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Unsolicited items liked smoked trout and parcels of meat began appearing on the doorstep of the house where I had digs. One night three men came to the door. They wore balaclavas and heavy boots. They had knives strapped to their waists. Two carried guns. It was a moment before I recognised the third man. Isaac’s face was split in a grin, his black curls clustered at the neck partly hidden by a white bandanna.
    The roar was on, he said. He and his cousins were leaving at first light to go deer-shooting. “Coming?” he said.
    “But I don’t shoot,” I said.
    One of the cousins returned a few hours later and collected me in a small truck. We went by a roundabout route to the end of a valley two hours away where horses were waiting and I confessed to Isaac that I didn’t know how to ride. “You don’t shoot and you don’t ride. What do you do, bro?” I told him that in the navy I had learned to navigate. He sent his cousins on ahead with the horses and for four days I was in his company in the open air unimpeded. Isaac had brought food, warm clothing, oilskinsto lie on. We slept out. On the second day he showed me the shack where he had lived with his grandfather until the age of fourteen.
    “My grandfather said the hardest thing in life is to survive,” Isaac quoted to me. “To survive,” he told me, “you need four things: Karakia . Land. Fire. And discipline.”
    Isaac had many sayings like this.
    I remember his laugh. Isaac laughed so much that the woodsmoke from the fire at night brought on an attack of asthma. He had a high tinkling laugh, as when he said kutikuti (scissors). He couldn’t say scissors in English, he said kutikuti , and laughed. When he laughed he shut his eyes; tears rolled down his cheeks and saliva glistened at the corners of his mouth, his cheeks puffed out and the wrinkles in his face turned to valleys and drains. He made a constant whistling sound as he walked.
    We followed a rough track through trees, descending every so often to the river to fish and swim in the pools. The river bisected the valley. Cattle grazed in bush clearings and small herds of horses. The hills on either side became vertiginous. On the evening of the first day I stumbled twice in the fading light—one of the first occasions I can point to as a sign I was starting to lose my peripheral vision. After that Isaac began to carry my load. He mothered me. On one occasion I lost my footing crossing the river. He bent down and piggybacked me across, spread-eagled on his back like a child. Nearly fifty years on I can conjure up those days—cry of the oystercatchers on the river, smell oftawa berries crushed underfoot, silhouettes of twisted tree trunks standing up in the morning mist like human torsos, silver, naked, spectral.
    There were no houses in the valley. On the last day we clambered up to a tumbledown building in a clearing. It was desolate. Evidently it had been a marae, a tribal centre. Isaac led me past a collection of crumbling outhouses to a building with carved posts and an iron roof. Warning me to stay back, he prostrated himself on the ground, then after uttering what I took to be a prayer or karakia he removed his boots and approached the house carrying his boots in his hand and sat on the porch in silence. Presently he began to wail.
    Isaac despite a high-pitched laugh had a deep cavernous voice and the wailing that came from his throat was unearthly. The rhythm was broken, now drawn-out, now interrupted by a patter of small intimate sounds as if he were conversing with someone. I thought of an ancient Chinese lyric I knew:
    It was our fathers’ sacrifice,
    It may be they were eased.
    We know no harm to come of it;
    It may be God is pleased.
    I don’t know how long Isaac wailed, but it was almost dark when he stopped and called out to me to approach. Nor did he explain anything, although we sat out on theporch until late, after we had eaten, talking by candlelight. In the morning when I awoke he