Molly and Anaru's Great Massey Adventure: Chapter 5

Yesterday’s Poll Results

Should Molly and Anaru follow Don Buck to his camp?

  • Absolutely! They need food and water! - 56%

  • No way! Better to explore where they are a bit - 44%

Chapter 5

Molly and Anaru looked at each other - each hoping that the other would make a decision. Eventually, Molly shrugged and started jogging to catch up with Don Buck who was slowly trekking down the dusty path, saddled upon his powerful black stallion. Anaru followed her. 

The track led down a hill and after an easy 20-minute walk, Molly, Anaru and the man known as Don Buck arrived in a shallow valley. The man bought his horse to a halt and turned to address the kids. 

“Wait here,” Don Buck instructed. “I will fetch food for your journey. You may fill your canteens at that stream.” He said, motioning vaguely with one hand.  

“What’s a canteen?” Anaru whispered to Molly.

She shrugged and turned back to where Don and his horse had been standing, only to see that they had galloped off into the distance. 

Peering ahead, Molly and Anaru noticed a clearing, with people meandering around and some crude manmade structures. 

“This must be his camp…” Molly uttered. 

The camp itself consisted of some roughly built shacks lining one side of a clearing, with a slightly grander wooden house at the far end. The ground was dotted with the short, flat stumps of once-towering kauri trees. 

A gaggle of grizzled-looking men dressed in loose pants, long-sleeved shirts and wide-brimmed hats either milled around the small huts or attacked the ground beneath the kauri stumps with shovels and pick-axes. One man was tending to a small fire with a heavy black kettle suspended above the flames. 

This camp was nothing like the Holiday Park that Molly’s parents had spent three nights in a tent at a couple of summers ago. 

Molly looked around the area, it seemed like a familiar spot to her. Then, when she spotted the small stream trickling underneath a wooden bridge she realised where they were. 

“This is the bottom of Don Buck Road…” she said to Anaru. She pointed up the hill they had walked down. 

“That’s where the rest of Massey is - up there….And over here is that big roundabout that goes to Ranui or towards Henderson… The vet we took Hercules to when he broke his leg is right over there - well, I mean, it will be!”

Anaru was staring intently at the guys hacking the ground to pieces. 

“What the heck are they doing?” he asked, observing one digger wrenching a chunk of something out of the ground, brushing if off and dropping it into a burlap sack. 

“It’s gum,” Molly answered.

“Like, chewing gum?” Anaru asked her, puzzled. 

“No you doofus! It’s kauri gum. These guys are gum-diggers. Dad made me watch this boring documentary about it once. It must be worth a lot of money….”

“I wish my chewing gum was worth money…” Anaru said absent-mindedly. 

Molly saw something glistening in the sun a few steps away from them. She went to examine it and noticed a shovel resting against a tall rock. 

“Wonder if we can find any gum around here…” Molly wondered out loud. She scouted around for a kauri stump and rushed over to it when she found one.  

“Uh, Molly?” Anaru said.

“Not now!” Molly grunted back at him as she started trying to break the earth with the shovel. 

“Molly?” Anaru insisted

“Not. Now.” Molly muttered, getting annoyed at the interruption. 

“Molly!” Anaru shouted, “Turn around!”

She looked up and spun around, furious. “What?!” she shouted at him, before stopping in her tracks.

A portal had emerged against the base of a massive kauri tree. It shimmered with a green and brown glow around it’s swirling edges, perhaps reflecting the colours of the tree it was set against. 

“Another one?” Molly muttered as she began to feel the ground beneath her heels starting to give way. She spun around in a split-second and let out a shriek. 

The small dent in the ground that she had made during her impromptu gum-digging expedition was expanding into a rapidly-growing hole. She leapt forward, away from its edge as the hole spread into a portal in the ground.

The ground portal started to shine with a darker brown sparkle as the abandoned shovel swirled and eventually fell into the dark abyss.

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The food that Don Buck had promised them was quickly forgotten. These portals seemed to vanish as quickly as they appeared and there was no time to lose.

“Where to now?” Anaru and Molly asked each other at the same time.

Massey Matters