Witi Ihimaera - The Whale Rider

‘Oh Kahu,’ Nanny Flowers cried again. But this time I told her to take a deep breath and, when she was looking underwater, to watch where I would point.

We went beneath the surface. Suddenly I pointed down. Kahu was searching the reef, drifting around the coral. Nanny Flowers’ eyes widened with disbelief.

Whatever it was Kahu was searching for, she was having difficulty finding it. But just then white shapes came speeding out of the dark towards her. I thought they were sharks, and Nanny Flowers began to blow bubbles of terror.

They were dolphins. They circled around Kahu and seemed to be talking to her. She nodded and grabbed one around its body. As quick as a flash, the dolphins sped her to another area of the reef and stopped. Kahu seemed to say, ‘Down here?’ and the dolphins made a nodding motion.

Suddenly Kahu made a quick, darting gesture. She picked something up, inspected it, appeared satisfied with it, and went back to the dolphins. Slowly the girl and the dolphins rose towards us. But just as they were midway, Kahu stopped again. She kissed the dolphins goodbye and gave Nanny Flowers a heart attack by returning to the reef. She picked up a crayfish and resumed her upward journey. The dolphins were like silver dreams as they disappeared.

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.

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.

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.’