The tide pulled Hine’s husband under on a night
when the waves hissed like broken pūtātara. She
found his cap tangled in kelp, saltcrusted,
empty. No body. Just the silence left when the
sea forgot its promises.
Three years later, the earth won’t take the dead
anymore. The government calls it “Soil Retention
Protocol” — a relic of the Collapse, when the
land turned sour from mining toxins and the old
taniwha woke angry. Graves crack open. Coffins
rise like driftwood. Corpses are incinerated on
concrete pyres, their ashes scattered over
farmland to “restore fertility.” No tangi. No
kōiwi in the whenua.
Hine’s hands still smell of kelp and tar. She’s
a fisherwoman, not a mourner. But she’s the last
who remembers how to weave a kete from harakeke
for bones. Her father taught her before they
took the marae. Before they banned te reo in
schools. Before they turned the coast into a
quarantine zone.
She rows out at dawn, past the rusted buoys
marking the old fishing grounds now poisoned by
heavy metals. The sea doesn’t answer anymore.
The kōura are blind. The snapper won’t bite. But
the tide still knows her name. It tugs at her
waders like a child pulling at a sleeve.
She finds his ribs near the wreck of the
Kaitiaki, halfburied in black silt. Not bones —
shards. The earth won’t hold them. So she
carries them in a bucket lined with dried kelp,
past the checkpoint where the Enforcers in grey
overalls scan for “unauthorised cultural residue.
” One of them once confiscated her grandfather’s
pounamu. Said it was “hazardous material.”
She walks the cliffs at midnight, where the
cliffside caves still whisper with the old names.
The rules bite here: if you bury a kōiwi outside
the state crematoria, you’re charged with
“ecological sabotage.” Three women before her
were taken. No bodies found.
She digs with her hands. Not a shovel — that’s
tracked. Her nails split. The soil won’t hold.
It crumbles like ash. She presses the ribs into
the hollow beneath the pōhutukawa, the one tree
that still blooms red in winter. She chants the
karakia low, her voice raw as kelp on rock. She
doesn’t speak his name. She never did. Names are
for the living.
At dawn, the ground swells. The roots of the
tree curl around the bones. The soil doesn’t
take them — it remembers them. The next morning,
the Enforcers come. They find no grave. Only the
tree, weeping sap like blood. They cut it down.
They burn it.
Hine watches from the rocks. She doesn’t cry.
She pockets a sliver of charred wood. Later, she
smears it on her forehead. The salt on her skin
tastes like him.
The state declares the site “contaminated.”
Evacuation order issued. No one leaves. Not yet.
The sea is quiet. The land is still.
But the tree’s roots, deep in the dark, are
growing back.
