The lake has many stories. My grandfather used to tell me the ancient ones, some of which are dangerous to forget. "Tell me a story about Ngātoro-i-rangi, Koro," I would ask, and he would look at me over his glasses, put down his book and tell me again how Ngātoro-i-rangi, seeking water for his people, climbed to the top of Tauhara and hurled down a tōtara tree into the dusty bowl below. The ground had cracked open and water welled up, filling the huge basin of the lake. This story I knew was true, and I also knew that the tree had landed upside down, because Koro had taken me in the dinghy to the place where, on a fine, calm day, if you know where to look and you look very hard, you can still see the giant roots of the tōtara stretching outward and up, deep in the water below. Ngātoro-i-rangi had then pulled a feather from his great feather cloak and thrown it into the newly-born lake. The feather began to move and grow until it became an eel that tried to swim away, but after a short distance it turned belly-up in the water. Ngātoro-i-rangi pulled another feather from his cloak and this time he recited a karakia before throwing the feather. This feather, small and white, did not grow, but it began to move and became a tiny fish. Sharp-eyed Ngātoro-i-rangi could still see the fish swimming far from the shore, so he pulled more white feathers from his cloak, and in the water these too became fish, moving quickly away, out towards the middle of the lake. There they laid eggs and soon there were thousands of these fish, the kōaro, swimming in the lake. I have not seen many kōaro, but Koro told me there used to be great numbers before the Pākehā brought the trout, which feed on them. Ngātoro-i-rangi had then travelled around the lake to the mountains of the south to explore white Tongariro—for he had never seen snow, and wanted to know what made the mountain gleam. That is a story of fire, ice and death, which I will not tell now, for I have sworn to tell my own story, to show that the ancient ones are true.
It was January 1958, when Hēmi was twelve and I was thirteen. Hēmi had his own dinghy, a nine-foot Mosquito Craft, which we often took out. It was a good little dinghy, quick in the water. We would fish from it, row along to other bays to explore, or sometimes we would row out a long way and jump off the side, swimming around in the deep water, diving down, dunking, chasing, splashing. Hēmi and I had been friends from before we could remember because our mothers were friends. We grew up together, building sandcastles on the beach at Rotongaio Bay.
We were restless from the long spreading weeks of the summer, impatient for school to begin, to break the monotony of the days. The day it happened we were both up early to take the dinghy out fishing. Hēmi rowed. Though younger, he was taller and stronger than me. (I used to pray to outgrow him—not knowing how my prayers would be answered.) The breeze was light and we were soon far enough out and put down our lines. We let the dinghy drift and while we sat waiting for fish, we placed bets about everything we could: how long we would wait, how many fish we would catch, who would make the first catch, who would catch the most, who would catch the biggest fish, the smallest fish, the fish with the most sheen on its scales. As neither of us had money we wagered items of clothing and trinkets of our parents. We both thought then that it didn't really matter if you lost, that anything lost could be won back, that you couldn't remain on the losing end of a bet for long.
We took turns to row the dinghy, letting the lines trail, but no damn fish wanted to bite our hooks that day. It was strange because usually we had plenty of luck. Hēmi said he knew another place, further south, so we pulled in the lines and rowed on.
While Hēmi rowed I trailed my hands in the water, enjoying the feel of my fingers breaking through. I thought about my friends who lived round the lake in Taupō who I'd hardly seen all summer. At school Hēmi and I stuck with friends our own age but, at the end of the day on the bus home, we would sit together and talk about the pranks we had played, trying to one-up each other. Hēmi usually won. He was a trickster. During a lunch hour once he took someone's bike, got it up on the bike shed, and rode around in tight little circles on the roof until a teacher climbed up to get him. Another time he set off the fire alarm during a storm, and we all had to troop outside in the rain for roll call (he didn't get caught for that one). Hēmi wasn't much of a talker otherwise and mostly I didn't mind that about him, although I wished he would say more about some things. That summer I'd been trying to get him to tell me about his sister Katie, who was fourteen and pretty and no longer played with us. I wanted to kiss her, but she never looked at me anymore and pretended not to hear the things I said. I asked him again now. "What does Katie do all day, Hēmi?" Hēmi didn't really know. I pressed him and he said she talked and laughed a lot with her friends, but he didn't think they really did anything. "What do they laugh about?" Hēmi didn't know. "Do you think it's about us?" Hēmi didn't think so.
I'm not sure how long Hēmi rowed for, but it seemed like a long time. "Where's this fishing spot?" I eventually asked, and Hēmi announced that he had another idea. Sometimes Hēmi had the best ideas for keeping us entertained, like the time one autumn when he raked up a huge leaf pile under the big old oak in the yard, so we could jump off the branches into it, or the time he suggested we hitchhike into Taupō to see the beautiful actress in Anastasia at the Starlight. "We're going over there," he said, and nodded his head towards Motutaiko. We weren't far from the island now. It rose sheer up out of the lake water with its dark greens and the crimson of pōhutukawa flowers. Hēmi began turning the dinghy towards it. "We can't go there," I said, and when he kept rowing I grabbed at his left hand, trying to stop his turn. He kicked me. "Yes we can. You scared?" I was, but I didn't want to say this to Hēmi because I was older and was meant to be the brave one. "No," I said—an idiot's reply—and we rowed on in silence, Hēmi's face fixed in a frown, little dews of sweat slicking his forehead. Koro had told me stories about Motutaiko. It was a place you were never meant to go. Hēmi and I both knew that. It was a place people didn't come back from.
We were close to its shore now and Hēmi started rowing alongside, looking for a place to land. "I've always wanted to come here," I said. Hēmi grinned at me. It was true. There was something about it, the lake's only island, the one place you weren't meant to go. It stared out towards the land, fort-like, forbidding, but also beckoning, calling. I had grown used to it being there and to not being allowed there. We had never even talked about trying.
We were skirting round to the north of the island now. The rock came up straight from the water and somehow the thick pōhutukawa roots clung to it, though the weight of the trees leaned outwards. I could hear tūī warbling and their joyful notes surprised me. There are stories that the spirits whisper when the mists are low, but I had always imagined Motutaiko as an island of silence.
"Over there," I said, though Hēmi had just seen it too. It was a narrow inlet with a small pumice beach at the end. Hēmi turned the boat and rowed in.
The dinghy ground against the pumice grit. I stepped out into the shallows and Hēmi pulled the boat up onto the beach. Trees and thick pigfern crowded the shore. Hēmi climbed a little way up from the beach, into the ferns. I ran to join him, and we began our scramble through the bush, away from the shore.
The dense ferns scratched at our legs until we came to an overgrown track, which took us along the island and then back down towards the water. I asked Hēmi twice if he knew where he was going but he didn't answer. Near the water's edge, he suddenly stopped to look at something. I looked in the same direction and couldn't immediately spot what he was staring at, but then I saw it—a dark hole, about as high and as wide as a cricket stump is tall, in the steep side of the rock, a few metres up from the waterline. "Are you coming?" I said and started to climb. I didn't want to be the scared one again. I had some idea of what we might find there, and now I wondered how it was that Koro knew his stories. If he had been here too, perhaps it was all right, I thought.
The volcanic rock was hard and sharp. We made our way up and across to the opening, placing our hands and feet lightly to save them from cuts. The air at the entrance to the cave felt cool and I breathed in a stale, almost salty smell. As my eyes adjusted I could make out a narrow passageway stretching back in the darkness. I shuffled forward in a crouch, feeling my way with my hands. I remember scraping my feet too hard against the rock and swearing. Looking back, I could see Hēmi, a hunched-down silhouette at the entrance. "Are you coming?" I called, in a stupid smug tone, and as he started to move forward after me I continued my awkward crouching walk, shuffling, feeling, hands outstretched. Distance is a difficult thing to judge in the dark, but it was only after perhaps thirty yards that my hands felt space opening to the sides and above me. I stood—my legs felt cramped and sore—and I hooted into the darkness. My voice bounced back. Behind I could hear Hēmi, and then he was standing beside me.
We stood there, side-by-side, silent. I stared into the darkness, waiting for it to reveal something, anything. A small amount of light made its way in from the tunnel, but most of this space had never seen sunlight.
"We should've brought a light," I whispered. After the guiding confines of the tunnel, I was reluctant to move forward into black gaping space. "You mean you should've," said Hēmi. There was a strike, a fizzle, a small flame, and in a bright moment Hēmi's face emerged from flickering shadow, lit by a candle. He blew out the match and looked at me with his cheeky grin. "Not bad, eh?" I felt a fool. "How did you know?" Hēmi shrugged. "I'd heard there were caves, that's all." I felt more foolish than before. Had he planned the bad fishing spot too? Perhaps he saw a change in my face. He touched his hand on my shoulder. "You can share," he said.
We began to move slowly into the cave. At first we saw nothing, just more rocky floor and coarse sand. "Why didn't you tell me?" I tried to make my whisper sound indignant. "Because then you wouldn't have come," Hēmi whispered back. "Yes I would," I said. Hēmi didn't answer, and I'm still not sure who was right. We moved in further, creeping forward, trying not to make a sound, as if that would make any difference.
And then we stopped. Illuminated just ahead of us was a ledge about waist height in a wall of rock, and along it, neatly arranged in a line, a dozen human skulls gazed back at us with black hollow eyes. Although it was no great surprise—I had heard the stories, after all—I had a prickling sense these heads had been watching us all along as we made our way through the darkness towards them. With his candle held down to one side, Hēmi stepped forward. I didn't move or speak, I just watched, barely breathing. Hēmi paused to hold the candle down to the ground, revealing an arm or a leg bone—I had no idea which—and I wondered how many more lay around us, strewn on the ground in the dark. He stopped in front of the skulls, and then moved slowly down the line, examining each one of them under the light of the candle. At the end of the line he stopped, and just stood there for a time staring at them, like he was waiting for them to speak. "Are you scared?" he asked softly, still looking at them expectantly. I shook my head, although of course he couldn't see me. Then, for whatever reason, Hēmi crouched down and ran his free hand along the ground, and it seemed to me that he picked something up—although I couldn't see what—and his hand brushed past the pocket of his shorts, as if he was putting something in it that he wanted to hide. He stood up again and came back towards me, his face hard and sad. "Okay, scaredy-cat, let's go," he whispered. I nodded and held his shirt as we crossed back across the cave towards the light of the tunnel. I was terrified that we were stepping on bones.
We crawled our way out and made our way back quickly through the bush. I kept looking behind me as we hurried on, expecting to see something following us, but there was nothing, and soon we were back at the water, the dinghy still there where we'd left it. We pushed it out, jumped in, and Hēmi began to row us back towards the shore, which wasn't so very far, but as we had come a way south along it, it would take us some time to get home again, especially as the wind was picking up now—it had a way of doing that in the afternoons. Off the island and with the wind on my face, I didn't feel frightened anymore, just angry.
"You took something," I said, surprised to hear the quaver in my voice.
"Nah," said Hēmi.
"You did," I insisted. "I saw you in there. You put something in your pocket."
Hēmi was silent.
"What was it?"
He still didn't answer and kept at his rowing, strong, smooth, back towards the shore, unfazed by the slapping of the waves. He kept glancing over his shoulder, checking his course, keeping it straight.
"Show me. I bet you wouldn't even have gone in if I hadn't gone first."
I was angry that he had deceived me, that he had been less frightened than me, and that now he wasn't sharing what he had taken. I half stood and lunged forward in the dinghy towards him, reaching for his pocket. "Show me!" The dinghy lurched violently to one side as I moved and for a moment Hēmi looked alarmed. But then it rocked back again the other way and I was crouching down in the centre, trying to get at Hēmi's pocket. He was kicking at me with his feet, holding on to the oars, kicking, telling me to bugger off, to fuck off, yelling that he didn't take a bloody damn thing. I was grabbing at his shorts and he dropped the oars to hold my arms back, his strong hands gripping my wrists tight, and I struggled. Then we were up standing, kicking, cursing, wrestling, as the boat lurched from side to side.
Before it happened I saw something in the water, a large, dark shape just below the surface, moving swiftly. We were still locked together, Hēmi holding back my arms while I struggled wildly, trying to twist around and bite his hand, when a large wave knocked the boat and we fell. I felt Hēmi's hands let go and I was in the lake, plunged underneath its deep chill water, then I was up gasping, treading fast with my feet, gulping a mouthful as another wave hit me. I spun around in the water. The dinghy was there just a few yards away, bobbing up and down, its oars trailing sorrowfully from the rowlocks. I swam across and heaved myself back into it, dripping, freezing from the water and the wind which was whipping strongly now. I looked around at the broken surface of the lake and across to the looming mass of Motutaiko. I couldn't see Hēmi.
"Hēmi!" I called, and then bellowed—I could be loud when I had to. No answer came and I called again, and again a fourth time, as loud as I could. "Hēmi!" I yelled. Each time, the wind seemed to snatch the word straight from my mouth. There was no answer.
It didn't make sense. Hēmi was a good swimmer, as natural an athlete in water as out of it. I jumped back into the water again and dived down under the dinghy, eyes open, checking the underside, looking into the murky blue, but there was nothing. I surfaced, called again, and dived again, kicking out, swimming downwards, deeper, circling, searching, looking for Hēmi in the lake's deep blue, until my lungs ached and I shot upwards, gasping and bobbing once more about the surface. Again I called and called and then dived again. I must have dived twenty, thirty times, each time surfacing to shout and check the dinghy, hoping to see Hēmi waving and grinning his cheeky grin; each time more desperate, more cold and weaker than before.
Eventually I climbed back into the boat, numb, and shivered there in the wind, waiting, hoping he would return, grinning, waving, asking if I'd been scared. I let the waves toss the little dinghy around. I hugged my knees. I waited. He didn't come. I waited.
It was a long, cold row back, and night by the time I got home. I cried to my mother a tale about fishing and swimming and Hēmi diving off the side, disappearing. The next morning I went back with my Dad and Hēmi's Dad and Koro to look and we still couldn't find him. I didn't say that we'd landed, though they searched on the island too, in case he had swum there. Koro said a karakia before going ashore, and while they searched I shivered at the beach, scanning the lake for dark shapes. They went out the next day too, and the next.
His mother said she wanted a body, but I wanted Hēmi alive, and for several years I expected to find him at the door with his big wide grin, excited, eager to tell me about his adventures on the lake, asking if I wanted to take the dinghy out fishing. I even told Katie that he would come back, but I don't think she believed me. She started talking to me again after it happened, but I never told her the truth, and I think she knew. Eventually she left school and moved with her parents up north to Auckland. She wrote me a letter soon after they moved, but I never replied and that was the last I ever heard from her.
Maybe Hēmi hit his head on the dinghy as we fell, maybe he lost sight of it and swam the wrong way. I'm no longer even sure I saw him take something in the cave—it was dark, and there was only candlelight. If I had left him alone, he could have rowed on and we might both have come home to our mothers. I say might, because though you may laugh and call me a fool, I think it was the creature of the ancient stories that took Hēmi into the lake that day: the taniwha Horomatangi, who is said to guard the island and its spirits and the waters around them. We both knew the stories and we both bet our lives that day, but I wish Hēmi had won and Horomatangi had taken me.
Since then, the lake has felt cooler with every passing year. On clear, calm days I have gone out and looked down into the water, trying to see the two of them deep below. The lake has always been a place of loss, yet people forget. They forget its ancient stories, they dishonour the sacred spaces. Today I see Hēmi in the faces of children down at the lakeshore. I wonder how he would look now if he had not gone, if he had grown old like me. Today I think I saw Katie too at the water's edge. The line of her nose and the angle of her cheeks has kept her beautiful. I wanted to tell her, to ask her forgiveness, but I couldn't find strength—yes, even today, though I have nothing more to lose. I am reminded of the love story of the mountains from the time before the lake, when the bowl was still dust, and how Tauhara refused to move far from his beloved Pihanga, and still torments himself now, staring out across the water to where she and her fiery Tongariro reside.