KEY POINTS:
They were crushed. There was no more track, just a sheer drop. Sam immediately caught their fear and began to wail drearily. There was nothing for it but to turn around. They walked all the way down the bluff until they were back at the river bank.
Emily had begun to hate the river. It laughed at them, dashing along over its rocks, it menaced and mocked and teased. She slipped and grazed her foot, and the river babbled and sighed and chuckled to itself.
She and Larry searched for another track. They were wary of entering the really dense bush; they knew how easy it would be to become confused, especially here where the gorge had widened and there were gullies and dips in the terrain.
They gave up and sat on the bank, bathing their feet in the stream.
The sky was still bright but the colours were changing, the sunlight growing yellower as the afternoon wore on. It wouldn't be many hours before shadows started to cross the gorge. Emily thought with fear of the bush at night.
Larry frowned over his map. Sam bleakly ate the last sandwich and Emily stared into the shallows, where the water rippled over ochre stones and the weed waved, and the eels curled and slipped between the rocks.
She saw a crayfish poke its claws out from under a rock as if to check the underwater weather - the swirls and flurries of sparkling mud, the tiny leaves whirling lazily past its door. It shot back under the rock again, quick as a flash.
The feathery river weed was combed and parted by the current, and tiny bubbles of air were caught in its strands and lifted off, and whisked away.
Larry said, "I've got it."
She looked up.
"It's obvious. We're so stupid."
He got up, snapping his fingers. "We don't have to find a track. All we have to do is follow the river. We want to find the sea - that's where the river will take us."
Emily got up, pulling Sam. Larry paced around them, repeating himself. "We've wasted all this time trying to find the track. It doesn't matter if the track's disappeared." He was so convinced that Emily and Sam felt a little flicker of hope. Sam heaved a long watery sigh. Emily dug her fingernails into her palm and prayed to the Unknown Somebody that Larry was right.
They went on. When the riverbank gave out, they waded and swam. Larry tried to carry the pack on his head but it was soon drenched, and they simply dragged it or floated it ahead of themselves. They sank in brown mud, slipped and slid over stones. They swam in their clothes and shoes.
Where the river was flowing too fast they clambered along the bank, hanging on to the ferns.
Now that they had given up searching for a track they felt they were making progress. Sometimes they could lie in the water and let the river carry them along; sometimes they swam and waded through long slow lagoons, where the nikau palms grew thickly overhead and the water lay brown and sun-striped and sluggish.
There were fewer rapids and waterfalls now. The land had begun to flatten out and they were no longer walled in on both sides of the river by steep hills. The afternoon sun blazed down, the bush was still in the heat, light glinted off every leaf, and the cicadas were so loud that the air seemed to shimmer and vibrate with the sound. There was still no sign of a track but they kept faith with Larry's idea: a river must lead to the sea. As long as they stuck with it, they wouldn't get lost.
Emily saw a plane high in the sky, a tiny silver dart. And she saw that shadows were starting to cross the bush. Now they were walking through a kind of grassland; the river was broad and slow and there were little tributaries, marshy pools, banks of toi-toi sticking out of the middle of muddy bogs.
Larry shouted from up ahead, and when she and Sam joined him they saw that the track had resumed, winding and overgrown and pitted here and there with the hoof-prints of cows.
"Listen," Larry said. They could hear a distant sighing roar - the sea.
They were in a wide, shallow valley. There were tussocky paddocks, fields of low scrub, and in the distance black and white cows grouped under a tree. Water lay everywhere, in brackish pools along the edge of the path, fringed by great banks of native reeds. They passed pools filled with bright green weed, and tiny frogs sitting motionless on lily pads in the shade of the waving stalks. The heat was intense. The sun was lower and burned into their faces. They were so tired that they couldn't talk.
They came to a sign. Larry consulted his map and Emily couldn't raise the energy to ask him how far they had to go; she only looked at the sign with dull resentment; she thought there was something utterly shameless about the track, the way it had simply resumed, all cheerful and businesslike as if it hadn't abandoned them in the middle of the bush.
And now, finally, the sea was really roaring, and when they crossed a wooden bridge over a marsh and followed a narrow path under a row of cabbage trees, they came to the foot of a vast black sand dune. Emily looked up the glittering iron slope to the intense blue sky.
She had never seen such a dune, a monster, its spine curving like the back of a giant lizard, its rippling flank so black that it had a sheen of blue.
They began to climb, toiling up the slope, their feet sinking into the hot sand. Sam began to cry as the sand got into his sandals, burning his feet.
They reached the top and there before them was the huge curve of the coast, stretching many miles south, all the way to Whatipu, and to the north towards Karekare, a desert of black sand and dunes and scrub rippling with heat waves, and, far across it, fringed with surf, the wild sea.
Emily turned and turned; it seemed to her that the whole landscape was full of bright, violent motion. The fluffy toi-toi waved in the wind like spears borne by a marching army; the surf ceaselessly tumbled and roared, the light played on the sand, casting a powerful, shimmering glare.
Where the black desert met the land there were enormous grey cliffs that sent the sound booming off them. Behind them lay the green valley they had come through, with its marshland and cabbage trees and the river that had spread into many waterways, spilling out towards the sea.
They walked along the backbone of the great dune, and across a boiling expanse of beach. Then they came down into a trench of scrub under the cliffs, where cabbage trees grew along the edge of a stream, and pohutukawa hung off the cliffs. Here there was a path of hard, matted grass that was easy to walk on. But Sam sat down with a bump. He couldn't go on.
Larry climbed up onto a clump of dune and scrub. "I can see people," he shouted.
She joined him. Far away, near the sea, there were figures walking in a line. Little shapes against the dancing, glittering water. Fishermen or trampers, heading for Whatipu. She saw that the light was changing; there were clouds gathering on the horizon, streaked with greenish light. Soon the clouds would turn orange and the sun would go down; there would be no twilight, no lights, only the sudden, absolute dark.
"Look what I got," Larry said. His hand was full of bright, squashy blackberries. There were clumps of bushes, laden with berries. They picked more and carried them back to Sam. The little boy dragged himself up with a persecuted look and consented to trudge on, his mouth stained with red juice.
Emily saw something ahead, a circle of light against the headland. It was a tunnel, cut out of the rock, made a long time ago, Larry said, reading from his map, when there was a railway line around the coast.
They walked through the tunnel, running their hands over the cold stone. "Now we're nearly there," Larry said when they came out the other side.
But Sam sat down again, and this time he wouldn't move.
"Christ," Hugh Richardson kept saying. "Christ."
The two fathers had crossed around the rocks and now faced the immense wasteland of sand, stretching away in the polished light towards Whatipu.
Per was blackly furious with himself. He couldn't even remember the morning's discussions about what the children were doing; he'd assumed Beth was handling all that and of course she had been distracted, and hadn't understood what Emily and Larry were meaning to do. Now they were somewhere in this huge landscape or worse, lost in the bush or drowned, and the Richardsons' little Sam, just 5, lost with them. Hugh loped along next to him, shading his eyes. "It's going to get dark."
Per looked along the line of coast and felt a part of himself crumbling with misery and panic. Should they go back and call the ranger, the police, summon more help? Now they'd come this far it would take a long time to get back, and meanwhile the dark would come on. He couldn't go back and leave them, even if it were the rational thing to do. Images floated in his mind. Beth's anxious face. The children in sunlight, waving as they walked away.
They joined the track. Four fishermen appeared near the cliffs and Hugh scrambled towards them. "Have you seen three kids?" he called. "Three lost kids."
The men shook their heads and marched past. Hugh stared after them uneasily. The fronds of the cabbage trees rustled over their heads, as sharp as knives. Per looked up at the wall of rock, at the deep black spaces.
He felt as if the cliffs were ringing with a terrible sound. The iron echo rang in his head. The whole landscape was reverberating, crying out to him. The crash of the waves on the shore, the cliff-echo. The black rock, the black sand, the seagull shifting on its red feet, its shiny black eye with no light no depth in it.
There was an orange tinge to the west now and long shadows crossed the sand.
They passed through a manuka glade and came out on a long stretch of scrub and marram grass.
Ahead of them they saw three small figures, sprawled in the grass at the edge of the track. They rushed forward. The children's faces were covered with blood.
Hugh's shout, the surge of his own blood, the horror and fear. Per ran and ran. He reached them first and they held up their little smeared hands. Blackberry juice.
"Christ," Hugh exploded for the hundredth time, swinging his boy up into his arms.
Per would never forget it. It would stay with him. He would make sure of this, by writing it down. The ringing of the cliff, the wild sound, the iron song the land had sung. He took his children by their red hands and thanked the God he didn't believe in, thanked him anyway.
