“Trouble, eh?” The voice had that Maori drawl which Pakeha acquire if they have been long on the East Coast.
“No one has heard from him for three years. This station was the last contact.”
“There’s all sorts of bloody goings-on you read in the papers. Blokes getting chopped up into little bits. International gangs and the like.” David was being eyed in a curious way. “We wouldn’t be wanting that carry-on here.”
“I realise he might have been a difficult employee.”
“Difficult, eh?” He poured David another drink. “OK, I’ll tell you. I thought he was a crook.”
David looked at him in surprise.
“The police told me some bastard was growing cannabis round here. I had my suspicions when this bloke spent so much time up the back and he didn’t shoot pigs or possums. So one day I followed him. I didn’t see any plant, but I saw him.”
Toby held out the bottle towards David’s glass, but David shook his head energetically.
The run-holder pointed to a long bare ridge which ran up from the farm buildings. “He was squatting up there beyond the last gate. You look out on the big range from there. At first he didn’t see me. Then he turned round and shot off so fast that I couldn’t see where he went.”
“What was he doing when you first saw him?”
The reply was slow in coming. “I couldn’t believe it at first.”
David waited.
“He was bawling.”
There was another long pause. “I like my hands to be happy. They work better. So next time I knew he was home, I took a couple of bottles with me. You see I yak a bit with them and he never used to come up to the house. I went down to ask him if he’d care for a drop. Well I knew he was there, but he didn’t answer. So I opened the door. He starts yelling at me. “Leave me alone!”
“After that, I couldn’t get him to work any more. I think he used to go off out the back most days. If I saw him he’d clear off in the opposite direction. I thought he was on drugs. Watery eyes, never shaved or washed his clothes. Once I asked the doctor to call, but he never let him in. The police kept on asking me about him, and one day they came up, and demanded to search the whare where he lived. I went up with them. He was out, and we broke in. Didn’t realise it leaked. I wouldn’t have let a bloody dog sleep there if I’d known. No sign of any drugs though. While they were searching, he showed up. They called out to him, but he backed away and hid behind some logs, just like a bloody animal. They went after him and he lit off. We never saw him again. The police put a search out for him and a warrant, but no one round here has seen him since.”
That afternoon David climbed the hill behind the homestead. He followed the fence line which led up the long ridge. It was a blazing hot day, and there was little shade save under the occasional old charred stump. He was fit and long-legged, and, as he strode on up the ridge, the feeling of being out on the hills exhilarated him. In spite of his fears he started whistling.
Soon the whole land began to open out below him. The Waitehaia River plunged out of the ranges in a deep gorge with a series of rapids. Towards the coast, he saw the bare, eroded hill country with a winding road along the ridge top, and tiny groups of trees marking the homesteads.
It was not till he reached the top of the ridge that he saw the view to the inland. Rearing up beyond the valley of the Waitehaia and right across the western horizon was the wide sweep of the main range of the Raukumaras, mounting up in great folds of forested ridges and valleys, till the bush itself faded into wind-blasted skeletons of trees and leatherwood and patches of snow grass. Soaring clear from the very crest of the ranges were two massive peaks with sheer rock battlements where even now the clouds were gathering.
Now, as he looked out on these peaks, they changed. They rose up like great horned monsters, fearsome, terrifying, menacing.
At that moment he knew that the police were wrong. The run-holder too.
That lonely, sensitive, turbulent man had needed a place where he could find comfort and peace. And where could he find it but in the great mystery and majesty of nature which he loved and which he had been led to explore?
That story about his brother had mentioned a tapu broken. And the tapu was connected with the mountains.
He had never made an effort to understand Tane. Yet he sensed that it was Tane’s strange relationship with the mountains which underlay his superb geological insight. Something had drawn him back to the Raukumaras . Was there a link between these mountains and the tragic death of his brother?
But why had he wept?
There came to David’s mind another picture. It came right out of his childhood, from the home of his grandparents who had been religious. A picture of a man, fugitive on a bare plain under an angry sky, head bowed, one arm over his eyes, the other thrust upwards in desperate appeal.
A man who had broken a relationship and could not find his way back.
Cain! The one who in a fit of jealousy kills his brother and then, driven from his home, becomes a wanderer and a stranger on the face of the earth. Cain – the man all alone – the murderer whose crime cannot be expiated.
Sometimes the imagination conceives fearful things which, strive as we will, we cannot drive out.
It was then that the cowering figure behind the logs looked at him – straight at him. He saw again that naive, childlike, piteous face, the same face that looked at him before he walked out three years before.
Tane, what did you want to ask me?
CHAPTER 9
The eyes terrified him.
From the bathroom mirror at the night shelter a wild, defiant creature stared out, accusing and mocking him.
He shrank away. He wanted to flee from that face as he had run away from everything else – the person he had once been, the position he had held, the people who had once been friends, even the care which he used to take of himself.
Running, running, running – finding some place where he thought he was safe, then having to run away again.
Even the mountains had failed him. The relationship was no more.
From Waitehaia he had travelled by day and night, taking several days. After one look most drivers had sped past him, and he had had to walk a lot of the way. He had found a bed at the Auckland City Mission among the homeless because it was one place where they didn’t ask questions.
Tomorrow he would go to the meeting and talk with his friend again as they had once talked.
Surely he will listen!
When he walked up to the hotel, he was the only one for whom the porter did not open the door. He stood in front of the reception counter in his torn, dusty T-shirt and jeans, with his lank, unkempt hair and unshaven face. The guests stood apart from him and the staff didn’t appear to see him. He reached in his pocket and pulled out his membership card.
“We’d be honoured if you joined us,” his friend had said “but you don’t need to go to meetings.”
The card was faded, soiled and crumpled. He pushed it towards the shining brass buttons of a blue-uniformed concierge, but kept his head down. The buttons drew back, there was a scarcely concealed sniff, then a searching glance at the photo and the printing on the card. He took the card and showed it to a colleague who said nothing but raised his eyebrows. The first man then said stiffly: “Your meeting is in the Board Room on the first floor up the escalator – sir.”
He crept around the far edge of the marble-floored atrium; he shunned close contact with the guests and business clients and the looks and the sniffs which would go with it – then he went up the escalator. At the top he felt faint, and realised he hadn’t eaten for two days and had had very little sleep. Approaching the Board Room, his feet seemed to drag in the lush carpet of the reception hall.