MANGAWHAI
By
Robert Black
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Robert Black on Smashwords
Mangawhai
Copyright © 2011 by Robert Black
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The moon departed unnoticed behind the clouds and pulled sheets of water, like bubbling glass, across cold soft mud and sharp broken shells on harder sandbanks, silently, apart from the popping sounds from mud crab holes, as they were quickly flooded. Baby flounder cheekily followed just behind the advancing tide. There was the occasional sound of an estuary bird. In one of the thicker, snaking channels, splashing came from somewhere inside a set net, full of dead and slowly dying parore and adult flounder. There were clumps of sea snails and small mud crabs, feasting on the fish that died earlier in the night. Some had already been reduced to skin and bones and the whiter skin waved about like gentle ghosts, as the tide lifted and moved them. Mangrove trees had taken over various parts of the estuary. Their green seeds and even small trees floated in the water, waiting to settle and clasp onto new territories. The smells were of morning, eel smelling mud, fish and salt and a slight land breeze carried the sweet country air. The estuary was divided in two parts by a manmade causeway and there was a concrete bridge along the dirt road. Dew dripped off an old yellow and black road sign, covered in road dust, which read, Mangawhai 3kms.
Early in the morning, Vernon tapped on my bedroom window. We went to the deck and sat. It was cold and we held our hot coffee mugs with both hands and pulled them to our chests. We watched the estuary. The sun was just rising to the east. It was a late spring tide and the water was very high, looking blue in the deeper channels and with a very smooth surface as there was little wind. The air was sweet with many smells: freshly cut hay, cows, macrocarpa tree sap, and pine needles. There was silence apart from the waking birds.
“Perfect conditions,”Vern said to me.
I nodded.
We waited, patiently watching the surface of the water. He had brought his binoculars and occasionally raised them to his eyes.
“So how’s the job hunting going?”he asked.
“Not much around,”I replied.
“How about the concrete works?”
“Shit, that place? Believe me that place would be my last choice.”
“Can’t handle working with a bunch of tough Maoris?”
“I’m sure being covered in concrete and stinking of diesel would really help me pick up girls this summer.”
“You’re already an ugly white boy. You would just be an ugly brown boy.”
“Fuck you too.”
“There!” he said suddenly and pointed to a place in the water.
I noticed his hand again. His little finger was missing. It was a stub, just below the knuckle. He told us that a big goose had bitten it off when he was nine. It just wouldn’t let go of his finger. He told us that later he had killed the goose with an axe but when his mother took him to the hospital it was too late to save his finger. Vern was a Maori. We all believed him because he never lied about anything. I first met Vern when he was eleven.
I looked at the area of water he was pointing to. He was right. There was a big V on the water surface. It was what we had been waiting for. It was a big kingfish. They came in on the spring tides to hunt and fed on the smorgasbord of small fish.
One time, when Vern and I were walking to our primary school across the causeway a big one got a flounder in the shallows, just a dozen feet from us. It was incredible to see and very exciting. Must have been nearly three feet long and about one foot of its yellow tail and body was outside the water as it ground its mouth down on top of the flounder. It was thrashing about wildly, noisily churning the water all around it. It had odd stud like things on its tail that looked like small barnacles. We had started to throw stones at it. We felt foolish but we had to do something. Couldn’t just stand there and stupidly watch it as it arrogantly ate a flounder in front us. It seemed to have no fear. We had never seen a fish without fear before, except a shark.
That was a few years back. Later that same day, we told old Foster about it. His house was opposite the primary school and next to the estuary. People said he was the local fishing inspector but we were not sure about that. Maybe he had been once, in the old days. We saw him at low tide sitting on the waters edge, near his garden. We had sat down next to him on sandstone rocks and told him about the kingfish. The whole time we told him about it he just kept on doing his chores. He had a big white plastic bowl of sprats that I guessed he caught that day in his dragnet or set net. He had both. The palms of his hands seemed to be very calloused and hard and he was cleaning the sprats with his hands. I had never seen anyone cleaning sprats before as most people just used them for bait and the head and the guts were important. I think he probably gave them to his cat or something. But he always looked poor so maybe he did eat them. Most people used a sharp knife and a fish scaler to clean fish. But he did it all quickly with his hands. Just rubbed his palms against a big brown sand stone to get grit on them, and then ran them quickly against the fish’s scales to remove them. After that he ripped their heads off then used his fingers to scrape and pull out the guts. At the same time he was listening to our story about the kingfish and how we had thrown stones at it.
He just laughed like we were stupid, and then told us about when he got one in his drag net at low tide in the main channel. He said it ruined his net and it took three men to get it in but he reckoned they got it in after about twenty minutes.
Ever since that day Vern and I had been talking and planning to get one. We bought a four pronged steel spear head and stapled it onto a fencing baton. Then we sharpened the points on an electric sharpening wheel at the garage where Vern worked.
I was sitting my university bursary exams. There were three weeks to go until the end of term and the exams. I wanted to go to university to study American literature, but I wasn’t too sure. And anyway, I still needed to pass the exams.
Every Sunday, for the previous month Vern had been waking me up early. But we hadn’t seen a kingfish for ages; until that morning.