Grandmother used to tell the story of a little mouse who travelled down the river with his mother in a dinghy made of kauri wood. Her eyes still closed, in the too-early morning she would hinge open the covers for me to crawl inside and press my cold, bare feet against her own warm two. Taking my hand, tracing endless circles against its palm, holding me rapt, while the family slept in she would begin the tale, the same way every time: The sun was rising as the little mouse packed a picnic lunch, picked up his mum and rowed downstream, past all the creatures of the world. The birds were first to serenade them as they passed pohutakawa boughs: the flightless kiwi shook his fluff and made slide-whistle whoops to call the tui with her two-bell tones and parson’s-collar breast puffed up like Sunday best for mouse and mum, then every bit of feather a child’s mind could catch. Further downstream the mouse slipped by a cobra and a boa and a rattlesnake who swayed and sang as toatara lizards sunned like drowsy tourists on the shore where kodiak and grizzly bears and cats with spots and stripes and claws reached toward the mouse whose mother only waved as they rowed on... Sometime after the possums’ band played “Tell Me Why,” and just before the one-act play starring zebras and baboons, my grandfather would stir, so she would stop the story there, promise to start again the next too-early morning, and if I asked where they were rowing to or why they never reached the sea, she wouldn’t tell, except to say: It is the travelling, the taste for it, that ever is important.
Ali Fischer