The Bolthole

Chapter I.

               'In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach,

in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.'

Rachel Carson

Rāpare, rua tekau mā waru o Hakihea kaotahi mano whitu rau ono te kau mā iwa

(Thursday, 28 December 1769)

New moon

Ōpito Pā

His heart pounded in his ears, as fiercely as the air whistled in his chest. He was running as fast as he had ever run, pumping his legs as hard as he had ever made them go. It had all been timed and executed flawlessly.

A perfect alignment of the sun and the moon and the earth had created the highest and lowest spring tides, in the darkest night sky of a new moon. He ran along a turning incoming tide so shallow, on a beach so dead flat, its sand so hard, that his footprints vanished quickly in the breakers that followed. No one saw him hurtling west along that coastline, neither from the hilltop fortification behind him, nor from the dunes and the primeval forest to his left, nor from the high mount lookout above the end of the seashore ahead. Except for the glowworm river overhead in the Milky Way, reflected in the frothy foam folding in alongside him, the predawn world was pitch black, and the only sound it made rose from the surf swells to his right, washing in over everything he had come from.

Where he had come from was behind him now, because of her. Taitai had fed the sentries and the dogs full of grey-faced petrel meat, laced with pepper tree sap. They would sleep long enough for her to free him from his enclosure. Taitai was Tama's first love. Both in their fifteenth year, he had grown up pushing her on a swing over the bay, until they had discovered their love in the dunes, before his true identity was discovered.

At the Pā entrance, under the crossbeam linking the two giant red ochre palisades, she gave him a vessel, flax woven around a gourd filled with wood pigeon breast and rat meat, preserved in their own fat. And then she bit his lip, and pushed him away, and ran sobbing silently, back inside.

Tama had careened down the 189 steps to the shoreline of Ōpito bay, but it was the next beach, over the headland, that would be the longest open space he would need to cross, to make his escape. He had sprinted up through the forest path, and come down onto a two-kilometer stretch of sand so white and pure, he remembered it squeaking and squealing under his feet when the sun was hot.

Tama was running on the edge of last place on earth to be settled by man, still moving away from the rest of the world, only as fast as his fingernails grew. In the first wave of seafaring canoe migrations, his ancestors had arrived on this ribbon of earth and water, to find, instead of any land mammals, a pandemonium of birds— in the sky and on the ground, in species and numbers, and size, too breathtaking to comprehend.

He remembered the stories his grandfather told, from the stories his grandfather had told him, from the stories his grandfather had told him, about an encounter with one of the last of the great ones in these coastal sandbanks, now bleached with the white dust of their gigantic fossil bones and eggshells, in the blowouts between the dune ridges. One morning, while collecting mussels on this beach, his ancestor had been startled by a deep low booming resonance that reverberated over the drifting mounds, emerging from the dunes as a monstrous wingless bird, weighing as much as four warriors and over two outstretched arm spans high, fearlessly moving towards him. Its vocalizations thundered from an elongated bone-ringed loop of windpipe, in a head rear-mounted and forward-carried, out of a triangular bill sharp enough to clip off the fibrous leaves of the flax and low twigs and leaves that sustained it.

But Tama's ancestor was not afraid. This floating feathered fowl, with its speckled copper and white and yellow and purple plumage, was as harmless as it was as huge as it was rare, and would soon be a ghost. Since the day his people had made landfall on this island that Maui had fished up from the bottom of the ocean, just over a thousand of Tama's ancestors had butchered sixty thousand moa, and would wipe out all nine species, here for 80 million years, in less than a hundred. His people ate only the upper third of the legs, and dumped the rest on giant rubbish heaps, where their feral dogs would roll and eat and play.

It would be the end of the Haast's eagle as well, its only predator, largest raptor in the world, with a striking force of a boulder off a high cliff, capable of seizing a moa's pelvis with the talons of one foot and killing it with a blow to the head or neck with the other, or the blood loss from the large beak ripping into its internal organs. Some of Tama's ancestors had also experienced that terror, before the eagle disappeared forever. Because of the rats and dogs and hunting and fire unleashed on this inexhaustible promise of plenty, he would never know the calls of now extinct native ducks or giant geese or yard-high flightless rails or native crows or giant harriers or so many others.

He was more than halfway along the second beach now. The gourd that Taitai had given him had hardly slowed his flight, but it did, imperceptibly. He carried it ever so slightly behind where he could have been. The penalty for his imprecision would be deafening.

The first rays of light broke on the earth and water, and the largest aviary on earth. Hundreds of millions of birds, patiently waiting in the silent night, thundered into a dawn chorus still so deafening, that Tama had to hold his head to keep his eardrums from bursting. The mewing of a billion seabirds, red-billed and black-backed gulls, white fronted terns and variable oystercatchers, white and reef herons, and dotterels and black cormorants, collided with the terrestrial bombast of pukeko swamp hens and rifleman birds, long-tailed cuckoos and kingfishers, and bellbirds and tomtits and tuis.

An eastern red radiance streaked past him from behind, to fall on the high yellow greywacke mount ahead. His world turned orange. A kite of paper mulberry, stretched over a supplejack vine frame, in the shape of a man with a head and arms and legs, flew off the top of the bluff. It sailed straight up and then behind him, towards the world he had escaped from. Tama knew what message it carried, and that his time had run out. To start early is leisurely, but to race against time is desperate.

Tama had been making for the fresh water stream that crossed his path, percolating down out of the forest, now just ahead. He hit it in a high hard splash, and made an abrupt turn south, to his left, up and through the dune bank, his footsteps still undetectable in the cascade of the creek. He wondered how they hadn't smelled his sweat, or heard his heart breaking out of his chest, or his last breath, as he bolted up and beyond the treeline, further into the woodland, into the cool ozone coming off the creek, gushing over boulders, spilling over his shins. Far enough up the stream, when Tama thought he might be safe, he let himself fall into a deep pool, and floated in the clarity of his achievement. Above him, fantails flitted in the puriri and mānuka trees. They were a harbinger of death, if they were found inside a dwelling, but Tama was living inside his own head, half submerged in a pool without walls, and here they were a sign of life, and freedom. He pulled himself out of the stream, and collapsed on the bank under the tree ferns. He picked up small rocks from the water, beautiful, shimmering with the gold they contained.

And then he slept.