The Runaway Settlers (4 page)

On a May morning, when the sting of frost was in the air, the Phipps family set out over the hills to Governors Bay.

There was an old track, the Cashmere shepherds told them, where the men who built the cottage used to come to and fro. They were to go up the valley through the flax, then strike up on to the spur to their left and continue on to the saddle, from which there was a steep descent to the Bay.

With a great many things to be carried, Bill and Jack were allowed two days off to see their mother safely settled. Each of them had a roll of blankets to sling across his back. The pans and dishes were taken out of the wooden trunk and tied into sacks, while the clothes were left in the carpet-bags. These bundles would have to be slung between two carriers and taken for short distances while some of the family came back for second bundles. However, the distance did not seem very long—seven or eight miles—and they had a whole day before them.

‘Am I to have a bag of my own?’ asked Jim, full of excitement.

‘I shall make you a Dick Whittington bundle,’ said his mother.

Mrs Phipps folded her brown shawl into a small square, placed Jim’s clothes in the centre and knotted the corners over the fork of a smooth stick. Jim poked his koala bear in so that it looked out of the top, shouldered the bundle gaily
and marched up and down the barracks singing:

‘Turn again Whittington,
Lord Mayor of London—don—don,
Ding dong ding dong.’

‘Turn again!’ teased Archie, ‘You won’t get over the top if you keep turning back!’

‘We must make new words,’ said Mrs Phipps. ‘How will this be?

‘Go ahead Whittington
Over to Lyttelton,
Find you a home!’

‘It isn’t Lyttelton, it’s Governors Bay,’ said Jack. ‘We should sing, “Halfway to Lyttelton”.’

‘Ding dong ding dong,’ chimed Emma, who liked that line of the song too well to part with it. She shouldered her rag doll Bibi and marched around too, to show that she carried her share.

They set off, still singing cheerfully. Before reaching the flax they could see well up the valley to the saddle, with the beginning of its dark edging of bush, and the big hill called the Sugarloaf to the left of it. It all looked very clear and simple; and never having been in the New Zealand bush they imagined it would be like Australia, where there was plenty of space between the trees.

All went well until the track through the flax began to break up into three or four paths and nobody could say which was the proper one. There were no footprints or hoofmarks, nothing
but the long leaves and tall flowering stalks that grew so fast as to cover up the marks of men completely.

‘Let’s take the path that gets us out the quickest,’ said Bill.

Up above them were the shining leaves of small trees, whiteywood and broadleaf and five-finger. But between this and the flax there lay a belt of creeper throwing out long trailing branches. ‘Mumma, mumma!’ cried Emma. ‘Ear scratch!’

Ugly spines curved behind each leaf and along the stalks. Mrs Phipps gently eased the creeper away, but a small trickle of blood went on oozing from the ear-lobe.

‘This will be the bush-lawyer they talk of,’ she said. ‘Once it gets its grip on you it never lets you go!’

There was no dodging it. They went up and down alongside the mass of bush-lawyer looking for stepping-stones, as if it were a river. And when they found them, Jim and Emma had to be lifted over from hand to hand. Mrs Phipps came last; but she slipped off a leaning rock and the lawyer gripped her up to the knees.

‘Mumma, Mumma!’ wailed Emma in terror. But Mrs Phipps began to laugh, so that Emma had to laugh too, and her mother seemed not to notice how her own hands bled as she eased the spines from her dress.

The scrub was not easy to walk through either. It was gay with fantails flitting and swooping everywhere, and bellbirds singing as they searched for late berries; and this would have been delightful but for the supplejack vines, which made such a tangle that Jack had to cut a track with his sheath-knife. ‘We must go upwards to the tussock-grass,’ said Mrs Phipps; but when they tried this, they came to a rocky bluff impossible to climb.

‘We could edge along it until there’s a place to go up,’ said Jack.

‘Or work back,’ said Bill.

So Mrs Phipps had to wait while both ways were explored and listen to the shouting of arguments as to which way was the best. In the end they followed Jack; and his way turned out to be almost directly upwards hand over hand, with only roots and small bushes to hold on to. It was a great trial passing the bundles up; and worse than the bundles was Emma, for she whimpered with fright and refused to move, and had to be dragged. Then Jim almost lost his grip from sneezing as the spores of the ferns got into his nose. To cap everything, when at last they sat down on a patch of level grass, right under their eyes was Bill’s chosen way—an easy slope. This was too much for Bill.

‘You idiot!’ he shouted.

He let fly a punch at Jack’s chest and bowled him over. Jack bounded back like a boomerang and the next minute was on top of Bill, pummelling him. ‘Stop, stop!’ yelled Archie, trying to get in between the flying feet and taking a kick from each brother for his trouble. That was the end of it. Mrs Phipps stood over them with a stick in her hand; a rough pronged stick.

‘Get up both of you if you don’t want the sharp edge of this! Do you want to be sent directly back to Cashmere? Isn’t one baby enough to carry?’ Suddenly she smiled. ‘Blows are a poor answer when stomachs call for food. There’s bread and cheese and a patch of sunshine—time for a spell!’

The sunshine was cosy and Jim began singing as he set down his bundle:

‘Go ahead Whittington,
Halfway to Lyttelton,
Find you a home—
Ding dong ding dong…’

so that weary Emma fell asleep in her mother’s lap, with the half-eaten bread in her hand. Archie and Jim and Jack wandered around the tussock while Bill sat staring moodily over the plains, nursing his anger.

When Emma woke they walked steadily up the long steep slope. Now she rode pick-a-back with Bill, while the others managed the bundles, which had to be lifted and carried and dropped and left and returned for over and over again. There was much circling around the clumps of matagouri which were all thorn, and Archie had his first taste of a spaniard, which looked like another tussock until he stepped on its cruel spines.

‘I never knew there were so many prickly things in this country,’ said Mrs Phipps.

It was afternoon before they reached the saddle. Then, for one glorious moment, the long grind of the climb was quite forgotten in the picture spread before them—the upper harbour with its three long fingers separated by chains of low hills, Quail Island right in the centre, Mount Bradley rising square beyond and the water dreaming and blue. All this they saw over the tops of the bush which hid the shoreline of Governors Bay.

Jim burst out singing again:

‘Go ahead Whittington
Halfway to Lyttelton,
Find you a home—’

‘Ding dong ding dong!’ chimed Emma. ‘Ding dong ding dong!’

Jack was looking at something even more inviting than the harbour—a narrow gully which reached down from the tall Sugarloaf hill to the left of them. Surely this meant a stream; and they were all dreadfully thirsty, for they had found nothing on the way up but a small trickle oozing beneath a rock.

He led the way down into the bush. But this was the southerly and shaded face of the hills, a wet mass of rocks and logs and ferns and supplejacks; so that it was a long time before the gully levelled slightly and water could be seen shining under a thicket of soft green bushes. Emma slid from Bill’s back and put out her hand for a drink. Next moment she was screaming. ‘Mumma, mumma, it bit me!’

‘Little goose! It bit you—did it?’ Bill couldn’t resist a laugh, but the smile on his face quickly straightened when it ‘bit’ him too. His hand felt as if tiny red-hot needles had been driven into the palm; and with the screen of leaves in the way he couldn’t even cool it in the water.

‘Keep away! It must be a nettle,’ said Mrs Phipps, eyeing the downy hairs that clung to the stalks.

This was more easily said than done. The nettle grew thickly all down the gully, which had to be skirted for some distance before they spied a pool that was free of it. By this time Bill’s hand was numb, and the water did not take away the sting; but at least it was wonderful to drink the dark marshy water.

‘We must make for the ridge, where it’s too dry for the nettle,’ said Mrs Phipps.

They worked over to the ridge on their left, only to find that it ended in a bluff. At least from here was some sort of a view; and it seemed that more bluffs extended in that direction, while the spur on the right had an even slope. But to reach it meant re-crossing the gully and finding another way through the nettles! They were considering this daunting prospect when Jim discovered that his Dick Whittington bundle had gone.

‘My koala! My koala!’ he wailed.

‘Your koala! All your clothes are in that bundle,’ said his mother sharply.

‘Where did you drop it?’ demanded Bill.

‘Did you put it down to have a drink?’ Jack asked.

Jim had no idea, but only sat sobbing for his lost koala.

‘You must all go and look,’ said Mrs Phipps firmly to the boys.

‘Let
him
look,’ growled Jack. ‘I’d like to spank him, I would.’

‘How could we find it?’ said Archie in a low voice.

Since leaving the saddle he had said hardly anything, and now he looked up with eyes like a beaten puppy’s—almost exhausted.

‘If we could find it, Mother,’ said Bill sensibly, ‘how would we find you again?’

Mrs Phipps considered this for a moment, and looked at Archie’s weary face, and listened to Jim’s sobs, with the addition now of a frightened whimper from Emma.

‘We will all go together,’ she said gently.

‘Let me go first,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll find the places where I cut the supplejack. It’ll be easy!’

But it was not easy. Everything looked different from the
opposite direction, and the children kept arguing wearily whether they had passed this stump, or that stone, making wrong turns and having to come back again. Only the knifecuts were a sure guide; and in the end they did come back to the drinking-pool, to see the bundle sitting safely on a stone, with the koala’s head peeping jauntily out. This cheered everyone a little, and also they were ready for another drink of water.

‘Go ahead Whittington, Halfway to Lyttelton, Find you a home—’

sang Mrs Phipps. Nobody else joined in; not even Jim. He would sooner have lain down to sleep.

They worked across to the spur on the right, slowly descending. The birds were out for their afternoon feeding. On the ground there were saddlebacks and a pair of the orange-wattled crows, while friendly tomtits and brown bushrobins chattered from the low branches, to cheer Archie up and to make Emma laugh. It seemed now that only a short distance remained, as the bush dwindled and they came out into a patch of bracken fern.

Low-growing at first, the fern became a little taller as they went on, and unexpectedly they found themselves surrounded by wiry stalks that reached right above their heads.

‘Let me go first and smash it down,’ said Bill.

The numbness in his hand was wearing off, but still it was easier to use his elbows. Soon he had to do more—to fling his whole length forward and open a path. Again and again he did this, and when he grew tired, Jack took a turn. They
inched their way along, dragging or passing their bundles and bags along the narrow track, scraping their skin and leaving more tatters on their clothes than they dared to notice. To fall on the springy fern was to want to lie there and sleep—but the sun was already cut off by the hills, and the chill of the coming night was sharp on their faces. Archie was silent; Jim was sneezing from the dust; and Emma clung so tightly to her mother’s arms that her fingers went white. They had no idea whether they were going deeper into the fern or coming out of it, or in which direction they ought to go.

‘Mother,’ whispered Jack, ‘what shall we do if we can’t get out?’

That was the very question she was asking herself; but she would not alarm anyone by admitting it. ‘We shall go on till we do,’ she whispered back; and then loudly, in a cheery voice: ‘Shall we stop for a while, and see what’s left in the lunch bag?’

A small nest was rolled in the fern and the billy opened for its bread and cheese. Archie took a bite on the dry cheese and broke his silence.

‘I can’t eat it! I’m thirsty. I want a drink.’

‘D’ink, d’ink!’ cried Emma.

‘Soon there’ll be water. Here’s bread, Emma!’

‘I’m cold,’ she whimpered.

‘Ugh, yes! It gives me the shivers,’ said Jack.

Mrs Phipps rounded on him, speaking softly but bluntly: ‘You boys must say nothing about your discomforts, nothing at all, do you hear? Can’t you see how they will begin, the little ones? We must keep our courage up! The fern won’t go on forever and then there’s home—somewhere to put your foot down!’

Bill said nothing. He munched his food until the gnawing inside him went away; then he began again to smash down a path. He came at once to a sort of bank densely covered with another growth—tutu. How would they get through that, and if they did, where would it lead? Try this way and that, it was a hopeless puzzle. Overhead the sky was quite grey, and all their hands were now stiff with cold.

Perhaps this is the moment, thought Mrs Phipps, in spite of all her determination, when we must bed ourselves down, thirsty and cold as we are…

Suddenly out of the silence came a long, strong sound:

‘Ah—oo! Ah—oo!’

‘It’s a cow!’ cried Archie, with the joy of one meeting an old friend. ‘It’s a cow!’

‘Where there’s a cow, there’s a farm,’ said Mrs Phipps. ‘Come, we’ll call.’

One—two—three! At the tops of their voices they yelled together, ‘Coo-ee! Coo-ee!’

Silence. Not even the cow. Only the first owl from the hillside answered, ‘Morepork. Morepork!’