Bound to books and pig hunting
In a remote forest by the ocean, Joshua Kauta is engrossed in pig guts and antique literature. Amanda Saxton reports.
Abattered blue sign on State Highway 35, just along from Opotiki, bears the legend ‘Pig Dog Training School and Bookbinder’. Down the track beneath it can be found Joshua Kauta, 68, a few generations of his whanau, up to 14 pig dogs, three horses, and a shed brimming with 19th century leather-bound literature.
His hands lead a double life – knifing swine in the morning, caressing antique volumes of Shakespeare and God’s word by night. A triple-life, if you include strumming Engelbert Humperdinck chords at functions around the Cape.
The guts and dirt and dog hair of the first job get meticulously scrubbed off for the second, as even finger grease could mar the fragile pages.
‘‘I love all my worlds,’’ says Kauta, who returned to the land he was born on in 1981; a thousand hectares of bush between Torere beach and the vast Raukumara ranges.
Hunks of driftwood strew the shore and a sun-warmed lagoon gives the Kauta grandkids a safe spot to swim. The shed of books sits surrounded by hydrangeas, on a clifftop facing the Pacific.
‘‘You’d call it unproductive land, if you weren’t a hunter,’’ Kauta says.
‘‘But hunting and gathering’s our way of life here – I’m out there getting meat while others are harvesting from the sea, and we swap what we reap.’’
Each sunrise sees Kauta take to the stoney beach on his quad bike, a horde of pig dogs galumphing alongside. After post-kennel hijinks, they hit the bush together on foot.
Today Kauta’s taking out Whip
Hunting and gathering’s our way of life here – I’m out there getting meat while others are harvesting from the sea, and we swap what we reap. Joshua Kauta
the keen huntaway bitch, and new recruit Spark – a lanky brindle crossbred. It takes 10 minutes for the team to pick their way through supplejack, slip down a muddy slope, and splash across a stream before Whip catches the scent and runs off.
‘‘People send me their dogs to train because I can guarantee they’ll get a pig every single day,’’ Kauta says.
Get a pig doesn’t mean kill a pig. It means sniff one out and bail it up: ‘‘that’s all you actually need a pig dog to do,’’ adds Kauta.
‘‘Then the hunter can determine whether it’s worth killing – most often it’s not – and dispatching the animal is his job.
‘‘You want no harm to the dog and no wounds on the hog, if you’re letting it go.’’
That’s in an ideal world. Kauta’s left hand shows pig hunting can be a risky business. The fleshy area below his thumb was ripped open by a tusk a few weeks ago.
He got the ‘‘wee nick’’ while helping two young hunters dispatch a hefty black boar. He dived in with his knife and got gouged in the process.
‘‘Part and parcel,’’ he reflects cheerfully.
Tusks aren’t the only hazard out hunting – there are roots to trip over and freezing, unexpected sleepovers to avoid. Kauta tries to press bush lore on younger hunters in his marae, for their safety.
‘‘Supplejack – you know that tough, twisting vine Tarzan swings on – for example, is good for binding up broken legs or to start a fire in the rain,’’ he says, reminiscing times he’d done both.
Kauta worries that some hunters have a lust for the macho image of the sport, living out violent video game fantasies: killing for the sake of killing or orchestrating unnecessary pig versus dog brutality to make a ‘‘cool video for YouTube’’, he says. ‘‘That’s not what pig hunting is about.’’
It’s about the relationship you develop with your dogs, he reckons: learning from and relying on each other, sharing swashbuckling adventures.
Each week he selects a team of them for a ‘‘big hunt’’, saddles up a horse – Red the frisky chestnut, placid old Dusty, or a brown nameless gelding he’s thinking about calling Boy.
He then heads up into the wopwops.
Sometimes the posse camp out under the stars and they usually snare a juicy porker; gutted in the bush, slung across the saddlefront, and hefted home by horse power.
If Kauta doesn’t drop the pig off at the Torere Marae, he invites people over for a Barry Crumpstyle feed of wild pork and watercress.
At nearly 70, Kauta has tried to retire from pig dog training and let his son take over the business.
‘‘But I just can’t stay out of the bush,’’ he says. ‘‘So I go out just as much, but these days I train friends’ dogs in exchange for half a dozen crayfish or a sack of mussels.’’
‘‘I think I just really love developing something. There’s a real pleasure in that.’’
He says it’s the same with the dilapidated books he restores using a 100-year-old guillotine and cast-iron press.
‘‘You take it from one thing to another, bringing on the glory days.’’
When Kauta was 17 he went down to Wellington to learn a trade – any trade – and ran into a ‘‘bookbinding Maori fulla from the Taranaki’’.
‘‘He asked me what I’d come down to do, I told him I thought I might become an electrician.
‘‘And he said, don’t do that – there’s hundreds of electricians and they don’t need you. Do bookbinding and there’ll only be the two of us.
‘‘So I thought, ‘hmm … bloody good incentive’. And we’ve been friends ever since.’’
Kauta prefers a rollicking Barry Crump yarn to Lord Byron’s poetry or the Shakespearian plays whose crumbling leather covers line his shed.
But occasionally a book about, say, the medicinal properties of native flora will arrive, and he becomes absorbed in the text.
The books and pig dogs that arrive on his remote doorstep from all over the country are often accompanied by their owners.
‘‘They’re both precious to people – old books and young dogs – so they like to check out who’ll be working with them,’’ he says.
In light of attacks that have left joggers, children, and pets ravaged in recent years, he believes responsible hunters know what’s at stake if they don’t get their dogs’ dealings with humans right.
Owners need to be vigilant about giving dogs enough exercise, encouraging them to bail not bite pigs, and keeping them in their ‘‘natural habitat’’.
‘‘Dogs used to running around the bush can get stressed in an urban environment – so can I, so can anyone who’s displaced – and that’s when they could lash out,’’ he says.
Meanwhile, deep in the forest Whip and Spark have bailed up a bristly grey sow. Spark’s barking helps us find them. Whip and the pig are locked in a hypnotic faceoff, staring into each other’s eyes and both snarling softly.
‘‘They’ve got her in a good bail now,’’ says Kauta. ‘‘This is the point where I’d shoot her with the Winchester, or jump in to stick her with my knife.’’
‘‘But I’m going to let this one go as I think she’s got piglets.’’
He summoned the hounds and the sow scooted off down a gully, a wily gleam in her human-esque eye.
‘‘Pig dog training must be the most satisfying job in the world,’’ beams Kauta, stroking Whip’s ears.
‘‘And bookbinding’s the second – for my character at least.
‘‘Every day I’m thankful to be here, in paradise, doing what I do.’’