Last Chance To See Part 8

'I said, "What did you say?"'

'I just said, "Do you come here often?" but let it pa.s.s.'

At last we lapsed into an awkward, deafened silence that was made all the more oppressive by the heavy bank of storm clouds that was hanging sullenly over the sea.

Soon the sombre bulk of New Zealand's most fiercely protected ark loomed up out of the s.h.i.+ning darkness at us: Codfish Island, one of the last refuges of many birds that are hardly to be found anywhere else in the world. Like Little Barrier Island it has been ruthlessly purged of anything that was not originally to be found there. Even the flightless weka, a fierce and disorderly duck-sized bird, which is native to other parts of New Zealand, has been eradicated. It wasn't a native of Codfish, and it attacked Cook's petrels which were. The island is surrounded by rough seas and strong currents, so no predator rats are likely to be able to make it from Stewart island three kilometres away. Food supplies to island workers are stored in rat-proof rooms, packed into ratproof containers, and rigorously examined before and after transfer. Poison bait is distributed around all possible boat landing places. There are people ready to swing into immediate fire brigade action to eliminate any rat invasion if a boat wreck occurs.

The helicopter came thudding in to land, and we clambered uneasily out, hunching ourselves down under the rotating blades. We quickly unloaded our bags and walked down and away from the tussocky hillock on which we had landed towards the wardens' hut. Mark and I caught each other's eye for a moment and we realised that we were both still hunched over as we walked. We weren't actually rats, but we felt just about as welcome, and we hoped to G.o.d that the expedition was not going to go horribly wrong. Arab stalked silently behind us with Boss who was now tightly muzzled. Although tracker dogs are rigorously trained not to harm any kakapos they find, they can nevertheless sometimes find them a little too enthusiastically. Even wearing a muzzle an over-eager dog can buffet and injure a bird.

The wardens' but was a fairly basic wooden building with one large room which served as a kitchen, dining room, sitting room and work room, and a couple of small dormitory rooms full of bunks. There were two other field workers already installed, the eccentrically named, or rather spelled, Phred, who turned out to be the son of Dobby and Mike, and also Trevor. They greeted us quietly and without enthusiasm and let us get on with our unpacking.

Soon we were told that lunch was ready, and we realised that it was time for us seriously to try to improve our general standing around the place. Clearly our hosts did not want to have a bunch of media trendies rampaging round their island frightening the birds with their video cameras and Filofaxes, and they were only slightly mollified by the fact that all we had was one tiny Walkman tape recorder, and that we were being very meek and wellbehaved and trying not to order gin and tonics the whole time.

The fact that we'd actually brought some beer and whisky with us helped a little.

I suddenly felt extraordinarily cheerful. More cheerful, in fact, than I had felt for the whole of our visit to New Zealand so far. The people of New Zealand are generally terribly nice. Everybody we had met so far had been terribly nice to us. Terribly nice and eager to please. I realised now that all this relentless niceness and geniality to which we had been subjected had got to me rather badly. New Zealand niceness is not merely disarming, it's decapitating as well, and I had come to feel that if just one more person was pleasant and genial at me I'd hit him. Now things were suddenly very different and we had work to do. I was determined to get these surly b.u.g.g.e.rs to like us if it killed me.

Over our lunch of tinned ham, boiled potatoes and beer we launched a major conversational a.s.sault, told them all about our project and why we were doing it, where we'd been so far= what animals we had seen and failed to see, whom we had met, why we were so keen to see the kakapo, how much we appreciated their a.s.sistance, and how well we understood their reluctance to have us there, and then went on to ask intelligent and searching questions about their work, about the island, about the birds, about Boss, and finally, why there was a dead penguin hanging on the tree outside the house.

This seemed to clear the air a little. Our hosts quickly realised that the only way .of stopping us talking the whole time was to do some talking themselves. The penguin, Phred explained, was traditional. Every 28 February they hung a dead penguin on a tree. It was a tradition that had only started today and they doubted if they would keep it up, but in the meantime at least it kept the flies off the penguin.

This seemed a thoroughly excellent explanation. We all celebrated it with another gla.s.s of beer and things began at last to move along with a bit more of a swing. In an altogether easier atmosphere we set out into the forest with Arab and Boss to see if we could at last find one of these birds we had travelled twelve thousand miles to see.

The forest was rotten. That is to say that it was so wet that every fallen tree trunk we had to clamber over cracked open under our feet, branches we clung on to when we lost our footing came away in our hands. We slipped and slithered noisily through the mud and sodden undergrowth, while Arab stalked easily ahead of us, just visible through the trees in his blue plaid woollen windcheater. Boss described a chaotic orbit around him, hardly ever visible at all except as an occasional moving flash of blackness through the undergrowth.

He was, however, always audible. Arab had fastened a small bell on to his collar, which rang out clearly through the clean, damp air, as if an invisible and deranged carol singer were cavorting through the forest. The purpose of the bell was to allow Arab to keep track of where Boss was, and also to let him know what the dog was up to. A flurry of agitated rings followed by silence might indicate that it had found a kakapo and was standing guard over it. Every time the bell fell silent we held our breaths, but each time the clanging started up again as Boss found a new avenue in the undergrowth to plunge through. From time to time the bell would suddenly start to ring out more loudly and clearly, and Arab would summon Boss back to him with a quick shout. There would then be a slight pause, which on one occasion enabled Mark and Gaynor and me to catch up with them.

We came tumbling breathless and wet out of the forest to a small clearing, where we found Arab squatting beside Boss stuffing a small wad of mossy earth up into the cavity of the bell to dampen its sound a little. He squinted up at us with his slow shy grin and explained that the bell mustn't be too loud or it would only frighten the kakapo away - if there were any in the area.

Did he think there were any around? asked Mark.

'Oh, they're certainly around,' said Arab, pulling his fingers through his streaming wet beard to clean the mud off them, 'or at least, they've been around here today. There's plenty of scent. Boss keeps on finding scent all right, but the scent goes cold. There's been quite a lot of kakapo activity here recently, but not quite recently enough. He's very excited though. He knows they're definitely around.'

He made a fuss of Boss for a few moments, and then explained that there were major problems in training dogs to find kakapos because of the terrible shortage of kakapos to train them on. In the end, he said, it was more realistic to train the dogs not to track anything else. Training was simply a long and tedious process of elimination, which was very frustrating for the dog.

With one last pat he let go of Boss again, who bounded back off into the bush to carry on snuffling and rummaging for any trace of the one bird he hadn't been trained not to track. Within a few moments he had disappeared from sight, and his muted bell went clanking off into the distance.

We followed a path for a while, which allowed us for the moment to keep up with Arab; while he told us a little about other dogs which he had trained to be hunting dogs, for use in clearing islands of predators. There was one dog he was particularly fond of, which was their top hunting dog, a ferocious killer of an animal. They had taken it all the way to Round Island, near Mauritius, with them a few years ago to help with a big rabbit clearance programme. Unfortunately once it got there it turned out to be terrified of rabbits and had to be taken home.

It seemed to Arab that most of his recent life had been spent on islands, which was not just a coincidence: island ecologies are so fragile that many island species are endangered, and islands are often used as last places of refuge for mainland animals. Arab had himself tracked many of the twenty-five kakapos that had been found on Stewart Island and airlifted by helicopter in soundproof boxes to Codfish. They always tried to release them in terrain that corresponded as closely as possible to that in which they had been found, in the hope that they would re-establish themselves more easily. But it was very hard to tell how many of the birds were establis.h.i.+ng themselves, or even how many had survived here.

The day was wearing on and the light was lengthening. Excitingly, we found some kakapo droppings, which we picked up and crumbled in our fingers and sniffed at in much the same way that a wine connoisseur will savour the bouquet of a fine New Zealand North Island Chardonnay. They have a fine, clean, herbal scent. Almost as excitingly we found some ferns which a kakapo had chewed at. They clip it and then pull it through their powerful bill so that it leaves a neat ball of curled up fibre at the end.

A lot less excitingly it was becoming very clear that the day was going to be completely free of any actual kakapos. As the evening gathered in and a light rain began to fall, we turned and trudged the miles we had come back through the forest. We pa.s.sed the evening in the but making friends with the whisky bottle and showing off our Nikons.

Towards the end of the evening, Arab mentioned that he hadn't really expected to find a kakapo today at all. They're nocturnal birds and therefore very hard to find during the day. To stand any chance of seeing one at all you have to go and search when there is just enough light in the sky to let you actually see the thing, but when its scent is still fresh on the ground. About five or six in the morning was the time you wanted to go and look for them. Was that OK with us? He stood up and dragged _ his beard to bed.

Five in the morning is the most horrible time, particularly when your body is still desperately trying to disentangle itself from half a bottle of whisky. We dragged ourselves, cold, crabby and aching, from our bunks. The noise of sub-machine-gun fire from the main room turned out to be frying bacon, and we tried to revive ourselves with this while the grey morning light began to seep hideously up into the sky outside. I've never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I've seen a few and they're never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you're in the right frame of mind, which is usually about lunchtime.

After a lot of sullen fumbling with boots and cameras we eventually struggled out of the door at about six-thirty and trudged our way back out into the forest. Mark started to point out exciting rare birds to me almost immediately and I told him to take a running jump. A great start to a day of virtually unremitting ornithology. Gaynor asked me to describe the scene as we walked into the forest and I said that if she poked that microphone in front of me once more I'd probably be sick over it. I quickly found that I was walking by myself.

After a while I had to admit that the forest wasn't that bad. Cold, wet and slippery, and continually trying to wrench my legs off at the knees with some b.l.o.o.d.y tangled root or other, but it also had a kind of fresh glistening quality that wouldn't go away however much I glowered at it. Ron Tindal had joined us this time, and was busy striding his way through the undergrowth in an appallingly robust and Scottish manner, but even this ceased to make my head ache after a while as all the glistening began slowly to work a kind of soothing magic on me. Way ahead of us, half-glimpsed through the misty trees, the blue plaid windcheater moved silently like a wraith, following the busy clinking of Boss's bell.

After a longish while of trudging, we caught up with Arab, who had stopped again on a narrow path, and was squatting in the sodden gra.s.s.

'There's a fairly recent dropping here,' he said, holding up a soft, dark mottled bead for our inspection. 'It's got that white on it which is uric acid, and it hasn't been washed off by the rain or dried out by the sun. That'll disappear in about a day, so this is definitely last night. This is just where we were, in fact, so I expect we just missed him.'

Great, I thought. We could have stayed out a little longer last night, and stayed in bed a lot longer this morning. But the early sun was beginning to glimmer through the trees and there was a lot of fragile beauty business going on where it glistened on the tiny beaded dewdrops on the leaves, so I supposed that it wasn't altogether bad. In fact there was so much glimmering and glistening and glittering and glinting going on that I began to wonder why it was that so many words that describe what the sun does in the morning begin with the letters 'gl', and I mentioned this to Mark, who told me to take a running jump.

Cheered by this little exchange we set off again. We had hardly gone five yards when Arab, who had already gone fifteen, stopped again. He squatted once more and pointed to some slight signs of digging in the earth.

'That's a very fresh excavation,' he said. 'Probably last night. Digging for this orchid tuber. You can actually see the beak marks through the bottom here.'

I wondered if this was a good time to begin feeling a bit excited and optimistic about the outcome of the day's expedition, but when I did it started to give me a headache so I stopped. The d.a.m.n bird was just stringing us along, and it would be another gloomy evening of sitting in the but cleaning our lenses and trying to look on the bright side. At least there wouldn't be any whisky this time because we'd drunk it all, so we would be leaving Codfish the following day clear-headed enough to know that we had flown twelve thousand miles to see a bird that hadn't turned up to see us, and all that remained was to fly twelve thousand miles back again and try to find something to write about it. I must have done sillier things in my life, but I couldn't remember when.

The next time Arab stopped it was for a feather.

'That's a kakapo feather that has dropped,' he said, picking it lightly off the side of a bush. 'Probably from around the breast by its being quite yellow.'

'It's quite downy isn't it?' said Mark, taking it and twirling it between his fingers in the misty sunlight. 'Do you think it was dropped recently?' he added hopefully.

'Oh yes, it's reasonably fresh,' said Arab.

'So this is the closest we've got yet . . . ?'

Arab shrugged.

'Yes, I suppose it is,' he said 'Doesn't mean we're going to find it though. You can stand practically on top of one and not see it. The signs are that the kakapo was quite active in the early part of the night, just after we were here. And that's bad news because there was rain during the night, so some of the scent has been washed away. There's plenty of scent around, but it's inconclusive. Still, you never know your luck.'

We trudged on. Or perhaps we didn't trudge. Perhaps there was a bit more of a spring in our step, but as half an hour pa.s.sed, and then an hour, and as the sun gradually crept higher in the sky, Arab was once more a floating wraith far distant from us in the trees ahead, and then we lost him altogether. The spring had certainly dropped from our step. For a while we stumbled on, guided by the very faint sounds of Boss's bell which were still borne to us on the light breeze sifting through the trees, but then that too stopped and we were lost. Ron was a little way ahead of us, still bounding with rumbustious Scottish gusto, but he too was now floundering for the right direction.

We were clambering over a bank that was thickly covered with ferns and rotten tree trunks, and which led down into a wide, shallow gully in the middle of which Ron was standing, looking perplexedly around him. Gaynor lost her footing as she negotiated the muddy slope into the gully, and slithered down it elegantly on her bottom. I got my camera strap caught in the only branch that didn't break off the moment you touched it. Mark stopped to help me disentangle myself. Ron had gone into bounding mode again and was hopping up the far side of the gully calling out for Arab.

'Can you see them?' Mark called out.

A thought struck me. We were lost because Boss's bell had stopped ringing. The same thought obviously hit Mark simultaneously and we both suddenly called out, 'Have they got a kakapo?

A call came back.

Gaynor turned to us and shouted, 'They've got a kakapo!'

Suddenly we were all in rumbustious bounding mode. With much shouting and hallooing we clambered and slithered our way hectically across the floor of the gully, hauled ourselves up the other side and down into the next gully, on the far side of which, sitting on a mossy bank in front of a steep slope, was a most peculiar tableau.

It took me a moment or two to work out what it was that the scene so closely resembled, and when I realised, I stopped for a moment and then approached more circ.u.mspectly.

It was like a Madonna and Child.

Arab was sitting cross-legged on the mossy bank, his long wet grizzled beard flowing into his lap. And cradled in his arms, nuzzling gently into his beard, was a large, fat, bedraggled green parrot. Standing by them in quiet attendance, looking at them intently with his head c.o.c.ked on one side, was Boss, still tightly muzzled.

Duly hushed, we went up to them. Mark was making quiet groaning noises in the back of his throat.

The bird was very quiet and quite still. It didn't appear to be alarmed, but then neither did it appear to be particularly aware of what was happening. The gaze of its large black expressionless eye was fixed somewhere in the middle distance. It was holding, lightly but firmly in its bill, the forefinger of Arab's right hand, down which a trickle of blood was flowing, and this seemed to have a calming effect on the bird. Gently, Arab tried to remove it, but the kakapo liked it, and eventually Arab let it stay there. A little more blood flowed down Arab's hand, mingling with the rain water with which everything was sodden.

To my right, Mark was murmuring about what an honour it would be to be bitten by a kakapo, which was a point of view I could scarcely understand, but I let it pa.s.s.

We asked Arab where he'd found it.

'The dog found it,' he said. 'Probably about ten yards up this hill, I'd say, under that leaning tree. And when the dog got close it broke and ran down to just here where I caught it.

'It's in good condition, though. You can tell that it's close to booming this year because of its spongy chest. That's good news. It means it's establis.h.i.+ng itself well after being resettled.'

The kakapo s.h.i.+fted itself very slightly in Arab's lap, and pushed its face closer into his beard. Arab stroked its damped ruffled feathers very gently.

'It's a bit nervous,' he said. 'Especially of noise probably more than anything. He looks very bedraggled because of being wet. When Boss first caught up with him he would have been in a dry roost up there and probably at the noise of the bell or the dog going too close, the bird broke out and ran down the hill, and was still going when I caught it. It's just gripping me a bit and that's all. If he wanted to put the pressure on . . . ' He shrugged. The kakapo clearly had a very powerful bill. It looked like a great horn-plated tin opener welded to its face.

'It's definitely not as relaxed as a lot of birds,' muttered Arab. 'A lot of birds are really relaxed when you've got them in the hand. I don't want to hold it for too long since it's wet and will get chilled through if the water penetrates to the skin. I think I'd better let it go now.'

We stood back. Carefully, Arab leant forward with the bird, whose big powerful claws stretched out and scrabbled for the ground even before it got there. At last it let go of Arab's finger, steadied its weight on the ground, put its head down and scuttled off.

That night in the wardens' but we jubilantly polished off the remaining beers, and pored, over the records of all the kakapos that had been transferred to Codfish. Arab had made a note of the ident.i.ty number of the bird, which had been fastened to its leg - 8-44263. Its name was Ralph. It had been transferred to Codfish Island from Pegasus Harbour, Stewart Island, almost exactly a year ago.

'This is excellent news,' exclaimed Ron. 'This is really very, very good news indeed. If this kakapo is coming up to booming condition just a year after being relocated, it's the best indication we've had yet that the transfer programme is working. You know that we didn't want you to come here, and that we didn't want to track kakapos and risk disturbing them, but as it happens . . . Well, this is very useful information, and very encouraging indeed.'

A few days later, standing on top of Kakapo Castle in Fiordland we tell Don Merton that we think we've been forgiven.

'Oh yes, I think so,' he says. 'You may have b.u.mbled around a bit and trodden on a few toes, but you've actually stirred things up a bit as well. The press conference was very effective, and from what I hear there's an imminent decision coming from quite high up to move the kakapo conservation programme to the top of the Department's priority list, which should mean that we get allocated more resources. I just hope it's not all too late.

'There are now twenty-five kakapos on Codfish, but only five of those are females, and that's the crucial point. There's only one kakapo that we know of left on Stewart Island, and that's a male. We keep searching for more females, but we doubt if there are any more. Add those to the fourteen birds on Little Barrier and we have a total of only forty kakapos left altogether.

'And it's so difficult getting the blighters to breed. In the past they bred very slowly because there was nothing else to keep their population stable. If an animal population rises so fast that it outgrows the capacity of its habitat to feed and sustain it then it plunges right back down again, then back up, back down and so on. If a population fluctuates too wildly it doesn't take much of a disaster to tip the species over the edge into extinction. So all the kakapo's peculiar mating habits are just a survival technique as much as anything else. But only because there was no outside compet.i.tion. Now that they are surrounded by predators there's very little to keep them alive, other than our direct intervention. As long as we can sustain it.'

This reminds me of my motorbike industry a.n.a.logy, which I have tactfully kept to myself. There are remedies available to motorbike engineers that zoologists do not have. As we tread our way carefully back along the ridge to the helicopter I ask Don what he feels the long term prospects for the kakapos really are, and his answer is surprisingly apposite.

'Well,' he says in his quiet polite voice, 'anything's possible, and with genetic engineering, who knows. If we can keep them going during our lifespan, it's over to the next generation with its new range of tools and techniques and science to take it from there. All we can do is perpetuate them during our lifetime and try to hand them on in as good a condition as possible to the next generation and hope like heck that they feel the same way about them as we do.'

A few minutes later our helicopter rises up above Kakapo Castle, puts its nose down and heads back up the valleys to Milford Sound, leaving behind a small scratched depression in the earth and a single, elderly untouched sweet potato.

Blind Panic

a.s.sumptions are the things you don't know you're making, which is why it is so disorienting the first time you take the plug out of a wash basin in Australia and see the water spiralling down the hole the other way round. The very laws of physics are telling you how far you are from home.

In New Zealand even the telephone dials are numbered anticlockwise. This has nothing to do with the laws of physics - they just do it differently there. The shock is that it had never occurred to you that there was any other way of doing it. In fact you had never even thought about it at all, and suddenly here it is - different. The ground slips.

Dialling in New Zealand takes quite a bit of concentration because every digit is where you least expect to find it. Try and do it quickly and you will inevitably misdial because your automatic habit jumps in and takes over before you have a chance to stop it. The habit of telephone dials is so deep that it has become an a.s.sumption, and you don't even know you're making it.

China is in the northern hemisphere, so its wash basins drain clockwise, like ours. Their telephone dials are numbered like ours. Both those things are familiar. But every single other thing is different, and the a.s.sumptions that you don't know you're making will only get you into trouble and confusion.

I had a kind of inkling that this would be the case from what little I knew of other people's experiences in China. I sat in the plane on the long flight to Beijing trying to unravel my habits, to unthink as it were, and feeling slightly twitchy about it.

I started buying copious quant.i.ties of aftershave. Each time the duty-free trolley came round I bought a bottle. I had never done anything like it before in my life. My normal, instinctive reaction had always been just to shake my head and carry on reading my magazine. This time I thought it would be more Zen-like to say, 'Yes, all right. What have you got?' I was not the only person I caught by surprise.

'Have you gone completely mad? Mark asked me as I slipped a sixth different bottle into my hand baggage.

'I'm trying to challenge and subvert my own fundamental a.s.sumptions as to what const.i.tutes rationally constructed behaviour.'

'Does that mean yes??

'I mean that I'm just trying to loosen up a bit,' I said. 'An aeroplane doesn't give you much scope for arbitrary and alternative types of behaviour, so I'm just making the most of the opportunities that are offered.'

'I see.'

Mark s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably in his seat and frowned deeply into his book.

'What are you going to do with all that stuff?' he asked a while later over an airline meal.

'Dunno,' I said. 'It's a problem, isn't it??

'Tell me, are you feeling nervous about something?

Yes.'

'What?'

'China.'

In the middle of one of the biggest, longest, noisiest, dirtiest thoroughfares in the world lives the reincarnation of a drowned princess, or rather, two hundred reincarnations of a drowned princess.

Whether these are two hundred different reincarnations of the same drowned princess, or the individual reincarnations of two hundred different drowned princesses, is something that the legends are a little vague about, and there are no reliable statistics on the incidence of princess-drownings in the area available to help clear the matter up.

If they are all the same drowned princess then she must have led a life of exquisite sinfulness to have had the conditions of her current lives repeatedly inflicted on her. Her reincarnations are constantly being mangled in s.h.i.+ps' propellers, snared in fishermen's nets full of hooks, blinded, poisoned and deafened.

The thoroughfare in question is the Yangtze river, and the reincarnated princess is the Baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin.

'How do you rate our chances of seeing a dolphin? I asked Mark.

'I haven't the faintest idea,' he said. 'It's very hard to get information about anything out of China, and most of it's confusing. But the dolphins are to be found - or not - in a just a few parts of the Yangtze. The main one is a stretch of the river about two hundred kilometres long centred on a town called Tongling in Anhui province. That's where there are people working on saving the baiji, and that's the main place we're headed for. We get to Tongling by boat from Nanjing, where there's a man called Professor Zhou who's a major authority on the animal. We get to Nanjing by train from Shanghai. We get to Shanghai by plane from Beijing. We've got a couple of days in Beijing first to get acclimatised and see if any of the travel arrangements are actually going to work out. We've got thousands of miles to cover and travel is meant to be insanely difficult.'

'Do we have much leeway if things go wrong?' I asked. 'Which days are Professor Zhou and the others expecting us??