CHAPTER ONE
Another dawn, and she drags her old bones up from sleep.
Her name is Paraiti and when she is sleeping her bones are light and weightless. As she wakes, however, she is aware of all the stiffness, aches and numbness of a body that has aged. She opens her eyes, adjusts to consciousness and listens to her heart thumping away, pushing the blood through thickened veins. ‘Still in the land of the living,’ she says to herself.
She hears the usual wheeze and gurgle as her lungs force her breath in and out, but there’s a lump of phlegm in her throat. ‘Aue,’ she grumbles as, creaking like an old door on worn-out hinges, she heaves herself into a sitting position. She is wearing a long flannel nightgown buttoned to the neck but, even so, the morning is cold, so she wraps a sleeping blanket around her before opening the flap of the tent and spitting into the cuspidor.
Now that she is awake, Paraiti fumbles under the pillow for her battered and well-thumbed Bible and hymnal. She raises her left hand and starts to chant a karakia, the Lord’s Prayer.
‘E to matou matua i te rangi,’ she begins, ‘kia tapu tou ingoa …’
Old habits die hard, and Paraiti wouldn’t dream of beginning a new day without himene and prayer. Her parents Te Teira and Hera, if they were alive, would roar with laughter to see her now; in the old days, when the faithful were all at karakia in the smoky meeting house, she was the child always squirming and wriggling. ‘Kaua e korikori,’ Te Teira would reprimand her.
Although Paraiti went for a few years to a native school, she can’t read very well; she trusts to her memory when quoting from the Old Testament or singing hymns. She raises her hand again in the sign of the faithful, ‘Kororia ki to ingoa tapu, glory be to Thy holy name.’ Her religion is Ringatu, created from the narratives of the Old Testament by the Maori prophet, Te Kooti Arikirangi.
Paraiti lifts her eyes to the sky lightening above her, and marvels again at the goodness of God for having made the world and granting her another day to live in it. The huge canopy of native trees has been a protective umbrella for her sleep; the shimmering giant ferns beneath have provided more intimate shelter from the rain. Mist is steaming from the forest, hastening upward in the wind currents that blow it in arabesques and curlicues toward the bright sun. Here, at the bend of a river, with flax and toetoe unfolding in the lower growth, she has had the perfect camping ground.
Morning prayer over, Paraiti whistles out to her stallion, Ataahua, and to Kaihe, her mule. The sound is strong and piercing with an upturned inflection: ‘Where are you two?’ Well trained, they whinny back. Good, they have not foraged too far away in the night.
Where’s Tiaki, her pig dog? Aha, there he is, big and ugly, emerging silently out of the bush on the other side of the river, looking at her. She calls to him, ‘Have you brought something for my breakfast or have you been selfish and wolfed it all down yourself?’
No, today Tiaki has been kind to his mistress. He has been hunting and in his jaws is a fat wood pigeon, still alive and unmarked. Even so, he whines, offended that Paraiti should think so ill of him. He jumps headlong into the water, swims across and waits for her to take the bird from his mouth. But he won’t let it go.
You can apologise first, mistress.
‘Very well,’ Paraiti says to him. ‘Give me the bird.’
Tiaki sighs, knowing she will release it back into the woods. All his work for nothing?
‘Ae, we let this one go. Give the first to Tane, Lord of the Forest.’ She kisses the pigeon and gives it freedom; it creaks and whistles its way back into the trees. ‘Now go, Tiaki, the second pigeon is for us.’
Paraiti watches her dog bounding back to the river and swimming strongly to the other side, creating a V in the water. Righto, down to the edge, mincing over the pebbles to wash herself, get the pikaru out of her eyes, and use a clean rag to wash her neck, armpits and nether parts. For an old woman, and despite her creaking joints, Paraiti walks with a surprising lightness of step; she is sometimes almost girlish. Where the water laps, she kneels and begins her daily ablutions. While she is at it, she sprinkles some of the drops over her head and looks at her reflection, hoping to see some improvement.
No such luck. Still the same old face, only getting older: big Maori nose, heavy upper lip, lumpy chin, and lots of bushy hair. She fixes the hair by pinning it back with two large ivory combs but, aue, now she can see more of her face. From this angle she looks like a very ugly potato.
‘Never mind,’ Paraiti says to herself. ‘Nobody else around to frighten.’
Time to change into her travelling clothes: layers of blouses all nice and dry, a jerkin made of supple hide, longjohns, a petticoat and long woollen skirt, socks pulled up to the knees and strong boots.
And now, breakfast.
Paraiti rekindles the fire and hangs a billy of water on an iron rod supported by two strong branches; she also puts a skillet among the hot embers.
Tiaki comes back with a second bird.
‘It’s not the same one we let go, is it?’ Paraiti asks. She has a sneaking suspicion that Tiaki has sometimes clipped the bird’s wings with his teeth so that it can’t fly too far and, when she is not looking, brings the same bird back.
Tiaki ignores her accusation. He drops the pigeon at Paraiti’s feet and, now that he has done his duty by his mistress, disdainfully he is off again, this time in search of his own breakfast.
Paraiti plucks the pigeon and puts it in the skillet; very soon it is sizzling in its own fat. From one of her saddlebags she takes some damper bread and manuka honey. There’s nothing like a fresh pigeon and damper bread running with manuka honey to soothe the gullet and start the day. A cup of manuka tea is made in the billy and, ka pai, with that extra stimulation to the blood and senses, she is in seventh heaven.
Once she’s breakfasted, Paraiti is keen to get going. ‘Time to saddle up,’ she says.
She puts on a wide-brimmed hat with a string that she ties under her chin. Quickly, she dismantles the tent and bedding and stows them in the saddlebag. She goes down to the river to rinse the breakfast implements, then douses the fire and buries the contents of the cuspidor in the ground. Nobody would ever know she’d been here.
At Paraiti’s whistle, Ataahua and Kaihe come at the gallop. She loads Kaihe first, making sure the weight is evenly distributed across his spine — wouldn’t want an unbalanced load to endanger the mule as he is climbing the steep slopes — and then she puts the bridle and saddle on Ataahua and taps his knees. Once upon a time she could get on a horse without trouble, but these days it’s too much for her old bones.
Ataahua obliges, going down on his front legs. He waits for Paraiti to lift herself aboard and settle, and then hoists himself up with a whinny of grumpiness; over the last few years his mistress has got not only older but heavier. And him? Well, his joints are troubling him too.
‘Me haere tatou,’ Paraiti tells Ataahua. ‘Let us go.’
Pulling her mule after her, Paraiti fords the river at its shallowest crossing; she doesn’t want to get wet, but, even so, Ataahua slips into a hole and her hem dips in the water.
Quickly Paraiti shouts, ‘Hup!’ before the fool horse dumps her completely in the water, and urges him up and onward. Scolding him for not being as young as he once was, she spurs him to climb the track on the other side. Every now and then on the way up she looks behind to check the load on Kaihe.
By the time Paraiti reaches the top of the ridge, Tiaki has joined her with a supercilious look on his face. The mist has lifted from the valleys and the air is clear. The forest is raucous with birdsong. Far away, Paraiti can see the smoke rising above the village of Ruatahuna, her destination.