For a long time David remembered that look and the sound of the door closing. Although he had never before lost his temper like this, he was too proud to take back his words. From that time, although they were flatmates, he and Tane ceased to be friends.
Soon after this there was a change in Tane. He became increasingly secretive and seemed to lose interest in the fieldwork that he had always loved. He hardly spoke to the other members of staff, even to argue. One day he told David he was resigning his lectureship and leaving Auckland. David made some inane comment about sacrificing all his training and his gifts.
“We’re just on different wavelengths,” Tane replied.
Had he heard from Tane? He remembered one postcard, but he had never made any attempt to find out where he was.
The quarrel had been a disagreeable episode in his life. He needed to forget it. In fact, he had been trying to forget it for three years. He had work to do. The project he had started just before Christmas was vital to him and to the Department. It was to be the defining point of his career. He turned to his notes again and tried to concentrate.
But it was no use.
Suddenly he realised how lonely he was. He lifted his eyes beyond the native trees that lined the drive outside the Geology building, beyond the old Chemistry buildings on Symonds Street. In his mind’s eye a great bushed range shimmered in the summer’s heat. He saw a dusty, worn pack and boots hastily thrown down on the verandah at the Grafton flat.
The anger he had felt at the disguised greenie just before Christmas had surprised him with its force. He had recognised it as the same anger that had welled up in him on that fateful evening to cause the quarrel, the anger that had ended his friendship with Tane. Why had he felt so angry? There had been no reason for it.
He had never felt this kind of anger before. Was it the attack on his father? Whatever it was, he had over-reacted.
In his mind’s eye he was back in the flat again, and Tane was looking at him after his attack. And in that look was no anger, no reproach and no retaliation. Only the look of a child who was surprised and hurt.
Tane, in his rebellious lonely paths and his abrasive argumentative manner, had trusted him. That was why he had started talking to him. He had mentioned his brother and had already opened his heart to him on his history as he had done to no one else. Perhaps there was something more that he wanted to talk about. He had cause to think that David would listen and understand. True, typically enough he was slow in getting to the point and had been diverted into provocative language.
But what had he done? He had allowed himself to retaliate angrily about what Tane had said and to get into an argument about what were probably side issues. He had closed his mind. He had been judgmental. He had refused to listen to what his friend really wanted to say.
Then Tane had gone out and the door had closed.
No, he was not emotional. But he couldn’t help it. The tears started running down his face as he saw once again that face, the face of the one friend he had had. The friend whom he had failed at the very time his help was needed. The friend that he had called a friend but had never made the effort to understand.
“Tane! I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing!”
David continued to act strangely.
Acting almost blindly as his tears continued to flow, he reached for his prized research project papers and swept them together into one file. Then he took the file, placed it in the lowest drawer of his metal filing cabinet, slammed the drawer shut and locked it. There was a finality, a satisfaction, a determination in the sound of that slam. He was deliberately closing a part of his life, a self-centred addiction to work which since Tane had left had acted like a drug to deaden his memory and all that had been true in that friendship.
Then with unusual agitation he began to search. It was not until his office looked as if it had been ransacked that he paused, holding up in triumph a postcard with a picture on it of Gisborne’s Wainui Beach. Tane had sent only one, shortly after he left Auckland. There had been no address, but right at the bottom he saw through his tears the familiar scrawl that was Tane’s handwriting.
“They’re wanting someone at Waitehaia Station”
Was it just a coincidence that Waitehaia bordered on the Raukumara Ranges, where he appeared to have made his last trip?
CHAPTER 8
If you go about as far east as you can go, and about as high, you come to a land that the rest of New Zealand has forgotten. It is the great empty expanse of the high backcountry between Gisborne and the East Cape.
Here snow lies sometimes in the winter, and, even in summer a chill wind blasts out from the strange pinnacles of rock that guard the approaches to a great mountain range. High up on the bare ridges, the charred stumps of rata still stand, forming ghostly patterns in the mist with the moss-encrusted fence posts and rusting wire.
Man, in his brief glory of axe and fire, established his hold, built his homesteads, sheltered them with macrocarpa, and covered the denuded hills with sheep. He was too greedy. The hills, over-burned and then over-grazed, fell off into the valleys, transforming the watercourses into wide seas of shingle. The forest fought back with its vanguard of bracken and second growth. In a softer age labour could not be enticed to live forty miles from the nearest pub. The homesteads decayed among the macrocarpa. Even the run-holders preferred to stay in town, making seasonal sorties for shearing and lambing, and for the rest of the time setting tank traps to deter rustlers.
Now there was profit in pine trees rather than sheep. The run-holders had not been reluctant to sell. A dark green sward began to move like a tide up the eroding hillsides where once stood in verdant splendour the triple canopy of the Raukumara.
David gazed with some anxiety at the little wooden cross on the mound beside the notice.
“It’s those larrikins in the forestry camp out for free meat. Most of them are bloody townies. They’ve got no respect for anything.” The run-holder looked at David’s dusty Honda Accord. “Where are you from?”
“Actually, I’m from Auckland.”
“You haven’t got a gun, have you?”
Quickly David explained the purpose of his visit. It turned out that the notice belied Toby Wilson’s real character. It was only after more half-pints than he could really take, a dirge on the state of the economy, especially wool prices, and a recitation of the exploits of former All Blacks from Poverty Bay, that David was able to broach the subject again.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, Tane Ngata was a colleague of mine at University.’’
“University, eh?” A long, searching look as the run-holder helped himself to another drink and drank it reflectively.
“I understand he used to work here. It would have been about three years ago.”
“Maori boy, eh. Pint-size with curly hair?” He nodded. “Never picked him for a professor. Lived in the whare at the end of the road, and did odd jobs round the station. Kept to himself. The missus and I didn’t see very much of him. He didn’t stay long. Not more than a month or two as far as I can remember.” His weather-beaten face looked out the window.
“I’d really be grateful if you could help me. I’m worried about him. He could be in trouble.”