There was still no response.
“There was a tapu, wasn’t there? That’s why the elders didn’t want a service in the church.”
“But why do you need to know?
“Because he was my brother and I cannot believe that he would do anything… like that.” He could bear it no more and burst into tears.
Behind her tough and weathered exterior she was a kind woman. She put her arms around him and pressed her cheek to his, and he felt it warm and wet with her own tears. “You are a good boy, Tane. And Hone was a good boy. I have told you all I know. Your life is before you. Go to a good school, get to university and work hard.” She paused, drew back and looked straight at him and said in her quiet way. “Some things are not right. If you can make them right, you will do well.”
The years passed. Tane never forgot his grandmother’s advice. He studied hard and excelled both at school and at university. But in everything he did he remembered his brother Hone and kept steadily before him the need to be worthy of him. Nor could he keep it out of his mind that one day he might clear his name.
CHAPTER 7
“Two trampers are overdue near the new huia sanctuary.”
It was January 12. David picked up the 1ZB headline on his transistor as he took a sip of coffee while working in his study in the Geology Department. Apart from time at home with his father at Christmas and New Year and doing a Rangitoto-to-St Heliers swim, he had not taken a holiday. What was the point when he did not have a wife or close friend that he wanted to go away with? Besides, his research was reaching an interesting stage.
The gazettal of the sanctuary together with the subsequent withdrawal of the new management plan proposal for the whole of the Raukumaras was a disaster. It was going to be more difficult to get mineral exploration licences anywhere in the Raukumaras.
Birds! Birds! How could the Government give away millions of dollars from an area with such potential for development?
Two Auckland men are overdue in the rugged Raukumara Ranges near East Cape. Originally the party were to attempt to reach the Waitoa Valley but, on being advised of the closure of the valley due to the rediscovery of the huia, they changed their route and were to come out at Mangaorongo Station in the Gisborne back country five days ago. The men are Stanley McTaggart and William Weatherley, both trampers of over thirty years’ experience. A search was commenced yesterday by the Gisborne and Opotiki police with assistance from Search and Rescue volunteers from Gisborne, Opotiki, Rotorua and Auckland.
Thirty years’ experience? The greenie who had called on him about the Raukumaras just before Christmas and been so abrasive? The creep looked about fifty. Was it just a coincidence?
Then that anger surged again. “Why the hell did he want to see Tane?”
David had met Tane when the latter joined the Department after gaining his doctorate at the Australian National University at Canberra. For the two years before Tane had taken off they had shared a flat in Grafton. He still lived in this flat, but on his own. It had been an unusual friendship, for the two were entirely different. David had an excellent brain, was tidy and methodical and worked hard and conscientiously. He was also gifted with a fine physique. As a result, it was not surprising that he had been successful in everything he did. He had been Dux at Auckland Grammar as well as school swimming champion, had gained First Class Honours at Auckland University and a doctorate at the University of Washington in Seattle. In his five years as a lecturer at the University of Auckland he had had several articles published in scientific journals and had done some administrative work in the Department. Partly as a result he had recently been appointed Senior Lecturer.
Conscious of his gifts, David was ambitious, but he knew that advancement in the Department meant working at the interface of research and development. Moreover, his superiors valued the direction of his ambition because they saw that it would help to build up the Department. In particular they noted his growing grasp of the application of geological research to large development projects and the way he was beginning to understand and relate to the business sector.
It might be mentioned too that David, the only son of an adoring and wealthy father, never lacked encouragement or financial assistance. Tane, on the other hand, was abrasive, unpredictable and erratic. But he was at the same time a genius, the foremost authority in the Department on minerals, deduction and analysis. An empathy or instinct for minerals together with uncanny powers of observation enabled him almost to see through rocks to their inner components. The scientific analysis of samples he regarded virtually as a second opinion to confirm what he already sensed by intuition.
But in his attitude towards the Department Tane had no idea of working as a member of a team. He did not share his research, and would even go as far as to seek embargoes on its use by anyone except himself. He refused to be associated with the Geological Survey.
But the main trouble with Tane in the eyes of his colleagues was that he appeared to have an agenda. He was of Whanau Apanui and had been brought up at Te Kaha on the East Coast beyond Opotiki where his grandmother had been deeply learned in Maoritanga. This knowledge she had passed on to him and his whole thinking was saturated with it. Even though he had chosen a scientific career, he didn’t always look at things scientifically. In a university which prided itself on academic freedom this was not unusual, but it was the way his Maoritanga influenced his evaluation of his colleagues’ work which caused the problem.
“You can’t go in and survey that valley because it’s full of wahi tapu that haven’t been put on the register yet.”
“You can’t touch that mountain. It has its own spirit and is sacred to the tangata whenua.”
His most exasperating response to their objections was, “You don’t feel the land. You don’t understand it.”
In the days before these matters obtained a measure of official recognition there was a suspicion among his colleagues that Tane’s objectivity as a scientist was affected by what might be loosely called “Maori spiritual values”. He spoke of wei or spirit and the mauri or life force. He would use Maori terms as much as scientific ones. He described exploring the secrets of the mountains as a kind of spiritual journey which involved sharing a relationship with the mountains, respecting their mana , entering into their taonga or treasures.
He almost seemed to be claiming that the mountains spoke to him.
David had a regard for the Maori too, particularly from boyhood holidays on the East Coast when his family had camped in remote coastal areas and had had contact with the local Maori landowners. However, his feeling might be said to be somewhat distant and paternalistic, and he would not have thought of connecting it with his present work.
The immediate problem for the Department was securing enough money from the Government and private firms to get research projects off the ground. Tane was respected for his geological ability, but the amorphous, uncomfortable – and commercially sterile – agenda of Maori spiritual values found little favour with his more hard-headed colleagues and even less from their private sponsors.
How could two such opposite personalities be drawn together?
From his earliest childhood David had been abnormally shy. Whether this had its origins in being a too-much loved only child or whether there were other factors, it could not be known. As he grew up, his sporting ability earned respect but he still found it difficult to form close relationships. As a compensation he had devoted himself to excelling in sport and his school and university work.
Nevertheless, he needed friendship.