Te Whetu

You would be surprised at how hard it is to kill a man. It takes skill and poise and practice and rage and fear to kill a man with a taiaha. To use a musket takes a more calculating way of thinking.

I knew a man who refused to even touch a musket – the weapon of the coward, he said. He was right of course, but … compromise: in the end you do what you can to do what you must. I signed their treaty. Only the shadow of the land would Kuini get! It didn’t take long before Kuini stepped out of the shadows.

So, yes, I used the aliens’ weapons – I thought we could defeat them that way.

A musket does not like the damp, but if you keep the black powder dry, tamp the right amount behind the ball, load enough into the pan …

The difficulty that day in the bush near Waitotoroa was that when the flint hits the frizzen, the spark is visible and the flash that flies sideways from the pan is very visible and the flash from the muzzle – even more so. To snipe as I did that day you must move as unseen as a ghost and as fast as the wind the instant you fire to avoid the flash giving away your position.

I had rage in my heart that day – at Ngatapa they shot 120 prisoners and threw them over the cliff, at Pokaikai they bayonetted the people as they slept while the chief negotiated peace, we knew their officers nailed the severed ears of our dead to their doorframes – but it was a cold rage, a hopeless rage.

To kill nine men with nine balls is something any marksman would be proud of. A feat! And always undetected by the terrified aliens who must have thought some demon hunted them.

When the ninth fell, a rainbow appeared in the sky – vertical like the post of a meetinghouse and it pointed to Parihaka.

The father of my wife said it was a sign of peace. Perhaps he was right. I would have fought them when they came, but instead Te Whiti o Rongomai – father of my wife – bade us offer no forceful resistance.

I am an old man now, and emotional with the emotion of old men. Sometimes tears dribble down my cheeks. No enemy will eat my flesh. Soon I will begin the journey north to the tree and down its roots and off across the ocean to Hawaiki. How I loved this world and how I regret living to see everything of worth in it destroyed. The father of my wife said, ‘I have a uniform, distinct path that I travel continuously – peace and goodwill to men is the password. The wayfarers are clothed in love and charity; the end of the journey to those who enter it is joy everlasting.’

Maybe he was right. It seems not. Perhaps we will not lose the next world.

Dhiraja