The two men were stripped of their clothes, wrapped in blankets, propped up on pillows and given pot water from the meat and vegetables cooking. My grandmother and aunties were filling vinegar bottles with hot water, wrapping them and placing them here and there, close to the bodies of my father and grandfather, who were fed at intervals all the night through. People were coming and going. It was noisy and warm in the kitchen while the two men slept. I sat there and waited, not wanting to go to bed, where recently I had spent nights on end seeing through my eyelids.

The next afternoon, the men were taken out to the wash-house to bathe and dress. There was a question on the edge of my tongue, but I knew better than to ask it.

When they returned, my father stood behind my grandfather, a hand on the back of my grandfather’s chair. The hand on the chair was to show everyone that he was not being disrespectful in standing to speak ahead of his elder, but that it was his intention to take the burden from the older man. These are the protocols I learned little by little during my life, without even knowing what I knew.

My father gave an account of their journey from the campsite towards the mountain and how they’d had to break their way through heavy bush as there were no pathways. It was a whole day before they came to the place where the creek runs at the base of the mountain, and that is where they camped for the night, moving into the trees to sleep where the ground was dry.

The next morning, because they didn’t know what they should do next, they began exploring, looking for what? They were not sure. Listening for what? They were not sure. It was on the third morning that they found what they didn’t know they’d been looking for. It was an indentation in soft ground, ahead of it another and then another. They were long, thin footprints, pointed at the heel and splayed towards the front in the shape of mussel shells but not hollow. Light, as if those who had made them had little weight to speak of. They followed this trail through soft earth. These were the footprints of the patupaiarehe.

I felt like crying. My father didn’t believe in the fairy people. He was lying. Whenever our mother and aunties had warned us against going into the bush because we would get stolen by little green-eyed people with copper hair, he would say something like: ‘That’s all humbug, just don’t go there, you’ll get lost, you’ll die. Do what you’re told.’

But Mum and the aunties would continue.

‘Because they themselves are small they want to steal children.’

‘Enticing them with melodies, coloured fruits and promises.’

‘Once they take you, there’s no way home.’