I got lost one day and nearly spent the night in the bush. I had no idea where I was, but just on dark I dropped down off a ridge and came out on the creek bed just where I’d lit a fire a few days earlier to have a brew. I reached camp an hour after dark, but I didn’t say anything to Uncle Hec about getting bushed. I was supposed to be able to remember exactly where I was at all times.
Uncle Hec’s foot was improving, especially after we changed the shirtsleeves for a proper bandage. He could take a bit of weight on it and get around more easily, but he still couldn’t get his boot on. It made him real crotchety, that foot. I was reading Don Quixote again and he used to say it was turning my head. But he was only looking for something to grumble about. It’s a good book, that.
(Pages 167-168.)
They appeared suddenly from among the rocks, from where they must have been watching me, and it was all I could do to keep the shock off my face. They were both dressed in rags tied around them with strips of torn cloth and flax. Where a button was missing they’d poked the cloth through the button-hole and inserted a piece of stick through it. One of the boy’s trouser-legs had frayed off above the knee and the leg was covered with old bruises and scratches and he had a large scab on his knee that didn’t look at all healthy.
Similarly one of the old man’s shirtsleeves was torn off at the shoulder; his arm was scratched and scarred and there was a filthy piece of rag tied around a deep graze on his wrist. Their boots were falling to pieces and by all rights should have crippled them.
The old man, Hec, was gaunt and stringy, with a straggly grey hacked-off beard and sunken piercing eyes. He had a pronounced limp, which I learned later was the result of an accident to his foot that had never healed properly.
The boy, Ricky, was a good-looking Maori chap. His hair stuck out in tufts from his head and his hands and face were streaked with inground dirt. There was something almost primitive-looking about him.
And they stank. Badly. Both of them.
The old man carried a battered old pea-rifle and they had two very thin dogs with them. They were both very nervous, especially the boy.
(Pages 309-310.)
