Miracle on Kaimotu Island
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Marion Lennox
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Prologue
NO ONE KNEW how old Squid Davies was. The locals of Kaimotu could hardly remember the time he’d given up his fishing licence, much less when he’d been a lad.
Now his constant place was perched on the oil drums behind the wharf, where the wind couldn’t douse a man’s pipe, where the sun hit his sea-leathered face and where he could see every boat that went in and out of Kaimotu harbour. From here he could tell anyone who listened what he knew—and he did know.
‘She’ll be a grand day at sea today, boys,’ he’d say, and the locals would set their sights on the furthest fishing grounds, or ‘She’ll be blowing a gale by midnight,’ and who needed the official forecasters? Kaimotu’s fishermen knew better than to argue. They brought their boats in by dusk.
But now...
‘She’s going to be bigger’n that one that hit when my dad’s dad was a boy,’ Squid intoned in a voice of doom. ‘I know what my grandpa said, and it’s here now. Pohutukawa trees are flowering for the second time. Mutton birds won’t leave their chicks. They should be long gone by now, leaving the chicks to follow, but they won’t leave ’em. And then there’s waves hitting the shore on Beck’s Beach. They don’t come in from the north in April—it’s not natural. I tell you, the earth moved in 1886 and this’ll be bigger.’
It had to be nonsense, the locals told themselves nervously. There’d been one earth tremor two weeks back, enough to crack a bit of plaster, break some crockery, but the seismologists on the mainland, with all the finest technology at their disposal, said a tremor was all there was to it. If ever there was a sizeable earthquake it’d be on the mainland, on the fault line, through New Zealand’s South Island, not here, on an island two hundred miles from New Zealand’s northern most tip.
But: ‘There’s rings round the moon, and even the oystercatchers are keeping inland,’ Squid intoned, and the locals tried to laugh it off but didn’t quite manage it. The few remaining summer tourists made weak excuses to depart, and the island’s new doctor, who was into omens in a big way, decided she didn’t want to live on Kaimotu after all.
‘Will you cut it out?’ Ben McMahon, Kaimotu’s only remaining doctor, squared off with Squid in exasperation. ‘You’ve lost us a decent doctor. You’re spooking the tourists and locals alike. Go back to weather forecasting.’
‘I’m only saying what I’m feelin’,’ Squid said morosely, staring ominously out at the horizon. ‘The big ’un’s coming. Nothing surer.’
