The Worm King (34 page)

Strangely, the whānau hadn’t wanted to
come over when he was living on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert in the
arse-end of nowhere. No, it was a much better idea when Wiremu moved to his
luxurious pad (by their standards) in Manly. Over the years they’d leached off
him good and proper and he hadn’t thought Āmiria was ever particularly
close to her “uncle” Tamahere and his overbearing wife, so the fact they’d
almost certainly perished in the Sydney tsunamis didn’t affect him as much as
he might’ve thought. In Tamworth they heard about the waves hitting the coast
the day after it’d happened. Wiremu quickly arrived at the gut-wrenching
decision his daughter would have to get to him, because she knew where he was
but not vice-versa. If they crossed paths in the dark, with him going south
while she was making her way up to Tamworth, they may never get another chance.
He decided to give her a month. When his daughter arrived in Tamworth:
that
was by far and away the best day of his life. There had been only 16 hours left
before the full month was up.

The bus floor was as clean as it was ever
going to get so he got off, via the front this time after levering open the
broken concertina door with his arm in order to squeeze through. The air felt cold
and gritty but sweet relief after the smell inside. Āmiria and Jerry were
still at the engine, Jerry back on the file, and Tim continuing to watch over
Āmiria’s shoulder. Wiremu walked up silently and tussled the boy’s head. He
looked around startled, and guilty. Wiremu suspected Tim was keen on her, and
he ort to frown, but it was funny more than anything because she could drop the
kid easily if he were game enough to actually try anything.

‘How’s she lookin?’

‘Bloody strut’s tricky to get level,’ said
Jerry, without looking up.

‘Bloody thing,’ his daughter agreed.

‘Hey! You watch your mouth girl!’ It came out
sharp; perhaps a touch more so than he’d intended. Tim stepped back. Jerry
looked up briefly and returned to his file. Āmiria was contrite for about
two seconds, then grinned. He used language like that all the time; he knew it,
and so did she. Potty-mouth was the least of his parental concerns.

Wiremu Ruarangi was worried about his
daughter mostly because she kept growing up too fast. He let her get away with
things his own father would’ve never in a million years tolerated. It could be
something to do with her brains, he suspected, and they’re a complicated
business. Unusual things had definitely been happening in her noggin from
before she could walk. He often wondered where it stemmed from—certainly not
his
side of the family. The way she could build things, and work out
puzzles and crosswords and the like was extraordinary. And brave! Almost
fearless.

Almost.

Occasionally, in the last year or two, the
odd thing happened and this look of pure unholy terror flashed over her face, and
he could never for the life of him work out what’d caused it. Then he’d have to
rethink everything done up to that point. Where’d he gone wrong? His attempts
at psychoanalysis seldom reached any useful conclusion. He must just be a bad
father.

‘Come on girl,’ he said gently. ‘Have a
break from that, and we’ll go over the fire and cook this up.’ He waggled the
can of Tom Yum.

‘ . . . so McGregor was
on the last ball of the over, and at the other end Howarth had just hit three
4’s in a row, then the wicketkeeper—you won’t believe this—called the umpire
over! I’ll tell you, the crowd were gobsmacked!’ exclaimed Alistair.

Lord Brown shuffled to one side allowing
Wiremu, Āmiria and Tim to sit. Ken went to help Jerry on the engine. Wiremu
had no idea a cricket game could go on for that long, so he said to Alistair,
‘I had no idea a cricket game could go on that long.’ John the Hat laughed; Alistair
looked offended.

‘Can do, can do,’ he replied tartly. ‘What
sport do you play then? Everyone’s an All Black over there, aren’t they?
Haw!
Haw! Haw!
’

Wiremu failed to smile, only squinted and
cocked his head shooting Alistair a piercing stare. ‘Black? What did you say? What
do you mean by that then?’

Alistair spluttered and tried to backtrack,
saying he hadn’t meant any of this, or that, or anything and Wiremu decided to
let the poor twit off easy. It was hard keeping a straight face anyway. He glanced
down, noticing the forgotten can of Tom Yum.

A twenty-liter, soot-stained cooking pot
with a makeshift wire handle was being used as a billy. They’d raised it on a rough
circle of unevenly-sized stones next to the fire, although John the Hat, who’d
volunteered to set it up, placed it a fraction too far from the actual fire so
it was taking ages to heat. Would’ve been much more efficient to build a
smaller, separate fire for the cooking. The billy contained a mixture of canned
food so everyone received a bit of everything therefore no one could complain. Wiremu
pulled the top off the Tom Yum, got to his feet, went and lifted the lid and poured
it in. They’d already done a billy-load of mixed cans two of hours ago, before
Kevin went out, and the Tom Yum combo couldn’t possibly be any worse than that.

He sat back down. ‘That’ll give it some
curry.’ Alistair fidgeted nervously, still unsure whether he’d avoided a
beating. ‘To tell you the truth Alistair, I don’t follow rugby these days. You
know, I played it for quite a while at school, even played Aussie rules a few
times when we were living in Port Hedland. And had a brief crack at league when
we came to Sydney. Ended up thinking they were all a bit tame, if you want me
honest opinion. And cricket? You call that a sport!? It’s a disgrace!

‘Pighuntin’s me main sport now. I’m in the
building trade, so it lets me slip over the ditch every three or four months for
a long weekend huntin. Whenever I can, really. The thing is, it keeps you fit,
you get to roam around some pretty good country, and sometimes get a big pile of
free meat to take home. On top of that, I can even take the girl out!’ He
smiled at his daughter. She looked chuffed.

‘You take
her
out hunting?’ frowned
Alistair, incredulous. ‘Not with real guns?’

‘Course I can!’ trumpeted Āmiria
proudly. ‘I went last time and helped get this—’

‘You helped get the tea ready!’ Wiremu cut
in, stopping her before she embarrassed herself. She had been on their last
hunt, but he’d kept her well back from the action because the boar turned out
to be a monster.

‘I’ve seen those pigs,’ bleated Alistair. ‘They’re
pink, the poor things, and they keep them in those dirty little sties, all
caged up. We got a pamphlet in the mail about it and Raymond thought it’s a
scandal.’

So Alistair definitely was a poof.

Wiremu continued. ‘We were in the Ureweras,
just before all this happened.’ Alistair looked blank.

‘It’s a big forest in the North Island of
New Zealand, about halfway up on the eastern side.’ He didn’t think he could constructively
pinpoint the Ureweras much more than that, so pressed on. ‘Anyway, we went in
with a cousin of mine, Monty Weke. Monty looks after the dogs while I’m over
here. It took us seven hours to walk in, up the Whirinaki track, and it rained
the whole bloody time, didn’t it girl?’

‘Dunno, didn’t notice.’ She shrugged, and he
laughed. That’d been the standing joke on the trip: Āmiria set a cracking
pace walking in (“we do athletics twice a week at school, you know”) but on the
second day, slowed considerably. That’s the problem with kids these days: no
staying power.

‘We spent the night in an old deerstalkers
bivvy Monty and I’ve used a couple of times. Next morning, there was a hell of
a downpour and we got completely lost for about four hours, then spent the
afternoon chasing this huge boar around a steep-sided gully all choked up with
supplejack and bush lawyer. She was a nightmare to fight your way through. Wasn’t
it girl?’

‘It was.’ No one in their right mind would
forget the awful struggle up that sheer, never-ending gully of mud and thorns.

‘I got a shot at it just on dark, when it
broke away from the dogs, but I only winged it and we found it’d made a real
mess of the bitch we use as the main holder. Poor thing nearly drained right
out there in the rain, and needed twenty stitches which Monty did with a needle
and twine he always carries. Next morning, we took the other two dogs out and
they found the trail not long after dawn and we got the pig cornered, then Monty
finished him off. Would’ve gone more than 200lbs we reckoned. Monty gutted it
and he carried it most of the way out too. Had these giant yellow tusks, sharp
as razors. Eight inches long they were. He was an evil looking mongrel, I’ll
tell ya. Bristly, jet-black hair all over him.’

John the Hat leant across and scratched Peanuts
head. ‘Do you use dogs like this?’ He nodded at the cocker spaniel. Āmiria
burst out laughing.

‘No. He’d get eaten alive. Wouldn’t last two
minutes. Monty’s found the best dog is a cross between a bull stafford terrier
and a greyhound. The terriers were originally bred a long time ago to chase
rats, and the staffie is one of the bigger terriers, so Monty’s dogs are like
massive ratters, but real fast and they can drag down something twice the
weight of a man. If we had Monty’s dogs here now, there wouldn’t be no one we
didn’t like get’in on that bus, that’s for sure!’

‘So that’s how you always get the pigs then,
shoot them while the dogs are chasing them round and round?’ asked the Hat.

‘Oh, surely not!’ pleaded Alistair. If he
was hoping for a humane ending he could be in for a disappointment.

‘No, we hardly ever use the gun, or you
might hit the dogs. Monty never does. You’ve got to grab the boar by a back
leg, then flip it over and stab it through the heart. You’ve got to hope the
dogs keep a hold on its head: usually there’ll be a dog on each ear if they’re
any good, and the boar will be squealing like banshee which is probably the
worst part. You’ve gotta make sure you stab it on the right side—the pig’s
left-hand side, I mean—because if you don’t get the heart, you’ll just make it
really bloody angry.’

Alistair looked pale, and aghast. Nigel said
he thought it sounded like a jolly difficult, violent sport, especially for a
wee one to be playing.

The Hat disagreed. ‘I think it’d be a hoot. Less
so for the pig, admittedly, but you never come home from a game of cricket with
a hundredweight of prime bacon on your back, do you? So is that how you blokes
over there have always hunted?’

Wiremu contemplated. ‘You’d have to say no. The
first pigs arrived in New Zealand with Captain Cook, which was well late in the
piece if you ask me. Still, we were always pretty good hunters cos we managed
to tear through all the moa in a fairly short space of time.’

‘Do you hunt in Australia at all?’ asked
Lord Brown.

‘Not so far. Although I hear the boars they
get in Queensland can be even bigger than the kiwi ones, but they often have a
type of worm in the flesh so aren’t much good for eating.’ He froze, then cast a
glance over his shoulder as though he’d heard something. ‘I suppose they’ll be
out roaming now. Big boars love the dark. That’s when they feed.’

Nigel and Alistair looked around too. Lord
Brown chuckled. ‘Perhaps you got it from the Germans somehow?’ he suggested. ‘The
Huns always liked their boar hunting. However my understanding is the
Māori are widely recognized as the best boar hunters in the world these
days.’

Steam was at last beginning to rise from the
billy. The smell drifted over; fragrant, but with a sickly-sweet tang Wiremu couldn’t
place. He asked the Hat what else was in the pot.

‘Six cans of no-frills strawberry jam, one liter
of lime thickshake syrup and four cans of Watties jellied mushrooms. And your
can of Tom Yum.’ No one spoke for several minutes, taking this in.

Eventually the Hat said, ‘Jeez, I bet those
moa were tasty. Weren’t they like a turkey, only as big as a car?’

Wiremu thought this a stretch. ‘I don’t
think they were that big.’

‘How’d you cook them? On a spit sort of
thing, I suppose.’

‘No. In a hāngī. And not sure
about turkey either. Monty reckons they would’ve tasted somewhere between venison
and seagull. You dig a great big hole, put hot rocks from a fire on the bottom,
wrap your meat in leaves, cover and cook real slow so it just falls of the
bone.’

It would be tasty too. Mouthwatering in
fact. Wiremu could almost see the enormous turkey-like thing laying there,
seductively wrapped in puwha, watercress and cabbage tree leaves with maybe a
sprinkling of kawakawa berry on top to give it some pepper. Then, next to the
moa, he spies this strange-looking, smaller hunk of meat, that might’ve been
pork, and then again it might not be. Something Lord Brown said earlier flashed
into his head, about “things getting much worse.” Suddenly he didn’t feel like the
moa anymore, and his appetite had gone right off. He wondered how Monty was
getting on: he’ll be alright, and should’ve been safe from any of those big
waves they had here. Where he lived in Turangi was about as far from the sea as
you could get, and virtually surrounded by mountains. Wiremu thought they were mostly
old volcanoes.

The Hat went to the fire and hooked the
billy away with a solid hunk of branch left there for that purpose. He gave the
brew a stir with a spoon, sniffed it, then jerked back like he’d been
whiplashed. ‘Perfect!’ A stack of paper cups lay on the ground and he slid one
out then dolloped in a spoonful of the lumpy, green soup. Yesterday Kevin found
a carton of five hundred cups in Gunnedah when they’d stopped to look for
diesel, so washing dishes wouldn’t be a problem for a while. It occurred to
Wiremu that Kevin had been gone some time, and his torch battery must be nearly
exhausted.