Shooting Stars Read online

  There was a tui singing in a tree nearby. They used to call it a parson bird because it has a little tuft of white under its chin. I was happy to see it because tuis bring good luck. I whistled back. They like it when you do that.

  The pig seemed to be heading towards Piccadilly, where two hunting trails cross. I nearly got caught by some bush lawyer following him there. It’s a vine with curving thorns. Stings like anything and it can take ages to disentangle yourself. I saw it just in time and we skirted around it. It’s bad enough on clothes, but horrible on bare skin.

  We finally saw the pig at Trafalgar Square, just along from Piccadilly. It’s a small clearing around a rocky shelf. He was up on the shelf and, jeez, he was big. Biggest pig I have ever seen. Gotta have respect for a pig like that. Two hundred kilos I reckon. Cook some, smoke some, salt some, he’d feed us right through winter.

  I gave Jack the stay sign and he lay down straight away, resting his muzzle on his paws, looking up at me out of the corner of his eyes. I knew what he was thinking: When is it my turn?

  The pig was higher than me, rooting around in a patch of mud. That gave me a clear shot at his heart, and I knew that if I missed I was going to have one seriously angry 200-kilo tusker on my tail.

  I crawled into the middle of a fairly dense patch of bush, where he wouldn’t see me. A couple of wood pigeons warbled their warning tune to each other, but the pig took no notice. I loaded the crossbow silently. I had already tensioned it, so just had to slot in the bolt…

  He turned around as I did that. I waited. I wasn’t going to shoot him in the arse – for lots of reasons.

  A helicopter flew overhead as I was waiting. I see them occasionally. Sometimes dragging deer carcasses out of the bush, sometimes dragging tourists from Auckland around on sight-seeing tours. I don’t know which kind this was. I couldn’t see it, just hear it through the trees. It didn’t seem to disturb the pig, he just kept grunting around up on the rock.

  Eventually he turned again and I lined up carefully, allowing for drop, but not for breeze. There wasn’t enough wind to make a difference at that range.

  Jack stayed still, he’s a good dog like that.

  Just as I was about to fire I heard a noise, not of the forest. My finger froze on the trigger.

  I cocked my head to one side, listening intently. There it was again, and this time there was a light metallic click.

  There was a hunter in the forest.

  I forced my body to stay still. I told my heart, which was racing, to calm down. I took long, deep, slow breaths, and waited.

  It would be a shame to miss out on all that pork, but the main thing was to keep him out of our garden. It didn’t really matter to me who killed the pig.

  I hoped the hunter would be a good shot. If not, then the pig would run, and I’d have to spend all day tracking him again. Or, worse, he’d be wounded and attack.

  Something else occurred to me as I waited. Up until that last moment, I hadn’t heard the hunter. Normally I hear them a mile off. But this guy was perhaps thirty metres from me and I hadn’t even known he was there until just now.

  Maybe I was concentrating too hard on the pig, or maybe the sound of the helicopter had masked his movements. But I didn’t think so. This guy was good.

  I crept backwards silently, hiding even deeper in the patch of brush. I gave Jack the ‘shut up’ sign. Twice.

  There was no sound or movement at all.

  The pig lifted its head, sniffing at the air. He was a clear, easy target. Why didn’t the hunter take the shot? What was he waiting for? It wasn’t one of those photo hunters; I’d seen plenty of them, traipsing through the forest with a camera instead of a gun hanging from their shoulder.

  But the click I had heard was the click of a safety catch on a rifle.

  Still no shot.

  I wondered if the hunter was stalking something else.

  But there was nothing else around here to stalk, I was certain of that. If there was a deer, or another pig, I’d have heard them.

  Then I realised. There was another animal in this part of the forest and that was what he was stalking.

  He was stalking me.

  Moma’s Code #4

  Never tell a lie.

  The consequences of telling a lie are always worse than those of telling the truth.

  December 3rd (continued)

  (I made this like a new chapter. When a writer leaves you hanging at the end of a chapter, like I just did, that’s called a cliff-hanger.)

  I stopped moving. Movement makes noise, no matter how careful you are.

  I didn’t think the hunter could see me. I was well concealed. I don’t know how he knew I was there, but I was sure he knew something was there.

  I gave Jack the stay sign. He watched me without flickering a muscle.

  Whoever this hunter was, he moved like a soft breeze through the trees, barely a murmur in the forest. But that was enough for me. I knew where he was now. He was circling around to my right.

  The sounds stopped and there was silence apart from the natural sounds of the forest.

  He was doing what I was doing – listening. That was good news. It meant he didn’t know where I was. I could stay still and wait for him to move, or I could move and hope that he wouldn’t hear me. Normally I’d just move, but this guy was good. Maybe he’d grown up in the bush, like me.

  I waited. He waited.

  I waited some more, then I heard him move.

  As soon as he was moving, so was I. He wouldn’t be able to hear me while he was moving. I crept out of the bush on the opposite side to where I had heard him.

  I had been concentrating so hard on the hunter that I had completely forgotten about the pig. He saw the dog, and Jack saw him and growled, despite the ‘shut up’ command that I gave him.

  The pig could have turned and run at that, but this pig was not afraid of one little dog and a scrawny human kid. It snorted a couple of times.

  I wasn’t sure whether I was more afraid of the pig, or the fact that the hunter was hearing all this.

  It was the pig I should have been afraid of.

  He put his head down and charged.

  I had no time to take a shot, and even if I had, it was the wrong angle. I jumped up, turned and ran for the nearest tree, no longer worrying about the noise I was making.

  Jack ran with me.

  I had almost made it when I got hit from behind and went flying into the trunk of the tree instead. I bounced off, dazed, and hit the ground, but rolled away automatically … and just as well, because those huge tusks ground into the dirt right where I had landed.

  I scrambled backwards on all fours, trying to put a tree in between me and him but he charged again and this time the only thing that saved me was Jack. He did what he had been trained to do. He lunged up and bit onto the ear of the pig and pulled down with all his strength.

  That stopped the boar in his tracks. He couldn’t run with his head twisted around to the side like that. Instead he snorted and tossed and tried to throw Jack off, but Jack was having none of that, he had a grip and he wasn’t letting go for anything.

  The boar managed to flick Jack up, and got a tusk to him, but it glanced off his thick pig collar, a leather collar and vest that covered all his vital organs.

  The pig advanced on me, dragging Jack with him. With my back to the tree I was going nowhere. He tossed his head one more time, loosening Jack’s grip, then lunged forward at my stomach.

  I didn’t have a leather collar to protect my vital organs. I didn’t even have clothes. I just managed to twist out of the way, but he pulled back and lunged again.

  This time was his last.

  Jack was still pulling him down by the ear, twisting his head around, and suddenly two long legs were straddling the boar, one hand lifting the boar’s muzzle up away from me,
widening the neck even further, and then in went the knife.

  I was gasping for air so my mouth was wide open and I got a mouthful of hot pig blood.

  The pig still fought, but only for a few seconds, growing weaker and weaker until he went limp.

  The hunter stood and pulled him to the side so he wouldn’t land on top of me. Then he stuck out a hand to help me to my feet, hawking and spitting out the blood.

  Jack still hadn’t let go of the pig’s ear, not sure if it was dead. I gave him the ‘stop’ sign, then the ‘sit’ sign, unsure if he would have a go at the hunter next.

  The man and I stood and looked at each other for a moment.

  He was tall and looked strong. He had a bushy beard but was almost completely bald. He wore a green Swanndri and old jeans that had been torn off into long shorts. He had a small camo-coloured rucksack. There was a weathered look to his face and he looked like he belonged in the bush. He looked tough and hard.

  I wondered what he thought of me. A scrawny, naked, fifteen-year-old kid, brown from the sun, wet from the rain, red from the pig’s blood. Unshaven, with wild hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  Whatever he thought, he didn’t comment. He unslung his rucksack and opened the flap. “Put this on,” he said, handing me an old scratchy, holey woollen jersey.

  “I’m not cold,” I said. “And it’ll get dirty.” Covered in blood, I meant.

  “It’s not for cold, it’s for shock,” he said.

  I didn’t like the look of it, and I wasn’t going into shock, but I took it and put it on in case my nakedness was making him uncomfortable.

  “What are you doing all the way out here, at this time of the day, in the altogether?” he asked.

  By ‘altogether’ I think he meant nude.

  “It was raining,” I said. “I didn’t want my clothes to get wet.”

  That answer seemed to satisfy him for a moment. Then he asked, “But what are you doing here? Are you camping nearby? Did you get lost?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not lost. I was hunting the pig.”

  “You’re a long way from anywhere,” he said.

  I just nodded.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell you,” I said.

  He looked intently at me. “Why not?”

  “Because I would have to lie,” I said.

  I expected that to lead to a whole lot more questions, but to my surprise he just nodded. “There’s no lie that’s worth telling,” he said. “I respect that. But you’re okay? You don’t need any help?”

  “No,” I said. “How about you?”

  He laughed. “I’ve been hunting in these forests for years. And before that it was the forests of East Timor and the deserts of Afghanistan. I think I’ll be okay.”

  “Were you a soldier?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Afghanistan!” I said. “That sounds really cool. Was it?”

  “Yeah … nah,” he said after a strangely long pause. “Not really.” After another awkward silence he said, “I love it here. It’s so quiet.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. The sun was going down so the birds had all started up. The crickets were going mad and the wind was shifting branches against each other. The bush was alive with sound. It was so loud that I could hardly hear myself think. But I didn’t want to argue, so I just nodded.

  “J.T.,” he said, holding out a hand.

  I didn’t know what to do with his hand, so I held mine out the same way and said, “Egan.”

  He took my hand in his and lifted it up and down a few times. I think this is called shaking hands. I have read about this.

  “And this is Jack,” I said.

  J.T. held out a hand to Jack, who licked it vigorously. He doesn’t know how to shake hands.

  “Did you have a line on him?” J.T. asked, looking again at my crossbow, then over at the dead pig.

  I nodded. “Woulda took him too, but I heard you and held off.”

  He didn’t ask why.

  “You’d have to be a good shot to take him down with that thing,” he said.

  “I am,” I said.

  “I bet you are,” he said. “Where’s your campsite?”

  “Coupla hills that way,” I said vaguely, nodding my head in completely the opposite direction to our hut.

  “You won’t make it back before dark,” he said. “You want to borrow a flashlight?”

  “No sir,” I said. “There’ll be a good moon tonight.”

  He seemed surprised at that and looked up at the sky, before nodding. “Yes, there will. But not for a couple of hours.”

  “I can wait,” I said. It wasn’t safe to travel around the bush in the pitch black, even for someone like me.

  “My camp’s just down the hill,” he said. “Are you expected back for dinner?”

  “No sir, not really,” I said. I was, but I didn’t want to tell him that.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s cook up this old grunter while we wait for the moon.”

  We dragged the Captain Cooker down to J.T.’s camp. It was heavy, but easy with two of us. His camp was by the stream, at the bottom of a shingle slide. Rather than lug the pig all the way down, we just pushed him off at the top and he took himself most of the rest of the way. Jack was running along behind, barking, as if the pig had suddenly come back to life. He grabbed it by the ear at the bottom of the slide and held it there, waiting for us to catch up. He looked up at me, excited, as if he had caught the pig by himself.

  I said he was brave and strong. I didn’t say he was smart.

  J.T. started preparing a fire. I took a moment to thank the pig for his life, and to apologise for killing him. He was a fierce warrior and had fought bravely.

  Moma taught me to do that.

  (But to be honest, I was actually thinking about his crackling skin on the fire the whole time.)

  J.T. made a rough spit out of some branches and a thin metal pole. He let the flames die down a bit while he butchered a leg and impaled it on the pole.

  While he did that, I took off the jersey and cleaned myself up in the stream. Then I rinsed the jersey, wrung it out, and put it back on to dry it out.

  Looking around at the camp it was clear that he intended to stay a while. There was a tent set up by a tree and a cache of supplies hung from a branch where animals couldn’t get to it. It was a good place for a camp: right by the stream for water, with a wide shingle area where you could safely make a good fire.

  We talked a bit while the leg was cooking, but I can’t really remember what about. Just shootin’ the shit, as Moma says sometimes.

  I did find out that he is a deer culler. Apparently the deer population has been exploding in this area. The DOC (whatever that is) didn’t want to wait until the roar, when all the amateur hunters come out, so they had sent in a culler.

  I did ask him how he knew I was there. That was peeving me, because I was being really quiet.

  “Birds,” he said. “You upset a couple of pigeons.”

  He was right about that. I just hadn’t thought he would have been smart enough to know their different cries.

  “I was worried you were going to shoot me,” I said.

  “Yeah nah,” he laughed. “I thought you were a deer, but I’d never pull the trigger until I was certain. You were safe. Unless you’d put on a brown fur coat and stuck antlers on your head.”

  I laughed and tossed a bit of meat to Jack.

  We had a farting contest after we ate. It started when I let one go. Moma always said not to fart in front of other people but there have never really been any other people so I forgot. Anyway, I blamed Jack, which was what we always did at home for a joke.

  “Crackerjack!” I said. “Pooh!” He gave me a disgusted look.

 
“That’s awful,” J.T. said. “Was that the dog?”

  I couldn’t lie so I admitted it was me. I was a bit embarrassed but J.T. just laughed.

  “Pardon me, number three,” I said.

  “Number three?” he asked.

  “You don’t know about number threes?” I asked.

  “Like number ones and number twos?” he said, so I told him Moma’s little rhyme. “Number one, use your gun, number twos, those are poos, number threes make a breeze.”

  J.T. laughed again. He lifted a leg and let out a much bigger, louder fart, then stared at me. “Now that’s a number three,” he said.

  So I squeezed a bit and cocked my leg and let go a long, whiney one. It really stank.

  J.T. laughed and waved his hand around to disperse it. Even Jack looked disgusted and wandered off upwind.

  “Wouldn’t want to aim that one at the fire,” J.T. said.

  I am not sure what he meant, but I laughed anyway.

  Then he did another big one, huge and long and stinky.

  “Oh man, I think you just invented number fours,” I said.

  I tried again but I only got a little peep.

  “I win,” he said.

  “Only ’cos my mother’s not here,” I said. That set us both off laughing.

  “You know what would go down real well right now?” J.T. asked.

  “No sir, what?” I asked.

  “Vanilla ice cream,” he said.

  I’ve never had ice cream, but I didn’t want him to know that so I just nodded and said, “Yes sir, that’d be swell.”

  He saw me looking at his rifle and asked if I would like to know how to use it. Of course I was mad keen, so he showed me how to load the magazine and how that slots into the rifle and where the safety catch is and how you aim and fire it. It was so cool! Much better than the crossbow, and it shoots a lot further. But it’s too noisy. With the crossbow, nobody hears you.

  I know this because he let me shoot it.

  He wasn’t going to, but I kept asking and asking. Eventually he said okay and I aimed the rifle at a tree, but J.T. said no. He said it was too dangerous to fire into a forest at night. There could be campers or other hunters.