She arrives at Pōhutukawa Point in November 1918,
boots caked with red mud, pack heavy with tinned
meat and a halfburned letter from her father.
The house she’d read about in his journal is
gone—replaced by a tītī (muttonbird) nesting
cliff, slick with guano and silence. No smoke,
no voices, just wind humming through hollowed
kauri trees.
The world had changed after the wars: land
returned to Māori hands under new leases, but
the Crown still held the right to survey
“unoccupied” areas. Her father, a colonial
surveyor, had mapped this coast in 1902. He died
two years later, official record says suicide.
But the journal entry from 1904 reads: “They are
not dead. They are waiting.”
She sleeps in a cave beneath the cliffs. At dawn,
the tide recedes—revealing a path of carved
stones leading inland, where no path should be.
She follows.
The village isn’t empty. It’s absent. Houses
stand, but their interiors are filled with old
clothes, wet blankets, muttonbird feathers. A
woman sits on a porch, staring at the sea. She
doesn’t speak. When the backpacker reaches out,
her hand passes through—like mist.
The rule bites: you can only see what the land
allows. If you’re not meant to be seen, you
aren’t.
That night, the storm breaks. Rain floods the
caves. In the dark, she hears singing—a lullaby
in te reo, sung in three voices. Not one voice.
Three. The same song her father wrote in his
journal.
She finds his name carved beneath a stone, not
on a grave, but on the wall of a hut that wasn’t
there yesterday.
The next morning, the village vanishes. The tide
returns. The cliff stands. Only the journal
remains—its last page now blank, except for a
single sentence in her own handwriting: “I am
here.”
She leaves the journal behind. The wind takes it.
No one sees her go.
