Witi Ihimaera - Sky Dancer

“We must follow Chieftain Arnie’s instructions,” Parera ordered. He kept his squadron in V-formation, maintaining their flight path for as long as he dared.

“They’re getting too close,” Arnie said to Tui.

“Now,” Parera called. In front of him was Tarara of terns.

The paradise shellduck clan stalled in the air and set up a clamour loud enough to wake the dead: “The enemy is too strong for us! They will overpower us! Head for the hills, boys, head for the hills —”

With that, Parera’s troops banked and fell away, flying towards the sacred mountains.

Elated, Tarara took the bait. “Come on, troops, they’re sitting ducks.”

“No, maintain your position,” Kawanatanga said.

But it was too late. To a bird, the terns followed Tarara’s impetuous lead. Further and further away from the seabird army they sped, gaining on the fleeing paradise shelducks. Over the flanks of the sacred mountains, around the corner they flew, across a large reed-filled lake. The shelducks descended lower, skimming the water and turned as if to make a last-ditch stand. Tarara led his terns in for the kill.

From among the reeds, the 100-strong mallard duck clan leapt up in a hail of white-feathered fury. Hissing and quacking, they grabbed the terns by throat, leg or wing and pulled them down into the water. A second contingent of ducks leapt into the fray, kicking up in single springs.

“ Glink-glink ,” they cried. “Come to your deaths, terns.”

“It’s a trap,” Tarara yelled. “Retreat!”

As he said the words, he felt himself being dragged down through the air. There was a splash. He tried to struggle, but it was no use. Held firmly underwater, he knew he was going to drown.

“It’s working,” Arnie said. The diversionary attacks by Chieftain Kahu and Chieftain Parera had softened the front-line attack of the manu moana. But not for long.

“Call my seashags to the front,” Karuhiruhi ordered.

Wheezing, whining, writhing, the seashags advanced like a horde of black striking snakes. With a sudden push they broke through the neck of Manu Valley.

“This is bad news,” Tui said. “Ka oti te kakati e te kawau waha nui. A shag which flies up a narrow valley cannot be turned back. Once its big throat has closed on a fish, its beak closes firm and the fish has no hope of escaping it. It will be the same with us.”

Arnie turned to Kawau. “Take a message to Chieftainess Skylark. Tell her that Manu Valley has been breached. We shall hold the seabirds off as long as possible and then make a controlled retreat. We shall make our stand at the lagoon. Tell her to be ready for my signal.”

Skylark turned her head, alarmed. Although the wind was blowing away from her, she could hear the clash of beak on beak and strike of claw against claw.

“We must hurry,” she said to Ruru.

Chieftain Ruru remained puzzled over the role of the shotgun. In following Skylark’s orders on how to install it, he had been basically working in the dark. No problem, he was used to that. Even so, he was still none the wiser about the function of the “cannon”, as Skylark called it now.

Would it work? Only one way to find out.

“Open the shotgun,” Skylark ordered.

With a sharp click, Ruru flicked the lever, and the double barrels were exposed.

“Load,” Skylark commanded.

Working in groups of four, owls placed two cartridges on the mats Kotuku and the other women had woven. Taking a corner each, they flapped their wings, ferried the cartridges up into the air and hovered over the shotgun. There, the beaks of other owls nudged the cartridges off the mats and into the two barrels of the gun.

“Close the shotgun,” Skylark said. Her voice came out as a small squeak. Her nerves were getting to her.

The owls put their backs under the barrel and raised it. Click.

“So what now, Chieftainess?” Ruru asked.

“We wait for the signal from Arnie,” Skylark said.

Hopping down from the shotgun, she checked the system of winches, pulleys and ropes which Arnie had arranged so that the shotgun could be fired. Six of Ruru’s strongest owl warriors were ready to take the rope in their beaks and pull.

But Skylark was bothered. She was sure that one item on her checklist was missing. What was it? It was something important.

Then Kawau came flying out of the sun. “The seabirds have breached Manu Valley,” he said.

With a cry Karuhiruhi urged the seabird army forward. “Charge! Take no prisoners!”

The ranks of landbird defenders buckled and broke apart.

“They’re through,”Arnie said “It will only be a matter of time before they overrun us.”

“We can hold them a while longer,” Tui answered. “Ara! Look —”

He pointed his wing at a birdfight between six seashags and three aggressive kaka; and the seashags were coming out much worse for wear. Arnie remembered Flash Harry and the kaka colony on Joe’s island.

“He kaka kai uta, he mango kai te moana,” said Tui as he watched one of the kaka warriors deliver the coup de grâce . “The kaka feeds just like the shark.”

Throughout the sky, the battle had broken up into individual and desperate birdfights: kea against albatross, shoveler against gannet, parakeet against petrel, bellbird against prion, cuckoo head to head with fulmar, crow with mollymawk. Darting in between were the valiant remnants of the swifts, joined by the smaller birds — rifleman, robin, silver-eye, thrush, tit, grey warbler, waxeye, wren, yellowhead — squeaking and chirruping, trying to divert attention so that their bigger cousins could make the fatal thrust, the lethal slice of claw or cut of beak.

Chieftain Kea and his stocky warriors were right in the thick of it. Arnie well understood why they had earned a fearsome reputation as sheep killers. This time their target was a flock of albatrosses who were braying across the sky in an attempt to shake their kea attackers off.

Elsewhere, Arnie saw Chieftain Kuruwhengi and his shoveler tribe entering the fray. Working in pairs, and in tandem, the shovelers used their speed and body weight to slam the seabirds to smithereens. Flying very fast with short, rapid wingbeats, they closed on their targets, banked, rocketed and bang : another gannet went to the Great Bird Heaven in the sky. Using similar tactics, Chieftain Kotare and the kingfisher clan joined the melee. Flying at considerable force, with a churring noise like a jet plane descending, they speared their opponents in skilful rapier thrusts of beak to beak.

But the seabirds were unstoppable. “How can you turn back the tide in full flood?” Tui asked Arnie in despair. “How can you stop a forest fire when it is raging through the trees? How can you stop the coming of the night? This is our twilight —”

Arnie sounded the retreat. He hoped that Skylark was ready.

“Fall back! Regroup at the inlet.”

Skylark was anxious. The noise of battle was drawing closer and closer. All around her, the birds who had been assigned to protect the lagoon were growing nervous. “E kui, will the seabirds kill us? Will they take us as their slaves? What will they do to our children?” Te Arikinui Kotuku, Te Arikinui Huia, Te Arikinui Korimako, Te Arikinui Parera and Te Arikinui Karuwai walked among them, soothing their fears.

“Hush,” they said. “Trust in the Lord Tane.”

“There will still be time for a treaty,” Chieftain Titi interjected. “I told you all right from the start that to fight the seabirds was the wrong thing to do. Now we shall suffer for it.”

Kotuku turned a baleful yellow eye on him. “Kra- aak. Kra- aak ,” she warned, waving her beak back and forth as if she was sharpening it. “Enough of your talk of a treaty, Titi. All of you, kia kaha, kia manawanui. Have strength. Be of brave heart.”