Show Me a Huia! Read online

  SHOW ME A HUIA!

  Chris Barfoot

  Copyright Chris Barfoot August 2019

  ebook edition

  Frontispiece: plate of a painting by J.G Keulemans of the huia, both male and female.

  Reproduced by permission of the British Library from Walter Buller’s Birds of New Zealand, the complete work of J.G Keulemans, printed in 1888.

  J.G Keulemans was a Dutch artist commissioned by Buller. Birds of New Zealand reprinted by Te Papa Press, a subsidiary of the Te Papa National Museum, 2013.

  Cover design: Bev Robitai

  Fiction: thriller, New Zealand, Maoritanga, conservation

  To my wife Pat for her

  encouragement and inspiration.

  What would the world be, once bereft

  of wet and wildness? Let them be left,

  O let them be left, wildness and wet;

  Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

  “Inversnaid”: Gerard Manley Hopkins

  CHAPTER 1

  The gangly young man in T-shirt and jeans bounded two at a time up the stairs of the Geology Department, then loped along a deserted corridor lined with cases and cupboards filled with ancient rock specimens, whistling at the top of his lungs.

  It was nine o’clock in the morning two weeks before Christmas at the University of Auckland. The white Italianate tower with its delicate wedding cake tracery soared into a Mediterranean-blue sky. Beneath its shade the dew still sparkled on the dark green, leathery leaves of the taraire trees, but the cicadas were singing their hearts out as they welcomed the first heat of a perfect summer’s day.

  The students had all gone. Exam papers had been sat and marked, and results had been awaited and received, celebrated, rationalised or commiserated with until at last these feelings faded in the stress of finding holiday jobs. Finally, as Christmas neared, for those who had not found jobs came the delicious anticipation of holidays in the sun on far-off beaches where the long waves curled and crashed on the golden sand.

  Though he loved surfing, not for this man today the thundering rollers of Muriwai, Piha or Mangawhai. Instead he was riding the crest of another wave.

  You could not blame Dr David Corbishley, graduate of the University of New Zealand with a doctorate from the world famous School of Mines at the University of Washington in Seattle, for being exhilarated with his career, or, should we say, the brilliance which this career was about to bring him. Already he was finding his niche in his Department by his contact with the corporate world which was the elixir for its survival. Now he believed himself to be on the cusp of a discovery which would in his opinion involve these financial interests in profitable development of his country’s untapped mineral resources. The prospects were mind-boggling.

  Today he would start to pull it all together.

  But suddenly the whistling broke off in mid bar.

  Wheeling round the corner, he saw before him a stranger in a well-cut light grey suit. He appeared fifty-ish with greying hair, but with a short, powerful physique. He was studying intently one of the geological maps.

  Hoping his enthusiasm had not affected the image he wanted to convey, he applied the brakes, slowed down, parked and cleared his throat politely. “May I help you?”

  The man turned. The face was square and commanding and the blue eyes piercing. “Are you a student here?”

  It was an understandable mistake. He was thirty-one but looked younger. “Actually, I’m a senior lecturer – Dr Corbishley.” He offered his hand.

  The stranger lifted his eyebrows momentarily but kept his hands at his side. Instead he indicated the map. “I’m looking at the Raukumaras. What can you tell me about the geology?”

  David put on his knowledgeable lecturer’s voice. “The Tapuaeroa valley has some interesting igneous extrusions. Several mineral surveys have been done there.”

  “I’m only interested in the middle.”

  “Beyond Hikurangi?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  These sorts of men were brusque. Business people went straight to the point. The profit, of course. “Although it’s a Forest Park under the Forest Service there’s great potential. Unfortunately, we haven’t any detailed mineral surveys. One of my colleagues went in there three years ago, but he took all his research when he left.” Realising as soon as he said it that this would be discouraging, he went on quickly. “However, it would be easy enough to do another survey and we could give you an idea of which areas would be the most likely.”

  He paused expectantly, but the other continued to examine the maps.

  “It’s a good opportunity now because the Forest Service may be changing the zoning. However, the survey would have to be done soon, and you’d need to show there was mineral potential before the submissions on the new management plan proposal close on May 1st.”

  The other still had his eyes on the maps.

  He decided to take the plunge. “As a matter of fact I’m just completing some new research which may be of interest in the presentation of a case.”

  At last the businessman turned and his glance was so direct that it was disconcerting. “What was his name?”

  “Who?”

  “Your colleague.”

  “Oh – Tane, Dr Tane Ngata.”

  “Where can I contact him?”

  “You’re sure I can’t help?”

  “No.”

  “Well – we’re not sure where he’s gone.”

  “You mean he’s at another university.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So you don’t know if he found anything.”

  “We have no record.”

  For a moment the sharp, deep-set eyes bored right into him. Then they focused on the maps again. He spoke in an undertone. “Perhaps that’s just as well.”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “If he had, that would be the end.”

  “The end – of what?”

  “A prime wilderness area, the last in New Zealand.”

  David watched his visitor go away down the corridor. The suit was not so well cut after all. His shoulders were wide and muscular, and for a short man, he walked with surprisingly long, lunging steps.

  “What an idiot – trying to disguise himself as a businessman!”

  Strangely, his whistle had gone and his zest for work. He sat in his office drumming on his desk with fingers which should have been flying over his typewriter. His mouth was set in a hard frown and a deep vertical furrow ran down the middle of his forehead.

  The guy was obviously a greenie and opposed to all that he was about to do.

  But that, curiously enough, was not the problem. His open youthful face suddenly twisted and there rose up in him an uncharacteristic and inexplicable anger.

  “Tane! Why the hell did he want to know about Tane?”

  CHAPTER 2

  The last rays of the sun lingered on the river flat below the newly completed Forest Service hut. Around the hut the waving grasses which had shimmered golden-brown all day were turning grey as a light breeze rustled through them. The crisp bite of a mountain evening was already in the air.

  Two men were kneeling behind a large rock close to the hut which commanded a view right down the flat. One held a pair of binoculars, the other a Winchester 308 rifle that rested on the rock itself. Both instruments were trained on some objects further down in the valley.

  The man with the binoculars turned and eyed the finger on the trigger. “Put it away.”

  The man with the rifle lifted it up and as he did so the sun glinted momentarily on the barrel.

  The speaker had a ginger goatee beard and a crisp, authoritative voice. He focused his binoculars again. “They’re staying down there by the river,” h
e said. “Mad Kiwis.” He added a few words in another language.

  The other man answered with a hollow laugh.

  Shortly afterwards, the two watchers got up and strode briskly up the rise to the hut. As they went, the sun dipped below the ridge. The shadows from the bluffs behind the hut came out towards them, and a damp chill spread over the valley as the mists began to drift down from the mountains.

  ***

  “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?”

  The accent intrigued him too. Was it South African? “We came up the Waiwawa yesterday,” he replied. “Last night we camped on the flat just below here. You must have seen the smoke from our fire.”

  The other looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t understand.”

  “I thought I saw one of your party looking at us from behind that rock below the hut just before the sun went down.”

  “I need to know your route.”

  A hearing problem? Bill quickly changed the subject. “Those 308s look just the job. Many deer round here?”

  The voice was showing increasing impatience. “Your route, please?” the goatee asked a third time.

  Short on the fellowship of the hills, thought Bill. But the route was not his department. He looked towards his companion.

  “We thought we’d have a crack at the Waitoa,” said Stan, using the typical Kiwi understatement but not without an element of pride.

  There was a short pause. “The Waitoa,” said the leader, emphasising every vowel carefully in his clipped accent, “is closed.”

  “Closed!” Stan threw down his pack and thrust his face almost right into the goatee. “What do you mean closed? No one’s ever even been there!”

  “These are official instructions from the Director-General of the Forestry Service.”

  “The Director can go and get lost! It’s a public Forest Park. He can’t just close valleys like that!” He disliked intensely those small shifty eyes, the flat voice, the ridiculous little goatee.

  “There must be some reason,” Bill said quietly.

  “Two days ago on December 29th there was a discovery in the Waitoa.”