive was the glossy white boat, hitched to the back of a beetle black LandCruiser.
“Kia ora,” said Ernest, approaching the man who was now prodding sizzling steaks with a wooden-handled boning knife. Ernest offered a gigantic hand, and the man looked up at him, smiling nervously. “I’m Ernest,” said Ernest.
“Call me Ishmael,” the man chuckled back. “I believe I’ve heard a lot about you already Ernest – or should I say ‘Ahab’.”
Ernest didn’t laugh. “I need to borrow your kayak,” he said.
The man snorted in disbelief. “Piss off, mate,” he said. For a moment the two men stared at each other with the barbecue between them. Then Ernest took hold of the man’s wrists and, suddenly pulling them wide apart, stepped in quickly and landed a devastating head-butt on the bridge of ‘Ishmael’s’ nose. Ishmael shot backwards, landing on his back in the grass. His shattered nose was streaming blood. He lay dazed as Ernest came around the barbecue and picked up the boning knife he’d dropped.
Ernest crouched beside the man and whispered through grated teeth: “It’s important, understand? I have to take your stuff.” The man attempted to voice some response but his eyes seemed unable to focus and his throat had filled with blood. Ernest covered the lower part of the man’s bloody face with one hand, and with the other drove the knife deep between the man’s ribs. Ishmael gave a muffled cry. Ernest continued driving the blade home as hard as he could, unable to stop until long after the man had finished moving or making sound. When Ernest at last came to his senses, he looked down at the man’s blood-soaked fleece top and realised what he’d done.
There’d be no going back now. He dragged Ishmael’s corpse into the first room of the over-sized tent and closed the entrance. Luckily for Ernest, it wasn’t peak season yet and there was no-one else around. He reasoned that he might as well take the LandCruiser and boat now that he’d gone this far.
Ernest wrapped the steaks in a tea-towel to take with him. He threw whatever he thought he’d need inside the boat, and was pleased to find the LandCruiser unlocked with the keys in the ignition. Towing the boat, he drove slowly out of camp. At the front gates he passed Ishmael’s friends returning from their swim. They looked confused, then threw up their hands and shouted in protest. There was a reassuring thunk as Ernest engaged the central locking. He was away free, heading for Fraser’s Beach where he’d reverse onto the sand and into the water to launch the boat. There wasn’t time to think about what he’d just done. This was simply a more efficient way to get to the puddle.
Ernest abandoned the LandCruiser, launched the boat and started the motor without problems. The lake was steel grey with a ruffled surface, but the next moment the strong noon sunlight broke through heavy cloud. Blue shadows were cast over the features of the bush-clad mountains and a brilliant rainbow arched from a valley on the western side. The lake turned ultramarine then violet. Ivy-coloured hills steamed themselves clear before newer, darker rain clouds swamped them again. Ernest cut the motor when he reached the other side. He allowed the boat to drift ashore, unloaded it then pushed it out again. He climbed back inside and started the motor, pointing the prow straight at the far north-eastern corner of the lake. Satisfied the boat would end up far away on the other side, Ernest jumped clear.
The shock of cold was instant, as Ernest suddenly found himself below the surface with the roar of water in his ears. He heard the muffled sound of the boat’s motor receding. He opened his eyes, and looked about, trying to reach the surface. The mountain water was incredibly clear. He could make out every stone on the bottom - about six feet beneath him – and see far into the emerald distance. Breaking the surface, he swam until stones scraped his knees and he found he could stand.
Glad to be back on land, Ernest gathered his pack which he’d filled with the stolen steaks, a container of water, three hands of bananas, a box of ammunition, his cell phone, a candle and matches, a roll of toilet paper, and a rain proof poncho. His rifle was strapped to the back, wrapped in an army blanket and plastic sheeting. He carried his tackle box with one hand and a stolen chilly bin in the other, and set off along the track until he found the overgrown trail.
Ernest moved slowly through the silent, dripping, moss-hung forest. Ferns stirred in the wind, which was lashing the striped sparse birch.
The trees were slender and tall with mean small leaves offering little shelter. Everything was wet, and a fire would be hard to start. Even though Ernest had no fire permit, it hardly seemed to matter now. He was tense and alert, but it wasn’t the authorities he feared – they likely wouldn’t catch up with him for a long while yet. It was the prospect of death, now that he was at the end of his life, and weaker than he’d ever been before. Or more than that, the prospect of the taniwha killing and therefore beating him. Or perhaps it was the place itself: the lonely dark interiors of the bush, and the way they seemed to whisper. Loath as he was to admit it, at seventy years of age Ernest had lost much of his former confidence, if not all his height and powerful physique.
His people had always said that the place was cursed. What the locals jokingly called the puddle, local Maori had named Whirotuna, meaning ‘evil eel’ or ‘eel of the god of evil and death’. It confirmed the taniwha’s existence in Ernest’s mind, because the taniwha had resembled a monstrous eel, in spite of its eviscerating claws and long matted hair. But as Rangi had remarked, the name might also have originated from the eels that congregated near the surface whenever there was a new moon. This was reasonable, but wouldn’t explain why these particular eels should be ‘evil’. In Ernest’s experience, every eel he’d wrestled with had had a naturally evil disposition. And besides that, eels had always been prized by Maori as food, so in that regard weren’t ‘evil’ at all. The bigger and nastier the better, in fact.
But there was no use arguing with Rangi. In Ernest’s son’s mind, his sophisticated opinion always superseded traditional folklore, which he now regarded mostly as childish superstition, especially when it touched on curses, taniwha, and ghosts. Rangi would always seek the scientific explanation beneath the surface of things. Ernest did wonder if Rangi wasn’t secretly still superstitious. Rangi had been sending undergraduate students to various lakes and sinkholes in the Fjordland area for the past year, but Rangi himself refused to go along. Perhaps there were too many painful memories for him, or perhaps it reminded him of how – in Ernest’s opinion – he’d betrayed a long-standing family tradition. Whatever the reason, the students had collected thousands of water samples for Rangi to analyze. The samples included some two-hundred taken from the puddle. Ernest continually asked his son what the point of it all was. But his son only replied he was ‘onto something big’, something that was going to guarantee his success within the academic community. The little prick was just like his mother, worrying too much what others thought. But at least the boy’s mother worried about what mattered to her people, and not a bunch of stuck-up, dry-balls pakeha.
It was three o’clock when Ernest arrived at the puddle. First he saw the cliff through the willow trees that circled the water. The black-hole caves in the cliff’s side were like staring, empty eye sockets. At the bottom was the largest cave of all, looking like a puckered mouth. Stalactites hung inside like rows of pointed teeth, and the cave was home to a colony of bats. There must’ve been more caves below the surface, some possibly going deep into the mountain or opening to unknown caverns far below.
Ernest unpacked his rifle (a 30-06 Remington 700), laid out the plastic sheeting amidst a clump of ferns and waited. The army blanket covered his legs. At four o’clock, with the wind getting colder and drizzle turning to rain, he slipped the poncho over his body. He waited in silence, nursing the rifle. At five he caught himself nodding off, so ate a banana. The smell of the fresh fruit attracted sand flies, which bit and sucked at his hands and face and raised itchy lumps on his skin. But soon his quarry arrived. At five-thirty he raised the rifle and fired.
The clear crack of the gun shot echoed from the caves and was quickly lost like fading thunder in the depths of the forest. Bats began to spray from the caves, emitting tiny screeches. The wild goat fell to the ground with a muffled thud, and the rest of the herd – which had come to drink as usual from the sinkhole at evening – fled. Ernest took his time making his way over. He was an experienced hunter and trusted his shot would’ve found its mark. Sure enough, up close he saw the bullet had shattered the goat’s elbow above the right foreleg, making escape impossible.
The animal bleated as it tried to drag itself away. Ernest soon caught up with it and dragged it back to the puddle. He tied the end of a length of thick rope around one of the strong supple willow trunks, and secured the other end about the goat’s horns and neck. The goat protested loudly, and kicked as Ernest lifted it. The creature looked down at the impenetrable water as though it knew what was coming and dreaded it.
Ernest casually hurled the goat into the centre of the puddle, and waited near the bank. (He hadn’t stood at the very edge since 1974 - unless it was necessary for tending the line or gaffing and landing an eel. 1974 was the year that Jess, his beautiful brindle terrier, had been drinking at the water’s edge and had presumably been pulled in, never to be seen again). The goat emerged a few seconds later, its head above water as its legs kicked frantically bellow the surface. Within minutes the puddle was full of the scent and taste of its blood, just as Ernest wanted it. When the goat finally exhausted itself, it gave a last, pitiable call before sinking. Ernest hauled in the carcass while there was still warmth in it, immediately butchered it and cut it into chunks for baiting the line.
As for the line itself, Ernest used a thirty-six-foot wire rope. He attached a weight to the end to ensure the line sank straight and didn’t foul. A meat hook was attached a metre above the weight. Ernest then secured a thirty-six-foot hauling rope to the other end. The end of the hauling rope was tied to the trunk of a strong willow, then wound around an old stump cut by Ernest’s father years before. Ernest left himself about a fathom’s worth of hauling rope to tug on. If he needed more, he could loop it off over the top of the stump, or loop it back on if he had the monster hooked and needed to rest while dragging it from the depths. The combined lengths of the cable and hauling rope gave him seventy-two foot, or twelve fathoms length in total. The line never touched the bottom. And no wonder. The divers who attempted to find Ernest’s father’s body had said that the hole didn’t even narrow until about a hundred metres down, and after that seemed to keep going. The currents were too dangerous for them to continue searching, they said. The official theory was that Ernest’s father’s body must have been caught in a strong downward flow then got stuck under a ledge. But Ernest could guess what had really happened.
On the night of his father’s disappearance, Ernest and the old man had been feasting on the overgrown eels as usual. Their teeth and eyes flashed in the firelight as they chewed, and the grease and gore covered their beards. They laughed and joked between mouthfuls of the rich, oily meet, which they cut in huge chunks from steaming skewers made from sharpened sticks. Forgetting the cable, they’d tended nylon hand lines instead, attaching raw chicken to the hooks and reeling in more eels than they could cope with. But the meat of the eels was delicious. They couldn’t stop eating it. Feeling giddy and nauseous, they rested when their bellies were bursting, then resumed as soon as they were able. Why the eels tasted so good on that particular night had remained a mystery. They’d both eventually begun to stuff it into their mouths without even bothering to cook it. They avoided looking each other in the eye. There was no conversation, only grunts of satisfaction and the occasional chuckle-producing fart. Ernest’s father first began to tremble about an hour before dawn. He became feverish and sometimes his eyes would roll back of their own accord. Ernest heaped blankets over his father’s shoulders. “It is real, boy,” his father had said through chattering teeth. “It is real,” he asserted. Ernest nodded, then went to find wood for the fire. His father’s condition sobered him quickly, and he was even ready to suggest they should abandon the fishing and head home. Ernest returned in time to see his father diving naked into the heart of the puddle. Had he seen something in those inky depths, or just decided to take the fight to the taniwha? Ernest would never know. Was it really fourteen years ago?
Ern
est remembered it clearly. He’d paced the banks, howling and crying. He’d yelled continually at the puddle in tearful rage, until his voice became weak and his throat hoarse, until dawn tinged black clouds with orange. The rain stopped and it was hot and humid. The sky became thunderous and the ruffled surface reflected its steely colour like polished, hammered metal. Ernest finally collapsed, clawing at his hair and cursing the taniwha in the language of his people. A peculiar quiet followed – the sky became silent and fixed, and it seemed to Ernest as though he could hear everything at once: the wing-flick of every insect, the twitch of every leaf, the heart of every motionless muted bird.
Suddenly the puddle boiled furiously. The monster’s semi-human head had smashed through the surface, forced high in the air by a gargantuan eel-like neck. The neck angled down, so that the taniwha’s awful face glared right into Ernest’s. There was less than a foot between them, and Ernest nearly spewed from the stench of the beast’s foul breath. In its puckered mouth, rotten broken teeth were set like miniature tombstones in disarray. Its long straggly hair dripped and swayed. But most terrifying of all were its eyes – crazy green eyes that slurped up from the depths of its skull, filling the barren caverns of its empty dark eye-sockets.
There was a heavy, smoking stick lying half out of the fire, just at hand to Ernest’s right. It would’ve served as an effective cudgel. Ernest might also have driven the sharp pointed end – which was still glowing hot – into the monster’s putrid face, burning those icy, unholy green eyes away from the earth forever (though from that day on, he’d never sear them from his tortured memory). But when he tried to move, Ernest found he was unable. Finally coming face to face with the monster had caused him to become faint, giddy and nauseous. His blood felt as though it’d fallen away from him. He was left breathless, petrified, snap frozen cold and white as a pakeha.
Dead Bait Page 5