The kauri trees in Te Puna Rere don’t grow
straight anymore. They curve inward like arms
pulling earth back into the dark, their roots
knuckled over buried survey pegs from 1912.
Constable Rāhiri Tākere, once posted to Auckland,
drives the last unsealed road into town with her
father’s old Ford, the radio dead since Te Kōpua.
She’s here because the surveyor vanished
midmeasurement — no trace, no note, just a
single pounamu pendant left on a trig station,
still warm.
The land registry says the block was sold clean
in ’18, but the old folk know: when the kauri
bleed resin that glows blue under moonlight, the
ground remembers what the Crown erased. Rāhiri’s
greatgrandmother whispered that the trees held
the names of those buried under the survey lines
— not graves, but tapu lines, where the iwi’s
tūpuna walked before the Crown claimed it all.
The forest doesn’t forget. It rewrites.
On night three, she walks the boundary with a
compass that spins backwards. The trees shift.
Where the surveyor’s last peg stood, a new root
rises — not wood, but something fibrous, humming.
She touches it. Her skin burns. The air smells
of wet earth and kerosene, like the old power
station that burned down in ’79. That’s when the
rule bites: if you touch a kaurimemory, you
carry its weight until the next solstice. No one
comes back unchanged. Her father left. He never
spoke of it again.
At dawn, she finds the surveyor’s boots, filled
with soil from a precolonial burial mound.
Inside, a watercolour sketch: a woman in a 1910
dress, standing where the school now stands,
holding a child’s hand. The child’s face is
Rāhiri’s. The date on the sketch? 1913. The day
the Crown declared the land Crownowned. The day
the kauri began to bend.
She doesn’t report it. Instead, she digs. Not
for bones. For the old pounamu pendant — the one
the surveyor left. She finds it buried under the
school’s foundation stone, still warm. When she
presses it to the kauri’s bark, the trunk splits
open. Not with rot. With light. Names rise from
the wood — Māori, not English — each one a land
claim the surveyors buried. The forest is
remembering. And now, it’s speaking through her.
She leaves the pendant where she found it. On
the last day, she drives out, but not before
placing a single pāua shell on the trig station.
The trees don’t move. But the road behind her —
the one she drove in on — is gone. Replaced by a
trail of crushed kauri needles, leading back
into the bush. No one else sees it. But she
knows. The land didn’t want a surveyor. It
wanted a witness. And now, it has one.
The forest still hums. And Rāhiri Tākere? She
doesn’t sleep in town anymore. She sleeps under
the trees. The ones that remember.
