The drought cracked the earth around Puketapu
Ridge like old pottery, and the kauri trees
stood bare as bones, their roots exposed by the
2012 subsidence that swallowed three farms whole.
No one planted there after. The land didn’t
allow it.
Tama Rangihuna, 23, wore his old Hawke’s Bay
Rugby Club jersey under a secondhand waxed coat.
He didn’t run anymore — his ACL had torn in the
final of ’18, the same night his father vanished
into the mist behind the old pā site. The trophy,
the Te Kāhui Tāonga, was taken then. Not stolen
by man. Taken by the whenua.
He carried no map. Only his grandfather’s voice
in his ribs: “The land keeps what it owns. You
don’t ask. You pay.”
At the ridge’s crest, the soil pulsed. Not with
heat. With silence. The air tasted of wet wool
and burnt kōwhai. A single tūī, its feathers
matted with rustcoloured lichen, perched on the
broken stone post where the 1907 land court had
declared the pā ‘abandoned’. It didn’t sing. It
watched.
He found the trophy halfburied beneath a fallen
tōtara, its silver dented from the fall, the
carved tiki on its base cracked — but still
glowing faintly, like embers under ash. When he
touched it, the ground shuddered. Not an
earthquake. A breath.
Three figures emerged from the mist between the
trees — not ghosts. Not men. Men who had been.
One wore the uniform of the 1896 Armed
Constabulary. Another, the tā moko of a Ngāti
Hine chief, his face stitched with the scars of
a treaty betrayal. The third was his father,
younger than he’d ever been, barefoot, holding a
rugby ball stitched with kelp.
Tama didn’t speak. He knelt. He placed the
trophy back where he found it.
The ground swallowed it whole.
The mist lifted. The tūī took flight.
On his way down the ridge, his boot caught on
something new — a single white rugby sock, clean
as fresh snow, tied to a manuka branch. Inside
it, a folded piece of kōwhai bark. He opened it.
Written in charcoal: “You didn’t take. You
returned. That’s how you win.”
No one else saw it.
He walked home.
The next morning, the dairy farm down the valley
reported the cows had all faced east, lowing
through the night. No one knew why.
Tama didn’t tell them.
He started training again.
