Read Online Kiwi Wars by Garry Douglas Kilworth - Free Book Online

still for a few days until it grows back on.’
    ‘Grafting. We call it grafting.’
    The business was soon done with a strip of Jack’s shirt serving as the bandage.
    ‘Now,’ Potaka said, ‘we must look at the ankle. Do you think it is broken?’
    ‘No, I think I’ve torn something.’
    ‘Good. Better than a broken bone. Ankles are terrible things to heal, if they’re broken. Can you stand on it?’
    Jack tried but went down like a felled tree. Potaka did nothing to stop him from crashing to the ground. He simply stood there with his hands on hips and said, ‘No, you cannot walk on it.’
    Jack muttered, ‘I think I’ve hurt my head again,’ and started to put his hand up to feel the wound, but Potaka arrested it, saying, ‘You just jolted it. It has started bleeding again, but you must leave it alone. I do not want to have to change the dressing yet.’
    Jack allowed himself to be ministered to. He felt he was in the hands of some capable female nurse, like Mary Seacole who tended him in the Crimea. Yet the man who tended to his wounds was a heavy-set warrior who could have broken Jack’s back in two halves if he had a mind to. The situation was very strange: the man who had wounded him was the man who now seemed intent on keeping him alive. Jack guessed it was a matter of work pride. On the one hand Potaka had tried to kill him and had failed, but now he had decided to doctor a patient, he was determined Jack would survive. It would be a job well done, to wipe out the stain of the botched killing.
    Jack did believe, however, that the Maoris now took Christian ethics very seriously. Whatever their religion before now, they seemed even more fervently Christian than the arriving white settlers. The bishops, who frequently took the side of the Maoris in land disputes, had something to do with that, but there was something else going on too.
    ‘Do you have a particular god you worshipped, before we came?’ asked Jack later, as they huddled round a campfire together. ‘I’m interested in your beliefs before.’
    Potaka gave Jack a hard look. ‘We knew how to give mercy, if that is what you mean.’
    ‘But what about these old gods of yours? Where did they come from?’
    The Maori shrugged. ‘They were born, like you and me. There was Tangaroa, god of the ocean . . .’
    Over the next hour Jack was given a whole pantheon, few of which he would remember. Two characters however seemed vastly more important than the rest. Tiki, the divine ancestor of these people, who always sat at the head of a canoe, and Maui, a wonderful trickster god. The powers of the gods were many and various. Some were just small gods, like Rongo-ma-tane, god of the sweet potato. Others had far more exotic positions in the pantheon, such as Hine-nui-te-po, goddess of the night, darkness and death. What was clear to Jack, though, was that the Maori had a complex culture of myth and folklore which belied the simplicity of their everyday lives. An intricate, multi-meshed culture, as tightly connected and webbed as a fishing net.
    ‘We used to eat long pig, of course,’ finished Potaka, ‘which Jesus would not have liked. So we stopped all that.’
    ‘For which I am eternally grateful, being quite attached to my thighs and liver.’
    Potaka stared, licked and smacked his lips – then openly grinned with malicious pleasure. ‘Just joking.’
    ‘So, how did you find these great islands?’ asked Jack. ‘I mean, how did you discover them? You have no great sailing ships, like the British. Was it an accident? A fishing canoe blown off-course? Something like that?’
    ‘There was a man called Kupe,’ Potaka began explaining in a storytelling voice, ‘who lived on an island far away. The name of the island was Raiatea. One day Kupe was out fishing when an octopus stole his bait. He was angry and set out in pursuit of the thief, which led him to these islands. In those days we could not write, so everyone had very good memories. Kupe