Uncle Trev and the Whistling Bull (9 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Gotta Henry and the Pook's Feet

“Old Gotta Henry spends half his time mucking about in his swamp watching pukekos.” Uncle Trev tipped his cup of tea into his saucer, blew on it, and drank noisily through his moustache. “By Jove, that's good,” he said, and munched a piece of Louise cake.

I looked at the back door.

“It's okay, I saw your mother chattering away nineteen to the dozen to Mrs Dainty outside the post office. Nodding and cackling like clucky chooks, neither of them listening to a word the other was saying. They'll be good for another hour or two.”

He refilled his cup, stirred in the milk and sugar, and tipped the tea into his saucer again. “Old Gotta knows where every pukeko builds its nest. He's fallen into the swamp a score of times, counting their eggs.”

“If Mum catches you drinking out of your –” I started to say, but Uncle Trev went on.

“They nest in the raupo, out where the swamp's more water than mud. It makes it a bit harder for the stoats and rats. I haven't seen a pukeko peck a rat,” said Uncle Trev, “but I've seen wekas stab them to death. I don't know how they'd get on with a stoat, though, or a weasel. Come to think of it, I haven't seen a weasel in years, nor a weka. They seem to have disappeared in the Waikato. But pooks, Old Gotta must have half the pukekos in the North Island in his swamp.

“That's a nice bit of Louise cake.” Uncle Trev took another piece and tipped more tea into his saucer.

“Aren't the pooks scared of Mr Henry?”

“They take him for one of themselves.” Uncle Trev poured more water from the kettle into the teapot. “You know how your old pook looks as if his legs might snap off at the knee as he walks? Old Gotta's legs look the same, as if his knees bend the wrong way.”

Uncle Trev's hand hovered over the tin and dived for another piece of Louise cake. “You'd better eat some, too. Otherwise your mother will blame me for gobbling the lot.”

I shook my head.

“He's an odd bird, your pook,” said Uncle Trev, “and so's Old Gotta. Probably that's why he's got so many on his place. I asked him once if he was milking cows or pukekos, and he didn't think it was funny.”

“Why does he count the eggs?”

“If he finds more than four or five in a nest, he pinches a couple. Sometimes, you'll get two birds laying in the same nest, and Old Gotta pinches half a dozen eggs then. He reckons pooks can't count, so it doesn't make any difference to them, and they couldn't have raised that many chicks anyway. It's the father bird does most of the hatching.”

“Does Mr Henry sit on the eggs?”

“I wouldn't put it past him. But he's always got a Black Orpington on the cluck, and he takes her eggs and slips the pook eggs under instead. Good mothers, the old Black Orpingtons, even if they are a bit clumsy. She'll squash one of the pukeko chickens occasionally, but she'll raise the rest and, once they're big enough to make it on their own, Old Gotta lets them go in the swamp. He reckons those ones remember him and come to their names.”

“Does he feed them?”

“He'll spend half the morning turning over old planks for slaters, catching grasshoppers, and digging worms; and they'll eat shoots of grass. Sometimes, he'll split up a rotten pine and collect all the huhus for his young pooks.”

“How does Mr Henry get out to the nests, without sinking in the swamp?”

“He's got pretty big feet,” said Uncle Trev. “When he takes off his gumboots, his toes are longer than most people's.”

“Doesn't he wear socks?”

“Never – except when he borrows mine. But his toes aren't just long, they're splayed out, a bit like a pukeko's, so his weight's spread. That's how the pooks get around on the swamp themselves. Even so, Old Gotta's feet aren't big enough for walking across the watery part where the pooks nest. What he did was he made himself a pair of wooden pukeko feet: three enormous toes out the front and a short one out the back. He takes off his gumboots, straps on his big feet, and away he goes, shuffling that gawky pukeko walk across the swamp, good-oh.”

“Doesn't he sink?”

“He did the first time.”

“What happened?”

“Old Tip took the end of a length of plough-line between his teeth and swam out with it.”

“Why didn't Mr Henry just swim ashore?”

“His pukeko feet had sunk deep in that watery mud and he couldn't kick them off to swim. By the time Old Tip got out there, Old Gotta had gone under and there was just his red cap floating. The old fool threw up one hand, felt the rope and hung on, and I backed Old Toot till Old Gotta popped out of the swamp like a cork out of a bottle. He'd swallowed a fair bit of mud, so Old Tip and I had to lie him face down over a log and rock him backwards and forwards a few times before he brought it up and started breathing again.”

“Was he all right?”

“It takes a lot to stop Old Gotta. He went straight home and made another pair of pukeko feet.”

“But they'd just let him down, too.”

“That's what I told him, but Old Gotta reckoned he'd fix that. I left him to it and went home to milk.” Without his noticing it, Uncle Trev's hand dipped into the cake tin. “I went over next day, and he'd made even bigger feet, and sewn sacking between them for webs.

“
‘
Toes like a pook's,' he told me, ‘and webs like a duck's.'

“Old Gotta buckled on his gigantic webbed feet. Legs wide apart, shoving those huge feet forward with a slidey noise, he slithered across the muddy water. Further out, he picked up speed.

“
‘
Watch out!' I shouted, but he squawked and went faster, waving his arms like wings. He had to keep running faster and faster because he was leaning further and further forward. The moment he slowed down, he'd go flat on his face.

“I galloped Old Toot round the other side of the swamp.” Uncle Trev swallowed his piece of Louise cake and emptied his saucer. The tea must have been cold by now, but he didn't seem to notice.

“Old Toot neighed, Old Tip was barking his head off, and I was yelling as Old Gotta came through the raupo, leaning forward almost parallel to the water, kicking up mud and spray. His red cap, his black-blue coat, his white shirt hanging out, he looked for all the world like a pukeko flapping itself into the air. You know how awkward they are taking off?”

I nodded.

“He made it to dry ground,” said Uncle Trev, “and skidded about five feet, pushing up grass and dirt with his nose.”

“I might make myself a pair of pook's feet,” I said, “and try them out down the creek.”

“I'll give you a hand, but you'll have to get well first.” Uncle Trev stuck his hand in the cake tin and felt around. “It's empty,” he said. “I'll hide it behind the other tins in the cupboard. With a bit of luck, your mother won't remember filling it with Louise cake this morning.”

“Mum never forgets a thing,” I reminded Uncle Trev. “She'll give you what for.” But he'd grabbed his hat and was gone.

I lay and thought how I'd make pook's feet out of a couple of old tennis rackets, like the snowshoes I'd seen at the flicks about the Mounties in Canada. I'd ask Uncle Trev for some old dog collars. The County Council gave him a new one each year, when he registered Old Tip. They'd do for straps.

I'd tell Mum I was feeling much better, and she'd be so pleased about that, she mightn't think about looking for the cake tin.

Chapter Eighteen

How They Built the Rangitoto Lighthouse

“You left school when you were big enough to carry a kerosene tin of water in each hand,” said Uncle Trev. “My first job was leading a string of pack-horses loaded with tucker for the kauri bush camps up the back of Mercury Bay.”

“Remember you told me about a kauri that was so tall, you could see the South Pole from its top? I gave a morning talk at school, and Mr Jones laughed and said it made a good yarn.”

Uncle Trev nodded. “There was another kauri up in the head of Mill Creek, so tall I get a crick in my neck just thinking about it.”

“Crikey.”

“The trunk was so thick through we had to lash two cross-cut saws together to cut it down. Half a dozen men each side tallied on to ropes tied to the handles. One team ran with the rope over their shoulders, pulling the saw through the cut. Then they had to run backwards while the other team ran and pulled the saw the other way.

“Instead of tramping all the way back to camp, we slept inside the scarf, the notch you cut out on the side you want the tree to fall. And you know we never felt a drop of rain in there.”

“What if it came down in the night and squashed you?”

“No show of that. That kauri was so thick, it took all of eighteen months to saw through, and when we finished, it sat on its stump and wouldn't fall. We drove steel wedges into the back-cut, but it squeezed them out like orange pips. One of my mates got hit by a flying wedge and he still limps.

“The bush boss said he was losing money on the big kauri. He told us to leave it alone, and the wind would blow it over.”

“And did it?”

“We had a storm, and the wind was so strong it blew our tent away, with a new chum hanging on to a rope. The last we saw of him, he was sailing over the top of the Coromandel Range.”

“What happened to him?”

“The tent came down on Waiheke Island. I believe he still lives there.”

“In the tent?”

“I believe so.”

“Did the wind blow down the big kauri?”

“It just stood on its stump and started growing again,” said Uncle Trev. “That tree was so big, it grew that fast you could hear the sap wood joining together, closing over the saw-cut till it looked like a thick belt around the trunk.”

“Is it still up Mill Creek?”

Uncle Trev shook his head. “The contractor sacked the bush boss and reckoned he'd see we cut it down properly. But that old kauri, he'd grown so much bigger we had to chop the scarf twice as big and tie three cross-cuts end to end. It came down this time, but it was so tall now, the top of the tree didn't hit the ground till a couple of days after it started falling, and then it came down with such an almighty thump, it buried itself in the ground. Took eighteen men seven months using thirty-six horses and scoops to dig it clear.

“We sniped the butt end and pulled the log down the gully with sixteen teams of bullocks, eighty in each team. One hundred men using timber jacks worked it down the rolling road into the creek. It took all the water from six dams to drive it down to the Mercury Bay River, and the huge log floated downstream with all those one hundred men standing on it, arms stretched out so only their fingers touched – that'll tell you how long it was. There wasn't a camera in New Zealand big enough to take its photograph.”

“What'd they do?”

“The photographer took twenty snaps as it floated past, and glued them side by side. He said the camera was never good for anything again.”

“Why not?”

“He'd strained the lens, trying to photograph that enormous kauri.

“We chained the log to Whitianga Rock down in the Bay. There was nobody in the mill with arms long enough to pitsaw it, and the breaking-down saws weren't built that could handle it. Then one night with a big tide the log tugged on its chains till it shifted Whitianga Rock several feet to the north. You can still see the flat bit at the bottom where it was moved off its base.

“People said what if the huge log towed Whitianga Rock out to sea? Besides, it displaced so much water, the tide rose several feet above its normal level, and water came right up to the pub door. Things were looking really serious. Then old Dugald Bryce had a brainwave. He rigged some kauri rickers along the top of the log as masts, sharpened the sniped end into a bow, and sailed it up to Auckland.

“He hollowed out the log at the foot of Queen Street. The timber out of the inside, he sold to the City Council, and they used it to build the old wooden harbour bridge to Devonport.”

“I didn't know they had a harbour bridge in Auckland,” I said to Uncle Trev.

“A German submarine torpedoed it in the Great War, and it caught fire and sank. You can still see the blackened stumps of the piles under the Devonport wharf.”

“What did Mr Bryce do with the hollowed-out log?”

“Towed it around to Rangitoto Island, stood it on end, built a circular staircase inside, and sold it to the Marine Department for a lighthouse. That's the one you can see from Takapuna Beach.

“Of course,” said Uncle Trev, “it's been painted so many times, people think it's made out of concrete. But anyone with half an eye can tell it's made out of a kauri tree.” He stopped and looked at me.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because,” said Uncle Trev, “when he put the light on top, old Dugald Bryce carved the lens by hand out of a big lump of kauri gum. Most lighthouses have a white light, but you'll notice the one on Rangitoto looks just a bit yellow – the effect of the light coming through the kauri gum.”

“I wonder if I'll ever see it?”

“Your mother tells me Dr Stirrup says you'll be going back to school any day now. When you're fit enough to travel, how would you like to go up to Auckland on the Rotorua Express, catch the ferry across to the North Shore, take the steam tram to Takapuna, and have a look at the only lighthouse in the world built out of a kauri tree?”

“I'd like that!” I said. “How tall is the lighthouse?”

“Funny you should ask that,” said Uncle Trev. “Nobody ever measured it, because there wasn't a tape measure long enough. And just last week, in the Auckland
Herald
, there was a letter to the editor from the lighthouse keeper saying he'd tried to count all the steps to the top of the staircase. He got up to two thousand, went giddy and lost count. Yet a few months ago, he counted the steps and there were only fifteen hundred.
He reckons the kauri lighthouse has taken root there on Rangitoto and started growing again.

“Just to make matters worse, he said when he got to the top of the steps he dropped his box of matches. By the time he'd climbed all the way down for them, and climbed all the way up again, the sun was shining and there was no point in lighting the candle.” Uncle Trev tapped the side of his nose, winked, and was gone.

“When I go back to school, I'll give them a morning talk about the Rangitoto lighthouse,” I said aloud to myself. “And I'll tell Mum about it when she comes home.”