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Chapter XV

Life in the Kaimanawas, while winter lay over them, wasn't dull, it was too uncomfortable to be dull. Later, when he became weak with exposure and lack of food, there came on him a settled apathy which stopped him from feeling the conditions in which he lived, but this was not dullness; it was a sickness against which he had to fight.

He made his home in a small rock shelter which was barely a cave, by the river at the foot of the valley. The sides of the cave dripped with damp, but after a time he plastered them over with mud and lined the floor with wood and dry stones and leaves on top. The cave was a suitable place to camp because, above it, the river curved and made a bar of drift-wood which was good fuel and more likely to burn than anything that he could find in the bush. He tried once cutting into standing white pine for the resined timber that would be inside it, but the task was hopeless with his small axe. Once, after two days of torrential rain, the river flooded and washed into his cave, driving him out with all his possessions and his rifle, to sit wretchedly on the bank above through the night. But he would not give up his cave and, instead, cleared timber and boulders away from the pool above so that the river could not flood again so easily. When the leaves on the floor of his cave had dried again it remained moderately comfortable.

He lived mainly on what birds he could shoot and this often took a great part of the day because of the care with which he used his ammunition. There were about two hundred shells in the two packets which he had brought. page 141 He reckoned to use not more than two a day: if he missed little .22 it was easy to miss and he would spend long he went hungry. He had never been a good shot. With the [sic: if he missed he went hungry. He had never been a good shot. With the little .22 it was easy to miss and he would spend long] hours stalking wild pigeon or parakeets, or the insolent and more easy bush-hens, to get shots that no one could miss. He had heard that there were deer in this country, certainly there were in the ranges farther south, but he saw no traces of them in the valley where he lived. He tried several times to devise traps for birds to save his ammunition, but without much success. Pigeon was the best food. For variety he experimented with all ways of cooking, from baking them in clay to boiling them whole. It was a thin and monotonous diet. He had used all his flour and oatmeal in the first three weeks of his journey across the range, when he had not stopped to hunt birds. He found himself now hungering, with a desire that he had not dreamed of, for bread or starch food of any kind. He had heard men talk of eating fern-roots, and tried this, but could not find anything that seemed like food. He guessed that someone who really knew the ways of the bush could have found them, but he was unsuccessful himself. The tea that he made in the mornings before he did anything else was his great comfort. He made it strong and black, boiling the same leaves over and over again, and drank it luxuriously. His tobacco, doled out scrupulously, lasted in all six weeks. After a while he ceased to miss it.

Johnson lost all real count of time there in the dark loneliness of the bush. There was sound all the time, of the river running, and birds from early morning to the owls calling at night, but he felt within himself a great solitude, a feeling which had never troubled him before in the long periods of his life that he had spent alone. There was a heaviness of the bush that pressed upon him, page 142 and weighed him down, until the sound of his own voice was startling to him.

He watched the moons go by and when the third full moon, from the day when he had left the farm, began to wane, judged it was time for him to move on. Rain and winter lay as heavily on the country as ever. There was still snow upon the heights above and he knew it would be a long time yet before the real spring or summer came. But he knew also that if he were ever going to move it must be now. He had grown thin so that the bones of his hands and arms showed through the flesh, but he was not yet really weak. What he had to fight was a desire never to move from where he was. Arguing with himself, he guessed it was partly fear of the world outside and the troubles that he had to face, and partly the tiredness of semi-starvation that had weakened him. Whatever it was, he found himself now accepting the discomforts that had at first disturbed him and in a way interested him, so that he would sit for hours by the smoking fire outside his cave in dreams that were half sleep, and then even to go and hunt birds was an effort to him. He fought this weakness until he knew that he could only fight it by going on, and, if he could come through, emerging into the world again. When he had decided this he hated leaving the cave. In his weakened condition it was a hard thing to do. Its rough shelter was more comforting to him than most homes had been. He put off the journey, waiting for the rain to break, and when the sky cleared one day was still hesitating until suddenly, in a fury with himself, he got ready his few possessions and began his journey down the valley.

He had little to carry now except his rifle. The clothes he stood in were torn and a rent in one trouser leg had been roughly mended with flax. He had discarded one pair page 143 of boots; the pair he wore were rotten with damp. His beard and matted hair had grown dirtily together, and his eyes were sunken and bloodshot with the smoke that he had allowed to fill the cave continually in an effort to warm it. The bones of his body stood out thinly underneath his clothes; the winter had left its mark on him.

He planned now to follow the river down rather than to lose himself in trying to fight a way through the crossed ridges of this range. The river flowed, as near as he could judge, south and east, and would lead him out somewhere in the eastern province of the island, where, he could not tell, and it did not much matter. For what would happen when he had to rejoin the outside world he did not greatly care. What had passed at Stenning's farm seemed to him already to have happened a long time ago. The effort of driving himself to make this journey out of the hills was as much as he could reckon with.

He followed the river down for days that lengthened into weeks. Journeying in the darkness of the bush he could not tell what progress he was making and seldom the direction that he travelled. His only measure was a gradual, insensible broadening of the river from the creek that he had known at the head, to a torrent whose pools were often too deep and difficult for him to cross. Often, when it ran under steep banks, he would have to leave it and fight his way through the undergrowth on its banks, to rejoin it again, guided by the sound of its waters, and go forward over its water-worn stones until in time he came to identify himself with it and its progress with his own.

He shot birds now when he saw them and often at night would find no energy to light fires, particularly when it rained. He would sleep then, taking what shelter he could from trees. He had none of the strength now that he had page 144 once had, but depended on a purpose that moved him slowly and painfully forward. He could not afford long rests in case this purpose failed. He came, in this journey, to hate the heavy silence of the bush and the dense obstructions that it offered to him, where before he had welcomed it as a sanctuary. His joy now was in a stretch of river, where it opened out for perhaps as much as fifty yards with a clear sky overhead.

The journey became desperate in the end as the bushhills wound on endlessly. He wondered if he could be travelling south and not east, going down the entire length of the range. He told himself that the hills must end, but each day showed him a new curve in their line against the sky, and then there came a day on which he met with real disaster. The river dipped down on this day, as it sometimes did, and he followed it, scrambling along on one bank and clinging to trees for support. He stopped, hearing above the noise of the river a deeper roar as of rapids or a waterfall ahead. Trying to see what was in front of him he swung himself up by a small tree that bent and broke with his weight. He fell and hit against a small boulder that rolled over, throwing him into the river, and he was swept down off his balance. The dark mud brown of the river was icy-cold and terrifying in its strength. His hands caught desperately at a rock, slipped, and caught again while water poured over and past him. He hung there catching his breath until he found strength enough to pull himself up. Then he jumped for a rock above and got back to the bank again, where a last effort pulled him up, and he sat cold and trembling. He was unhurt, but his rifle had gone; it had been broken from his back when he fell. After a while he worked his way along the bank, hoping for a chance that might allow him to recover it, but the chance was not given, and fifty yards page 145 on he stopped, seeing the ground drop away and the river fall over rocks in a fury of yellow foam to deep pools a hundred feet below. Somewhere down there, he guessed, his rifle lay; its loss meant that he would be foodless now.

The incentive for a final effort came from his belief that he must already have come a long way and that a break in the hills could not be long delayed. He left the river now that it had brought him misfortune and struggled up the side of the valley in an effort to see which way the country lay.

It took him a long time, working his way across the steep side of the valley to the east; it fell steeply in places where the ground dropped to the waterfall in the river and at times he had to pull himself up from sapling to sapling, digging his heels in loose clay. Near the top there was a chalk fall which had taken trees with it and so gave him a chance of seeing down the valley. There was no break anywhere that he could see in the sky-line, but only the curve of bush-hills as the valley swung left away from the setting sun. He sat there resting for a time and then, finding a trickle of water by the clay bank, made tea, lighting the fire laboriously with one of the last of his small stock of wax-matches. He drank the tea, which was now his only food, and felt it warm and revive him. Then he got up and pressed on to use the last hour of daylight that was in the sky.

He was going desperately now and as hard and as fast as he could, swinging along and jumping from tree trunk to tree trunk on the steep side of the hills in an energy of excitement. He reckoned himself fit for a good two days or perhaps three. He slept well in a carpet of green and springy moss and was up with the first light of early dawn and a waning moon, but the afternoon of the next day found him tired and dispirited. He was exhausted by the page 146 effort of forcing his way through this jungle that seemed to grow more and more thickly as he went on. Supple-jack and bush-lawyer caught and tripped him. To go forward at all was an effort, exhausting at any time, but now that he was foodless, doubly so. To have had some opening as a goal in front of him would have made the struggle possible. The continual sightless darkness of the bush was like a nightmare.

To add to his depression there came, in the early afternoon, a thin mist of drizzling rain that blanketed the hills and cut off the rare glimpses of country on which he depended. He plunged on desperately, not daring to stop, and relying on the slope of the valley to guide him. He stopped in the late afternoon and made tea again, building his fire in the shelter of a great tree that had crashed down the hill-side, tearing up its roots and bringing undergrowth and smaller trees down with it for a hundred feet around. As he drank the tea he began to feel that he was finished. The warm tea cleared his head, but could not take away his weariness or his hunger. He sat, feeling the ache in his legs, the torn side of his right foot where the boot had been wrenched away, his face and hands scratched and bleeding. He was wondering whether the few hours that were left of the day were worth further effort and saw then, without emotion, the clouds of mist that filled the valley divide as an eddy of wind caught and trailed them upwards. For a brief moment a watery sun shone through, catching the same endless line of the ridge on the far side of the valley and nothing beyond that he could see. But his eye caught then, what for a moment he could not believe, hidden in trees miles below on the far side of the valley, the tin roof of a hut. He stared at it till he could believe what he saw, then, standing on the tree trunk, checked it rapidly by the line of the sun and the page 147 curve of the valley. It was a good five miles away–a day's journey perhaps in that country–just below the ridge on the western side of the valley. It was only plain to him there for a few minutes and then the clouds came down again, covering everything, and, moving up towards him; drove the fine, wet, chilling mist against him. He gathered his tea-billy and pack together and set off.

Night came as he reached the river and he waited till daylight to cross it. He woke weak and tired, but optimistic, for the sky was clear and if no rain came there was less danger of missing the hut. Thought of food and shelter within reach sustained and encouraged him. But the mood of confidence passed in the first difficulty of crossing the river, which was steep and swift at this point. He crossed it at last and then, lighting a fire, made his last boiling of tea and went on, discarding the few remnants of kit which he had kept and taking only the small axe for help in the bush.

By the early afternoon he knew, with a sick feeling of failure, that he had lost the line which he had set for himself. He had reckoned to strike diagonally up the western side of the valley and to be guided by the ridge at the top from going on past where the hut should be, but the ridge on which he had relied was deceptive, flattening out and dipping again when he had reached it so that it was impossible to keep to it. Also by this time rain was falling again, not just the mist of the previous day, but falling steadily and heavily. He was calm with the coldness of utter exhaustion as he turned back and fought his way down to the river again. He planned to go farther down this time and to strike up below the hut in the certainty that there must be some track running up to it. Two hours went in getting back to the river, and another two in struggling downstream. He was making only slow pro- page 148 gress now, forced to long rests while he gathered himself for each new effort. As night came on, with rain still falling and the sky overcast, he knew that he must turn in now away from the river if he was to make the hut at all. It would be ill-fortune if he had not yet come far enough down river, but he could not trust himself to go on after another cold and foodless night in the bush.

He began to go forward up the side of the valley again, often crawling and climbing on hands and knees, while the bush grew dark around him. His head was at first very clear and his senses seemed alert and over-sensitivized so that he could hear each sound from the patter of rain in the leaves to the rustle of small birds. But as time went on he began to talk aloud, arguing softly with himself, murmuring over each obstruction as he came to it. He went on, unable and not caring to stop, until the full pitch blackness of night was really around him and the rain still falling steadily. He planned not to stop consciously, but as he went on he could feel the strength of his resistance to unconsciousness lessening. The sense of reality that he had had began to go from him until he was struggling with ferns and creepers in dreams that succeeded each other.

He stopped suddenly, not realizing what was strange to him, and then, collecting himself, knew that he was in a clearing of some kind, that for the moment there was nothing in front of his groping hands. In the pitch blackness that held the bush he could see only shadows and forms. He stood up and stepped forward, feeling with his arms outstretched until he met the trees again, then back until he had placed them on the other side. He was on a track of some kind. He was too sick and exhausted now to understand all that this meant or to argue whether he should go up or down it. He had planned to come out below the hut so the hut must be somewhere up the track. page 149 He began, with the last effort of weariness, to walk up the track, stumbling over roots of trees that ran across it and fearful all the time of wandering off it into the bush again. The line of faintly lighter sky overhead sustained him.

He had not far to go now and came at last to the end of the track where it turned suddenly into a clearing, and he saw the hut. It stood backed against trees, but through them showed clearly a glint of light from its window. Johnson gathered himself together and walked across to the door of the hut. Dropping the small axe which he had carried all this time from his hand he knocked on the door and without waiting threw it open and went inside.