Keri Hulme - The Bone People

He cannot recall falling asleep, but the wetness and the cold wake him. There's a thin whining of insects. In the chill gloom, all else is silent. Slatebodied midges begin crawling in every gap, hordes of them, slow but thorough biters, driving him to get up.

In the grey half-light, he discovers he has gone to sleep in a bog. A small bog, crawling with every kind of biting life. Midges and daylight mosquitos of all varieties. They whine joyfully.

He stands, incomparably miserable, the soles of his socks wet and growing wetter, letting the creatures bite their fill.

Ngakau, wake up. Look, the sky is lightening. Make a tea. Dry out your gear. Pull yourself together, man.

Two kinds of manuka, he thinks, consciously observing as he spreads the bivsac and sleepingbag. One with white flowers and fat leaf lobes, and that one has smaller diamond leaves and pinkish flowers. Wonder which one she made the sedative from? Or was it both? He notices sundews, some vivid red, some tall with a dozen green sticky heads per stem. Kerewin would love 'em, eh, she had a mind for the macabre. Probably spend hours watching until some poor bastard of a fly got snared. Fern curls, bracken, pollen-like dust round the rims of puddles. Cracked white rocks edging out of the soil. An odd bleak place, but better than the concrete desert.

As he lit the spirit-cooker, a seagull flew overhead and made a raucous noise. He was reminded of the boy imitating the mollymawk, and the minding made him smile. You learnt to remember the sweet things and squash down the bad ones. It works until sleep comes.

The sun is out: the bivsac is drying, and the wet patches at the mouth of the sleepingbag have dried. His sad fey mood begins to pass.

Midges in the tea… he scoops them out, frowning… what was that childhood horror? Ah yes, Kohua-ora, meaning "Cooked alive

in an earthoven." Refers, the book has said, to an ancient event near Papatoetoe. He had stumbled across the reference in one of the useful books his grandmother gave him, and it brought him nightmares for months.

You have plenty of time to think when you're sick and helpless, when you're cooped up and made to feel useless.

Had it been deliberate, the slow cooking of a hated rival? Or someone laid in the hole, who though thought dead, was still alive and showed it? She told him what a noble fighter the old Maori was, and the school texts repeated it whenever they mentioned the Maori at all… God, what lies we get taught. Exemplify the honourable incidents, and conceal the children who got the chop, the women and old men stampeded over cliffs, the bloody endless feuding… yet the gallantry according to the code was there, the wit in the face of inevitable death… besides, he grins to himself, as a race, we like fighting. We're not too far from the old people, Kerewin and me… but Kohua-ora? Thinking about old horrors somehow lessens the impact of the new ones.

As he flicks away the last waterlogged midge, the sun shines more brightly, and his heart lightens with the morning.

The kaumatua:

plaited a kete.

He put in it: cold potatoes; fresh cress; old corn; and the last piece of fried bread. He filled the battered thermos with strong sugared milkless tea.

"That is all there is, for now."

There was half an ounce of tobacco left in his tin. He put it, and a dozen wax matches and a strip of coarse sandpaper, into the kete too.

"This person, they may smoke."

There is a person, digger or stranger or broken man.

Last night, a huhu beetle tapped on the window.

He sat wrapped in the blanket from his bed, candle glimmering on the floor beside him, and watched it knock and walk over the pane for an hour.

He did not let it in.

Then he dreamed, although he did not think he fell asleep. And his grandmother, whom he had last seen as oiled ochred bones, spoke to him.

"I wasn't feebleminded, I did not speak of illusions before I died," she said acidly. "It was the way things had to be done. The waiting was as much for your good as for that which you watch over. It is finished now."

The candle had sunk and died. The huhu had gone. He had sat, shivering, waiting for the dawn.

Even though I have had a long life; even though I have been taught and prepared for this time, I am not ready for it.

Are all people so wary of their death?

He took off his pack, lay down, and looked over the face of the

bluff. A grey blue clay-like material, slippery-looking; no handhold visible,

no purchase for feet.

"Ah, screw it." He sat up, leaning against the pack.

It had begun to drizzle again an hour ago. He had tramped two miles looking for the river, and hadn't found it. Wet branches smacked into him viciously, his shoulders still ached from the packstraps, and he was beginning to feel sick and faint.

He had last eaten yesterday afternoon, when the bus had stopped at a tearooms. Cardboardy sandwiches with limp tomato insides. This morning's tea had used all his water, and the freeze-dried food he carried needed water for cooking it.

He had turned for the beach, and the bluff still confronted him.

On the beach I'd have water. And there might be some decent food, there will be… pipi, karengo, kina, something… but I'm not a bloody bird.

He gestured over the bluff with his thumb, and then snarled at himself… you're going round the twist, Ngakau-

There was a quart flask of rum in the pack, and three of Kerewin's cigars left in their case. Might stimulate some useful thinking. Some thinking, eh. And dear Lord, it'd make me feel warmer.

Despite his parka, he was cold, even while he had been walking. Now the cold had pierced bone deep

He pours the cap full of rum and swallows. Fills it again, and tosses that down too. The stinging warmth sweeps down his gullet, and his skin contracts and tingles; his stomach opens wide. He fills the cap again, and balances it carefully: it holds three nips, and it is a long time since he had a drink.

"That is better," and his voice sounds cheerful and confident.

Days in pubs… long long days and nights, days soaking, and blind nights… and those three mixed-up sweet times of song and talk and happy heavy drinking… though Kerewin pake could never forget herself and come home, it was so good.

He can feel his face flushing, beginning to sweat. He throws back the hood of his parka and lets the drizzle fall on his hair. Clipped hair, prison cut.

He drinks the capful slowly.

The kaumatua:

"Now," he says, sitting down beside the little mound of earth, "where do I go?"

The top of the mound is smoothed flat, and he has traced where the river flows, where the inland track is, where the five beaches are, and their headlands.

So many years-

He shuts his eyes, and drops the twig of karamu he holds in his left hand. In the dark at the back of his mind, he hears his grandmother whisper. He lifts his right hand and lets the other twig fall. It leaves his hand slowly, not like a stick dropping at all.

It falls without a sound.

Then, his eyes tightly closed, he says haltingly, fearfully under his breath, the old words.

He sighs when they are finished. I must do this, for my strength is waning, but the cold, aiee, the cold is almost too much.

He opens his eyes.

The dart he had first dropped lies on the third beach. It is twisted as though something had snapped at it in midair.

The other, the seeker from his right hand, has inched its way to meet it, and now lies quiescent, touching the first.

He can see its thin trail quite clearly on the smoothed earth.

But it is as the first time: the twigs have moved and he never saw what moved them.

And as before, he feels the dry harsh laughter of his grandmother rustle through his mind.