The plane touched down at Whangarei at dawn, and
Tama Rātana drove the last forty kays through
misted kānuka, the smell of wet earth and diesel
rising through the cracked window. His father
had died three weeks prior, leaving behind a
house with no title deeds, a dairy shed full of
rusted machinery, and a grandfather clock that
hadn’t chimed right since 1912.
He found it in the hallway, still ticking — but
each chime pulled the light earlier. By noon,
the shadows stretched west. By teatime, the sun
hung low over the Tasman like it was returning
to morning. The clock’s face was carved with
taniwha coils and kōwhai blossoms, not Roman
numerals. The hands moved counter to all time.
Tama knew this wasn’t superstition. His father
had been a surveyor for the Crown, and he’d
spent his last years digging up old Māori land
markers beneath the pasture, whispering to
stones no one else could hear.
The first rule bit when he tried to unplug it.
The cord didn’t lead to a wall socket. It
vanished into the floorboards, threaded through
wet concrete like a root. When he pried up a
board, the wood beneath was blackened,
fossilised — not rot, but time reversed. A 1907
land deed, signed by his greatgrandfather,
dissolved into ash on his fingertips. The
Crown’s claim, inked in English, had been erased
by the clock’s rhythm.
The second rule bit when he slept. He dreamed of
his mother — not as she was, but as she’d been
before the accident. Before the Pākehā road crew
widened the coastal track and split the pā site.
She stood in the garden, barefoot, holding a
kōwhai branch heavy with gold. She didn’t speak.
She just pointed to the clock. When he woke, the
kitchen window showed the sky in bruised
twilight — but the radio said it was 4:17 a.m.
By the third day, the farm’s boundary markers
began to shift. Fences sagged into the earth.
The old sheep run, once registered as Crown land
under the 1881 Act, returned to the soil as
pūriri grove. A neighbour’s bulldozer, sent to
clear the overgrowth, broke down the moment its
blade touched the clock’s shadow. The operator
swore he saw a woman in a tīvaevae blanket
standing where the fence had been. He left his
truck and never came back.
Tama didn’t call the lawyer. He didn’t call
anyone. He lit a candle, placed it beside the
clock, and sat until the chime swallowed the
afternoon. The hands turned. The sun climbed
again — but this time, it rose from the west.
The land sighed. The kōwhai trees bloomed in
reverse, petals folding inward into buds.
Somewhere in the bush, a pā site reformed from
moss and stone, its entrance lined with carved
pou, silent and waiting.
The clock stopped at 8:07. The room filled with
the scent of karengo and wet wool. On the wall,
the faded photo of his father in his surveyor’s
hat now showed him holding a pounamu, not a
theodolite. Outside, the first kōwhai blossom of
the season fell — not to the ground, but upward,
into the branches.
Tama took his father’s old coat, hung it on the
hall peg, and walked out. The land behind him
was no longer his. It had never been. The clock
had given back what was stolen. And now, it was
sleeping.
The kōwhai would bloom again. Not for the Crown.
Not for the bank. For the tangata whenua who
remembered how to listen.
