CHAPTER 35
From his time as an undergraduate and graduate at the University of Auckland, Tane had loved the mountains, especially their rocks. He had been awed by the dark Waitakere gorges where the Pararaha and the Piha Streams carved deep into the black volcanic rock as they plunged down to the wild west coast. He had climbed the rearing columnar basalt towers in Great Barrier and Coromandel. He had aqua-tramped down fossilised sea beds exposed by the rivers of the Urewera. He had walked out on the delectable ridges of the “candy mountains” of North West Nelson. By the time he went to Australia for his doctorate he knew nearly all the mountain ranges of New Zealand.
Tane’s knowledge of mountains was not just of routes or peaks climbed or of crossings made. He knew the secrets undisclosed to those who somewhat fearfully only pass through and remain extraneous to the mountains’ spirit. He sensed the mystical nature expressed in the Maori names like Moehau and Hauturu and Maungapohatu. He knew the place of the thunder and the mists and where the wind gathered. From the deep dark gorges and from towering bluffs he read history, almost from the beginning of time. On the soaring ridges and in the river beds, he fathomed the blending of minerals in all their multitudinous hues.
When he became a geologist, the pattern of his life did not change, but he began to search deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the mountains. For him it was not so much a search as a relationship. It was because he was aware of his relationship with the mountains that he was able to explore and discover. As with the Maori of old, he entered into the mountains with awe, not to exploit but to respect. And the mountains in turn revealed to him their secrets.
Then everything collapsed. What have you done with what we gave you? they accused him.
He could not speak to them as he did before, and he wept because they had become his enemies. But that was not the worst thing. The mountains had already signalled the revenge that they were preparing, and there was no way back.
It was like a vision of hell.
That was why he could not face the mountains again.
He had not told David. There were some things which David could never understand.
4.30 a.m. on Monday 24th January.
The course from Rotorua for two and a half hours had been eastwards. Kate was driving and David was with her in the front seat. The sky was already lightening and he peered excitedly ahead for the Raukumaras which would soon be revealed.
The light was coming more intensely than usual and David averted his eyes.
“Isn’t it too early for the dawn?” said Kate, “or the sunrise?” But her voice faltered.
Suddenly the whole landscape was ablaze.
Red, flaming red, burned the sky, a wall of fire stretching right across the horizon in front of them. And silhouetted against it was a huge dark shape like the grotesque saw-tooth outline of an advancing prehistoric monster.
An unearthly scream shattered the silence. Hands lunged forward over Kate and shaking white fingers reached out towards the ignition keys trying to pull them out.
“Get away, you fool!” shouted Kate as the car veered and swayed across the road at a hundred miles an hour.
David threw himself against Tane, forcing him back, and they grappled, their writhing shapes lit up in the fearful red, the car interior seemingly bathed in blood. At last he was able to overpower him.
“Stop the car!” he said.
Slowly, slowly, the terrible colour in the sky faded. David felt the horror and the trembling subside. The real dawn came. The windows were open and he could smell the dew and the pennyroyal, see the sleepy cows across the misty paddocks. The silence stole in, healing, reassuring.
But for David the silence was pregnant with terror. The man he had wrestled with was a stranger. The same mop of dark curly hair, but a man whose character had suddenly, totally, changed.
Tane was huddled now in an almost foetal position, the sunken eyes looking at him fearfully.
“What was it?”
A shaking hand pointed to the mountains. “I can’t go on.”
“Because of that red sky? “
“You can’t help me. You never understood me.”
“I know I didn’t. But now I want to listen.”
There was a long pause. “It was – the tutumaiao.”
“Is it a sign?”
“The second aitua, or omen.”
“It is saying something?”
“Papatuanuku is angry. The first one was a warning. The second one means she is about to take revenge.”
“Papatuanuku is the earth mother, I know. But revenge for what?”
“Defilement.”
Kate was looking back anxiously the way they had come. “Dick will have told the police. They’ll be following us,” she said.
“Hold on, Kate. We must listen.” He turned to Tane. “You heard about this from your people?”
“Te Whanau-a-Apanui. The first tutumaiao was three years ago. Just before I went to Waitehaia.”
“Did they understand?”
“They understood all right, and they were terrified.”
“What did they do the first time?”
“They went to the forests, the fishing grounds, the kumara and maize crops, but they couldn’t find any sign of a defilement. But there was a breach of tapu all the same. They only knew it was in the mountains because things kept happening. Like drownings on the Motu and pig hunters not returning. Even the rahui didn’t help. The trouble was they didn’t look far enough”.
“What do you mean?”
“They didn’t realise who was responsible.” And as Tane spoke his eyes narrowed and his face twisted strangely.
“Surely you can’t think…?”
Tane did not reply, but turned his face away.
And David suddenly knew. Waitehaia – it was not a sick imagining. The member of the whanau who was most sensitive to the spirit of the mountains had known all along why that spirit was disturbed.
“Surely you’ve been healed,” but even as he said it, the words mocked him.
Tane looked back at him with fearful eyes. He seemed to be curling back into a foetal position.
He felt the same numbing fear gripping him, and desperately he turned to Kate. “I don’t know what to do.”
“My pastor once laid his hands on someone like that. Do you think…?”
David didn’t know quite what happened next but he found himself and Kate sitting on each side of Tane and saying over and over again some of the words that the vicar had used at the service. As he did so, he felt the taut, coiled body gradually relax and saw the light coming back into the face and the eyes beginning to focus outwardly.
“Thanks, you tohunga,” said Tane at last in his normal voice.
David sank back, exhausted, full of silent gratitude.
Tane was mopping his brow. “That tutumaiao. It was for me. I wanted to run away. But now I know I can’t.” He looked ahead to where the ranges rose in the real dawn, fresh, cool, their highest peaks mist-wrapped. “They are my life. I don’t know what’s going to happen and I’m scared as hell. But there are things which have to be put right.”
David looked at Kate. “I think Tane is saying that it’s OK for him to go on. How do you feel?”
“Le-et’s go!” said Kate as she pressed the starter and the Mercedes leapt forward towards the Raukumara.
David too was scared. They were probably the most wanted people in New Zealand – the subjects of a manhunt by police and who knows how many other people. Yet what they were involved in wasn’t just the physical action of a rescue or a kidnap or an escape or a chase. It was a struggle with invisible forces whose very existence a short while ago he would have doubted – Papatuanuku, the tutumaiao, the utu.
The tutumaiao showed that the mountains were still defiled. What that defilement was he did not know.