The Tooth (5 page)

Kaimanawa horses mean so much to me.

Living their life so unfettered and free.

As wild as the country where they can still roam, Kaimanawa horses—have—brought—me—back—home.

The guitarist finished with a strumming of chords and everyone applauded. As the clapping died, Grandad called out, ‘OK, now it’s Michael’s turn. C’mon Mike. C’mon Mike.’

Everyone turned to Mits. His smile changed to panic; he’d never thought that anything like this could happen. Then he amazed me. He opened his mouth and started singing ‘Puff
the Magic Dragon’. It was not very loud, but it was in tune and got stronger when the guitar caught up with him. As he finished the first verse and moved to the chorus, everyone joined in as loudly as they had for ‘Kaimanawa Horses’.

He sang all four versus, ending amid deafening applause: everyone knew he’d not found it easy. I clapped as loud as anyone. I was so proud of him—even though he’d used the forbidden D-word at least ten times.

That night, we were lying in the bunkhouse thinking through the events of the day when Mits asked, ‘Why do you like horses so much?’

I thought for a while before answering. ‘Because when you’re riding a horse it is like you’re joined together. The horse makes me stronger and more powerful. At least Phoebe does.’

‘Maybe it’s because you’re so small,’ Mits suggested.

I chuckled. ‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘You could be a jockey. They have to be small.’

‘It’s been suggested. But I dunno. If I worked with horses all the time, I might stop enjoying riding them for fun. Anyway I’ve got a few years to make up my mind.’

We thought our own thoughts for a while, before I asked, ‘Do you know what you want to be?’

‘Yes,’ he said, definitely. ‘I want to do computer animation like those people who did
Lord of the Rings
and
King Kong
.’

‘More fantasy.’

‘Yeah, it’s what I’m good at.’

‘Tell me, Mits, do you really believe that dragons once existed?’

‘Yes! Of course! Almost all people have stories about large reptiles that attacked them and caused all sorts of harm. They wouldn’t have these stories unless some part of it was true.’

‘But they don’t all have wings and breathe fire, do they?’

‘Some do.’ I sensed him going on the defensive.

‘So why haven’t we found fossils of reptiles with wings?’

‘Because we haven’t looked in the right places.’

‘OK, but how could they breathe fire?’

‘Oh, that’s easy. They belch methane.’

‘Methane?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Yeah, you know the stuff that’s in a cow’s fart. The stuff that causes global warming. It catches fire if you put a match to it. Well, dragons belch it out instead of farting. And, just at the right stage of the belch, they bash their teeth together to form a spark. Then—hey presto—you have fire. See,’ he added proudly, ‘I told you it was easy.’

I laughed. ‘And you believe that?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, laughing with me. ‘Because it makes me feel good. Just like you riding your horse.’

I couldn’t argue with that.

It was Wednesday before we got the chance to go searching for The Tooth. I’d tried to convince my grandparents that we could go by ourselves on Phoebe and the quad, but Grandad wouldn’t let us, mainly because we would have to travel on the main road for about ten kilometres of the trip. I could see his point: it would be dangerous for both horse and bike if a big truck-and-trailer unit thundered by.

I hadn’t told my grandparents the real reason for wanting to visit the Waitea River. All I’d said was I wanted to see the place before it became a lake. They thought that was a good idea and were prepared to go out of their way to help. Grandad even offered to go with us, until I said we wanted to spend the whole day there. In the end we found a solution. On Wednesday Nanna and Grandad were going to Taihape for a hogget sale and they could take us most of the way. That suited me fine, as it meant Mits and I didn’t have to go to Taihape. I’d been to the sheep sales a couple of times—for me, they meant a long, boring day. It’s not as if Grandad buys anything. To him and Nanna it was a day out with the chance to meet friends and catch up with the gossip, and there’s always plenty of both in country areas.

So, on Wednesday morning they dropped us off at the end of the road that led to the park on the river. We were to be back there in seven hours. We figured that would give us plenty of time.

In my mind I had tried to envisage the park. My images were nothing like reality. To begin with, bulldozers had been working, creating a new car park and picnic area. This was quite some way from the original park. A sign told us it was a lakeside park developed by the electricity company.

We walked down to the old car park. A sign warned us that the area was to be flooded and should be considered dangerous any time from the first of February.

As we wandered around getting a feel for the place, Mits asked, ‘You remember any of this?’

I shook my head. ‘Nothing. I can’t believe that something very important in my life happened here and I’ve no memory of it.’

He looked at me, and asked gently. ‘How do you feel?’

I smiled. ‘I feel good. I’m pleased I came and saw it before it was flooded.’ In fact I was surprised how good I felt. I had expected to be emotional about the place. Instead, I was feeling the warm glow of completion, as if I’d been putting off something for too long, and now I’d finally done it.

‘Are you ready for the quest then?’ he asked.

I lifted our supply bag onto my back, and replied, ‘Yes, I’m ready. Lead on, Sir Michael.’ He chuckled and moved towards a bit of a path that led downstream beside the river.

It soon became plain that the path was a goat track when we disturbed a group grazing on a steep hillside. Wild goats, pigs and deer live in the area, although Grandad says not in the numbers they once did.

While the aerial photos in
The Quest
didn’t show the track, it was easy to see where we were, and how far it was to the first possible landing area. After about fifteen minutes, we rounded a bend and there it was: a small, sandy beach
alongside a remarkably green piece of flat land, surrounded by cliffs with lots of bare rocks. It was just the sort of place we wanted.

Unfortunately it wasn’t
the
place. We spent an hour searching the base of the cliffs without finding any clue that would lead to The Tooth. No ongaonga trees, no Red Admiral butterflies, no shining crystals, and certainly no fossils of any form.

Locations two, three and four were just as bad. By then we had used up four of our seven hours. We sat on a large boulder by the river, eating lunch and discussing progress.

‘This could take forever,’ complained Mits.

‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘Have you got a better idea?’

‘You’ve got to remember more, or we’ll never get anywhere.’ There was a whine in his voice that I recognized as the first sign of anger.

‘I can’t remember stuff that’s gone forever,’ I said with some annoyance. Although, even as I said it, I had the feeling, yet again, that I was missing something important.

‘Well if you don’t, then we’ll mess around all holidays without finding a thing.’

I kept quiet. When he got like this it was better for him to work his own way out of it.

‘Throw me the bag,’ he ordered.

I did, and he pulled out
The Quest
. Angrily, he thumbed through the pages until he got to the place showing the five most likely sites. ‘Look!’ he shouted, stabbing a finger at the page. ‘There’s hundreds more places than the ones we marked.’

I nodded. There weren’t hundreds, but there would have been at least another twenty before the dam.

‘Let’s go back, we’re wasting our time here,’ complained Mits.

‘No! We’ve come this far and there’s only one more place to go. We should check it out. If it’s not the right place, then we’ll have to work out another plan.’

‘I’m going back.’

‘Well, I’m not.’ I stood and climbed down from the boulder. I walked a few metres downstream before turning and calling back, ‘C’mon, Mits. We might as well get it over and done with.’ Without waiting for a reply, I continued moving down the river.

‘Wait!’ he yelled.

I turned and looked back. ‘What?’

‘Look,’ he said in a softer voice, pointing to the top of the cliff opposite. There were two people up there looking down at us.

I waved to them, but there was no response from the two on the cliff. Instead, they turned to each other and we saw them in profile. It looked like a man and a boy.

‘That’s Sam Mason,’ said Mits. ‘I’d know that shape anywhere.’

He was right: the profile was a perfect match. ‘The other guy must be his cousin.’

They stared at us for a while longer, before turning and walking away and out of view. A horrible feeling formed in my stomach: I’d tried to wipe Sam Mason from my mind. I’d almost convinced myself that if he was on holiday up here then the place was so big it was unlikely we would ever see him. Now I knew that was a stupid hope. Not only was he here, but he was in exactly the area where we’d expected to find The Tooth.

I turned to Mits. ‘We can go back if you want.’

‘No!’ he said, harshly. ‘We go on. We’ve got to find The Tooth before Mason does. I’m not letting that thug beat us to it.’

The fifth place was as useless as the previous four. We did a quick circuit of the canyon, only to find that there were no ongaonga trees. Then we struggled up a dry creek bed until we reached the top of the cliffs and the surrounding land. That should have been easier going, but it wasn’t: it looked like the land hadn’t been farmed for years, and the manuka had reached an awkward height.

It was almost two hours past the meeting time when we got back to where my grandparents were waiting. They were not happy with us.

‘What happened to you?’ barked Grandad as soon as we got in the car.

Mits answered: ‘It took longer than we thought.’

Grandad looked at me. ‘We thought something must have happened to you. We were worried sick.’

I couldn’t hold his gaze. I looked down and said, ‘Sorry, Grandad. Sorry, Nanna.’ That took the heat out of things and we drove back to Pounamu in silence.

After we’d showered and changed, Mits and I held a council of war.

‘What do we do now?’ Mits asked. ‘Give up?’

‘No!’

‘Then what? We could be looking for the whole of the holidays.’ He looked over to me. ‘Unless you come up with some more clues.’

I thought for a while before replying. ‘I think we need help from people who know the area better than we do,’ I said.

‘Who? Your grandparents?’

I nodded.

‘Do you think they’ll help us?’

‘We can only try,’ I said. ‘Even if they stop us from doing anything, we’ll be no worse off than we are now.’

It was soon obvious that Nanna and Grandad weren’t going to stop us. Quite the opposite, they became increasingly excited by the idea.

The discussion took place after dinner. Mits and I described our day and what we were trying to do. We gave them everything we knew about The Tooth. I even had my books there:
The Quest
, Grams’s lost scrapbook, and ‘The Ballad of Wee Timothy Thomas’.

‘So,’ I said, at the finish, ‘the problem is we can’t find any of the clues except for beaches that lead to small canyons and sandstone cliffs. And there are too many of those to search every one.’

‘Let’s look at the clues one at a time,’ said Grandad. ‘The ongaonga is probably the best. I know it grows in the district. We used to have it here until we chopped it all down. You don’t want that stuff around horses.’

‘Would it be in any of the bits by the river?’ asked Mits.

‘Probably,’ replied Grandad. ‘It’s just that you haven’t been to the right place yet. You’ll know it when you find it. It stings like hell.’

‘What about the glowing crystals?’ I asked.

He thought for a while. ‘I don’t think there’s anything like that around the place at all. I think you’ve got that wrong. It’s probably something else.’

‘Glow-worms!’ put in Nanna. ‘That’s what glows in the dark around here. Glow-worms.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Grandad, thoughtfully. ‘I think you’re right. You said it was cold, Timothy. That probably meant it was damp. If it’s damp and an overhanging cliff, there’d be glow-worms for sure.’

I looked at Mits—why hadn’t we thought of that? It seemed so obvious now that Nanna had mentioned it.

‘But that doesn’t help us much,’ continued Grandad. ‘Because, like ongaonga, they could be in any of the places by the river. What we need is something that points us to one particular place. What we need is a decent map.’

He left the room and returned a moment later with a large topographical map of the area. He spread it before us on the table. ‘First thing is to mark where you’ve been.’

For the next few minutes we traced our path from that day. When you saw it on a map, we had covered quite some distance. No wonder I was feeling a bit tired. But the disheartening thing was how much of the river we hadn’t covered.

While we were studying the map, Nana was quietly reading ‘The Ballad of Wee Timothy Thomas’. She’d reached the end and was peering at the drawing of me caught in the headlights, when I glanced over at her.

‘That’s just how you looked when you got home,’ she said.

I looked at the page and suddenly bells and sirens went off in my head: this was the thing that had been trying to come to the surface. On that page was an important clue.

‘What was the red stuff on my T-shirt?’ I asked, trying to hold back my excitement. ‘Was that blood?’

‘No,’ replied Nanna. ‘You weren’t injured. I don’t know what that stuff was. We didn’t pay much attention to it. We were only interested in you. We were so pleased you were alive.’

‘Clay!’ shouted Grandad. ‘That’s what it was. Red clay! And I know just where it came from.’ He turned to the map. ‘It’s over here somewhere.’ Suddenly, he stabbed his finger at a spot. ‘There! That’s where you must have been.’

Mits and I peered at the spot. There was a small symbol showing a shovel crossed with a miner’s pick.

‘That’s the clay quarry. In the early days they took clay out for making tile drains. Then later, potters took it for their pots. Maybe they still do.’

‘The Tooth wouldn’t be in there, would it?’ asked Mits.

‘No. But it gives a pointer to where you might have got out of the river.’ He started making marks on the map. ‘You were found here. The quarry is here, so you must have got out of the water somewhere near here.’

I opened
The Quest
and matched the aerial photos with the map. The place Grandad had found was just like the places we had explored, except it was a lot further downstream.

‘That’ll be it,’ said Mits, his face glowing with excitement.

‘So how do we get there?’ I asked.

‘Easy,’ replied Grandad. ‘You go overland. If you take Phoebe and the quad, you don’t need to go onto the main road at all.’ He traced a path across Pounamu, and then over the main road on to the gravel track where I was found. If we travelled along there for a while, we would reach a smaller track that led to the quarry. From there it was no distance to the place on the river.

‘What’s this?’ asked Mits, pointing to a black rectangle halfway along the gravel track.

‘That’s Fred and Sarah’s old place. The people who found Timothy. They’ve moved to a retirement village in Napier. The place is derelict now. So’s the farm. Nothing’s been done to it for the past five years. You walked over part of it today, so you know what it’s like.’

We talked away for another half-hour or more until I started falling asleep.

As I hugged Nanna before going to bed, she said, ‘I’m pleased you’re doing this, Timothy. Rebecca would have loved to find something like a dinosaur. You know, she used to collect all sorts of things. Her room was like a little museum, right from the time she was only little. It will be great if you can find something really worth while. It will give us all so much joy.’

Then she pulled me tighter and I felt her tears on my cheek. For the first time, I realized that this whole thing was more than finding a few dinosaur bones. For my grandparents and father, there were things that had not yet been finished. This was my chance to add the final bits, and then maybe this episode in our lives could be closed.