Kiwi Tracks (6 page)

On the way down through the forest I meet Yoda the hut warden from the Milford Track. ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask, snapping out of my nightmarish daydreams.

His ears flop alarmingly. They look as if the tops are made of wax and are melting; if they droop much more they’ll surely fall off. He replies: ‘It’s my days off, so I thought I would tramp around the Keplers.’

Another one. Don’t the DOC wardens have a life? They live in isolated huts for a living and then traipse alone through forests for fun? They take the Lonely Guy concept to extremes. I secretly watch him as he tramps up the track. What’s going on in that head of his? What’s going on in mine?

At Te Anau I head straight for the supermarket, lumbered with my backpack. I spend my last fifty dollars buying half a dozen lamb chops, sweet potato, corn and a few other goodies. I have not eaten since last night and have walked more than twenty kilometres today.

I rush to the backpackers giddy with greed, but when I unpack the shopping bags in the communal kitchen, I discover that half the food I bought is missing, including the chops. I have heavy jugs of orange juice and milk, but they will not fill the rumbling cavities inside me. I run back to the supermarket and frantically tell the cashier: ‘I must have left a bag full of groceries here just fifteen minutes ago.’ The bag is nowhere in sight and she calls the manager.

‘Do you have your receipt?’ the manager asks calmly.

I urgently give her the tiny piece of paper.

‘Do you know what you are missing?’ I nod. ‘Follow me.’ She proceeds to collect the missing items, with me following her up and down the aisles. ‘Chops this big?’ she asks, wafting a package under my nose, with several bloody, juicy red chops easily visible through the cellophane. I nod and drool, like a bedraggled dog that has not been fed by its master for a day. ‘Better to err on the plus side,’ she says benevolently. I agree enthusiastically, wagging my tail. In the vegie aisle, I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and realise I have a vintage tramper-head. I try to fluff and reposition my hair into a shape resembling a human head rather than a deflated rugby ball.

She hands me the full grocery bag beyond the cashier, so that I do not have to pay for it. My intestines feel like they are tied in a knot: I don’t think I’ve ever been this hungry in my life. If I’m not careful, I’m going to keel over. I don’t want to delay the process of tucking into this feast, but I don’t want her to think that I’m ungrateful either.

I wipe the saliva from the corners of my mouth and ask: ‘How can you run a business if you give free bags of food to absent-minded shoppers?’

‘Nah,’ she says. ‘Whoever was behind you took your bag by mistake. Happens all the time. We just replace the food that’s missing. They’ll bring it back.’

If I had accidentally found myself with an extra bag of free groceries I would rationalise that it was divine intervention and keep it. ‘I know who was behind me. A big Maori guy.’

‘He’ll bring it back,’ she replies. ‘It was an honest mistake.’

I thank her profusely as she ushers me out. She says: ‘Good as gold.’

‘What?’

‘Good as gold.’ She sees the look of incomprehension on my face. ‘Means OK. No problem.’

Tightly clutching the good-as-gold groceries to my chest, I scurry back to the backpackers. I dump the bags on the counter, turn on the stove, put some garlic butter in the pan and start cooking, cutting off pieces of baby sheep ribs to eat even as they fry. There is no smooching. There is no foreplay. This is the gastronomic equivalent of an instant orgasm.

Lying prone in bed, still in post-orgasmic bliss, I read the
Southland Times,
gently resting the paper on a full belly that looks as if it could be a few months pregnant.

TRAMPER DIES AFTER FALL FROM TRACK

A three-day friendship between two tourists ended in tragedy yesterday when one of them, a Canadian, died in a tramping accident.

The story goes on to explain in detail how the two had been out in the same awful weather as Eisaku and I. The Canadian had slipped down an icy slope. I reflect that had I not been with Eisaku during the climb that day, I probably wouldn’t have walked as slowly as I had, waiting for him to catch up. There were plenty of slippery slopes to have fallen down, too.

Return to beginning of chapter

Isolated at the southern tip of the South Island, or ‘the Mainland’ as South Islanders prefer to call their half of the country, is the settlement of Invercargill. There is a certain indefinable charm to the town, despite its main Dee Street being a gauntlet of fast-food joints, ‘new-in-NZ’ used-car lots and toys-for-boys farm machinery. Maybe the appeal has more to do with the people who live here and their down-to-earth friendliness. I don’t even have to stick my thumb out to hitch before someone stops to offer me a ride. You couldn’t meet more hospitable people. Perhaps it’s because ‘The World’s Southernmost McDonald’s’ is Invercargill’s most obvious claim to fame and the burghers are over-compensating.

Waiting at the airport for the weather to clear before the short hop across the Foveaux Strait to Stewart Island, I flip idly through the
Southland Times
. The front page has a photograph of an English publican who is walking from Invercargill all the way up to Cape Reinga at the top of the North Island. Unlike me, he will literally walk every step of the way, on roads and highways. Curious to see what someone who walks the length of New Zealand would look like, I scrutinise the photo carefully. Why would he want to see New Zealand from the perspective of a highway shoulder?

On page two, the crime report lists several offences occurring in the past twenty-four hours:

• A first-aid kit was taken from a car.
  
• A rose in a terracotta pot was stolen from a grave at the Eastern Cemetery between Thursday and Saturday.
  
• Five poppy plants were removed from a Bamborough Street property.
  
• A half packet of cigarettes was taken from a bar in Tweed Street.
  
• A pair of glasses was taken from a Thames Street house.
  
• A forty-litre petrol tin was taken from a farm at Awarua Bay.
  
• A man was hit over the head with a No 9 frozen chicken needing six stitches.
  

There is no clarification as to whether it was the chicken or the man needing the stitches.

This crime wave is given prominence, but the deaths of locals are allocated less column space. I read with alarm that: ‘The reign of terror which led to the deaths of at least three kiwis on Stewart Island ended on Saturday when two dogs were destroyed. Since then no further kiwis have been found dead.’ I’m not so sure now that I want to visit an island that places so little importance on the death of its citizens.

My flight is announced and I am swept along with a bunch of stalwart Stewart Islanders returning from a shopping spree to the ‘mainland’. Still nervous, I point out the ‘reign of terror’ article to the Kiwi sitting next to me on the plane. ‘Ah yeah,’ he comments, leaning towards me confidentially. ‘Kiwis can’t fly.’ The comment does not inspire confidence. I stare down the centre aisle and watch as the pilots flick switches on and off and fiddle around with the paraphernalia to be found in any aircraft cockpit. I hope these Kiwis can fly.

The dilapidated twin-engine Islander sags under its full load, horrifying creaks and groans hinting at metal fatigue. Like a crippled moth, it taxis the huge expanse of runway, which is almost as wide and long as Dee Street. The aircraft does not immediately lurch forward when the captain pushes the twin throttles to maximum thrust. It slowly picks up speed and momentum, and at the end of the long runway it lifts hesitantly into the air, defying all proven laws of gravity. The plane banks ponderously over the grid-patterned concrete and asphalt of this urban outpost, the endless green pasture encompassing the town mown to resemble golf fairways by a sizeable portion of New Zealand’s seventy million sheep. Then we flutter out over the frigid waters of Foveaux Strait. The aircraft’s navigational equipment had better work: if we miss Stewart Island, the next stop is Antarctica.

The view out of the window on our port side reveals a foreboding black cloudy sky with zero visibility. By contrast, on the
starboard side, the sun shines brightly, sparkling off the waters below and lending the scene a holiday atmosphere. The clouds drift east, away from Stewart Island. Within twenty minutes we are floating against the wind over Halfmoon Bay, above bush the colour and apparent density of giant heads of broccoli. A tiny postage-stamp sized clearing carved out of the bush is the landing strip.

I pray that the brakes and reverse thrust of the props function properly and we don’t crash into the trees at the end of the dirt runway. To distract myself, I study a brochure of the island but surreptitiously cross my fingers underneath the pages. I read how William Stewart, an officer of the sealing vessel
Pegasus
, compiled the first detailed charts of the southern coast of New Zealand. In a fit of modesty, he named the third-largest island in New Zealand after himself. It hangs almost forgotten off the bottom of the South Island, like the dot of an exclamation mark. Captain Cook, exploring the area on his earlier tour of duty, had mistaken the island for a peninsula, forgivable for someone who navigated the world with a hand-held sextant, a prototype chronometer and no Global Positioning Satellite.

In Maori legend, New Zealand’s islands are more imaginatively named. According to the legend, the demigod Maui, who lived in Hawaiki, went out fishing with his brothers. He dropped his magic fishhook over the side of the canoe and caught a great flat fish, which became the North Island. The South Island was Maui’s canoe, and Stewart Island was Te Punga o te Waka a Maui, the anchor stone.

Landing, the aircraft groans, moans, creaks and squeaks in protest at the rough ground. The ground crew, meaning someone nearby on the airstrip, opens the door to the cabin and a bewildering cacophony of unidentified birdsong greets us, as if we had just been emptied out into an aviary. The air is noticeably fresh and clean, laced with the fragrance of vegetation and flowers. The temperature is cool, the chilly wind blowing down the runway. Walking from the airstrip towards the settlement, I keep a sharp lookout for Kiwi-eating dogs. I trust they can tell the difference
between a Kiwi and a Canuck far from home; I should have stitched a maple-leaf flag prominently on my pack.

In the Department of Conservation office in Halfmoon Bay, I ask how dangerous it is to walk in the rainforest.

The DOC worker answers: ‘There’s nothing dangerous here, except a spider and that hasn’t been seen for a while anyway. Niver iver bite you.’ She converts the ‘a’ to an ‘e’, the ‘e’ to an ‘i’ and the ‘a’ in front of an ‘r’ to a double ‘aa’, dropping the ‘r’, as in cars to ‘caas’ and farms to ‘faams’.

‘What about those dogs?’

‘You mean the dogs that killed the kiwis?’ she says nonchalantly.

I nod, trying to look cool about the subject too.

‘Destroyed them.’

‘So I should be safe?’ I ask, just to be sure.

‘They attacked kiwis,’ she explains.

‘But how did they know the difference?’

‘Between what?’

‘Well, like between me and a Kiwi.’

‘Between you and a kiwi?’ she repeats.

I nod.

She blinks a couple of times, then with the infinite patience of a civil servant, launches into a spiel on the native wildlife. ‘Pre-human New Zealand was separated from other land masses in the Mesozoic period, more than 150 million years ago, before the evolution of land mammals. The only native mammals in New Zealand were two species of bat. That’s why birds became the dominant fauna. Some bird life adapted in the absence of mammalian predators to become flightless or weakly flying birds, like the kiwi.’

‘You mean kiwis can’t fly?’ I repeat my fellow passenger’s assertion.

‘Yeah. That’s why it’s so easy for the dogs to get them. The other birds can fly out of danger.’

The penny drops. It seems incredible that over the tens of millions of years some mammals, apart from bats, did not find their
way to these fertile islands. None of those odd and dangerous creatures from Australia ever climbed on a piece of wood and drifted across the Tasman Sea. There are no snakes of any kind here, never mind poisonous ones. Apart from humans, there is nothing to eat me, maul me, trample me, bite me or even scare me to death. Even the dogs are going to leave me alone as long as I don’t flap my arms helplessly.

I continue through the settlement. Outside a wooden cottage with a white picket fence, a hand-painted sign proclaims it to be ‘Jo and Andy’s Place’, in competition with ‘Ann’s Place’ and ‘Dave’s Place’ down the road. Jo and Andy’s place proves a little austere, heated by coal and wood, and with a chemical toilet. Yet it is connected to the real world and Jo’s mother by e-mail umbilical cord. Both Jo and Andy have fled the moral decay of America and this is about as far as they could get.

Halfmoon Bay was first settled in 1865. The first post office opened soon after in 1872 and the first school in 1874. There is a frontier-style general store, an old pub and a few quaint wooden cottages barely protruding from the thick vegetation, smoke curling from their hidden chimneys. A dozen fishing boats rock lazily at their moorings on glassy, breathing swells; sea birds strut self-importantly on an empty beach. It definitely feels as if I am far away from anywhere: there is no one in sight. I pass an empty bowling green, a Returned Servicemen’s Association hall, and an Anglican church. The only sign of life is the pub, which has a couple of battered cars parked outside. Where do the owners of these cars drive? There’s nowhere to go.

Were it not for the simple memorial to the soldiers who died in the Great War, the peaceful cove would seem totally removed from the rest of the world. Of the one hundred thousand Kiwi troops sent to fight, seventeen thousand were killed and another forty-one thousand wounded. The names of several brave local boys are inscribed on the stone monument.

I stride along a narrow, winding asphalt road leading to the start of the Rakiura Track. Rakiura, I read somewhere, is the Maori name for Stewart Island. Unfamiliar birds are everywhere,
including a black bird with an iridescent shine on its back and twin blobs of white feathers like wattles hanging under its throat. I stop to listen. Its voice is almost, but not quite, melodious, fluid chimes followed by an assortment of harsher notes, clonks, chuckles, squeaks, clucks and clicks. It sounds drunk. I stop, unload my pack from my shoulders and seek out my bird book. Inevitably it is at the bottom of the pack, and by the time I successfully extract it the scene looks as if there has been a traffic accident: clothes, plastic bags of food, stoves, pots, pans and a sleeping-bag are scattered on the empty road. Thankfully there isn’t any traffic. I look the creature up and discover it is a tui, New Zealand’s national bird.