Toward the Sea of Freedom (39 page)

A few days later Michael took an evening stroll to look at the sheep but found the pens empty. Fyfe must have finally followed his advice. Michael wondered whom he had hired as shepherds and decided to ask the old sea dog right away. Fyfe was just then walking out of his manor and looking with suspicion at the hills behind the whaling station. Apparently, he was expecting his sheep.

The first of them could already be seen as Michael approached the captain. They were trotting down the hill, flanked by a few Maori girls.

“Took little longer to find all today,” said the first to reach Fyfe. “Kere and Harata had to run far. And I climbed.” The girl was clearly proud of herself and her friends.

“You didn’t lose any animals, did you, Ani?”

The girl shook her head.

Michael had to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Fyfe asked.

“I’m just enjoying the lovely sight, sir,” Michael said. He stole a glance at the slender, agile Ani, whose long black hair fluttered in the wind. “And I’m wondering why they use dogs to herd sheep in Ireland when girls look so much better. Although I’d wager the dogs are faster. Maybe that’s why they’ve replaced the girls. After all, ‘collie’ comes from ‘colleen.’”

Fyfe looked at him and furrowed his brow. “Dogs?” he asked. “That probably costs more money?”

The Maori girls understood more quickly. The next day, they brought two fat, yellowish-brown mutts along. The dogs waggled happily and greeted every person enthusiastically but did not take any interest in the sheep.

Fyfe sent for Michael. “Can you train them? To replace the girls?”

Michael tried, but the Maori dogs had no shepherding in them. Yet they found the whaling beach irresistible and rolled around in the remains of the slaughtered whales.

“If a sheep runs away from them, it’ll only be because they smell so bad,” Michael said.

Tane pursed his lips. “But they’re dogs,” he said.

Michael nodded. “Just not the right kind. Is there another sheep farm anywhere? Perhaps somewhere farther inland?”

Tane asked the members of his tribe and finally found something. The next weekend, Michael went with Tane and two other Maori boys, three of the eager shepherdesses, and two bitches in heat up the Clarence River. Michael sometimes had difficulty keeping up with the quick strides of the Maori, and roads rarely crossed the copses and scrubland through which the river flowed. Finally, though, they reached cleared land and pastures.

“Coverland Station,” one of the Maori boys exclaimed. “House there.” He pointed to the west and counted the miles off on his fingers.

Ultimately, Michael and the Maori camped about a mile away from the sheep farm’s main house. Tane and the other boys caught fish in the river while Michael made a fire and the girls cooked sweet potatoes in the embers.

The dogs did their part. They disappeared during the night, and when they returned in the morning, a gorgeous long-nosed black-and-white collie followed them.

“That’s the kind we want,” Michael said contentedly, and enjoyed the next two days he spent fishing, hunting, and in the arms of the lovely Ani.

A few months later, the Maori village was crawling with puppies, all of which had more herding instinct than their mothers. Most of them were black and white, and some of them looked exactly like their father.

“We’ll use them to keep breeding,” Robert Fyfe cheered, happily paying Michael and the Maori a bonus.

Michael concentrated fully on training the dogs, and Fyfe reluctantly accepted him as a shepherd. After all, there were now much more demanding tasks than the herding of the animals: lambing and shearing. The former proved no great problem. The young Maori shepherdesses understood what they had to do after Michael showed them just once how to help the ewes when there were complications. The shearing was more difficult. Michael had done it a few times in Ireland and managed again, after a little practice, to produce acceptable fleece. But he was slow—shearing all three hundred, which would soon be around a thousand, was out of the question. Teaching the girls was no use. They lacked the strength to flip the sheep onto their backs and to use the shears efficiently.

Ani and her friends sheared two or three sheep and then stopped—as the Maori often did, without grand announcement or even excusing themselves. Yet Tane and the other Maori men soon proved willing. The number of whales continued to decline, but the Maori had gotten used to extra income from the
pakeha
and were no longer solely dependent on hunting, fishing, and the meager yields of their fields. They pushed for work on the farms, and almost all of them showed skill in handling animals. Shearing, though, was once again a challenge: it presented moral problems for Tane and his friends.

“Sheep don’t want this,” Tane said as Michael seized one of the animals and held it between his legs while he sheared it. The ram bleated in protest.

“Well, and?” Michael said, taken aback. “Whales don’t want to be harpooned either. That hasn’t stopped you so far.”

“Whale something different,” responded Tane. “With whales we call on Tangaroa before harpoon and ask forgiveness. Then whale forgive us.”

Michael doubted that but shrugged his shoulders. “Fine, just ask him for forgiveness with the sheep too.”

Tare shook his head. “Tangaroa, god of sea,” he said. “Sheep not of sea. Sheep not from here at all. Came with
pakeha
.”

Michael understood. In Aotearoa’s pantheon, there simply was no one responsible for sheep. But there was a solution. Michael silently thanked Father O’Brien for his comprehensive teachings on the many saints in the Catholic Church.

“For us, St. Wendelin handles sheep,” Michael told Tane. “We could all address a small prayer to him.”

“Now we just need to get them to put a little effort into it,” Michael said to Robert Fyfe and his cousin George, newly come to Waiopuka.

The time had come for shearing again. George Fyffe—he never neglected to point out that he spelled his name with a third
f
—had just taken possession of a piece of land north of Kaikoura and named it Mount Fyffe Run. He planned to raise sheep there in grand style.

“So far, they’re hardly managing more than one or two sheep per day. What if we made a sort of contest out of it? The fastest shearer gets a bottle of whiskey?”

This arrangement soon proved its worth: Michael took home only the first bottle. After that, the skillful natives surpassed him. However, the problem had to be solved of when to say the prayer to St. Wendelin. So far Tane and his friends had been calling on the saint before the shearing of each sheep, but now they agreed to collectively ask for absolution before they started work each day. Because of this, George Fyffe and his foreman, Michael Parsley, soon gained a reputation as especially reputable and God-fearing men. After all, no other sheep farmer called his men to prayer before work.

While Michael made a name for himself, ultimately giving up his shack in Waiopuka to move into better accommodations in Mount Fyffe Run’s barracks, a priest in Ireland was working through a difficult task.

Letters lay before Father O’Brien: a few from Kathleen Coltrane, who wrote about her children in, to his joy, an ever more fluent and lively style. And there was an awkward—but no less astounding—letter from Michael Drury that told of his flight from Van Diemen’s Land, a feat for which he was thoroughly proud. After all, not many men had accomplished that before. Michael wrote that he was in New Zealand and well on his way to making a fortune by whaling. He intended, within a short time, to earn enough money to fetch Kathleen and his child. Michael asked for news of his “fiancée” and sent her his love.

Father O’Brien needed to know more before he replied to either of them. He went to Dublin, where he visited libraries in search of information about far-off New Zealand. Christchurch and Kaikoura might well be hundreds of miles apart or even be located on different islands, and then he could discourage Michael without needing to lie to him. But really, it wouldn’t matter. In his heart, the old priest knew that Michael Drury would sail across half the world to see Kathleen O’Donnell again.

Father O’Brien soon learned that Kaikoura was less than a hundred miles from Christchurch. Michael could reach Kathleen and their son in a few days. But then what? Would Michael blame her? Would Kathleen commit a deadly sin and leave her husband when she saw Michael again? Father O’Brien had known when he married them that Kathleen had not loved Ian, and her letters did not make it sound as if that had changed. Indeed, she hardly wrote about Ian at all.

The more Father O’Brien thought about it, the less wise it seemed to inform Michael of Kathleen’s whereabouts. It must have been one of God’s strange occasional jokes to bring them close enough that they could be together again. Or was this an act of the devil to test all those involved? Father O’Brien did not want to be guilty on any account, so he decided on the following reply:

As for Mary Kathleen, my son, shortly after your deportation, she married the livestock trader Ian Coltrane. The two of them emigrated, and the last I heard from her she had three children and was leading a God-fearing life overseas. This news may disappoint you, but God has surely directed Mary Kathleen and He will hold her and her children in His hand. The oldest goes by the name Sean. The boy was born but a few months after the wedding and has, according to Kathleen, a sharp mind and dark hair like his father. I include Mary Kathleen and her family in my daily prayers, as I will you now, as well, my dear Michael. I remain ever concerned for your health and for that of your everlasting soul.

Father O’Brien

Chapter 4

“Look what I have!” Claire pulled Kathleen into her house and pointed excitedly to the tea cakes she’d baked. “Oh wait; let’s take care of the children first. I don’t want sticky fingers on everything.”

Kathleen set Heather next to Chloe, who was playing with little building logs in a corner of the living room, and Claire gave each of the girls a fresh-baked tea cake. She made these cakes astoundingly well, while her bread only met the lowest of expectations.

“I once stole two pastries something like these,” Kathleen said, lost in thought. How long ago that was. “I didn’t want to, but I was so hungry.”

Claire laughed. “Well, now you have plenty of them. Here, take another. Matt only needs three or four.” She generously placed two little cakes on the fine porcelain plate she had set out for Kathleen.

The two women were sitting, as they did almost every afternoon, in Claire’s living room, which still was not very comfortably furnished. Almost two years had passed since the births of their daughters and the incident with the mule, and Matt Edmunds and Ian Coltrane seemed to have halfway reconciled themselves to their wives’ friendship. Matt, at least, no longer held a grudge against Ian. Since the chestnut mule did good work for him, he viewed the first bad deal as a misapprehension on the trader’s part and was open to being good neighbors.

Ian traveled farther through the country to buy and sell animals. He still primarily traded in horses, but now he also had a herd of gorgeous sheep, which, in Kathleen’s opinion, absolutely needed to be shorn. The women considered bringing professional shearers onto their land. Such bands had been forming recently, ever since sheep breeding and wool producing had developed into important industries in the Canterbury Plains. Among the large farms, people already talked of “sheep barons,” and Ian frequently went off to try to do business with them while Kathleen remained behind to work with the animals and take care of the children.