Kokopu Dreams by Baker Chris

Author:Baker, Chris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869694692
Publisher: Huia (NZ) Ltd
Published: 2012-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Sean came to with Hamu licking his face. He lay on his back feeling his wounds. One eye was blind. His head and his arm throbbed. His nostrils were full of the unbelievable stench of the burning monster. Sean was too weak to move and he stayed on his back, the front of his swanny pulled up and held against his eye. Bojay was eating grass again and Hamu, unhurt after his encounter, had started picking his biscuits out of the grass. Sean struggled to his feet and rebuilt the fire, one-handed and one-eyed.

As he sat half blind, wondering if he was going to live or die, he noticed Hamu. The dog had stopped rootling in the grass for his biscuits. He was sitting with his head on one side, gazing enraptured at a point beside the fire. Again Sean followed his gaze. This time he saw a little creature, less than a metre high, warming himself by the flames. He was gnarled and misshapen with a high forehead and reddish curly hair. He was one of the little guys out of Cally’s paintings — one of the Maeroero. Hamu and Sean were entranced. Even Bojay had stopped munching. Sean could smell his grassy breath as he moved up behind them. The Maeroero turned to them and spoke, and the sound made Sean forget anything he’d read about the clear and piping voices of the little people. The Maeroero sounded like Tom Waits on a bad day, like cutlery caught in the waste disposal unit, and he spoke in a dialect full of g’s and k’s, grunts and clicks.

‘Tena koutou,’ he said.

The barely comprehensible formal greeting sounded more like ‘tinna goat.’ A noise like three metres of concrete mixing in a truck followed. Sean strained to make sense of the noise.

‘Ko Uruao ahau.’

Uruao? Sean had never heard the name before. It wasn’t from anywhere he’d been. Then the little guy started smiling and nodding, just like the blanketed man at Ngaruawahia.

‘Tatou tatou!’ he said to Sean, though the noise was more like a motor mower running over tin cans. Tatou tatou? All of them together? Uruao continued smiling and nodding. Sean wondered what he meant. Then Sean heard a strange noise, like a mixture of grinding gears and a punk rock drum solo. The noise was coming from the little guy. He was shaking with what looked to Sean like laughter. As Sean fought to focus, he saw the Maeroero lift one arm and point, right at his face.

That was about the last straw for Sean. He felt crook as hell. In the past couple of days he’d been ambushed, shot, chased, frightened half to death, and, to cap it all, he’d probably lost an eye.

‘And you can fuck off too, you crater-faced little dipstick!’ Sean yelled at the diminutive creature, sitting there by the fire, wrapped in a cloak made from some spotted hide and sounding like the old Cresta had just thrown a rod.

And he did. He rose,

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