Song of the Spirits (29 page)

“William, go let out the bulls!” Gwyneira called to him, screaming wildly against the wind. She had just emerged for the second time, dragging a cow behind her that seemed to feel safer inside. “That’s where we need people who know something about livestock.”

William had wanted to manage the bucket chains and encourage the people to work faster, but he turned with trepidation in the direction of the bulls’ stalls.

“Get to it!” roared Andy McAran, taking William’s horse without asking after William had finally dismounted.

“Come on, Gwyn, we’ve got enough heifers. We need good riders to herd the steers in. Otherwise, they’ll level the Maori village like they did the paddocks.” The old farmhand dug his heels roughly into the flanks of William’s horse, which seemed to have as little
desire to plunge into the tumult as its rider. However, the situation was becoming critical. While the boys held the heifers and dairy cows in check, the young steers had long since been on the move. William observed Gwyneira leaving the cows to other helpers and leaping onto her horse. She rode alongside Andy toward the Maori camp. Her cob mare did not need to be spurred on, seeming to have been waiting for the chance to leave the burning buildings behind.

William finally approached the barn, annoyed at Andy McAran for taking possession of his horse. Why could the cad not release the bulls himself and let William ride off with Gwyneira?

Meanwhile, flames were pouring out of the dairy cows’ barn, but the cows were already trotting about outside. Two Maori women who seemed to know what they were doing had freed the last of them and were now drawing them into a paddock that their men were in the process of jury-rigging. The boys were driving the heifers in the same direction. The animals had calmed down significantly, and the rain and thunder slowly abated.

William stepped into the barn, but Poker Livingston held him back.

“Take a rag first and hold it over your nose or you’ll breathe in smoke!” The old farmhand then ran back into the barn, directly toward the stamping, roaring bulls. The animals could now see the flames and were panicking in their pens. William began working on the first pen’s lock. He didn’t feel entirely safe stepping up to the raging monster to untie it, but if Poker thought…

“No, don’t go in!” thundered Poker, running among the pens. “Haven’t you ever worked with cattle before? Those beasts’ll kill you if you get in their pens now. Here, come and hold me. I’m going to try and undo the chain from above.”

Poker clambered up the stall and balanced precariously on the thin wall. As long as he held tight to a beam, it was fine, but to undo the chain, he had to lean forward and have his hands free. He would have to let go of the cloth covering his mouth too, though the smoke in that area was not overpowering yet.

William climbed onto the wood divider as well, straddled it and held Poker’s belt tightly. Poker dangled perilously but kept his balance as he fumbled with the first bull’s chain. Both men had to keep a watchful eye to avoid being struck by the mighty animal’s horns.

“Open the pen, Maaka!” Poker called to a Maori boy who stood ready in front of the stall. The boy who had just been driving the cattle with Jack ducked behind the gate in a flash as the bull burst forth from his pen.

“Good. Now, onto number two. But careful, Maaka, this one’s crazy.” As Poker moved to start climbing the wall of the next pen, the bull inside rolled its head about and pawed threateningly at the ground.

“Let me do it, Poker! I’m faster!” The exuberant young Maori had already clambered up the wall before the older man had found the right footing. With a dancer’s grace, Maaka balanced on the wooden divider.

William just wanted to be done with the whole business. The flames were coming closer, the smoke was getting thicker, and the men could hardly breathe. But neither Poker nor Maaka seemed to even consider sacrificing the bulls.

William held Maaka by the belt as he had held Poker before, while the old hand went on his own to see to the third bull, a youngster bound to its pen with a rope instead of a chain. Poker used his knife to slice through the rope from above, and Jack McKenzie, who had just entered the barn, opened the stall. As a result, the bull had already stormed out before Poker could even climb back from the feed trough to the gate to set the animal free. Jack and Poker then went to work on the gate of the last pen, which appeared to be stuck. Meanwhile, Maaka was still struggling with the chain on the wild bull, which had only grown more panicked since the other bulls had taken off. The boy leaned forward recklessly, almost floating over the stall’s walls.

William did not know whether Maaka was first struck by the bull’s horn or his own precarious seat on the divider was to blame, or if the belt that he was holding onto gave way. It could have been the
shaking caused by the collapsing haystack that disturbed their balance. William would never know if he felt himself fall or heard Maaka’s scream first as the leather belt slid from his hand. But he saw the boy fall between the hooves of the bull as William landed in a corner of the pen himself—safe from an attack as long as the animal was chained up. But then he saw that the bull was free. Maaka must have undone the chain just as he fell. Once the bull realized it was free, it tried to flee, but the pen was still shut. While Poker and Jack struggled with the locking mechanism, the bull ran around its stall in a crazed panic. It stopped short when it caught sight of Maaka, who lay scrunched up on the ground, trying to shield his face. The boy whimpered as the bull’s massive, horned head approached him.

“Distract the beast! Damn it, Mr. Martyn,” Poker howled, turning the bar on the pen’s lock. It hardly budged.

William stared as though hypnotized at the gigantic animal. Distract it? Then the beast would charge at him. He would have to be crazy to do such a thing! But the injured boy was crawling toward him in a panic.

“Look here, Stonewall!”

William saw out of the corner of his eye that Jack McKenzie was waving a blanket in front of the gate to draw the attention of the animal away from Maaka. Dead tired, Jack flung himself against the stall’s wall. As he did so, the lock finally gave way, and the door swung open. The bull did not realize this right away, however, and continued to focus its wrath on Maaka. Lowering its horns, the animal was preparing to strike… when Jack threw the damp blanket onto the animal’s hindquarters and started dancing around behind him like a torero.

“Look here, Stonewall. Come here!”

Poker roared something from the gate, apparently wanting to call the boy back. But Jack stayed where he was and continued goading the bull, which turned around very slowly.

“Come get me! Come on,” Jack provoked him—and spun around in a flash when the animal finally began to move. As the wiry boy dove in a single leap over the fence to safety, Stonewall finally saw the
opening in the pen. The bull shot out of its stall past Poker Livingston and finally made it outside. The men in front of the barn must have heard the screaming, because helpers streamed inside. Flames had lit up the barn. As William started coughing, he was seized by a couple of strong Maori workers and dragged outside. Two other men carried Maaka away, and a third supported a hacking Poker.

As William, gasping, breathed in the clear late-afternoon air by the lake, he was only peripherally aware that parts of the barn were collapsing behind him.

Although several men were tending to Maaka and Poker, William’s helpers didn’t even give him a chance to catch his breath before one of them pulled William abruptly to his feet. Once again, his men had markedly failed to show him any respect.

“Are you hurt? No? Then, come, sir. There’s nothing more to be done here, but we need to herd the sheep elsewhere. And the cattle have to be put up somewhere. We just got word that Mrs. McKenzie is herding the steers toward the shearing sheds. The sheep needed to go there so that the cattle can go into these paddocks. And we have to work fast. They could be here at any moment.” As the man ran to the sheds, he turned around several times, as though to make sure that William was following.

William was wondering why Gwyneira did not herd the cattle straight into the shearing sheds and was about to give an order to that effect. But the words died on his lips when he saw the tiny entrances to the sheds. Of course. The sheep were released more or less one at a time after being sheared and put through a bath, and only then gathered together again in the paddocks outside. The riders would never be able to get a riled-up herd of cattle through those narrow gates. At the moment, the sheep were proving unenthusiastic about the shift into the sheds, which was hardly surprising, as they did not have very pleasant associations with the shearing buildings. But the sheepdogs were doing most of the work anyway. William and the rest of the men merely had to direct the stream of sheep into the correct sheepcotes and shut the gates.

At the time, William didn’t know much about how Gwyneira and Andy were herding the cattle, but he heard a great deal about their apparently spectacular efforts later, of course. They had caught up with and stopped the herd of steers just in front of the Maori village, turned it around, and driven it back, with only four riders and a sheepdog. Thanks to their efforts, the damage from the lightning strike was minimal. True, the cow barn was completely destroyed, but a wood building like that could easily be rebuilt, and the stores of hay had been all but exhausted anyway. Only a few of the Maori’s fields had been trampled, and Gwyneira would pay the damages. No animals had been lost, and the heifers had only suffered a few scratches and mild smoke poisoning. Only Poker and Maaka had come out of it any the worse off. The old farmhand had some bruises and a dislocated shoulder, while the Maori boy had a few broken ribs and an ugly head injury.

“That could have turned out much worse,” mused Andy McAran when it was all finally over, and the cattle were chewing hay in their new paddocks. Jack and his friends had managed to drive the bulls toward the shearing sheds to join the herd of steers and were at that moment walking proudly among the workers. Jack’s assertion that in Europe you could make money for making bulls angry by waving a red cloth in front of them while a crowd watched made all the Maori boys want to grow up to be matadors.

“How did that even happen?” Andy asked. “Maaka didn’t enter the stall with Stonewall, did he?”

While Gwyneira yelled at her son, accusing him of endless stupidity, Andy McAran began to investigate what had happened. Jack and the other helpers couldn’t tell him anything though, since none of them had witnessed the accident, and Maaka himself was still not coherent. Finally, Poker, who sat on a blanket, still coughing, caught Andy’s eye.

“The crown prince was a good… sorry, a good-for-nothing,” commented the old hand with a meaningful smile. Then his face took on a pained expression. “Could somebody snap my shoulder back into place? I promise not to squeal.”

“What the hell did you think you were doing?”

Gwyneira had finished with her son and had rewarded the hardworking helpers with a barrel of whiskey. She had given the Maori women a sack of planting seed to thank them for their help. Now she was taking advantage of the walk back to the manor house to lay into William. She was soaked, dirty, in a very bad temper, and looking for a scapegoat. “How could you let the boy fall?”

“I already told you. It was an accident!” William said, defending himself. “I would never—”

“You never should have allowed the boy into the stall! Couldn’t you loosen the chain yourself? The boy could have died. And Jack too. But while those two boys tried to let the bull out, you sat in the corner looking on like a spooked rabbit!”

He doubted that Poker had phrased it that way, so that expression must have come from Jack. William felt rage swelling inside him once again.

“That’s not how it happened! I—”

“That
is
how it happened!” Gwyneira broke in. “Why would the boys lie? William, you’re always trying to secure your position here, which I understand. But then things like this happen. If you’ve never worked with cattle before, why didn’t you say so? You could have helped with the bucket chains or with repairing the paddocks.”

“I should have ridden with you,” William declared.

“So that you could have fallen off your horse?” Gwyneira asked rudely. “William, wake up! This isn’t a business you can run like a country gentleman. You can’t simply ride out at your leisure in the morning with your gamekeeper and delegate the work. You have to know what you’re doing, and you should count yourself lucky that you have people like Andy and Poker who come to your aid. People like that are inestimably valuable. This isn’t Ireland.”

“I see things differently,” William stated brazenly. “I think it’s a question of leadership style.”

In the last light of day, he saw Gwyneira rolling her eyes.

“William, your old tenants have been on the land for generations. They don’t even need the landlords. They would keep the shop in order on their own—and maybe even do a better job! But here, you mostly have make do with beginners. The Maori are gifted shepherds despite the fact that sheep only first arrived in this area some fifty years ago with Gerald Warden. There is no tradition here. And the white shepherds are adventurers from the four corners of the earth. You have to teach them and no amount of arrogance will help with that. Just listen to me for once and stay quiet for a few months. Try to learn from James, Andy, and the others instead of insulting them all the time.”