Greywacke

By Benn Jeffries
Photography by Liam Grandy

Benn is a
Wellington-born
writer. In 2004,
he was awarded
a little plastic
trophy for the
most improved
player in his under
9’s rugby team.
He now lives in
New York where
he teaches at
Columbia
University.

Featured in Capital #87
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Trigger warning: This story deals with difficult themes and may be upsetting for some readers. Discretion advised.

Cattle stops and gravel – dust leaked into the cab and showed in the mandarin light that crept over the Tararuas. I came to the end of the paper road and made camp beside the Ruamahanga river. Swallows danced above the water, feeding on the moths and flies that roused at dusk. The greywacke around my neck is from this river. I always wanted a piece of pounamu when I was a kid but you have to be gifted pounamu. My Grandma was the one who raised me and she sure as hell wasn’t gifting me shit. When I was eleven, I went out and found this piece of greywacke and it’s been around my neck ever since. It always warms up when I’m near the river. I’m sure that means something to someone; people have a habit of attaching meaning where it isn’t needed.

With a fire going, I cooked a couple of crayfish tails. Kupe began to whine so I gave him one, which he ate outer shell and all. I lay down beside the fire and counted out my money; two hundred bucks in twenties. It would be just enough for two boxes of 12-gauge ammo, fuel to get to East Wairarapa, and beer to last the opening weekend of duck shooting.

I’ve hunted with the same four guys for nearly twenty years. We’re only all together once a year and that’s for duck shooting. Paul lives in Wellington and wears a suit, Marti is a builder out of Carterton, Hemi is a farm manager in the Manawatū and Steve owns and works the farm we shoot on. This year was the first year in history we’d all been together outside of duck shooting. Steve’s boy had died in one of the back paddocks in March and we’d all gone to the funeral out at the farm. I was the boy’s godfather but I never really knew what that meant. A few years back, I’d taught him how to cast a fly line on this same stretch of river. It seemed odd to me that that memory only belonged to me now. It was a halved, broken memory and it spoiled the murmur of the river.

Kupe came and settled beside me and I stroked his swollen crayfish belly. The last of the light went. Night birds called. We became river stones.

At dawn, I pulled on my waders to fish the morning rise. Kupe watched me for a while then disappeared into the bush, bored by my fruitless casting. It had been raining in the hills and the water was the colour of a bruise. Still, I worked it methodically and finally landed a good brown trout from a run of pocket water. The fish was more bronze than brown, with golden gill plates and an ocean-green colour around its eyes. Black speckled its skin and formed little constellations. I broke its neck and gutted it.

Back at camp, I found Kupe with blood all around his mouth. I’d given him bird aversion training but he was old like me and needed reminding now and then. I was about to give him an earfull when I saw possum fur stuck in his teeth. A possum was reason to celebrate so we sat down and halved the trout which pleased him heaps.

I reached the farm in East Wairarapa by mid-afternoon. Steve’s sheepdogs barked from their kennels. Kupe followed close by my heels with his tail between his legs which only pissed the working dogs off more. The others were already there and had started boozing. Before things got too carried away we shot some clay birds off Steve’s front deck which cheered Kupe up. He would run out and retrieve the broken bits of orange pottery, but only the ones I had shot.

For dinner, Paul reheated a lasagne his wife had made. We all huddled around and ate directly from the baking dish, then focused on drinking. Port wine and Ranfurly. Marti got so drunk he took all his clothes off and threw them in the fire. I wanted to join him but I don’t make enough money to do something like that. Steve wasn’t impressed for some reason and slunk off to his bed. The rest of us settled on the living-room floor bedside the smouldering fire. I could hear the house creaking. The room smelt of manuka smoke. I matched my breath to the man’s beside me.

At five, an alarm woke us. We pulled on our hunting gear and covered our faces in camouflage paint the colour of bull kelp. Hemi asked me to take a photo of him on my phone but my phone didn’t have a camera so he did it himself. Hemi reckons he’s connected to the world now. I don’t know about that but he is happier than I can remember him being in years so I figure the internet can’t be such a bad thing for a lonely old farmer.

After a coffee, we all piled into Paul’s ute and drove down to the maimai. Paul has the flashiest truck out of all of us despite working in the city. I told him I was going to report him to the UteSPCA for keeping the thing cooped up most of the year. He got embarrassed and I felt bad so I offered him a cigarette which I knew his wife didn’t let him have.

The sky was still black when we parked on the roadside. We had to make our way through a long paddock to get to the maimai which sat down in a perfect valley that funnelled the birds right to us. As we jumped the fence, Steve remembered the paddock had a couple of bulls in it that hadn’t seen a lot of humans before. It was hard to see the animals in the dark but I felt their nervousness, and the ground shake as they quickly flanked us. One of the bigger bulls started bellowing and stamping the ground. Our head torches showed the steam rising off its back and the saliva dripping from its mouth. Paul thought it was funny and bellowed back until Steve snapped at him.

‘I’ve been meaning to send that one to the meatworks,’ he said. I don’t know if the bull understood English but right as he said that, it charged me. The paddock was muddy and I didn’t stand a hope in hell of outrunning the thing. Luckily Hemi had a shell up his breach and fired a shot at the bull’s feet. Its thunder scared the thing enough for us to make it to the other side of the paddock and leap over the electric fence.

The sky was paling when we reaching the maimai. The walls were a strong gust away from collapse but we settled on its mud floor and started calling to the silhouettes that flew over us. A flurry of mallards banked and descended to the dam. We peppered them with steel and in the dawn light the fire from our barrels showed. It was a slow morning after that. Marti cooked a feed of bacon and eggs on a Coleman cooker and the duck calls became less. By eleven we only had twenty odd ducks. Last year we shot well over a hundred, but none of us thought it mattered much.
On the walk back to the truck, we loaded our guns but the bulls were all huddled around a hare carcass. That explained things a bit – the smell of blood makes bulls angry.

I had the most wonderful nap on a top bunk that afternoon. Kupe settled on the bottom bunk and I whispered to him about rivers I’d seen over the years until I could hear his breathing slow. The bunk beds were next to a window covered with thin teak blinds. Light leaked through and dyed my dreams amber.

When I woke, no one else was up so I walked around the farmhouse inspecting things. Cobwebs clouded all the windows and the smell of mud had settled over everything. I picked up a thin book that sat on the coffee table and took it out into the sun to read. In the front of the book I saw there was a handwritten note to Steve that said some nice things about his son and the farm. At the funeral, I’d heard people say it was because of the farm that he was gone. A lot of pressure goes on the kids of family farms. You can’t blame a youngster for wanting a life beyond the boundary fence but you sure as hell shouldn’t underestimate a decision like that. That’s something I don’t know too much about though. I’ve never had land enough to feel tied to it.

I looked up from the book and saw Steve watching me. I thought he was going to say something but he just pursed his lips and turned away. The paddock where his boy died backed onto native bush. Steve had shown us when we’d all come out for the funeral. It had been a winter feed paddock then and only magpies and putangitungi had been around. I wondered what the bulls might have thought had they been there when it had happened. I wondered if all blood smelt the same to them.

That afternoon we plucked the ducks and I collected a few iridescent feathers to make trout flies with. Normally we shot Sunday morning too but somehow, we’d all silently agreed it would only be the Saturday this year. After torching the ducks with a flame gun, we stood around in the driveway with our hands in our pockets. You get lots of poplar trees in East Wairarapa and during May all the leaves fall off. People think it makes the landscape look pretty but I’m not so sure. I watched the leaves swirl around my feet and thought about Steve’s boy and how no one had said a thing about him. Marti cleared his throat and started shaking hands. Next thing I knew, we were all driving off in our separate trucks.

I drove further east instead of back west. I knew of an estuary on the coast where I could camp and watch the dotterels and stilts. The fact that Steve’s boy hadn’t come up made me want nothing to do with people. I wondered if something gains gravity when it isn’t mentioned or if it’s simply forgotten.

Before I reached the coast, I spotted a swamp harrier feeding on a white-faced heron carcass in a paddock. I pulled over and trudged through the grass to get a better look. The harrier had only just arrived and I could see the heron it had been plucking had been killed by a shotgun. I stared at it for a while then took my knife from my belt and cut its head off. I left the body for the harrier and slipped the head into my pocket. I figured I’d bury it for a month or so until the worms cleaned it down to the bone, then I’d dig it up and keep its skull. I got no idea what I want with a heron skull but something like that deserves to have meaning attached to it. Something like that deserves to be thought about and talked about. I’ll have that skull for the rest of my life. Maybe I’ll only look at it now and then, but when I do, I’ll remember that bird and that year we only hunted the Saturday of opening weekend because Steve’s boy shot himself in the head that year.