Caitlin O'Brien, Columba College, Dunedin

(inspired by Colin McCahon’s “Otago Peninsula”)

Early morning, and a ray of west-bound sun over the monument burns open one small eye a slit. Awakened from his sleep, slowly at first, then suddenly and greatly by the natural alarm of a stomach’s growl, Kāhu opens both his eyes wide now, lifts his wings apart, and soars up into the wind. Wasting no time in search of a mouse, he lets the wind lead him where it flows, a current of air travelling through and around; over, and across. In all his years of wisdom, he has learnt to trust these pathways, never to fight against them. Each day a new direction, another place, but always the promise of a meal. The gust takes Kāhu up the south face and over the top of Peggy’s hill, where he perches on a branch of the hunchback tree that sits high on the north side. He must take time to survey the vast expanse that has appeared before him. The amount of times he's seen this before he could not count, but somehow this vista seems to be different each time, with the weather, the season, the wind, the tides.

He looks out over the green peninsula; a row of large spikes of hill sticking up as if the intricately carved Taniwha is submerged with just its scaled spine to show above the Pacific. Sunlight reflects back off the cone into Kāhu’s sharp eyes with an intensity he has found nowhere else. It seems to him this is Sun’s way of showing off Rain’s devotion to Te Mua Upoko, polished to pristine beauty so that the cloud may see its own reflection.

But Kāhu’s internal desires take precedence at this point, takes flight once again. He scans the areas below him to the square centimetre, blinking as blues mix with greens, mix with greys, mix with golds, a glorious palette of light. Tussock grass springs up, hiding skinks, mice, and running streams from Kāhu’s view. He must swoop down closer, over the old tin shed that seems to have fallen from the grounds of the castle, and the mudslides showing ripped up roots from metres above. Perfect. Now he can see, now he can scan again. He sees every hole, every pebble, every nook and cranny in the cracked old stone walls that seem to fence out nothing but thistle from gorse, tussock from more tussock, ending promptly after but 30 metres. And now he spots it. A hare runs between macrocarpa and up the cone ahead of him, a likely impossible but worthwhile target. With stealth, he rises up above, then hurtles down like a drill toward his meal...

All but too slow, as the mammal prances regally onward through the grass, and a chase is on. Kāhu pulls up, and glides but a beaks length from the tips of the grass in hot pursuit, eyes fixed on his bouncing exasperated tucker, too fixed, even, to see the flat crown above them, and within a blink, the hare’s in a crack in the rocks, inside Hereweka. Fairy protection, Perhaps?

Kāhu presses on, over the hill, a town, swiftly and silently, still scanning. His shadow covering skink, shell, sea, sand, and basalt, as a heron squints up at him, (inquiring) nobly (and angrily/with growing detest) from his rock as to what could possibly have frightened his dinner from before him. Kāhu covers a land, then another, greater inlet. He reaches a land like nowhere else he has yet visited. Stacks of perfectly hexagonal basalt piled up in pyramids mark his entrance, A vast expanse of yellows, oranges, browns, greens, stretch out through first swampland, to dunes, before abruptly halting on an uneasily symmetrical beach, waves breaking high over the top. He hunts low over a dense collection of plantlife. Were he a botanist, he possibly could have been in awe of all he saw, but truth is, he’s not. He’s hungry, he’s tired, and he needs something now. And he’s in luck. Black as night, it’s far away, but he’s locked on. Unsuspecting skink wanders up the sandy path, as bird spirals down on prey, drilling through the air, grasps the animal in his talons. Kāhu perches at a nearby Horoeka, his eyes once again slits, a Kāhu grin of content. Spray from the waves on the rocks far behind him catch light as Sun looks back East on his day’s progress, one last Haere rā.