High Water

I had held the good bunk in that hut for years, and I was sitting on it with my boots off and my socks steaming on the woodburner rail when Rawiri Pene filled the doorway, dripping, with a pack on his back like a small cow.

“That’s my bunk,” he said.

“It’s been mine fifteen years.”

“There’s no plaque.” The rain came off him in sheets, and he looked at me the way he’d looked at me across two years of hunting-block meetings, as if I’d said something stupid in a foreign language. “Shift your pack, Aitken.”

“Shift yourself. I was here first.”

“Because you drove up the Kawhatau road in a ute that burns more diesel than a bulldozer, and passed me on the bridge, and didn’t wave.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“You saw me.” He hauled the pack off with the shrug of someone who has carried other people’s deer out of gullies for fifteen years, and dropped it with a bang that rattled the billy on the stove. “You always see me. You just don’t say hello. You complain to the Department about my truck on the track, and you send your hunters past my turn-off in the dark so they’ll miss it, and when we’re in the same room you look at the wall.”

That one landed, because it was mostly true.

He ran Pene Backcountry out of the next valley over and I ran Aitken Guiding out of this one. We were both after the same exclusive concession for the block, the Department would decide in the spring, and for two years he’d been taking my hunters while I told anybody who asked that he was a loud, flash bugger who couldn’t read a topo map. That was a lie. He read maps better than I did. He also had a laugh you could hear across a river, and on the rare days I’d heard it I’d had to put down whatever I was holding.

I had not told anybody about that either.

“I look at the wall,” I said, “because you’re hard to look at.”

I’d meant it as an insult. It came out true, which was worse. He stared at me.

Thunder cracked over the ridge and the whole hut shook. Outside, where the track dropped to the ford, a sound had been building for an hour that I’d been choosing not to listen to, a low brown roar like a freight train in a tunnel.

“That’s the river,” Rawiri said, in an entirely different voice.

We both went to the door.

The creek we’d each crossed that afternoon on rocks, ankle-deep, was a chocolate torrent as wide as a road, hurling logs. It took out the bottom step of the porch while we watched. Neither of us said anything. I’d been in the Ruahines thirty years and I knew a flood that wasn’t leaving for a day and a half.

“We’re stuck,” Rawiri said.

“We are.”

“With each other.”

“There’s four bunks.” I took my pack off the good one and put it by the wall. “You can have this one. I’ll take the one by the door.”

I will say this for Rawiri Pene. He looked at the bunk, and then at me, and he started to laugh. It was that laugh. It came right up out of his boots and bounced around the hut, and I stood there with my pack in my arms like an idiot and felt the ground go out from under me.

“Mate,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Two years. You’ve got to be the most stubborn man in the North Island.”

“Probably.”

“Sit down. I’ll make the tea.”

---

We made a night of it. There was a tin of mince and a tin of peaches and a bottle of whisky I’d been saving for when I won the concession, which I opened, because the sky was black and the river was howling and I could no longer see the point. Rawiri sat across the table with a mug of whisky and a face gone soft in the lamplight, and told me about his father’s farm, and the winter he’d spent shearing in Wales, and the bookings he’d lost because he wouldn’t shoot a hind with a calf. I told him about the wife who’d left in 2014, and how I’d known long before she did that she should. He didn’t make a big deal of it. He nodded.

“You’ve been out, then?” I said. “I always figured. You’ve never had a girlfriend.”

“Out since I was nineteen. Mum cried. Dad took me hunting.” He turned the mug. “You?”

“Not a word to anyone.”

“Not a word in fifty-three years?”

“There was a bloke in Palmerston North once. 1998.” I looked at the table. “He had a motorbike.”

Rawiri put his head back and howled. When he’d stopped he looked at me, and the laughing was gone from his face, and what was left looked at me very steadily.

“Bruce.” He had never once used my first name. “Is the wall thing about me, or about the whole idea?”

My hands had started to shake on the mug, so I put it down. The wind blew and the rain came and the stove ticked. I said, “It’s you. It’s been you for two years. I wanted to put my fist through your truck, and then I wanted to put my hands on you, and I couldn’t work out which one was worse.”

“Which one’s worse now?”

“I don’t know. I’m too old to know.”

“I’m thirty-eight, and I know exactly what I want.” Rawiri stood up. He came round the table and stopped in front of me, close enough that his wet knees touched mine. “I’ve wanted it since the meeting in Taihape when you told the room I was a risk to the herd. I wanted to shut you up with my mouth.”

“That was a poor meeting.”

“It was a great meeting.” He put his big hand on my jaw, calloused at the base of the thumb, and tilted my face up. “Tell me to stop.”

“Don’t stop.”

He kissed me. It tasted like whisky and woodsmoke, and for one stupid second I thought I might cry, and then his tongue was in my mouth and I’d got both hands in his hair and pulled him into my lap, and the chair made a noise like it was about to quit.

---

We got to the sleeping platform by way of the table and the wall. We got most of our clothes off by way of Rawiri’s belt buckle, which defeated me, and my long-johns, which defeated both of us. The woodburner was roaring and the hut was warm as a bread oven, and when I finally sat down on the edge of the platform in the red light with nothing on, Rawiri stood in front of me and looked at everything I had.

I stopped apologising for my belly at forty. Rawiri looked at it like a man reading a good map.

“God,” he said. “Bruce. You’re a beautiful bastard.”

“Shut up.”

“I mean it.” He got a knee on the platform and then he was in my lap, straddling me, brown and hard-working with a scatter of black hair down the middle of his chest, and his cock, thick and dark and curved a little to the left, was already pressing against my stomach. I put my hands on his back and felt him shiver from end to end. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want to feel you,” I said, because it was the only thing I could think of. “Against me.”

“Yeah?” He grinned. He got the wash bag from the end of the platform, rummaged in it, and held up a little tube. “Water-based. I pack it every trip, just in case. Eight years of just in case.”

“That’s a lot of optimism.”

“That’s a lot of hut.” He squeezed some into his palm. “Hold still.”

He took us both in his hand. His fingers wrapped around my cock and his own together, slick and warm, my hard cock against his curved one, and he pulled his hips forward, and the slide of him along me tore a sound out of my chest I didn’t know I owned. I’d had sex with maybe four men in my life. None of them had ever done this.

“Fuck,” Rawiri breathed. “Bruce. You’re thick as a fencepost. Tell me you can feel it.”

“I feel it.”

“Say it properly. I want to hear you.”

“I feel your cock against mine,” I said. My voice was hardly there. “It’s hot. It’s wet. I can feel it jumping. Rawiri, you’re going to make me come like this.”

He had his mouth on my neck. He worked down, licking sweat out of the hollow of my throat, and bit my collarbone, and when he got his lips round one of my nipples and sucked, I swore so loudly the stove door rattled. His free hand roamed over my belly, pulling at the grey hair, and every time I bucked the slick fist jerked tight around us and made me do it again.

“You’re sensitive,” he said, delighted, lifting his head. “Nobody ever found these?”

“A bloke in Palmerston North.”

“He was an idiot.” He twisted the nipple, gently, and I made a noise that was frankly embarrassing. “I’ll find them every time.”

I told him again I was close. “Not yet,” he said, and he kept his fist slow, his forehead against mine and his black beard scratching my cheek. The platform creaked and the rain came down on the tin roof like gravel, and I got my teeth into his shoulder and tasted salt. “I want you to wait. I’m going to ride you, Bruce. I’ve thought about it in the truck. I’m going to sit on you and have the lot, and you’re going to watch me do it.”

My cock jumped so hard in his fist that he laughed.

“Yeah. You like that.”

“Christ,” I said. “Yes.”

---

He lined me up by the fire, in the end, because the platform was too narrow and the floor mat was thick and the stove threw heat like a hand. I lay on my back on a foam mat with a folded jacket under my head. He knelt over my hips with his eyes half closed and his mouth open, slicking himself with the tube, groaning softly, and I watched every second, hardly breathing.

He wouldn’t let me in till I’d opened him first. I used my fingers with the slick on them, one and then two, working them in slow while he panted and rocked back against my hand. “There,” he kept saying, “a bit to the left, yeah, that,” and I did it, and watched his eyes go dark and unfocused, and said, quite calmly, that I could look at that all night. He called me a sentimental old bastard. He shoved back onto my knuckles so hard I felt it in my wrist.

He’d said the rest of it out loud already, straight, at the start. He’d had his bloods done after the New Year and everything was clear, and he hadn’t been near anyone since. I told him February, same result, same drought. That was the whole conversation, and it was easier than any I’d had with my wife.

“Okay,” Rawiri said. He was breathing like he’d climbed a hill. He wrapped slick fingers round my cock, and I swear to God I nearly went in his hand. “Okay. I’m taking it.”

He sank down on me.

It was slow. The head pushed in, thick and tight, and he took a long breath, and sank an inch more. His thighs were trembling with the effort of going slow. I put my hands on them, and his skin was slick with sweat, and he looked down at me with his whole face open and his lips parted and said, “Oh, bro. Oh, you’re big.”

“Go easy.”

“I’m going easy. Hold me.”

I held his hips. He took the rest of it in a long slide until he was sitting right down in my lap, the heat of him closed round me, and neither of us could speak.

“All right?” I managed.

“Mate.” He laughed, shaky, a wet breath of a laugh. “I’m a bit full.”

Then he started to move.

He rode me the way he did everything, loud and without a scrap of shame. He lifted up till I was nearly out and dropped down, and the slap of his thighs on mine was loud over the rain. He found a rhythm, rolling his hips so the head of me scraped along something inside him that made his eyes roll shut, and he said there, right there, that’s it, Bruce, fuck me, fuck me up into it, and I did. I got my feet flat on the mat and drove up into him, and he threw his head back and shouted. The firelight ran down his chest.

“Come on, old man,” he gasped. “Let me have it. You’ve been saving it two years.”

“I’ll give you old man.”

I took hold of his hips and fucked him hard, snapping upward, hearing him curse in te reo and English and a mix of both. He braced one hand on my chest and bounced on me, grinning down with the sweat running off his chin, yelling yes, yes, sweet as, so fucking good, and I told him a great deal in language I’d never once used in front of a hunter. He laughed, and groaned, and ground down on me, and then he took his own cock in his fist and started to pull, fast and rough, his eyes locked on mine.

“I’m going to come all over you, Bruce,” he said, wrecked. “Watch me.”

“I’m watching.”

He came shouting, the noise ringing off the tin walls, hot across my chest and into my beard, clenching round me so hard that I lost whatever was left. I went off inside him with a roar I hope the deer didn’t hear. It went on for what felt like a full minute, white and enormous, my fists locked on his hips and his hand slick and shaking against my ribs. When it was over he folded down onto my chest, wet and heaving, and I wrapped both arms round him and the hut went on being warm.

“Right,” Rawiri said into my neck. “You’re not going to say anything about this at the meeting.”

“I’ll be too busy watching you.”

“Good.” He lifted his head and kissed me, gently, on the mouth. “You do that.”

We lay there with the mess cooling on us and the stove ticking down. After a while he got up, naked and steaming in the cold air, and fetched the billy, and wiped me down with a wet tea towel while I lay there letting him, which no one had done since my mother. He tucked the sleeping bag over my feet. Then he fed a split of rimu into the stove and sat on the mat beside me, broad and bare in the firelight, with a look on his face I’d only ever seen on him when he’d brought a hunter’s stag down clean.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing. I like your belly.” He put his hand on it. “I’m going to sleep on it.”

And he did, with his head on my stomach and one arm flung over my thigh, and I lay awake a long time listening to the rain ease off the roof.

---

The river dropped by morning. I knew before I opened my eyes, because the roaring had gone down to a mutter, and there was a sort of pale wet light on the wall, and an arm lying heavy across my chest.

I lay there a while. The stove was dead and the hut was cold, and Rawiri was warm against my side and snoring gently into my shoulder. Somewhere out in the beech, a tui started up, and then another.

I made my decision about the concession there, and it turned out to be an easy one. I’d go to the Department in the spring and tell them the block was big enough for two outfits and that mine would be glad to share it with Pene Backcountry, preferably under a single roof. I didn’t know yet how I’d put the last part of that.

Rawiri opened one eye.

“You’re thinking,” he said. “I can hear it.”

“I was thinking I should say hello.”

He smiled, slow, all that black beard moving, and pulled the sleeping bag up over both our heads.

“Say it again,” he said. “Properly.”