a (blessedly) short story...

It was between Christmas and New Years, high summer in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Paul and I spent a slow hot day in the sun, hooking irrigation hoses and drips to their support wires in his family's fledgling vineyards. When we'd had enough, at about five in the evening, we headed back down the hill to our caravan in the paddock. As always, we had a cup of tea first. Then I remembered the 6 cans of Speights - the touchstone of the South Island kiwi identity, and a fine lager besides - that I'd left held down by a rock in the burbling race nearby. I went to the bridge over the race where I'd left them... and... they were gone. Talk about the cruelty of fate. My tired mind struggled to comprehend - apparently, I decided, some farmer had taken a temporary damn out up stream after diverting some of the flow to water his pasture, and the resulting surge had knocked the rock off and carried the Speights family down stream. I raised the alarm for Paul and went running down stream in the hope of finding them hung up somewhere calm, cool, and collected, waiting for their thirsty saviour...

Over hill, around dale, I followed the stream. Over fences, through thistles I proceeded to no avail, for I never caught a glimpse of the cans. Eventually, I came to the end of the line. Around a brush covered embankment on the next farmer's land, the race ran into an ancient iron sluice that then ran over a cliff, and then, bouncing only occasionally as a favour to gravity, it hurled itself more than a hundred meteres into the spectacular Kawarau River below, milky blue with glacial flour.

I allowed myself to go only as far as the sluice, afraid of what carnage I might find below. I chose instead to allow a faint light of hope to burn: that somehow they'd made it; down to the river, and from there to their mother, the all embracing sea.

As I returned to the caravan, head hung low in deference, I met up with Paul who was headed towards where I'd just been. His face was a picture of grim determination mixed with an unshakable desire for truth. He continued past me, down towards the sluice, with only a nod to acknowledge our understanding - that each individual must choose his own path through the mire of senseless loss and injustice.

Back at the caravan, I indulged myself in a moment of self pity as I put more water on for tea, and sat ouside chiding the stupid sheep and baiting the mosquitos and black flies. After a while I began to worry about Paul. Had he discovered the fate of the Speights, and in his sorrow, had decided to merge it with his own?! As my mind clicked through terrible snapshots of Paul and a six of Speights, pride of Southland, hanging battered and torn, dripping, from thorny branches jutting like the arms of a drowning man from the cliff side, Paul appeared around the bend. When he came into sight he paused. There was a shimmering in his hand. In the orange-yellow light of the setting sun, it was unmistakable. Paul raised his right hand to reveal, still hanging from its now distorted ringed plastic safety harness... the lone survivor - battered but whole!

Sadly, Paul's adventure down the sluice and part way down the sheer cliff (luckily, he'd had the foresight to wear his all-terrain gumboots) over the Kawarau confirmed that four of the survivor's brothers, all by one accounted for, had either been skewered by cliff-side branches, mashed on jagged rocks, or burst open after a harsh plunge into the torrent below. The one unknown, survival too much to hope for, had either been battered into oblivion, or was now at peace, quietly returning to the sea, cleanser of this grief stricken land. In his grief, Paul had struggled down the cliff face to recover two of the casualties, which he had carried back tucked, warm and dry, into the pockets of his swandri, that we might give them a proper send off.

The lone surviving representative of that brew of the Southland, born on a hillside in Dunedin, lives to this day, a grim, somewhat dented testament to the horror. Like its scuffed exterior, Paul and I were changed by our recurring visions of what transpired there in that deceptively idyllic spot, where terror strikes brutally and without warning, where the spectre of the quiet farmers' mill race flows without compassion, untamed.