“This’ll do us, Bill!”
The short, square-faced man with the greying hair lowered his pack on the grassy flat beside the river and lay down to test a patch of springy pohuehue, commonly known as ‘Maori mattress’. Having done this, he jumped up and started breaking off dry twigs from the bushes nearby and making them into a little pile.
“Fine night. We won’t need the tent. And this turpentine bush is just the stuff to get a fire going.”
His lantern-jawed companion, comfortably reclining against his pack and stretching out his long legs, glanced at the sky but made no effort to join in the activity. Instead he took out a cigarette. “Isn’t the new hut somewhere round here?” he asked.
“Probably just round the corner!” said the short man scornfully. “Do you know Forestry has just put in a helipad to fly in parties of overseas adventure tourists?”
“We’re not going there?”
He was answered with a derisive grunt. “That hotel!”
“Fair enough,” said the other, lighting up and taking his first puff. Staying at a hut didn’t worry him because the mattresses would have been more comfortable than the pohuehue. “Any deer, I wonder?” he went on philosophically as he scanned the grassy river flat for movement. Although he had not brought his rifle, the action was a reflex one for him. It was a long flat and he could see possibly 500 metres up the valley. The late afternoon sun was still on it, but the shadows were advancing from the valley sides. Suddenly he stiffened.
“There’s something up there behind that big rock.”
“Deer?”
“No. A flash in the sun. Metal, I think.”
“Do you think it’s the hut?”
“No, it was moving. Gone now.”
That second-to-last night in December, as Stan McTaggart lay back under the stars warmly cocooned in his sleeping bag, he thought with relish of the great shapes that loomed ahead where he and Bill Weatherley were to spend the next ten days. These were the Raukumara Ranges, which stretched from the Urewera to East Cape and were the most rugged and also the least known of New Zealand’s great forested ranges.
Beyond the headwaters of the Waiwawa lay fifty miles of high mountain country, often mist-covered even in summer, and deeply gashed by impenetrable gorges lined with black slimy rock which hardly saw the light of day. Above the bushline were rocky crags and peaks covered with a dense jungle of leatherwood. Great rivers had formed in the heart of the mountains and, rolling logs and boulders before them, every decade terrorised the lowland farmers with ferocious floods. Here, before the European came, Ngati Porou on the eastern side and Te Whanau-a-Apanui on the west fought and ambushed each other on the incredibly difficult trail which once linked the head of the Tapuaeroa to the headwaters of the Raukokore and the Kereu. Along this trail are sites like “the place where hundreds weep” and “the place where the greenstone mere is sharpened”. Later, here and in the adjacent Urewera, Te Kooti, the daring Hau Hau leader, and Rua, the prophet of Maungapohatu, had found sanctuaries, hidden from Pakeha eyes, where they inspired their followers, the Tuhoe, the people of the mist, with visions as awesome and mysterious as the mountains themselves.
Only Hikurangi, the great sacred mountain on the eastern boundary, had a track to its summit.
Yet sleep did not come to Stan.
Angry thoughts kept churning over. The management plan put out before Christmas proposed to open up the Raukumaras to swarms of camera-clicking, helicopter-riding, dollar-spending, overseas adventure tourists. The Government had suddenly decided that the Raukumaras had huge potential and needed promoting as the finest “wilderness experience area” in the world. They wanted to build huts, tracks and helipads everywhere. The newly completed Upper Waiwawa Hut was mentioned ominously as a “gateway”.
It was going to be a battle to keep the present zoning. The great forested interior was virtually without tracks or huts. You might almost call it a “de facto” wilderness; a place where those with a pioneer spirit could find their own way using a compass, swimming rivers and bush-crashing up leading ridges in order that they might retain the rugged spirit of independence which was part of the New Zealand character.
Stan was an old-fashioned tramper with an old-fashioned ambition. His aim was to discover a valley which no one else had trod. To him this could be found only at what he called “the point of maximum inaccessibility”. In November he had pored long over the inch-to-the-mile topographic maps of the Raukumara Ranges. From the Urewera to East Cape they had been spread out on the lounge floor so that he could study every valley, every ridge in their great green heart.
At last he had seen it! A valley of which there were no records, where the contours formed a solid brown band writhing like a snake in the heart of the central massif, a valley with a “would it go or wouldn’t it” gorge. His finger rested on it while his heart thrilled.
It was his forgotten valley, his Shangri La.
The name on it was Waitoa. Aptly the translation of the Maori was “rough waters”.
But he still couldn’t sleep. Because of the proposed change in the zoning and the new emphasis on development, the multinational mining companies were hovering like vultures waiting for the relaxing of the rules of the present Forest Park. He fumed as he recalled his visit to the University before Christmas. That bumptious young lecturer in the geology department who had been so full of his own importance had even had the cheek to ask him if he wanted a mineral survey done.
Strange that he didn’t want to know about that colleague of his who had done the survey. Yet he would have liked to talk to the chap. Before each trip he made a point of getting to know about things like limestone belts and possible caves and underground rivers
The tiredness after ten hours of fording and re-fording the Waiwawa at last overcame him. His aching legs stretched out deliciously on the mattress of pohuehue. Bill was already snoring. A few yards away the infant Waiwawa gambolled and sang its way along through the flat.
Why can’t they leave the mountains alone?
CHAPTER 3
Bill was a deerstalker.
He read the ground like a book. He observed recent hoof prints, droppings, chewed shoots, broken branches, scents on the wind and other signs of the presence of deer. As they walked up to the Waiwawa Hut at about nine o’clock the next morning, he glanced behind the rock which turned out to be just below the hut. He also looked carefully all around the valley and the hill slopes. As he approached the hut, he turned aside to examine the helipad just below it.
A lean, athletic man sat on the bench outside cleaning his rifle. His clean shorts and shirt, his long socks and polished shoes would not have been out of place in a suburban shopping mall.
“Gidday,” said Bill in his slow, laconic drawl, noting the Winchester 308.
Stan added briskly. “Just on our way through.”
“Where are you blokes from?” Bill continued pleasantly.
The other looked at him blankly. “No speak English.”
“Let’s sign the hut book and get going,” said Stan looking at his watch.
“Hut book,” said Bill slowly and distinctly.
The other nodded and disappeared inside murmuring “hut boo-ook”.
“Bloody tourists!” said Stan.
Bill examined the row of boots on the verandah. He counted twelve pairs. The party seemed unusually quiet.
An older man, similarly neat, clean and athletic, but tall, spare and with a ginger goatee, came to the door with a book in his hand.
“Sorry to interrupt your morning prayer, boss,” Bill said.
There was no hint of a smile. “I am the leader of the tourist party which is staying in this hut,” the other replied. “I have been asked to check the routes of all other parties coming through. Would you please tell me your route and where you camped last night?”