A Canoe In the Mist (4 page)

Eleanor sounded as if she was the one with the right to complain, but she couldn’t stop Lillian.

‘I don’t care who’s famous, or royal either. It’s a disease, like measles, it’ll spread and spoil everything,’ she sobbed.

‘And how will you cure them, you cheeky kid?’ snarled Eleanor as she turned her back and hurried down.

‘To blazes with her,’ said Mattie. ‘She mustn’t spoil our day. I can hear Papa calling.’

‘Mattie! Lillian!’ he hailed them. ‘Hurry up, lunch-time!’

‘Lunch, did he say?’ Lillian exclaimed. ‘We’d better give up being princesses. I’m much too hungry to be dainty.’

Down by the lake a well-used path led them to the lunch place.

T
he lunch had style. Over a slab of rock was laid a bordered tablecloth with plates and fresh-baked bread, butter and jam; bottles of lemonade and ginger beer; and tins of bully beef ready to be opened. But the savoury smells were coming from the mysterious flax kit lying in the steam-jet. And Pera said grace before he opened it to reveal well-cooked potatoes, kumara, pumpkin, and some red-coloured, curled-up members of the fishy tribe.

‘What are those?’ asked Mrs Fazackerley with an air of suspicion.

‘K—’ began Lillian, but Pera got his word in first.

‘Prawns,’ he said.

‘Prawns!’ echoed Dr Ralph. ‘We have them in Australia, a proper delicacy, but I didn’t know you had them over here. And bigger than ours, too!’

‘Freshwater prawns from Lake Tarawera,’ said Pera. ‘You try.’

Dr Ralph took a cautious nibble. ‘Not quite like ours,’ he said, ‘but good! Oh, very good.’

And so they settled down to a feast of these excellent prawns, leaving the bully beef unopened. The tourists were too busy to notice the sly glances between Rano and Pera and Sophia and Lillian. No! Here was one secret Lillian wouldn’t share. For the prawns were really koura, freshwater crayfish; and she’d been put off eating them herself the first time she saw them taken from the water. All those waving feelers! Ugh!

After lunch came a walk round the thermal features on the same side of the lake. Lillian had heard their names a hundred times. Now she could see what they were really like. She raced from one to another, recognising them easily and awakening some real interest in Mattie, who wasn’t afraid any more—not after facing that enormous and splendid ngawha which created the White Terrace. But Mattie’s heart was in things that were beautiful and not merely spectacular.

Oh, the noises! Every steam-jet, hot spring, geyser and mud pool had its own peculiar sound. Together they rumbled and roared, grumbled and groaned, whistled and shrieked, clattered and banged and bumped in utter discord. Lillian laughed at the cacophony; Mattie just had to endure it. The only features she lingered to watch were
the mud volcanoes as tall as herself, which spurted out their steaming spray with a rush and a rumble.

‘They’re like working models of real volcanoes,’ said her father. ‘Isn’t this how it happens, Dr Ralph?’

‘I believe so, but with fire of course,’ said Dr Ralph.

‘And it makes a cone like this, before the weather wears it down. Mr Haszard told us,’ said Lillian.

‘Krakatoa didn’t make a cone,’ said Mattie. ‘It blew up and sank under the sea. On the way to Java we saw where it was, and we sailed through acres of floating pumice that came from the eruption. And that happened three years before.’

‘I know about that,’ said Lillian, ‘because we had gorgeous sunsets from the dust in the air.’

‘As far away as here?’ exclaimed Mr Hensley.

‘We heard the explosion in Australia,’ said Dr Ralph.

By now they could see the Pink Terraces across the lake with the sun shining on its salmon-pink crystal. It was tantalising. Mattie wished they’d hurry to finish this parade and cross over. Only one of the sights made her pause again: the big cave and the remains of a small village where eight generations of one family had lived.

‘Here?’ she exclaimed. ‘How could they?’

‘They lived well,’ smiled Sophia. ‘Plenty of food, plenty of flax for weaving, and a steam-heated home. They knew the place so well, they’d soon notice any danger signals. People still come for health cures to those whares on the islet of Puwai.’

‘Oh look, here’s the canoe!’ interrupted Lillian. ‘Can we go first, please?’

‘Yes, it’s ladies first this time,’ answered Sophia.

She didn’t say why, nor did she take any notice of Mrs Fazackerley making out she must have her husband with her. They were quite spellbound as they were paddled towards the Pink Terrace, smaller than the white but more finely shaped. But this time there was to be no lingering on a fairy staircase. Taking a mysterious bundle from the canoe, Sophia hurried them up, past the miniature grottoes under the fringed edges of the fan-shaped pools, putting off till later the view of the sapphire lake above the Terraces. Instead, she led them off into a clearing in the scrub.

‘Clothes off, we’re going to bathe,’ she said briskly as she unrolled the bundle of towels and threw off her flax cloak.

‘Here, in front of everybody?’ exclaimed Eleanor Fazackerley.

‘Everybody is us,’ said Sophia as she bared her shoulders. ‘Hato won’t bring the men just yet.’

Never in her life had Mattie undressed anywhere but in a bedroom, a bathroom or a ship’s cabin, or seen the naked body of any grown woman. Neither had Lillian ever seen an adult unclothed, although she had, unknown to her mother, taken dips in Lake Tarawera with the Maori girls in their birthday suits. But somehow the way Eleanor carried on made them bold. Soon they were giggling at
their own bare bodies as they ran to join Mrs Hensley and Sophia, already in the chosen pool.

‘It’s perfect,’ said Mrs Hensley. ‘Smooth as porcelain, heat just right, and large enough to swim in if any of us know how.’

‘I can, a little,’ said Lillian, plunging out with a few strokes.

The water came up to their necks but hid nothing. Its clear sapphire blue made their bodies look white as marble. ‘I’m a statue!’ cried Lillian, and she struck a pose, prompting Mattie to do the same, changing positions, trying to outdo one another till they set everyone laughing—even the Fazackerleys.

‘Cleopatra never had a bath like this,’ said Mattie as she sat on a ledge with her legs floating out in front of her.

‘Who’s Cleopatra?’ asked Lillian.

‘She was the Queen of Egypt. She used to bathe in marvellous perfumes.’

‘And milk,’ said Sophia. ‘Wouldn’t she come out sticky! I think it was all whakahihi though—showing off.’

‘How do you know about Cleopatra, Guide Sophia?’ asked Mrs Fazackerley.

‘From books, like you,’ said Sophia, quite unruffled.

‘She couldn’t have had a bathroom that was anything like this,’ said Lillian. And she waved her arms at the encircling hills adorned with puffs of steam, and the bright blue sky with a line of ducks flying over.

‘It’s even lovelier looking down,’ said Mrs Hensley. ‘The sun brings out the other colours. I can see amber and carmine and saffron and primrose and seven shades of pink, and lacework as delicate as the winter work of old Jack Frost.’

‘Mama, you’re quite poetic!’ said Mattie. ‘They remind
me
of the flounces on a Spanish dancing dress. It makes me want to dance to the Water Music.’

‘Let’s,’ said Lillian. So they danced, hands linked, in gentle curves and circles, lifting their arms to scatter a rain of sparkling drops, while the women watched.

It had to end at last. The canoe was bringing the men across to take their turn.

‘I’ve never seen you do anything like that before,’ said Mrs Hensley to Mattie as they dressed in the clearing. ‘You might have the makings of a dancer.’

‘We don’t stay anywhere long enough to find out about me,’ said Mattie.

The words slipped out. She hadn’t meant to complain, but it was true. ‘We won’t be travelling for ever,’ said her mother. ‘You’ll be a well-educated young lady with all you’ve seen of the world.’

‘I’d rather stay at Te Wairoa with Lillian,’ Mattie said. And she meant it more seriously than her mother guessed.

‘I wonder if we’ll see that big canoe again,’ said Mattie as the whaleboat sped out onto Lake Tarawera on its return
journey. But though she looked and looked, and so did her father and Dr Ralph, there was only the sunset reddening the peaks of the great mountain, and a surface not even ruffled by a single shag.

The boatmen were singing. Each in turn began with a solo and the others joined in with a harmonised refrain. It was so beautiful that Mattie couldn’t help la-la-ing the tunes, but softly so as not to mar the listening.

‘I will sing you a song my father taught me,’ said Sophia. It was the ‘Skye Boat Song’:

‘Speed bonny boat, like a bird on the wing,

Onward, the sailors cry.

Carry the lad who was born to be king

Over the sea to Skye.’

And now, it was Mrs Hensley who came in with a clear and strong soprano, while even Sophia fell silent:

‘Loud the winds roar, wild is the sea, Scattered the loyal men. Yet ere the sword cools in the sheath Charlie will come again.’

How could the others resist! Maori and English voices joined in a harmony that was never dreamt of in Scotland,
and the boatmen drew in their oars to join Sophia in her impromptu hand actions.

‘I didn’t know you could put actions to a Scottish song,’ said Mrs Hensley when they ended.

‘Hands can speak for any human feeling. We can sympathise with Bonnie Prince Charlie,’ said Sophia, ‘though the winds do not roar loudly on our lake today.’

‘Because of the koha to the taipo,’ said Mr Hensley with a teasing smile.

Mattie sighed with contentment as she looked round at the shadowy cliffs from which came the first night calls of the kiwis.

‘I
do
wish I could stay here,’ she whispered.

‘So do I,’ said Lillian.

I
t was dark when they reached the boat landing. Shaded from the sun all day the boards were still wet, but Mattie and Lillian were across in a twinkling. Watching them disappear up the zigzag track, Mrs Hensley forgot to mind her own feet. She slipped and fell heavily and lay there gasping, and cried out with pain when her husband tried to raise her.

The boatmen carried Mrs Hensley to the hotel. Mattie was saying long farewells to Lillian and knew nothing of the accident until Dr Ralph was examining her mother. Waiting in the corridor, she worried herself into imagining such terrible injuries that when her father came out of the bedroom she burst into tears and couldn’t say a word.

‘It’s not so bad, Mattie love,’ said Mr Hensley, holding her close. ‘Dr Ralph says she’s got three broken ribs, a sprained
ankle and some nasty bruising. She’ll soon mend.’

‘Does it hurt a lot?’ sobbed Mattie.

‘She’s very sore, but not as bad as you by the sound of it. Come now, make yourself useful and ask Bridget downstairs for the widest bandages they’ve got. She has to be bandaged firmly round the chest. Oh, and Mattie—she can’t be jolted over that rough coach road. We’ll be stuck in Te Wairoa till she’s fit to travel. I’m sorry, but we must think of Mama first.’

Sorry! thought Mattie as she slid down the banisters. Sorry! Oh, she
was
sorry about her mother, but how could she be sorry about staying on at Te Wairoa! She had wished for it out loud, twice. Had she wished her mother into an accident? No, no, her father would say that was silly superstition.

She was allowed into the room when the doctor had finished the bandaging. Mrs Hensley was propped up comfortably and smiling. ‘It doesn’t hurt if I keep still,’ she said, ‘but would you brush my hair for me? And look at the mess those men have left.’

Mattie had the clothes tidied away when the housemaid Bridget came up with a dinner tray and offered to fetch another for ‘that dutiful daughter’. Then Mattie began reading her mother a magazine story, but dozed in the middle of it, and scrambled exhausted into her own bed next door. Over at the Temperance Hotel Lillian was already asleep. Neither of them knew anything of the remarkable
conversation between the men in the smoking room, over their glasses of whisky.

‘Apart from the unfortunate accident to your wife, Mr Hensley,’ said landlord Joe McRae, ‘did the day come up to your expectations? Or were there any other mishaps?’

‘If I hadn’t been quick-footed I’d have been soused at the start,’ said Dr Ralph cheerfully.

‘Ah, the big wave? I heard tell of that. A small earthquake under the lake, no doubt.’

‘Yes, the water rose all over. I observed the banks all the way to Te Ariki. Although part of the time my attention was taken by a large canoe that came out of the mist and made as if it was going to pass us.’

‘A large canoe? I wonder whose that would be. Would you be speaking with them, Doctor?’

‘We hailed them, but they didn’t answer, and then the mist hid them from us.’

‘A splendid sight,’ said Mr Fazackerley, who wasn’t as silent as when his wife was around.

‘Paddling in perfect unison,’ said Mr Hensley, ‘with a carved prow and a high stern.’

‘Oh surely not,’ said John McRae. ‘You’ll have seen one of those dug-outs piled up with firewood or flax. There’s times our morning mist enlarges things.’

‘No, it was carved,’ said Dr Ralph. ‘I’ve been studying these things, you know. Three of the men stood up like kaihautú to direct the paddling.’

‘You must have been very near to see so much,’ said Mr McRae in amused disbelief.

‘Near enough to see the feathers in their hair. My daughter saw them first,’ said Mr Hensley.

‘Feathers in their hair!’ Mr McRae laughed outright. ‘Gentlemen, I’ve no wish to doubt your word, but there’s no such canoe on the lake, and I never saw a crew wearing feathers in all my seventeen years in these parts.’

‘Perhaps it was a dress rehearsal for a regatta, or something of that sort,’ ventured Mr Fazackerley.

‘If there was I’d be sure to know. And where would they get a
carved
canoe?’

‘Couldn’t they make one?’ said Mr Hensley.

‘Without the whole countryside knowing? Never. It took three years to make the carvings for that meeting house, Hinemihi. A carved canoe is a difficult undertaking. It needs a special tree and special ceremonies. No, no, what you’ve seen is a dug-out magnified by the morning light. Yon’s a strange lake when the mist is on it.’

‘But we all saw it,’ insisted Dr Ralph. ‘I asked Guide Sophia if it was a waka taua, and she said no, it was a waka wairua.’

‘A waka wairua!’ Joe McRae’s whisky glass went down on the table with a bump, and he sat rigid, staring at the doctor.

‘Why, what’s up? What
is
a waka wairua?’ asked Mr Hensley.

‘Smile if you will, Mr Hensley, when I tell you. It’s a ghost canoe. There’s tales of it crossing the lake long ago, but never in my time here. Was it making for Tarawera mountain?’

‘Yes, it was,’ said Dr Ralph.

‘Yon mountain is a burial place for chieftains. They say the ghost canoe is an omen of disaster. I don’t pay too much heed to these Maori tales, but then I’ve never before heard tell of a Pakeha seeing a Maori ghost.’

‘If it
was
a ghost,’ said Mr Hensley. ‘It looked perfectly real to me. Anyway, we’ve had the disaster already. There’s my wife lying upstairs with three ribs broken.’

‘I doubt that will count. They’ll be expecting a Maori disaster.’

‘D’you really believe that, Mr McRae?’ said Dr Ralph.

‘I’m only saying what they’ll expect. Any talk of disaster is bad for the tourist trade. It can frighten people away if they’re thinking of earthquakes and the like.’

‘I know what I think,’ said Mr Fazackerley. ‘It’s a put-up job by some tohunga who wants to frighten the insides out of another tribe. Isn’t it true that the two tribes hereabouts are quarrelling over land for a new school?’

‘Sub-tribes,’ said Mr McRae. ‘Tuhourangi and Ngati-Rangitihi. They all trace back to the Te Arawa canoe. Well, they have their differences, but these land problems are the business of the tribal elders, not the tohunga. Besides, the only tohunga of importance round here is Tuhoto, and
he’ll not take sides about the school. He sets no store on Pakeha education.’

‘Perhaps there’s a tohunga you don’t know about,’ persisted Mr Fazackerley.

‘Supposing there is, I’d take my hat off to him if he could raise a carved canoe on Lake Tarawera in these times.’

‘You’re trying to make a fool out of me,’ said Mr Fazackerley angrily. ‘I think I’ll join my wife and daughter.’ And he marched out.

‘He thinks he knows more than he does,’ said Joe McRae with a smile. ‘When you’ve lived among Maoris as long as I have, you begin to see things their way.’

‘Frankly, I’m puzzled,’ said Dr Ralph. ‘The Maoris were so alarmed by that wave, they didn’t want to go on. And then this canoe. They sounded quite stirred up, but Guide Sophia didn’t tell us anything really.’

‘Aye, that I can understand. They’ll not discuss Maori things with strangers who canna’ understand. Besides, Guide Sophia has a level head, like mine. It’s not in her interests to upset the tourists.’

‘You can’t alarm
me
,’ said Mr Hensley firmly. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts. The canoe was as real as you are, Mr McRae. There must be an explanation.’

‘You must find it yourself then, for I can’t,’ said the hotelkeeper. And that ended the conversation.

Sophia went home so deeply troubled that she could not
at first open her heart to her own family. All day long she had kept her composure; she could keep it a little longer. She told them instead about Lillian and Mattie and their day of enchantment, the whareátua placed in the White Terrace, the dancing in the Pink Terrace pool and Mrs Hensley singing the ‘Skye Boat Song’. And they laughed with her about the Fazackerleys. Afterwards she lay awake for most of the night.

In the morning she went to the whare where Tuhoto lived alone. To the youth of the village he might seem a fierce old man, but to her he was a sage of wide and deep learning. She knew of his great services to the Te Arawa people long ago before Pakeha times, when Ngapuhi warriors had invaded from the north with their guns. She told him about the waka wairua and ended:

‘I kept my silence because of the tourists, but the thought came to me:
I shall not see the Terraces again
. Tuhoto, surely that canoe was an omen?’

‘Yes, it was an omen.’

‘Then what does the omen portend?’

‘It is a sign that all these lands of ours will be destroyed,’ he said, quite calmly, as if this was only to be expected.

Sophia went out into the sunlight, keeping her own sad counsel. But Tuhoto wasn’t silent, and neither were the boatmen. Soon it was all round Te Wairoa that the ghost canoe had been seen and that the disaster Tuhoto had been going on about for years would soon come true.

Some of the people believed his prediction and some did not. Some thought Tuhoto himself had called on his ancient gods to produce a disaster. None of the Maoris doubted that the strange canoe was a waka wairua.