Mutuwhenua (an excerpt).

Grace, Patricia

I WAS NINE YEARS OLD when we found the stone. Grandpa Toki was alive then and my parents and I had gone to his place because a man from the council was to be there to discuss with my grandparents and the rest of the family a road that the council wanted to put through our settlement to open up more land in the area. My grandparents' place is a mile or so from our place, on a small rise, with the hills stacking up behind. And from somewhere in the hills comes a creek which in times of heavy rain can swell and flood the flat land of the gully.

The man from the council had his son with him, and while the adults were talking the boy and my cousins and I went down to the creek to play.

Spring was unfolding from the end of a sodden winter, pushing up new shoots of grass along the edge of the creek which was now returning to its normal flow. The wet had flogged the gully. Banks had pulled away and slid into sticky mounds along the ferny edges of the bush. Shingle, heaped by the awry spilling of the creek, had filtered mud and rotting debris into reeking piles.

I don't know who noticed the stone first. Its shape made it different from the other stones and pieces of stick lying at the bottom of the creek. Lying in the water it had no colour at all. The boy and my cousin Toki lifted it out on to the bank between them. It was about a foot in length, tongue-shaped at one end and tapered towards the other. We dried it on our clothes and sat on the bank talking about it in the way that we always used to talk about the special stones or shells we found. Or about our coloured bits of glass. Now and again we stroked our hands along it or held it to know its shape and its heaviness or to feel it warming to our touch.

Then we began to wonder how it had got there in the creek. And, suddenly, the boy, who was older than any of us, said, "It came in the floods from the hills and it took years and years to get here. It's hundreds of years old." He picked it up and walked towards the house and we followed with our eyes popping. Not because of what the stone was, but because of the hundreds of years and because of how it came, taking ages and ages.

"Look what I found," he said, and there was sudden silence in the kitchen, with all eyes on him and what he held.

"Well," his father said. He took it from the boy and weighed it in his hands, looking about at all the adults. But they too had become stone in the leaping silence of the room.

"Well," he said. "Must be worth a coin or two." But they didn't move or speak.

"In the creek," the boy said into the long moment. "Just lying there."

Then my grandfather said, "It goes back. Back to the hills." And we all waited.

"Come off it," the man said. "Can't you see?"

They didn't answer him.

"Well, look, think of it this way. What use is it to anyone back there in the hills. Who can see it there?"

He told the boy to go and put the stone in the car and kept talking about how they could all share. "It was my boy who found it," he kept saying. "But it's your land. There's something in it for everyone."

While he was speaking I saw my father beckon my cousin Toki to him and whisper; then Toki slipped away.

The man was angry later when he went to the car and found the stone had gone. He accused my grandparents of many things but they were quiet and said nothing.

After the man and his son left, my cousin took the stone from under the house where he'd hidden it and gave it to our grandfather. The older ones spoke together. Then Grandpa Toki and my father went, taking the stone, far back into the hills, and returned without it. They told us how they had stood at the top of a rise and thrown the stone piece into a deep gully. And the next day they went back again with a tractor and graded the top of the hill down into the gully where the stone was, covering it with fall after fall of rock and earth.

I often think of that piece of stone lying at the bottom of the gully buried under a ton of rock and earth. And when I think of it I can feel its weight in my hands and the coldness of it, and I can see its dull green light. And it always seems that I can feel it and see it better now than I could when it was just like another shell or piece of coloured glass. As though part of myself is buried in that gully.

Whenever my cousins and I talk about that time I know they feel the same way too. And I have often wondered what the Pakeha boy's feelings would have been had he known what our older ones did with the stone. I saw him stroking his hands along the tapered handle and watched him curl his fingers about it and I wondered if it warmed in his grasp. I watched him look way into the hills with quietness shining from his face, so it is difficult to know. Perhaps the stone is part of that boy too, though I think not.

But what I'd wanted to tell Graeme during those days before our wedding was not so much the story of the stone, because that would have been easy enough. I'd wanted to tell him about the significance to me of what had happened; wanted him to know there was part of me that could never be given and that would not change. Because of my belief in the rightness of what had been done with the stone, my clear knowledge at nine years of age of the rightness (to me), I can never move away from who I am. Not completely, even though I have wanted to, often.

There is part of me that will not change, and it is buried under a ton of earth in a deep gully. The ngaio tree will age and die. Or perhaps it will not age. Perhaps the wind will have it in spite of its protectors, or perhaps it will be in the way and will go under the axe one day. But the stone with both life and death upon it has been returned to the hands of the earth, and is safe there, in the place where it truly belongs.

Plimmerton, New Zealand

Editorial note: The editors wish to thank Chadwick Allen for his introductory note to this excerpt and for his guidance in preparing this section. He is the author of Blood Narrative (2002), which deals with American Indian and Maori indigenous identity.

* From Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (Longman Paul, 1978; Penguin, 1986). Copyright [c] 2978 by Patricia Grace. Reprinted by permission of the author and Penguin Group New Zealand.

In Your Opinion

IN THE EXCERPT by Patricia Grace, the narrator's cousin, Toki, took the stone out of the car and hid it under the house. Do you think he did the right thing? Why or why not? Why do you think the stone was so important to the author's grandparents and parents? To the man from the council? Who do you think was right about the stone: the Pakeha who wanted to sell it to a museum or the older ones who wanted the stone put back in the earth? Why?

This excerpt describes remembering an important event in the main character's life. It shows how what starts out as an ordinary day can have an impact on a person's life that lasts as one grows up. Ask your parents or grandparents to tell you about something that happened when they were children that has influenced them as adults. Why was it so important to them?

PATRICIA GRACE is a Maori writer who traces her descent lines through the indigenous iwi (nations) of Ngati Raukawa, Ngati Toa, and Te Ati Awa. Her four short-story collections, six novels, and several books for children have been popular with both readers and critics, and they have won a number of prestigious awards. The excerpt below is from Grace's first novel, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (1978). The main character, Linda, struggles with her decision to marry Graeme, who is Pakeha (a New Zealander of European descent), which will mean leaving her rural family home to live in the city. She remembers an event from her childhood that helps to define what it means to be a contemporary Maori. A conflict arises when a Pakeha man from the local government and his son visit Linda's Maori family on official business. While playing in the creek, the children discover a piece of "greenstone" (nephrite jade) that appears to be very old and shaped by human hands--it probably washed out of a Maori grave. How the different children and adults think about the value of the stone, and what they argue should be done with it, helps Linda to better understand some of the ongoing differences between Maori and Pakeha, despite almost 150 years of contact. The memory of the stone also helps Linda to understand better her own sense of who she is.

PATRICIA GRACE was born in Wellington in 1937. She lives in Plimmerton on the ancestral lands of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa, and Te Ati Awa, in close proximity to her home marae at Hongoeka Bay. Awards for her work include the Children's Picture Book of the Year for The Kuia and the Spider (1982).