The man in the yellow shirt

Totara Park is like a painting by John Constable – a green, pastoral idyll; rolling, grass-covered hills interspersed with trees and woodland; placid cows graze. The trees are perhaps a little darker in hue than the oaks and beeches of blessed Albion – the dark khaki of the vegetation of an antipodean archipelago – with a smattering of white manuka flowers.

Totara Park is one of Manukau’s premier parks and stretches over 216 hectares. The park has something to offer everyone, with a wide range of facilities and activities to enjoy. From this entrance you can take an easy scenic walk, horse ride, or bike ride along the historic bridle trail. Please share with care.

Spring, like a timorous suggestion, can be felt. Rabbits scamper at the pasture edge and tui swoosh overhead.

‘There’s no nice way to put it: he got fucked up’, the New Zealand Herald reported.

It has been a long, wet winter; the ground is waterlogged and pugged with the hoof prints of cattle, each footfall a stinky little lake in the sward.

The sign says ‘Keep to the trails’. Walking off the trail, a man sinks in the muddy slopes, his boots and the bottoms of his trouser legs soon caked with slimy mud. The cows squelch as they walk, and, when they pick up speed, gouts of water splash up around them.

‘A herd of “possessed” cows attacked and injured a man in South Auckland’s Totara Park on Sunday afternoon ripping hunks of flesh from his body.’

Scattered beneath the puriri trees are fallen, crimson flowers like the reminiscence of blood.

‘The cows were rocking back on their hind legs and raining down on the victim who tried to free himself from the attack.’

‘Blood makes noise’, Suzanne Vega sang – it was an odd thing to remember:

But blood makes noise
It’s ringing in my ear.
Blood makes noise
And I can’t really hear you
In the thickening of fear.

Once you are down, and time fails to move at all, the only thing you hear is the pounding of blood in your ears; and a strange, bright light fills the air as the great shapes move above you and the pain explodes.

Barnaby McBryde