Barkskins (55 page)

“Where is Mr. Bone?” His voice was penetratingly loud and Jinot saw people standing outside the hut, listening and watching.

“I do not know. He set off several days ago with a native man wearing a grass cloak. Against my advice.”

“Your advice! Who are you, a servant, to give advice to Mr. Bone! Which native man did he go with?”

“I do not know, sir, only that it was a native man, much tattooed, and wearing a cloak.”

“I beg to inform you,
sir
”—there was a sneer in his voice—“that there is much apprehension as to his whereabouts. It is thought he has come to harm and the one under suspicion is not some mysterious native in a grass cloak, but you, his servant, who have prowled the ravines of the locale with an eye to disposing of your master's body.”

“Untrue!” said Jinot. “You have only to ask Mr. Grapple. He knows the native man and first introduced Mr. Bone to him.”

“What a pity. John Grapple is in Port Jackson for a month on business. You must be confined to this hut until he returns. I will arrange for food to be brought to you, but you, Sel, are our prisoner, pending verification of your statements. We shall mount guards against any attempted escape.”

Back in his mission Mr. Rainburrow put fresh ink in the inkwell, selected a steel nib and composed a letter.

Reverend Rainburrow To Mr. Joseph Dogg, Bone Ax Company, Massachusetts

Sir.

I am prompted to get in touch with you re circumstances relating to your employer, Mr. Albert Bone whom I had the pleasure of traveling with these past eight months. We esteemed each other greatly, indeed, I may say we became close friends. Within the last few days a worrisome circumstance has arisen which I feel I must impart to you. Mr. Bone was accompanied by his servant, Jinot Sel a dark-skinned man much given to exploration of the forest and who has frightened some of the natives by suddenly appearing from behind a bush and screeching at them. It is with concern that I write that his forays into the forest may have a sinister motive. Mr. Bone disappeared entirely from our enclave three days ago and has not been seen since. Within this hour I have quizzed Mr. Sel on his knowledge of Mr. Bone's whereabouts. He insists that his employer went away with a native wearing a grass cloak. As many do wear grass cloaks there is no way to discern the truth of this statement except, as Sel claims, by a witness, that is the respected interpreter in these parts, Mr. John Grapple, who is unfortunately away on business for some weeks and therefore cannot vouch for Sel's statements. I have taken the liberty of confining Sel to his quarters until Mr. Grapple returns and we can get at the truth of this matter. I have also taken Mr. Bone's money box into care as I suspect it is the motive for Mr. Bone's disappearance and for Sel's forays into the trees. His claim that Mr. Bone owed him money lends weight to my suspicions.

Should Mr. Bone have come to harm I can assure you that I can act for him as his friend
and spiritual adviser
in every way. I have considerable influence in the country and can arrange to have his possessions returned to Boston and see to it that the servant Sel receives British justice—for New Zealand has recently been annexed by the Mother Country. I can oversee any legal matters that may arise. To my knowledge he has made no will in the colony but perhaps you know more than I of such a document if it exists at all.

I will inform you at once if we learn anything in the matter.

I am, &c.,

The Rev. Edward Torrents Rainburrow, Church Missionary, New Zealand.

Confined to the hut Jinot's days passed slowly. One of the missionary wives brought him roasted yams and fish. She never spoke to him and if he asked a question she scuttled away. He thought about this often, that here in New Zealand every woman he had seen ran from him, shunned him. The four powerful Maori guards lounged around outside waiting for his escape, two of them scratching at pieces of dark green stone, the other two talking and laughing with each other. He stood in the doorway on some days, sat on the veranda on others, listening for the kokako, but always watching the harbor. From the doorway he could see a rock outcrop in the near distance crowned with half a dozen old pohutukawa trees setting the world on fire with their crimson blossoms. He would rather have seen a ship. If an American ship put in he would risk everything to get to it. But only English ships arrived to take on kauri spars. Every day he looked out past the pohutukawa trees to scan the sea for vessels. One morning he saw that the oldest tree at the end was down. As he stared he caught the flash of an ax and made out two whitemen attacking the trees. As the trees fell each sent up a puff of red blossoms like an exclamation. By late afternoon they were all down and he looked no more in that direction.

It was more than a month before Grapple climbed up the hill to his house again, followed almost immediately by several of the missionaries. The reverend men started back down the greasy steep slope a quarter of an hour later. But it was not until dusk that Mr. Rainburrow and his crony, Boxall, came to the guesthouse, both looking sour.

“It is my duty to say that John Grapple has returned from Port Jackson. He does corroborate your tale of the native in the grass cloak, but he says he did not know the man. He is a chief from other parts who somehow heard of Mr. Bone and wanted to know him. He may have been one of the rare bad Maori. There is no way to tell as his name and place are unknown here.”

Boxall said in a rush, “So there is no reason to hold you. You may leave.”

“That is very well,” said Jinot Sel. “I would like to return to my country. I ask you to pay me my wages from Mr. Bone's money box. He has not paid me since we left Boston more than a year ago.”

Mr. Rainburrow wriggled his shoulders as if his coat was out of order. He cast his eyes around the hut as if looking for the money box. “Sir, you must know I—we—cannot do such a thing. The money in Mr. Bone's strongbox belongs to him, and if he does not return it will go to his heirs and family—I doubt you are among that number. In any case I shall take it for safekeeping lest you be tempted to help yourself.”

“But I have no money for my passage.”

“I suggest that you take up the ax again. Mr. Bone said you were once a good woodsman. You can earn your way back to where you came from. And to show there are no hard feelings I will tell you that after discussion with Mr. Palmer I understand there is suitable work for you felling trees. Mr. Palmer owns several shore stations with allied timber camps in the kauri bush. You shall leave tomorrow.”

Yes, it seemed he must do that and save his wages until he could buy passage; he was old now but his scarred leg had improved over the years and he felt he could swing an ax. What else could he do? And he would be away from the swarm of missionaries and their ukases.

A
t the Bunder shore station Jinot was disturbed to see some Maoris selling tattooed enemy heads to eager whiteman sailors as curiosities. He thought suddenly of Kuntaw and imagined him laughing at the gruesome sight—Kuntaw always laughed at horrors as though they were nothing much. Jinot walked away for fear he might see Mr. Bone's old grey head among the wares. He went into the trader's
whare hoka
to see the show of goods—brilliant bolts of cotton, wooden flutes, tambourines, buttons and spools of thread in twelve magical colors. This was the place to find precious needles, choose from an array of hats—and yes, axes of poor quality. A Maori would come in timidly for the first time and stand in the center of the
whare hoka,
then turn slowly, slowly to see everything, dazzled and made to desire many strange objects of unknown use. Imprisoned in the hut Jinot had overheard the missionaries say that Sydney merchants were filling all the good harbors of the Northland with shore stations—in the Hokianga, on the Coromandel, anywhere there was deep water and handy timber. “Opening the country right up,” they said with approval.

Miles apart, the stations were not only logging camps but trading posts dealing in flax, spars and lumber. Separate enterprises—chandlers, warehouses, sawmills and small shipyards—drew Europeans to them. They skimmed off the cream of the shore forest and moved the camps on to the next good show leaving behind smoldering stumps and shoulder-deep waste. The intense assault fell first on kahikatea, then on the kauri, cutting and cutting. In some places men could walk for days on the downed timber that carpeted the ground. Then the great mass was set alight, the fastest way to clear the forest, brush, vines, birds, insects, fruit, bats, epiphytes, twigs, ferns and forest litter. The newcomers did not care to understand the strange new country beyond taking whatever turned a profit. They knew only what they knew. The forest was there for them.

•  •  •

Trader Palmer had two logging camps, Little Yam and Big Yam, named for nearby Maori plantations of sweet potatoes. Many of his warehouses and camps stood on land that had once belonged to members of his wife's clan. Smart and wily, a fluent and persuasive talker, he moved people to his advantage as a cook moves gobbets of meat around in the hot pan.

Temporary or not, Jinot had never seen a camp so flimsy and ragtail-bob as the Little Yam. The quarters that passed for a bunkhouse were nothing more than ridgepole tents with fly openings, thatched with great hairy masses of nikau leaves from the cabbage palm.

Almost every small mixed-race child that Jinot saw in New Zealand looked like Waddy Baker, the bush-boss, swart, pale-eyed, jug-eared and quick-handed whether catching something or striking someone with his
wadi.
The bush gang at the Little Yam was small, not more than twenty choppers—ex-sailors, ex-convicts, Irish, British settlers, Maori. Half of them had never worked in the woods before.

The evening meal was a “Captain Cooker” stew from descendants of the pigs Cook had released, and a loaf of bread for each man. Jinot hoped to find a partner who knew woods work; if luck was with him a partner who knew the ways of big kauri cutting, for he reckoned there was something to learn about taking down these giants beyond the swinging of an ax. The young rickers they would cut first would be easy, but when he thought about it he did not see how they could do more than nibble around the circumference of the grey-bark giants. They were just too massive. He had heard that the Maori got them down by cutting into them and then making and tending a fire in the cut until the tree burned through. It was a poor method as the burning hardened the wood so that no sawmill could get through such a log. As for getting the logs to the sawmills on the shore, he hoped there was a better way than what he had seen while standing in the doorway of the missionary hut in detention.

One morning, smoking his pipe and regarding an offshore pod of spouting whales, he heard a distant rhythmic chant, a call and response chant such as a ship crew's capstan shanty stamp-and-go used when weighing anchor. At least eighty Maori men emerged from the forest hauling on a hawser bound around an immense kauri spar. A muscular headman stood on the log, which was decorated with flowers and feathers, and it was he who called out the urging chant, and the pullers who drew deep breaths, opened their mouths and roared a response as they heaved. The great spar moved forward a few feet on the roller roadway. Again and again the pullers answered the caller and the giant mast moved down to the ship.

Jinot worked one day with a half Maori named Arana Palmer who spoke English with what sounded like his own familiar Maine accent. He was young, not more than twenty, and strong, said, “I worked in the kauri since I was a boy.” When Jinot told him he was a Penobscot man from Maine, Arana laughed. “Orion Palmer, the trader, is my father. He come here from Maine years ago after seals. Them times not many
pakeha.
So I say I am part Maine. He talks once a while about his old life there. You come talk with him sometime. He likes talkin Maine, goes down to the ships, says, ‘Anybody from Maine here?' Sometimes there is and he'll keep 'em up all night guzzlin rum and talk, talk, talk, get jeezalum drunk.”

Jinot had not heard anyone say
jeezalum
in years and was glad to hear it now, in Arana's inherited accent. Arana showed Jinot how to stuff a large sack with bracken fern for a mattress. Better, said his new partner, was to get a wool fleece—nothing more comfortable. They agreed to work together and share one of the thatched tents. Before he fell asleep Jinot looked forward to replacing the ferns with a fleece.

•  •  •

He was no longer the man he had been the last time he chopped trees. His scarred leg would carry him in the mornings; by the end of the workday it burned and ached intolerably and could barely take his weight. He was too old for logging.

“What troubles your leg?” asked Arana, and Jinot told him of the Miramichi fire that had nearly caught him, that had burned his brother Amboise. It was a great ease to have conversation with someone he liked. It had been a long, long time since he had had the pleasure of friendship. He went with Arana to meet his father, Orion Palmer, the trader from Maine. The white-haired old ruffian launched into a flood of reminiscence about his early days in Maine and a long involved story of why he could never go back, something to do with killing a rich man's horse.

•  •  •

The labor of axing down a tree with the girth of a village church was monstrous. The bushmen tried every way, whittling around the sides for weeks until the trunk began to resemble a pencil, chipping and chopping until a saw could finish the cut. Or chopping out a commodious room within the living tree, room enough to swing an ax, a great waste of good timber. They built platforms to lift them above the stack of debris at the base of every kauri. It took weeks to bring down a single giant. The ax alone was not enough and the trader ordered ten-foot felling saws—double-tooth rakers every four teeth—onto the job. When the saws arrived the kauri began to come down by the hundreds. “
Now
we're doin it,” said Shuttercock, one of the choppers. On the shore near the wharves Palmer's roaring steam-powered sawmill, specially equipped to handle kauri, spat out the most desirable lumber in the world day after day. Hundreds of Maori hauled vast logs to these mills, inching them up out of the ravines, easing them down the steep slope below the ridge. They could not bring them in fast enough to suit Palmer, who began to talk of getting bullocks from Australia. “Queensland,” he said. “Where there's good timber-broke beasts to be had.”