The train drops him at Waikawau at dawn, the air
thick with wet fern and the saltsour tang of old
sheep yards. He hasn’t set foot here since ’07,
when he painted his father’s face midshearing —
not as a man, but as a carcass with eyes. The
canvas sold in London for £12,000. The family
never spoke again.
The station’s 4000 acres are now 1100, mortgaged
to the hilt after the ’87 crash. The bank’s man
came last week with a clipboard and a smile that
didn’t reach his eyes. The deadline: one last
shearing before Easter. No extensions. No mercy.
He finds the shearing shed still standing, its
timber blackened by decades of wool grease and
rain. The old blades hang rusted on the wall —
but the new ones, the ones the bank allowed, are
Japanese steel, razorthin and silent. No clatter.
No rhythm. Just efficiency. The land doesn’t
like it. The kākā in the rimu trees have gone
quiet.
He wakes at 4am. His hands shake. Not from
nerves. From memory. He used to shear with his
father — left hand guiding, right hand pulling,
the wool slipping like wet silk. Now, the
machine he’s forced to use catches fleece in the
teeth. One ewe bleeds out before noon. The shed
falls still. No one speaks. Not the Māori
stockman who’s stayed on, not the teenage nephew
who brings tea in a thermos. The air thickens
with something older than debt.
At dusk, he finds the old stone cairn behind the
woolshed — the one his grandfather built with
stones from the Waikato River, each one marked
with a karakia. No one’s touched it since the
land court rulings in ’12. He kneels. Doesn’t
pray. Just touches the first stone. It’s warm.
He goes back to the shed. Takes down the old
shearing blades. Polishes them with tallow and
kōwhai bark. The stockman watches. Says nothing.
But when the first light hits the shed, he walks
in with a bucket of warm water and a clean rag.
He doesn’t help. Just waits.
The flock comes in at 6am. Fortyseven ewes. He
doesn’t use the machine. He shears by hand. Slow.
Methodical. The wool comes off in thick, curling
slabs. The blades sing. Not loud. Just right.
The kākā return. A single tūī lands on the shed
roof and sings the old waiata for tangi.
By noon, the last fleece falls. Clean. Whole. No
blood. No torn skin. The shed smells of earth
and lanolin and salt.
He doesn’t pack. Doesn’t call the bank. He walks
to the cliff edge above the Tasman, where the
sea gnaws at the rocks like a hungry thing. He
drops the shearing blades into the surf. They
vanish.
The next morning, the bank’s man finds the wool
bales stacked in the shed — each one wrapped in
kōwhai bark and tied with flax. The scale shows
387 kilos. Not enough to cover the loan. But the
bank doesn’t send the bulldozers.
They never do, after that.
The nephew starts learning to shear by hand.
The kākā still come.
