As in one sickening moment a canoeist loses control and feels himself borne helplessly onwards into a roaring whirling mass of white foaming water, so now they were being swept inexorably into a very maelstrom of horror and destruction.
The ranges now hemmed them in on all sides. Kate had turned off the main highway onto a roughly metalled road that wound up the narrow valley of the Kaniwhaniwha River.
The bush, alive with cicadas and tui, rolled down into sunlit paddocks. Every now and then the crunching of the metal was interrupted by the rattling of a wooden one-way bridge as little streams rippled down from the valley sides, their pleasant burblings fading out as they were lost in the sleepy meadows.
Kate’s organisation had been superb . They learned now who her Opotiki contacts were. “My parents have a farm round here,” she said casually, “and they happen to believe me instead of what they see in the papers.” Half way up the valley, she stopped outside an isolated hay barn. There was no one in sight. She led the way into the barn, and after some rummaging in the hay, she presented them each with a pack complete with all their needs for fourteen days: tents, sleeping bags and covers; spoons, knives, plastic bowls and mugs; billies and dehydrated food; matches, a primus and bottles of white spirit for when it might be unsafe to light a fire – even torches for each of them.
At the head of the valley, the road would end, and the tramping would begin.
David glanced at Kate as she slid behind the wheel again. After they had dropped Dick Burton at Rotorua, she had taken over. She had driven the one hundred and fifty miles at a furious pace, and she had had no sleep. She did not appear tired. Indeed she looked – well, you might say – glowing. Strange. He had never thought of her that way. Efficient yes, cheerful, and game as they come. What a fantastic job she had done arranging the getaway from the church with the clothes and the car switch. Without her he would not have known what to do as they faced the terrible curse of the tutumaiao. And she was with him now, and she was glowing.
She turned to him and smiled. He placed his fingers gently on her arm. “Thanks for your help back there.”
She did not seem to resent his liberty. “It was we who were helped.”
“By the way, I’d like to apologise for dragging you into all this.”
“You big oaf! it’s far too late to apologise.”
07:00 hours on Monday.
David found himself looking out of the window of the car across the sunny, dew-filled paddocks. Suddenly he was startled by a loud roar close by and was surprised to see a yellow helicopter with a large Number 1 painted on the fuselage, alighting about a hundred yards from the road.
“Only a pilot in it. It’ll be picking up hunters,” said Tane.
Kate slowed down and looked at David. “It’d be a lot quicker,” she said with an impish grin.
He glanced back along the road. At the other end of the flat he saw the dust swirling behind a red sports car being driven up the valley. It was not a farmer’s car and it was being driven very fast.
Kate had seen it too. She stopped. “The helicopter!” he shouted.
Over the fence, across the paddock, they ran, stumbling, falling, with their heavy packs.
“We need to leave straight away,” said David as they piled in.
The pilot saw the revolver in David’s hand, and he started the rotors again.
“How long does it take to warm up?” asked Kate anxiously.
The sports car had stopped. Determined-looking Pakeha in football jerseys emerged with revolvers in their hands, and were looking towards the helicopter. Now they were over the fence and running through the paddock, shouting as they came.
“Stop them! They’re the kidnappers!”
“They’re going to shoot up your helicopter,” said Kate.
The pilot decided to protect his helicopter and ask questions later. Fortunately, the engine was warm. He lifted up just as the leader of the pack flung himself furiously towards the skids.
David marvelled at the speed with which the pilot moved both feet and both hands, all on different controls, at split second intervals. They climbed, veered, looped, wove miraculously through the fusillade of shots that sprayed from the men standing on the meadow. Soon a windbreak of poplars rose comfortingly to break the line of fire.
“Congratulations!” said David. “You handled that lot pretty well.”
“You’re not my hunters,” said the pilot. “My boss can’t afford to break a contract.”
“I wouldn’t go back if I were you,” said Kate. “Those types we met are not very friendly.”
“I don’t suppose you happen to know the Waitoa?” asked David, speaking as if to a taxi driver.
“But that’s the huia sanctuary!”
“That’s where we’re going.”
The pilot had heard the latest news bulletin and realised who his passengers were. Looking at the revolver in David’s hands, he knew that he was wasting his breath. He hoped his boss was insured against hijackers and decided to play dumb and wait for an opportunity.
Not long afterwards, the frustrated watchers saw, two thousand feet above the valley, a tiny speck pause alongside a great bushed arm of the Raukumara. Then it vanished into the anonymity of the mountains.
CHAPTER 36
Dick Burton was a ranger of the old school.
He had not been to University or taken a degree in psychology or education or business management. When he had left school, on gaining School Certificate, he had joined the Wildlife Service as a trainee. He had worked at cutting tracks, making ponds, constructing boardwalks, netting and ringing birds. They had given him oilskin and boots, a slasher, a hammer and a spade, and he had worked outdoors in all weathers, in the wind and the rain and the burning sun. He loved the feel of the roots of a plant as he gently bedded it into the welcoming soil, the damp fresh smell of the forest floor after rain, the sound of the children as they romped through the forest on one of his newly constructed boardwalks. So deeply did he feel these things that he even wrote poetry about them, a pastime unusual for one of rugged weather-beaten appearance and sometimes uncouth language.
Ginger was his hair, gingery and stubborn his nature. What he believed in, he believed in strongly and simply, and he was not easily turned aside. Fiercely loyal, he would battle for the trees or the birds under his care with an intensity that some people would see as abrasive or one-eyed.
Those who did not know him well might dismiss him as a simple man who wore his heart on his sleeve. But you could not be a ranger for thirty years without knowing something of the worse side of human nature. Slow he might be, but he was also wary. Years of dealing with certain members of the public such as wildlife poachers had developed a healthy sense of suspicion.
The appointment to the Waitoa Sanctuary was the high point of his life. The only disadvantage was the advice that he would be working outside the sanctuary and that permission to enter rested entirely with the Director-General of Forestry.
Dick Burton was not a desk man.
After alighting from the stolen Mercedes he strode off in the sulphur-laden Rotorua night making for the police station. But on the way he decided to call in to the Wildlife office in Pukaki Street. “I’ll scotch those bloody kidnappers’ stories.”
At 3 a.m. on Monday the light in his office still burned as he read and reread the huia file.
Bloody kidnappers! Mental geologists! What a cheek they had had, first turning a gun on him, then telling him that cock and bull story about a uranium discovery in his sanctuary!
He looked at the file again. He examined the photograph, which looked pretty genuine as far as he was concerned. He’d never read Buller’s Birds, though he had heard people talk about it. But Kevin’s report was said to be faultless. He was regarded as the Ornithological Society’s expert on rare birds. That was why it had not been considered necessary to get the Ornithological Society regional recorder to sign it off.