Kaihau pulls his nets at Te Rerenga Wairua at
dawn, the way his grandfather did before the
land courts took the papakainga. The sea’s been
wrong since the highway cut the dunes — silent
where it used to hum, thick with salt that
stings the eyes like tears. He doesn’t know the
anchor’s been waiting. Not until the net snaps,
and the weight drags his skiff sideways into the
shallows.
The thing is blackened iron, fused with what
looks like ribs — human, but too long, too
jointed. Woven through the chain, strips of
dried harakeke still hold their shape, braided
with a single white feather. He knows that
pattern. His kuia used to weave them into tā
moko patterns for the dead who never made it
home. The Crown’s surveyors buried the old ones
under concrete when they widened the coast road
in ’78. No record. No funeral. Just silence.
That night, the tide doesn’t go out. It pools
around his whare, lapping the porch steps,
smelling of wet wool and burnt kelp. His dog
whimpers, digs at the floorboards where the salt
seeps in, and doesn’t come back. Kaihau walks to
the rocks with his axe, not to break the anchor —
to bury it deeper. The rules are clear: don’t
move what the sea keeps. His grandfather’s voice,
not spoken, but carved into his bones — the land
took their kin, but the sea remembers who they
were.
He drives the anchor into the black mud beneath
the old pohutukawa, where the tide turns. The
water doesn’t recede. It climbs. By morning, the
church spire’s halfsubmerged, and the school
bell rings — not from the tower, but from the
harbour mouth, clear and cold as a bone flute.
The Pākehā councilmen come with chainsaws and
survey tapes, laughing about “flood nonsense.”
One steps on the slick rock where the anchor
lies. His boot sinks. He screams. Not from pain.
From recognition. He’s seen those bones before —
in his grandfather’s photo album, captioned:
“Māori caught poaching in 1902. Buried at sea.”
The tide rises again. Not with waves. With
bodies. Not ghosts. The drowned. All of them.
The ones the Crown buried in the deep, the ones
the surveyors called “illegal occupants.” They
rise in kelpdraped skin, eyes full of kelp,
mouths open — not to speak, but to sing. The
song is the old waiata of the whenua, the one
the missionaries banned. It doesn’t come from
their throats. It comes from the salt in the air,
the damp on the walls, the rust on the anchor.
Kaihau doesn’t fight it. He wades in, barefoot,
and places his hand on the iron. The water
stills. The bodies sink. The bell stops.
By dusk, the sea is calm. The tide has gone out —
for the first time in three days. But the church
bell’s gone too. And the councilmen’s boots?
Left on the shore. Empty. Full of sand.
The anchor’s gone. Only the feather remains,
pinned to his doorframe by a single mussel shell.
He doesn’t remove it. He knows what happens when
you forget the sea’s memory.
