Nanny Flowers and I were treading water when Kahu appeared between us, smoothing her hair back from her face and blinking away the sea water. Nanny Flowers, sobbing, hugged her close in the water.
‘I’m all right, Nanny,’ Kahu laughed.
She showed the crayfish to us. ‘This is for Paka’s tea,’ she said. ‘And you can give him back his stone.’
She placed the stone in Nanny Flowers’ hands. Nanny Flowers looked at me quickly. As we were pulling ourselves back into the dinghy she said, ‘Not a word about this to Koro Apirana.’
I nodded. I looked back landward and in the distance saw the carving of Paikea on his whale like a portent.
As we got to the beach, Nanny Flowers said again, ‘Not a word, Rawiri. Not a word about the stone or our Kahu.’ She looked up at Paikea.
‘He’s not ready yet,’ she said.
The sea seemed to be trembling with anticipation.
Haumi e, hui e, taiki e.
Let it be done.
winter
whale song, whale rider
fourteen
The muted thunder boomed under water like a great door opening far away. Suddenly the sea was filled with awesome singing, a song with eternity in it. Then the whale burst through the sea and astride the head was a man. He was wondrous to look upon. He was the whale rider.
He had come, the whale rider, from the sacred island far to the east. He had called to the whale, saying, ‘Friend, you and I must take the gifts of life to the new land, life-giving seeds to make it fruitful.’ The journey had been long and arduous, but the whale had been filled with joy at the close companionship they shared as they sped through the southern seas.
Then they had arrived at the land, and at a place called Whangara the golden rider had dismounted. He had taken the gifts of Hawaiki to the people and the land and sea had blossomed.
For a time the whale had rested in the sea which sighed at Whangara. Time had passed like a swift current, but in its passing had come the first tastes of separation. His golden master had met a woman and had married her. Time passed, time passed like a dream. One day, the whale’s golden master had come to the great beast and there had been sadness in his eyes.
‘One last ride, friend,’ his master had said.
In elation, anger and despair, the whale had taken his golden master deeper than ever before and had sung to him of the sacred islands and of their friendship. But his master had been firm. At the end of the ride, he had said, ‘I have been fruitful and soon children will come to me. My destiny lies here. As for you, return to the Kingdom of Tangaroa and to your own kind.’
The heartache of that separation had never left the whale, nor had the remembrance of that touch of brow to brow in the last hongi.
Antarctica. The Well of the World. Te Wai Ora o te Ao. Above, the frozen continent was swept with an inhuman, raging storm. Below, where the Furies could not reach, the sea was calm and unworldly. The light played gently on the frozen ice layer and bathed the undersea kingdom with an unearthly radiance. The giant roots of the ice extending down from the surface sparkled, glowed, twinkled and flashed prisms of light like strobes in a vast subterranean cathedral. The ice cracked, moaned, shivered and susurrated with rippling glissandi, a giant organ playing a titanic symphony.
Within the fluted ice chambers the herd of whales moved with infinite grace in holy procession. As they did so they offered their own choral harmony to the natural orchestration. Their movements were languid and lyrical, and belied the physical reality of their sizes; their tail flukes gently stroked the water, manoeuvring them ever southward. Around and above them the sealions, penguins and other Antarctic denizens darted, circled and swooped in graceful waltz.
Then the whales could go no further. Their sonics indicated that there was nothing in front except a solid wall of ice. Bewildered, the ancient bull whale let loose a ripple of harmonics, a plaintive cry for advice. Had his golden master been with him, he would have been given the direction in which to turn.
All of a sudden a shaft of light penetrated the underwater world and turned it into a gigantic hall of mirrors. In each one the ancient whale seemed to see a vision of himself being spurred ahead by his golden master. He made a quick turn and suddenly shards of ice began to cascade like spears around the herd. The elderly females throbbed their alarm to him. They were already further south than they had ever been before and the mirrors, for them, appeared only to reflect a crystal tomb for the herd. They communicated the urgency of the situation to their leader.
The aurora australis played above the ice world and the reflected light was like a mesmerising dream to the ancient bull whale. He began to follow the light, turning away from the southward plunge. As he did so he increased his speed, and the turbulence of his wake caused ice waterfalls within the undersea kingdom. Twenty metres long, he no longer possessed the flexibility to manoeuvre at speed.
The herd followed through the crashing, falling ice. They saw their leader rising to the surface and watched as the surface starred around him. They began to mourn, for they knew that their journey to the dangerous islands was now a reality. Their leader was totally ensnared in the rhapsody of his dreams of the golden rider. So long part of their own whakapapa and legend, the golden rider could not be dislodged from their leader’s thoughts. The last journey had begun and at the end of it Death was waiting.
The aurora australis was like Hine Nui Te Po, Goddess of Death, flashing above the radiant land. The whales swept swiftly through the southern seas.
Haumi e, hui e, taiki e.
Let it be done.
fifteen
Not long after Kahu’s dive for the stone, in the early hours of the morning, a young man was jogging along Wainui Beach, not far from Whangara, when he noticed a great disturbance on the sea. ‘The horizon all of a sudden got lumpy,’ he said as he tried to describe the phenomenon, ‘and lumps were moving in a solid mass to the beach.’ As he watched, the jogger realised that he was witnessing the advance to the beach of a great herd of whales. ‘They kept coming and coming,’ he told the Gisborne Herald, ‘and they didn’t turn away. I ran down to the breakwater. All around me the whales were stranding themselves. They were whistling, an eerie, haunting sound. Every now and then they would spout. I felt like crying.’
The news was quickly communicated to the town, and the local radio and television stations sent reporters out to Wainui. One enterprising cameraman hired a local helicopter to fly him over the scene. It is his flickering film images that most of us remember. In the early morning light, along three kilometres of coastland, are two hundred whales, male, female, young, waiting to die. The waves break over them and hiss around their passive frames. Dotted on the beach are human shapes, drawn to the tragedy. The pilot of the helicopter says on camera, ‘I’ve been to Vietnam, y’know, and I’ve done deer culling down south.’ His lips are trembling and his eyes are moist with tears. ‘But my oath, this is like seeing the end of the world.’
One particular sequence of the news film will remain indelibly imprinted on our minds. The camera zooms in on one of the whales, lifted high onto the beach by the waves. A truck has been driven down beside the whale. The whale is on its side, and blood is streaming from its mouth. The whale is still alive.
Five men are working on the whale. They are splattered with blood. As the helicopter hovers above them, one of the men stops his work and smiles directly into the camera. The look is triumphant. He lifts his arms in a victory sign and the camera sees that he has a chainsaw in his hand. Then the camera focuses on the other men, where they stand in the surging water. The chainsaw has just completed cutting through the whale’s lower jaw. The men are laughing as they wrench the jaw from the butchered whale. There is a huge spout of blood as the jaw suddenly snaps free. The blood drenches the men in a dark gouting stream. Blood, laughing, pain, victory, blood.
It was that sequence of human butchery, more than any other, which triggered feelings of sorrow and anger amo
ng the people on the Coast. Some would have argued that in Maori terms a stranded whale was traditionally a gift from the Gods and that the actions could therefore be condoned. But others felt more primal feelings of love for the beasts which had once been our companions from the Kingdom of the Lord Tangaroa. Nor was this just a question of one whale among many; this was a matter of two hundred members of a vanishing species.
At the time Kahu had just turned eight and Koro Apirana was down in the South Island with Porourangi. I rang them up to tell them what was happening. Koro said, ‘Yes, we know. Porourangi has rung the airport to see if we can get on the plane. But the weather’s cracked down on us and we can’t get out. You’ll have to go to Wainui. This is a sign to us. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.’
Luckily, knowing Kahu’s kinship with the sea, I was glad that she had still been asleep when the news was broadcast. I said to Nanny Flowers, ‘You better keep our Kahu at home today. Don’t let her know what has happened.’ Nanny’s eyes glistened. She nodded her head.
I got on my motorbike and went round rousing the boys. I hadn’t realised it before, but when you catch people unawares you sure find out a lot about them. For instance, one of the boys slept on his stomach with his thumb in his mouth. Billy had his hair in curlers and he still had a smoke dangling from his lips. And a third slept with all his clothes on and the motorbike was in the bed with him.
‘Come on, boys,’ I said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’ We assembled at the crossroads, gunned our bikes, and then took off. Instead of going the long way by road we cut across country and beach, flying like spears to help save the whales. The wind whistled among us as we sped over the landscape. Billy led the way and we followed — he was sure tricky, all right, knowing the shortcuts. No wonder the cops could never catch him. We flew over fences, jounced around paddocks, leapt streams and skirted the incoming tide. We were all whooping and hollering with the excitement of the ride when Billy took us up to a high point overlooking Wainui.
‘There they are,’ he said.
Gulls were wheeling above the beach. For as far as the eye could see whales were threshing in the curve of sand. The breakers were already red with blood. We sped down on our rescue mission.
The gulls cried, outraged, as we varoomed through their gathering numbers. The first sight to greet our eyes was this old European lady who had sat down on a whale that some men were pulling onto the beach with a tractor. They had put a rope round the whale’s rear flukes and were getting angrier and angrier with the woman, manhandling her away. But she would just return and sit on the whale again, her eyes glistening. We came to the rescue and that was the first punch-up of the day.
‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ the lady said. ‘The whale is already dead of course, but how can men be so venal?’
By that time many of the locals were out on the beach. Some of them still had their pyjamas on. There were a lot of elderly people living near Wainui and it was amazing to see them trying to stop younger men from pillaging the whales. When one of the old women saw us, she set her mouth grimly and raised a pink slipper in a threatening way.
‘Hey lady,’ Billy said. ‘We’re the goodies.’
She gaped disbelievingly. Then she said, ‘Well, if you’re the goodies, you’d better go after them baddies.’ She pointed down to where a truck was parked beside a dying whale. There were several beefy guys loading a dismembered jaw onto the back. As we approached we saw an old man scuffling with them. One of the young men smacked him in the mouth and the old man went down. His wife gave a high piping scream.
We roared up to the truck.
‘Hey, man,’ I hissed. ‘That whale belongs to Tangaroa.’ I pointed to the dying beast. The stench of guts and blood was nauseous. Seagulls dived into the bloodied surf.
‘Who’s stopping us?’
‘We are,’ Billy said. He grabbed the chainsaw, started it up and, next minute, had sawn the front tyres of the truck. That started the second punch-up of the day.
It was at this stage that the police and rangers arrived. I guess they must have had trouble figuring out who were the goodies and who were the baddies because they started to manhandle us as well. Then the old lady with the pink slipper arrived. She waved it in front of the ranger and said, ‘Not them, you stupid fool. They’re on our side.’
The ranger laughed. He looked us over quickly. ‘In that case, lady, I guess we’ll have to work together. Okay, fellas?’
I looked at the boys. We had a strange relationship with the cops. But this time we nodded agreement.
‘Okay,’ the ranger said. ‘The name’s Derek. Let’s get this beach cleared and cordoned off. We’ve got some Navy men coming in soon from Auckland.’ He yelled, ‘Anybody here got wetsuits? If so, get into them. We’ll need all the help we can get.’
The boys and I cleared the beach. We mounted a bike patrol back and forth along the sand, keeping the spectators back from the water. The locals helped us. I saw a shape I thought I knew tottering down to the sea. The woman must have borrowed her son’s wetsuit, but I would have recognised those pink slippers anywhere.
All of us who were there that day and night will be forever bonded by our experience with the stranded whales. They were tightly bunched and they were crying like babies. Derek had assigned people in groups, eight people to look after each whale. ‘Try to keep them cool,’ he said. ‘Pour water over them, otherwise they’ll dehydrate. The sun’s going to get stronger. Keep pouring that water, but try to keep their blowholes clear — otherwise they’ll suffocate to death. Above all, try to stop them from lying on their sides.’
It was difficult and heavy work, and I marvelled at the strength that some of the elderly folk brought to the task. One of the old men was talking to his whale and said in response to his neighbour, ‘Well, you talk to your plants!’ At that point the whale lifted its head and, staring at the two men, gave what appeared to be a giggle. ‘Why, the whale understands,’ the old man said. So the word went down the line of helpers.
Talk to the whales.
They understand.
They understand.
The tide was still coming in. The Navy personnel arrived and members of Greenpeace, Project Jonah and Friends of the Earth also. Two helicopters whirred overhead, dropping wetsuited men into the sea.
A quick conference was called on the situation. The decision was made to try and tow the whales out to sea. Small runabouts were used, and while most of the whales resisted being towed by the tail, there were some successes. In that first attempt, a hundred and forty whales were refloated. There were many cheers along the beach. But the whales were like confused children, milling and jostling out in the deeper water, and they kept trying to return to those who were still stranded along the beach, darting back to those who were already dead. The cheers became ragged when all the whales returned to beach themselves again at low tide.
‘Okay, folks,’ Derek called. ‘We’re back at the beginning. Let’s keep them cool. And let’s keep our spirits up.’
The sea thundered through his words. The seagulls screamed overhead. The sun reached noon and began its low decline. I saw children coming from buses to help. Some schools had allowed senior students to aid the rescue. Many of the old folk were pleased to be relieved. Others, however, stayed on. For them, their whale had become a member of the family. ‘And I can’t leave Sophie now,’ an elderly lady said. The sun scattered its spokes across the sand.
The whales kept dying. As each death occurred the people who were looking after the whale would weep and clasp one another. They would try to force away the younger, healthier whales which had returned to keep company with their dying mates. When a large whale was turning on its side, several juveniles would try to assist it, rubbing their bodies against the dying whale’s head. All the time the animals were uttering cries of distress or alarm, like lost children.
Some old people refused to leave the beach. They began to sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. They continued to
try to right the whales, rocking them back and forth to restore their balance, and encouraging them to swim in groups. It was soon obvious, however, that the whales did not wish to be separated. So the ranger decided that an effort should be made to herd the surviving whales as one large group out to sea. They seemed to sense that we were trying to help them and offered no resistance or harm. When we reached them, most were exhausted, but when they felt us lifting them up and pushing them out to sea they put their energy into swimming and blowing.
Somehow we managed to get the whales out again with the incoming tide. But all they did was to cry and grieve for their dead companions; after wallowing aimlessly, they would return to nuzzle their loved ones. The sea hissed and fell, surged and soughed upon the sand. The whales were singing a plaintive song, a fluting sound which began to recede away, away, away.
By evening, all the whales had died. Two hundred whales, lifeless on the beach and in the water. The boys and I waited during the death throes. Some of the people from the town had set up refreshments and were serving coffee. I saw the lady with the pink slippers sipping coffee and looking out to sea.
‘Remember me?’ I said. ‘My name’s Rawiri. I’m a goodie.’
There were tears in her eyes. She pressed my hand in companionship.
‘Even the goodies,’ she said, ‘can’t win all the time.’
When I returned to Whangara that night, Nanny Flowers said, ‘Kahu knows about the whales.’ I found Kahu way up on the bluff, calling out to sea. She was making that mewling sound and then cocking her head to listen for a reply. The sea was silent, eternal.
I comforted her. The moon was drenching the sky with loneliness. I heard an echo of Koro Apirana’s voice, ‘This is a sign to us. I don’t like it.’ Suddenly, with great clarity, I knew that our final challenge was almost upon us. I pressed Kahu close to me, to reassure her. I felt a sudden shiver as far out to sea, muted thunder boomed like a door opening far away.