Rain slicks the ferns along the old logging road
when Tāne Mātāpuna finds the first body — not
shot, not stabbed, but hollowed, ribs splayed
like a opened pātua, moss growing through the
ribs. She doesn’t touch it. The bush won’t let
her.
She’s been hired by the Department of Lands to
find Hemi Rātana, a former kaitiaki turned
fugitive, last seen near the abandoned sawmill
where the 1913 land confiscations turned into a
massacre. The official story says he stole
timber deeds. The real one? He stole silence.
The world changed when the kōkako returned — not
as birds, but as voices that sang the names of
the dead back into the earth. No one knew why,
not even the Pākehā surveyors who swore the
birds had been extinct since ’08. But since ’17,
if you walked too close to the old burial
grounds after dusk, the trees would hum. And if
you answered? The land took a tooth. A finger. A
memory.
Tāne carries her grandfather’s rifle —
steelwrapped, carved with tā moko that only glow
when the wind shifts south. She doesn’t shoot
unless the ground cracks. That’s the first rule.
The second? Don’t speak to the kōkako. Even if
they call your mother’s name.
She finds Hemi in the mill’s basement, curled
under a tarp, skin grey as wet pumice. He’s not
running. He’s waiting. He holds a bone flute
made from a child’s femur. The same one used in
the 1895 peace talks that never held.
She raises the rifle.
He doesn’t flinch. “You’re here because the
land’s hungry again,” he says. Not a question.
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t speak.
But the kōkako start singing.
One by one, they land on the rafters — not birds.
Not spirits. Things with too many eyes and
feathers that smell like burnt kūmara. They sing
the names of the 37 men buried under the mill.
Their wives. Their children. Their dogs.
The floor splits.
Hemi presses the flute to his lips. The first
note bleeds out — black, thick as tar — and the
nearest kōkako dissolves into smoke. The second
note, and the ground seals over the corpse Tāne
found.
He’s not the thief. He’s the anchor.
The deal was simple: one life every decade to
keep the dead from walking. The Pākehā forgot.
The land remembered.
Tāne lowers the rifle.
She doesn’t kill him.
She takes the flute.
That night, she walks to the cliff edge where
the old pā once stood. She doesn’t sing. She
doesn’t pray. She breaks the flute against a
pōhutukawa root and lets the pieces sink into
the earth.
The next morning, the kōkako are gone.
The bush is silent.
But when Tāne returns to town, the
schoolteacher’s daughter is missing.
And on the wall of the empty classroom, written
in wet ash:
E kore a koe e whakaae i te utu.
You did not agree to the price.
She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t look back.
She walks into the bush with nothing but her
rifle, her boots, and the weight of a pact she
never signed — but now must keep.
