Aunt Effie's Ark (11 page)

We sailed on through the saddle at the head of the Horomanga. From up one of the poplars on top of
Tutaepukepuke
, a grey-haired old man with a rifle yelled, “Seen any sign of me shooters?” His voice was like the crack of a whip.

“Why is Jack hiding behind the bulwarks?” Lizzie whispered to Marie.

“That grey-haired old man was his senior field
officer
,” said Marie, “when Jack was a deer culler. They called him the Grey Ghost. If he sees Jack here, he'll give him the bullet.”

“But that was years ago.”

“The Grey Ghost never forgets,” said Marie.

Jack hissed something to Peter at the wheel.

“Not a single footprint in the length of the
Horomanga
!” Peter shouted to the Grey Ghost through the speaking trumpet. Jack hissed something else.

“Somebody reckoned they're all at Tamati Cairns's hut at Ohaua!” Peter shouted.

The grey-haired old man stuck a cork in the
barrel
of his rifle, slung it on his back, and dived off the poplar tree and over the side of the ridge. We saw him
swimming powerfully underwater down the Pukareao Stream towards the Whakatane Valley.

“He didn't say thank you!” said Jessie.

“The Grey Ghost never wastes words,” said Jack.

“Why did Peter tell him we hadn't seen the deer cullers?”

“He'd give us the bullet if he found us playing poker when we should be out shooting.”

“But you can't shoot under all this water,” Lizzie said.

“Deer cullers can do anything!”

We sailed south again over the drowned bush:
Umukahawai
, Heipipi, and down the head of the Whakatane River to Ruatahuna where Jack dropped a bottle with a message. It sank and disappeared down the chimney of a house.

“Just saying hello to Russ and Pat Tulloch,” Jack said as we made for Papatotara Saddle. “This is where the Vast Untroddens start turning into the Grim Inscrutables.”

Because of the rain, we hadn't seen the sun for many months. At night, though, we saw an occasional star through the clouds, and Peter and Marie worked out our latitude with a cross-staff. They pointed one rod at the horizon, the other at the star, and read off the angle between. Because they knew all the stars, they could work out what latitude we were on.

But for weeks and weeks now, we saw no stars. We lost our bearings between the ridges of the Grim
Inscrutable
Ureweras. One morning we found ourselves hove-to off cliffs that Jack said were the bluffs along the top of Maungapohatu Mountain. We sailed up the Waiawa Stream, through a saddle, and down the valley
of the Hopuruahine. Far to our left was Manuoha, the highest mountain, still deep in snow. We didn't know whether to believe him or not, but Jack reckoned a tiny black dot on top was his fly-camp.

Near the mouth of the Hopuruahine River we looked down and saw the same men inside a hut, playing poker again. “The Hopuruahine Hut,” Jack told Lizzie. “We swam all the way underwater from the Horomanga to dodge the Grey Ghost!”

“How did you hold your breath that long?”

“Deer cullers can do anything!”

Peter ordered the headsails backed, and the spanker brailed. We took in the topsails, jilled to and fro, and watched. Down in the Hopuruahine Hut, Bonehead tipped a loaf of bread out of the camp oven, chopped off thick slices with an axe, smeared them with cocky's joy, and handed them round his mates.

“Pretty tough-looking bread,” said Jessie.

“Deer cullers can eat anything,” said Jack.

One of the men in the Hopuruahine Hut looked more like a horse than a deer culler. He didn't like his bread and threw it on the fire where even the flames couldn't burn it. While the deer cullers swallowed their slices whole and tried to see each other's cards, the one like a horse sneaked a tin of condensed milk out of the tucker cupboard. He knocked a couple of holes with a bullet head, and swigged the tin empty in one suck.

“He looks a bit like a horse,” Lizzie said.

“That's Harry Wakatipu,” Jack told her, “the leeriest old packhorse in the Vast Untrodden Ureweras!”

The deer culler called Rex Newton looked up from his cards, saw Harry Wakatipu stealing another tin of
condensed milk, and booted him out the hut door.
Bubbles
came out of Harry Wakatipu's big mouth, streamed up and burst on the surface of the water beside us. And out of the bursting bubbles came a horse's voice saying, “I'll get my revenge!”

Harry Wakatipu dived into the Hopuruahine River, swam straight up the falls, and on up the Cascades, his big feet kicking him upstream fast.

“He's going to tell the Grey Ghost where his shooters are!” said Jack. He pulled out the net Peter and Marie had made, stitched it into a huge bag, lashed chains along the lower side of the mouth and floats along the upper side. “We'll make a trawl net and catch him!”

Marie saw what he was doing and made a couple of steel-sheathed otter-boards. Peter ran a heavy wire rope out over a gallows either side of the stern.

“Hurry!” said Lizzie. She pointed at a figure standing on top of Whakataka Mountain. One hand keeping the rain out of his eyes, the Grey Ghost was trying to spot any sign of his shooters around Lake Waikaremoana.

“He can't see that far,” said Jessie.

“The Grey Ghost can smell a deer culler being lazy thirty miles away. If Harry Wakatipu tells him we're playing poker in the Hopuruahine Hut, we'll all get the bullet!” said Jack. He laced the release cord through the cod-end of the net.

They shot the net over the stern. Peter steered Aunt Effie's Ark up the Hopuruahine River and took the fork into the Orangitutaetutu Stream, following Harry Wakatipu's wake a thousand feet below. The water spread the otter-boards apart so they held the net wide open as it sank towards the stream-bed.

“Run out the sweeps!” Jack yelled. Alwyn and Bryce let go the brakes on the winches so the wire ropes ran out over the gallows. But now the drag of the net, the otter-boards, and the sweeps began to slow down Aunt Effie's Ark.

We saw Harry Wakatipu take the left-hand fork into the Orangihikoia Creek. Peter gave the orders, and we scampered up and down the ratlines, ignoring the
lubber's
hole, swinging ourselves out along the yards,
adding
studding-sails, topgallants, royals, and watersails.

Harry Wakatipu looked up at the shadow of our keel and swam even faster, but the years of drinking condensed milk were beginning to tell. His fat puku hung heavy between his legs. His breath was coming fast, we could tell by the bubbles.

“The Grey Ghost's looking down this way,” said Marie.

“It's okay,” said Jack. “He can't see us, because none of this has happened yet, not in his lifetime. But he might see Harry Wakatipu if we don't catch him first!”

“Got him!” said Jessie. She and Lizzie were leaning over the stern. There was Harry Wakatipu going down the throat of the net and into the cod-end. We winched in the sweeps, swung out our lifting gear, and brought the net aboard. Marie pulled the knot undone on the cod-end, and the horse tumbled on to the deck with several eels and a couple of rainbow trout.

Harry Wakatipu got to his feet snarling. His lips drew back till we could see his green teeth.

“It's okay,” said Jack. “They're just green
plasticine
. I made them myself.” But he jumped back when Harry Wakatipu spun, kicked out with his back feet,
and snapped his ugly teeth. The next moment, he had dived over the side and was swimming up the
Orangihikoia
again.

“We won't get him in the net a second time,” said Peter but, already, Jack was cutting off the chains and floats from the net. He parcelled it, strapped it under the mouth of one of the cannons, tied a rope from it around a cannon-ball, and loaded the cannon.

“Fire!”

The cannon-ball flew over Harry Wakatipu's head. The net flew open with it and fell over the struggling horse. This time we swung him aboard and kept him in the net.

“Where did you learn that trick?” Lizzie asked.

“Net guns?” asked Jack. “The chopper boys used them to catch deer alive. You can read it about in Bonehead's book.”

“But choppers aren't invented yet,” said Lizzie.

“Does it matter?” said Jack. “We caught Harry Wakatipu before he could tell the Grey Ghost.”

“I'll report you to the Rotorua police!” Harry Wakatipu was screaming.

“You know you're not allowed near Rotorua,” said Jack, “and you wouldn't dare go near the police.”

Harry Wakatipu stopped thrashing and kicking in the net and climbed to his feet as Jack let him out. He leered an ingratiating smile with his huge green
plasticine
teeth. His eyes rolled so the whites flashed, and he said in a winning voice, “Don't I know you?”

“He's going to get away again!” Marie called, but Harry Wakatipu spun around, pointed his long nose towards the peak of Whakataka, and neighed in a high
scream, “Mr Grey! Mr Grey! I've found one of them, sir!”

“Too late!” Jack told the whinnying packhorse. “The Grey Ghost just dived off Whakataka into Mimi Creek. He'll go down Totara, down the Parahaki, and down the Lower Waiau. By the time he's been to Central and Te Waiotukapiti, and back up the Upper Waiau, the deer cullers will have shifted to another watershed.”

“All right,” the nasty old packhorse said. “I know when I'm beaten. Could I please have a couple of cases of condensed milk?”

“We should tie your four feet together and drop you over the side with a cannon-ball round your neck,” Jack told him, but Daisy pulled out her SPCA card and brandished it.

“This is cruelty to dumb animals!” she cried.

“I'm not a dumb animal!” Harry Wakatipu snarled.

We sailed back and dropped him near the
Hopuruahine
Hut. The deer cullers stopped playing poker long enough to put hobbles on him, so he couldn't run away again. They waved their thanks. For one moment, we
all saw Jack in the past staring up puzzled at Jack in the present. Then the Hopuruahine Hut disappeared, and the deer cullers faded.

“We're watching Jack's memories fade as he forgets them,” said Peter.

“That's sad,” said Lizzie.

“No. He'll remember them again.”

“What will happen to the other deer cullers? While he's not remembering them?”

“Don't ask silly questions that don't have an answer to them!” snapped Daisy. “The child's been reading too many books,” she said.

We sailed on. Around the corner from the
Hopuruahine
Hut, Lake Waikaremoana lay two thousand feet below us, navy-blue with lines of white waves breaking.

“How can there be waves breaking on Lake
Waikaremoana
if there's two thousand feet of flood water above it?” Lizzie asked.

“There you go, asking silly questions again,” said Daisy.

Even through that depth of water, we could hear the bellowing of walruses, and the slap of sperm whales whacking their tails on the surface. We watched a killer whale eat a seal. And a giant squid tried to wrestle with a huge Waikaremoana eel which gave it a hiding. Two great white sharks swam right up through the flood waters, leaned their fins on our bulwarks, and stared at us with their piggy eyes. We swung ourselves into the ratlines and ran up the mast.

“Down, you brutes!” Peter said and whacked their noses with a marlinspike till they let go and sank back down through the flood to the lake. Even that deep, we
could see the flash of their white bellies.

Excited by the cold, Daisy stood in the bows, hung on to the forestay, and sang lustily, “From Greenland's Icy Mountains”. The hymn echoed off Panekiri Bluffs and started several avalanches. Finally the passengers on the upper decks signed a petition – asking Daisy to be quiet.

“That's gratitude for you!” Daisy retired to her bunk still singing: “Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile…”

“Daisy really knows how to enjoy herself,” said
Victor
.

After some months we reached the far end of the lake and sailed over the ridge behind Marau, down the Manganuiohou, and into the valley of the Waiau. At Te Waiotukapiti we saw far beneath us that diligent senior field officer, the Grey Ghost, still swimming strongly underwater, searching for his shooters.

“He'll sack the lot when he finds them,” said Jack. “Give them the bullet in the morning, and sign them on again in the afternoon.”

“Why?”

“There's not that many good keen men around.”

“What will happen to Harry Wakatipu?” asked Lizzie who always had a soft spot for horses.

“They're stuck with the old fraud at the
Hopuruahine
Hut. No one else will have him.”