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The first chapter of a story

Chapter One

The great tribe of Kuaka, the godwit, moved restlessly and chattered uneasily throughout the night. Standing together on the sandbar high above the tides, fluttering their wings intermittently, they seemed as one great body as they journeyed with Pipiwharauroa in mind, ignoring the movement of the tides that exposed the mudflats and their feeding grounds. Their combined strength carried Pipiwharauroa across the oceans.

As the first rays of the sun suffused the sky and the waters of Ohiwa, the great sunken estuary of the Waiotahe river, Pipiwharauroa emerged from the deepest meditation, from her mind being caste adrift on the seas of timelessness. She had been travelling wide and far, into territory that left her, Pipiwharauroa, shaken and disturbed.

As Pipiwharauroa awakened, Kuaka moved as one great flock to lift from the sand spit. As they took flight, they turned as one body to acknowledge her before scattering to their feeding grounds. Their cries stirred her friend and guardian, her namesake, the shining cuckoo, who had been quietly roosting throughout the night in the Pohutakawa tree that sheltered her. The light caught the beauty of his iridescent blue green feathers as he flew down to alight on her shoulder. It had been Pipi who had persuaded her to communicate with the godwits.

Slowly her beautiful surroundings grounded her again, brought her back to earth. "It seems you are right my friend. Kuaka tell me that on their journeys back and forth across the oceans north to their nesting grounds, they see many, many, things. They have shown me many things. They see what you and your kind have been seeing on your journeys north."

All the birds for some time now had been telling her that something terrible was happening. She could feel their sense of dread, their fear, and she could see the pictures that they tried to convey to her, but she could not really understand, she could not grasp quite what was happening for she had no experience to encompass it.

She was spending so much time now on Te Motu, the island, listening, meditating, reaching out, but all she knew was that something terrible was about in the world. Yet her own kind seemed to care too little for what she felt was going on. The birds they said were always in a state about something. It was their excitable nature. There was nothing to worry about.

But Pipiwharauroa knew that it was no accident that over eons and eons of time, they had evolved together, her kind and the birds, and that it was as well to listen to them. In order to understand what the birds were telling her she had been working at the very outmost limits of her extraordinary mental powers, reaching out over time and the seas of the universe, looking for some answer, some understanding of what the birds were telling her. She had to move so slowly and carefully, building defences, for the powerful and sensitive mind that characterised her species could be killed by psychic shock, by the awfulness of what the birds were conveying.

And there finally, across the seas of time, with the help of the great flock of Kuaka, the godwit and her namesake, Pipiwharauroa, the shining cuckoo, she could see that what the birds were conveying was true, that a species was coming, and what was most puzzling, creatures like themselves, like Pipiwharauroa, but then not like themselves, the same and yet so different. How could it be? They had come, the birds said, on the waters of the sea, in vessels floating like sticks upon the waters. They were doing terrible things, killing, slaughtering indiscriminately as if those birds like Ruru, the owl, and Pouakai, the great eagle, had gone mad. They were lighting fires which got out of control and together with strange four legged creatures they called Kuru, the dog, they were driving the terrified great and gentle Moa birds into the swamps and there slaughtering them far beyond their immediate need for food. These were the pictures conveyed to her but she could not comprehend it. It could not be.

How could these creatures be of their own kind, like themselves, who ate only fruit and nectar, plants and roots, shellfish and eggs the birds gifted to them on special occasions, gathering everything carefully, with a prayer and supplication toward those they were taking. As the birds collected seed and nectar and insects to survive, so did her kind, and always with the understanding of how interdependent they all were, how much they needed each other to survive. They never took more than they needed. How could they be like them? Surely the messages were wrong. Perhaps she was just growing old and her powers were failing her, or worse, going mad. But no, the birds would soon let her know, would soon condemn and leave her.

But she was hungry after her all night vigil and climbed out of her nest hanging in the great pohutakawa tree and descended to the ground, closing the entrance flap behind her and securing it against the rain which she knew would come later in the day. She knew she must now leave the island and return to the mainland.

"I am hungry my dear friend", she conveyed quietly to her friend. She had brought nothing with her to eat as such a journey required an empty belly. "What I now need is some of the sweet nectar of the pohutakawa", she said, feeling quite light-headed while she folded the feather blanket that she had wrapped around her all night and placed it in the cave, the entrance of which was hidden within the roots of a pohutawakawa tree. The blanket had been made from the caste off feathers of the ducks when they moulted every year and interwoven with flax fibres.

She stayed for a time kneeling in the dry sandy floor of the cave out of respect for her ancestors who once lived in and around this cave and for her mate Kahua who was buried nearby. The entrance was sheltered from the southerly winds and had offered shelter to their kind for many, many generations. Hot springs were nearby and the cave itself was cunningly developed by generations of habitation. There were niches on which to hang their hammocks and carefully carved storage rooms. There was a fire pit and a cunningly concealed exit for the smoke.

Pipiwharauroa had all but forgotten why her tribe ceased to live here other that that it became vulnerable to storms. Still the island remained their most sacred place and where all their tribe chose to be buried.

"Pipi, my friend, I can hear you and I am listening to you all, but now we must leave the island and go to Ngahuia". For above the tumult of the world far beyond she could hear her daughter calling her, asking her if all was well. There was it seems something that she and her mate Ruru needed to convey to her.
End