Birdbrain (10 page)

‘Kea: The Open-Programme Bird’

by Jiselle Ruby and Anthony Verloc

The kea belongs to a group of animal species that can well be compared to humans, inasmuch as its ability to adapt to changing conditions, such as the diminishing of their living environment or the arrival of new sources of nutrition, is both fast and exceptionally efficient. The kea’s resilience as a species is based on its resourcefulness and opportunism, qualities which some researchers now believe can no longer be considered simply instinctual actions.

The kea is the only species of mountain parrot in the world. It lives primarily in the uplands of the South Island of New Zealand, often above the snowline, and generally in such harsh natural conditions that the acquisition of sustenance represents a significant challenge in itself. For this reason, the kea has developed into a master of survival.

The kea’s diet is normally plant based, consisting of various seeds, nuts, shoots, etc., although it should be noted that it is exceptionally flexible with regard to its diet and is eager to seek out alternative sources of nourishment. In fact, the kea will eat almost anything that comes its way and switches readily to animal proteins whenever they are available.

The kea is a very lively creature and always seems in need of challenging activity. If food is readily available, it spends a greater proportion of its time engaged in other activities such as social games and competitions. It would appear that these games and displays of prowess in part serve to create and maintain hierarchical relationships within the flock.

The kea is an extremely inquisitive bird — a trait that is clearly a key factor in the survival of the species — and can even solve complicated problems with relative ease. When it encounters an unfamiliar object, the kea will normally examine it carefully, often by breaking it into pieces. This behavioural pattern becomes more common when food is in greater supply, meaning that the bird’s energy is not spent searching for its daily nourishment.

I look up and squint. How the hell could anyone ever think of going through that?

Then, after a moment, the eye latches on a tree root that might serve as a wobbly step, or makes out a hole in the rocks big enough for the tip of a boot, and with considerable effort, all but crawling, we manage to inch our way forward. There’s water running down the path. Further up on the ridge it must be raining.

The path is a stream is a path. In this terrain it’s the only track there is.

The path is a sick joke.

When you look up you can’t see the sky, because the steep, almost vertical wall that is Ironbound, with its giant intertwining sodden trees and bushes, both in front of us and above us,
are
the sky. The ridge almost seems to fall in on top of us with its crushing gloominess. Even at midday there’s so little light in this all but sheer tree tunnel that everything is shrouded in a greenish darkness.

And even when we’re not hauling ourselves up across this hybrid of way and waterway the shelf-like plateaux in between them are nothing but immense quagmires. The mud is black, churned into a thick porridge. And it’s bloody deep. You can’t avoid it or walk around it. The only thing you can do is look for roots or brandies sticking out beneath the enormous pools of slurry, trampled clumps of grass or, if you’re lucky, a blessed stone to stop your feet sinking too far into the depths.

The myriad tree roots stretching out into the path are like very cleverly designed hurdles or traps. They offer your boots about as much friction as a bar of soap. They are elevated either just enough so that you trip over them or just enough that you have to make an effort to step over them. They form tangled networks, the gaps in between them just too small to put your boot through but large enough that they could twist your ankle into the most contorted positions.

On top of that, this joke of a path is pinned down with a fair number of impressive-sized fallen trees forming sheer walls or barriers as thick as your waist. There’s no option but to climb over them and force your way through the thick branches for all you’re worth.

Jyrki uses his hiking pole to support him on the other side of a fallen tree. He apparently feels something firm beneath the surface and lowers almost his entire body-weight on to his pole. There comes a yell as he disappears behind the tree trunk, followed by a sticky squelch as he hits the ground on his side. His pole is stuck into the ground almost up to the handle. Jyrki hauls himself upright and, cursing and standing up to his groin in mud, tries to wrench his pole up from the sludge. But the mire just burps and gurgles, as if some creature living inside the earth didn’t want let go of the strange
titanium-aluminium
object that had suddenly been thrust into its underground kingdom.

Jyrki yanks at his pole, cursing profusely. If I weren’t so weak with a sore stomach and standing up to my ankles in mud myself, I might even have suppressed a laugh. Seeing as we’ve stopped, I take the opportunity to crouch down for a piss in the middle of the path. I don’t bother taking off the rucksack, although the struggle to stand upright once more makes my thigh muscles recoil. Taking the thing off and heaving it back on to my shoulders would require way too much effort.

The first leg of our hike across Queen Charlotte Track in New Zealand had been a bit muddy towards the end, but compared with this it was a breeze. Here, if you put your foot down in the wrong spot you could be up to your thighs in squelching sludge.

It’ll soon be time to suggest stopping for a bite to eat; there hasn’t been anything in my stomach all morning, save for those couple of minutes. We’ve been moving uphill for three hours, but it seems we’re not even halfway up the steeper-than-thou incline at Ironbound. The forest is damp and thick and ugly, rising like a wall on both sides; mud churning all around us and nowhere to put our rucksacks down. If we want to eat or do anything more complicated than thrashing about in the undergrowth, we’ll have to balance our rucksacks against a tree trunk and do whatever it is we have to do standing up, shifting from one foot to the other.

I'm beyond caring. I just keep moving through the bush and mud without thinking about the amount of shit my boots are gobbling up, stumbling and bruising myself, swallowing back the tears and four-letter words — anything, so long as Jyrki behind me doesn’t notice how I’m panting, my mouth wide open, almost hyperventilating, whimpering like a woman in labour.

When it gets even worse I start thinking about Dad — his arrogant face, his fat fingers bulging beneath his signet rings, his hands, quick to punish and quick to buy the kind of behaviour he wanted — and the thought makes me lift my feet again and again and push forwards instead of slumping into a weeping wreck in the mire at the edge of the path.

My shorts are caked in all manner of dirt and slime from the slippery tree trunks, and I curse myself for not putting on a pair of trekking trousers. At least they would have protected me a bit instead of letting all the branches and thorns tear at me, scratching my shins with uninhibited abandon.

Gaiters dead weight? Yeah, right.

Well well, Jyrki happens to like the suggestion of a break, too — a change of clothes and a few apricots, although apparently we have to save our muesli bars for the top of ridge once we reach the majestic altitude of nine hundred metres. I pull on my trekking trousers at the edge of the path, at times balancing on one leg. I have to take my boots off because they won’t fit through the trouser legs. Besides, even if the trousers had had some ingenious zip system to help you push your boots down the legs without taking them off, you’d be mad to shove clumps of wet humus through the insides of your trousers. Meanwhile Jyrki takes a look at his hiking pole.

‘Fucking, fucking
fuck.’

Well, that certainly comes right from the heart. I turn to look at him. The tip of his telescopic trekking pole is missing.

‘Fucking cock-sucking arsewipe. I wondered why the terrain seemed so fucking wonky on one side.’

The mud has swallowed up the entire lower section of the pole; the sludge has won the tug-of-war, at the same time scoring a resounding victory over the Komperdell spring mechanism.

I’ve never heard Jyrki swear so much. He unscrews the remaining telescope section of the pole as far out as it will go, so that it will be of at least some use alongside its intact partner. The severed pole looks weirdly crippled, and because the broken end is open like a pipe you can expect it to take a neat mud sample every time it sinks into the ground.

‘Fucking useless piece of shit.’

‘You shouldn’t get too attached to inanimate objects,’ I comment, poker faced, with a knowing nod of the head.

Once we move above the treeline we find ourselves in the clouds, completely enveloped in mist. Visibility is only a couple of metres. Once the forest disappears it is swiftly replaced with boggy marshlands. There must be some directive to protect sensitive alpine plants and vegetation, as the path continues in steps along a series of duckboards, all the while moving in a steep incline.

It’s almost a relief. At least on these steps you can sit down for a moment, take a good gulp of water and unwrap a muesli bar.

The air has been damp throughout this leg. Now the water is starting to condense into droplets on my arms and in my hair. It's only once you stop for a minute that you realize how cold it is. Out here, climbing up to eight hundred metres has the same effect as climbing two thousand in the Alps. I have to put my jacket on straight away.

When there are no trees there’s nothing to hold back the wind. It comes right in across the sea. This high up you get a real sense of its ferocity, biting and penetrating. The strongest gusts can make you stagger to maintain your balance.

The wind isn’t just wind. It’s cutting. It howls and gnaws.

Never was suncream as pointless as today.

I try to chew the muesli bar, but my mouth is almost too dry. I wonder what’s wrong with my eyes. Why does the surrounding mist suddenly seem so stripy? Then it dawns on me: it’s raining harder now, and the water is coming down as sleet. Horizontally. Or snow. Or hail. In its solid form, the water strikes my cheek facing towards the sea with such force that a moment later the flesh is tingling and sore.

I look at my hiking poles, particularly the crippled one, and it pisses me off so much it hurts.

I pull up the hood on my hiking jacket and stuff the muesli-bar wrapper into my pocket. I grab my poles and stand up.

‘The path won’t walk itself,’ I tell her.

As I sit down on a duckboard step I see that the stitching in the seam of one of my trouser legs has come apart. It’s gaping open almost right up to the knee.

‘Tasmania ruins everything.’

‘What?’ Jyrki is already on his feet, gazing up ahead of us as if he could actually see anything in this weather.

It's an irony of almost cosmic proportions that Ironbound, supposedly the breathtaking highpoint in the panoramas along the whole of South Coast Track, is completely shrouded by the cloud cover, with whirling snow hurtling into our faces more convincingly than Finnish storms in March ever do nowadays on the other side of the planet.

It occurs to me that, in addition to the mud, the water and snow now have free access to the mouth of one of my boots.

And when I stand up I realize that it’s all in there already and has been for a while, that the heat of my body movement has prevented me from noticing that my boot is full of water.

Jyrki looks at my trouser leg and shows me one of his hiking poles. There’s something silvery grey wrapped around the middle.

‘There’s a couple of metres of duct tape on here. You can fix it with that.'

But the idea of taking my trousers off in this blizzard seems impossible, and I say so.

Jyrki shrugs his shoulders. My unstitched trouser leg billows like a sail with every step I take.

You could almost imagine a small dinosaur peering out from behind a rock at any moment.

Ironbound’s western face is virtually the Garden of Eden. The path winds its way along the edge of a ravine so deep that you can’t see the bottom through the mist. Just over a metre wide, this shelf of rock is home to a gushing profusion of all different shades of green, buds and shoots in red, lilac, yellow, the orange of pine needles. The dampness and the mist in the background make the colours seem even deeper and more exuberant. Battered by the wind, the flora here is close to the ground, but it is incredibly diverse and comes in forms I’ve never seen before. Perhaps this is what the world looked like some time back in the Mesozoic era. In its sheer colourfulness and strangeness, this is another Tasmania altogether; it couldn’t be more different from the almost savannah-like yellowy-green landscapes of the plains, the eucalyptus groves, the bushes and the scrub. Up here enormous boulders balance precariously on the edge of the cliff; sheer drops and promontories follow one after the other. Everywhere you look you can see that 18,000 years ago the land was covered with a continental ice sheet.

A primordial forest hanging on the edge of bottomless gorges, set right in the middle of a giants’ game of skittles. Now I understand why Southy is cut the way it is.

As we descend further down the western face and the path begins to veer to the north-east, the flora thins out in stages. Soon the wall is almost nothing but rock. There is nothing to remind us of the suffocating black, damp forest of the eastern face. Now there are only long-suffering clumps of grass and every now and then a small stunted bush, ravaged by the wind, barely the height of a dwarf birch.

The sleet begins to relent, and the covering of clouds breaks in places. The glow of the sun can be seen as a pale moon-like disk behind the layer of clouds. After a moment I catch a glimpse of the sea looming to our left.

Christ alive.

We’ve crossed Ironbound.

It would have been a damned sight easier to come up this ridge than to go down it, and now I understand why there are so many people coming from the opposite direction and so few going the same way as us.

Who would have thought I’d end up actually missing the tree roots we had seen on the way up, the branches and the stone steps as high as your waist? This fresh nightmare, which we might jokingly call the descent path, is nothing more than a strip of gravel, worn away and slightly lighter than the rest of the cliff, running down the steep hillside that we’re supposed to use to get back down without loose stones slipping beneath the soles of our feet or the weight of our rucksacks throwing us on to our backs. Our trekking poles are pretty useless, too — the only way to move forwards is to take small steps with the sides of your boots, like a first-time skier on an almost vertical expanse of snow.

My boot goes
slosh.
I can feel the muddy water churning inside my sock and between my toes. The other boot is probably full of all kinds of things, too, but at least it’s drier.

The path of the Louisa River can be seen down below — not the actual river itself, of course, but the mass of thick vegetation that follows all the waterways around here. And I can see the start of tomorrow’s leg: the undulating, yellowy-green plains which extend as far as the eye can see. Once we reach flatter ground it looks like it’s only a stone’s throw to the camp at Louisa River.