Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (6 page)

The whole cast of manhood is here. Ranked facing each other, twenty thousand varied guns. The weasel unencumbered by ethics is here, the saint with his God, the idiot agreeing with himself, the scholar shaking his head, the coward with his heart pounding against a daguerreotype of Mother, the hero jollying his mates, the beaten man, the good man, the bad man, the ambitious, the meek, the sodomite and the rakehell, the shell-shocked and the broken-hearted … they are here. None of them fires a shot.

Every visitor to these trenches until now has been a member of one military or another, officially involved in this war, and as such complicit in the bloodletting. But she is not. This alien is innocent of the crime being committed here and can thus bear witness to it.

She stands watching this part of the world that men have made. Slowly sinking in the mud. It is doubtful she is disgusted or despairing at what she finds at Passchendaele. Likely she has no thoughts beyond fear and hunger. But for the men of Germany and Australia she
is so exotic, so unlikely and beautiful, such a mysterious presence, they project a spiritual identity onto her. She swings her head slowly this way and that, looking at the ranks of soldiers, and it feels like she is judging them.

The soldiers of both countries begin to justify their actions. I'm here to save hearth and home, to save my loved ones. I'm here to stop a marauding force of slavering Huns. I'm here to save little Belgium. I'm here because my country needs me. I'm here to fight evil.

The 3rd Australian Division looks across no man's land at the zebra, and past the zebra to the Germans who are also staring at the zebra and past the zebra back at the Australians. And, realising she is of a different consciousness, none of their justifications make them feel any better. A zebra, sunk to its belly now, casting about for a blade of grass on the churned earth of war.

To have this alien bear witness to their barbarity is humiliating. Like having your mother suddenly visit and find, despite your upbringing and education, despite her hopes for you, despite the piano lessons you'd taken and the Latin you'd learned, you are fallen to the most ghoulish pursuit. Caught, red-handed, killing other Latin scholars and pianists. This zebra becomes the embodiment of their shame. Becomes God, mother, lover … conscience. How would you feel if an angel spied on you at butchery?

Tears emerge on the faces of the soldiers of Germany and Australia. Battle-hardened veterans begin to cry. For themselves. And for their lost selves. Some cry openly with uncontrolled sobs, some silently with quivering
chins and welling eyes. Twenty thousand men. No word spoken. Only crying, until the sun has set and the sight of her dimmed.

Next day the zebra is gone. Sunk in the mud. In the trenches at first light men peer into periscopes and confirm, ‘Gone.' ‘Gone.' And everyone breathes easier. Within an hour smiles bloom and jokes are made. Shots begin to speckle the dawn as snipers take up their duties. Back to killing each other now. Out from under the merciless presence of that zebra.

A
man alone, an explorer, a hunter, tiny silhouette against a backdrop of wilderness, bent sideways with a palm cupped to his ear, listening, scanning the heavens. For he is matching wits with that deadliest, most ingenious bitch … Mother Nature. Matching his endurance against her vastness; his wisdom against her storms, floods and droughts; his toughness against her heat and cold; his courage against her many beasts. Mother Nature, repeatedly insulted by man, has become cantankerous and unpredictable of late. Storms from nowhere. Fires from the sky onto droughts without end. Snakes that leap at a grown man's throat. But this frontiersman is out there, striding through the cataclysm, hunting her treasures.

That is how the egg bandits of the red centre would have themselves portrayed. Yet before me in the Alice Springs lockup stands, of all things, a portly German. A fop with red and green streaks in his blond hair and three-quarter-length pants, asking, ‘Oh, Wildlife Ranger Smokey Bear. Yes, you bring the crème? You know, I said on phone, for my piles so … tender.' He calls me Smokey Bear because he thought Park Ranger was a career for cartoon grizzlies and finds me hilarious in the role.

I hand him the crème. ‘Thank you, Smokey Bear. Excuse for one moment.' As he enters the toilet off the back of the interview room he says, ‘You must think of something else. Not Lars dabbing the crème to his … little tenderness. Whistle to yourself a tune.' He is coquettish, flirting. I whistle ‘Year of the Cat' while Lars whimpers and squeaks at his ministrations.

Then, standing before me smelling faintly of tea-tree oil he tells me, ‘I was the long time partner of Wolfi. I arrange his financial side. But I am not involved regarding his activities like you suspect me.' He shakes his head to confirm this. ‘He had the one career. I have the one other career. I design fabrics.' He shrugs. ‘I am in sadness and am joost here to take home Wolfi's remains. Your falcon to me is no more than a pig.'

I reach across the table between us and slap his face. He recoils, shocked. ‘Oh … a grieving partner,' he says. His lip has cracked and he dabs at it.

‘I don't want to hear your opinion of the falcon, Lars. All right? I'll tell you what the peregrine falcon is. It's
the endpoint of a long, complex path from microbe to miracle, you bastard. And I don't want
you
calling it a pig.'

‘You joost are like Wolfi. A zealot for the birds.'

‘I'm not anything like Wolfi. He was a slaver. He stole them and sold them into captivity. I'm not a man who could lock a bird in a cage. A creature with a vast mosaic interplay of wind and gravity laid out in its soul. I'm not anything like
him
. We were enemies.' I lean toward Lars across the table. ‘I never met Wolfi. But when I found him, I danced a little jig in the pool of his secretions.'

Lars takes his hands from his face, open-mouthed, and extends his left hand and shows me a gold ring on his finger inlaid with a purple stone. ‘Please … he was my husband.'

‘Congratulations.'

He sighs, ready to speak. ‘All since I knew him he was much a lover of birds. He studied the avian biology in Munich. Our walls are covered with the paintings of the birds.'

‘But he came out here to the desert to raid their nests?'

‘You sometimes must relocate individuals to ensure the survival of the species, Mr Smokey Bear.'

‘Oh? An environmentalist was he? An eco-warrior? And just as a by-product of his environmentalism he makes a pile of euros you couldn't jump over. And our skies are empty. And a bird, somewhere, a bird that had an instinctive expectation it might wake to life looking off an escarpment over a red plain, made happy by the breeze in its down that promised the sky was a labyrinth
of pathways and journeys … this bird breaks from its shell into … a cage. It wakes blinking through wire at four white walls and listening to Mahler.'

Lars cocks his head at me. ‘You are very poetic.' He shrugs. ‘Is true. Wolfi made much money. Yes, we live in Hamburg at the waterfront, among bankers and others. There is a great hunger for your exotic birds in Europe. But I do my little bit with the fabric design, remember. Curtains bearing my break-dancing-rabbit motif were chosen by the foremost kindergarten in Hamburg. And anyway, most of the buyers of your birds were zoos and wildlife parks and researchers … the well-regarded carers of birds.'

‘Bullshit. Fat frauleins in housecoats poking marshmallows through bars to pink cockatoos. Pudden-head sons of technocrats bored with Xbox who want an eagle for Christmas to toss rats at. Pole-dancers looking for a new angle who think it'd be cool if they could train a parrot to pull the bow on their bikini undone. Shopping centres using pretty birds to distract shoppers from ugly prices. CEOs who think because their company logo is a falcon it'd be a good idea to imprison a real one in the atrium of their skyscraper. I met a hotelier in Düsseldorf who ordered an egret for his fibreglass lake from your Wolfi. It was tethered there in the sparkling blue chlorinated water while kids splashed at ball games all around it.'

‘You think Wolfi didn't care for birds?'

‘I think Wolfi was a treasure hunter and Wolfi thought falcons were diamonds and kites were emeralds and
parrots were sapphires. He thought they were pretty. He knew they were valuable.'

Lars shakes his head at me to let me know how wrong I am. ‘Wolfi loved birds. Is what makes his death so cruel. That disgusting falcon …' The tears that begin to bloom in Lars' eyes only make me angry. I can't help myself.

‘Lars … I mean, sorry, him being the love of your life and all, but his death … His death is from Greek myth. It's justice from the gods.'

A moment after this outburst I soften. I curse myself silently. I reach out and lay my hand over his and give it a friendly squeeze. ‘Sorry. You're right. I'm a zealot for birds. Sometimes I lose sight of, you know, people.' This German fabric designer, whose break-dancing-rabbit motif is currently beguiling the tots of Hamburg, is in possession of a treasure map I want.

How Wolfi died is a mystery to rank alongside those tales of ghost ships and lost tribes and Egyptian curses that used to fill the
Boy's Own Annual
when I was a child. The facts I gathered are these: Lars, who admits keeping the financial books for their little family of two, recalls Wolfi returned from Australia, from the Western Desert, with a smuggled shipment of eggs in February 2006. In May of that year it is recorded Wolfgang Stemple, a registered bird breeder from Hamburg, sold a peregrine falcon chick to the Hamburg World Wildlife Park. The HWWP
is an internationally recognised, state-registered animal research centre and asylum. Needless to say since the scandal broke that Wolfi was a bird smuggler there has been much embarrassment and finger-pointing at that facility regarding the way they procure their wildlife. The director, name of Grupp, has been suspended on half pay while an investigation is held. I like the thought of Grupp on half pay.

The nest from which Wolfi obtained the 2006 falcon eggs (there were two eggs that year, he sold the other to a Kazakhstani oil baron) had proved prolific. His records show he had already harvested fifteen eggs over eight years at an average sale price of nine thousand euros for a total revenue of one hundred and thirty-five thousand euros from that one nest in a remote location in a distant land.

In mid 2007 zoologists at the Hamburg World Wildlife Park, having banded the young peregrine falcon with their distinctive triple-crown leg band, released it into the raptor aviary, a vast dome of netting that takes an impressive bite of sky. At showtime, it haggled mid-air with buzzards, eagles, hawks and owls over euthanised gerbils that were fired into the sky from a pneumatic mortar by gloved ornithologists as the tourists wowed and oohed at the aerobatics. It endured a year of this pitiful lolly-scramble before plumbers using a backhoe tore a hole in the netting of the aviary and it and two other raptors escaped. The Steppe Eagle and the Caledonian Osprey didn't get far. They died of probable heartbreak in the endless geometries of industrial
Hamburg. Citizens found their remains and called the phone number on their leg bands to report the fatalities.

But the young falcon took to the unfettered air, feeling bliss, I guess, at home at last in the grand architecture of the sky.

It disappeared for a year, before a ranger with the Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife Service called from the bottom of the world to report its discovery. That ranger was me. The ornithologists at the Hamburg World Wildlife Park wouldn't believe I was calling from Australia to report I had found their falcon. Likewise I could barely believe I had called Germany. I had to email them photographs of the leg band, still attached to the desiccated raptor, so they could read its identification number for themselves.

How did that falcon get back to Australia from Germany? Falcons are not migratory birds. It had no electro-magnetic template of the world in its bones. It had no map of the world behind its eye. Alfven waves from the sun could not have charted its course. Global wind patterns, so orderly and knowable to some species, should have been a trackless mishmash to it. The stars of the north were not stars its ancestors had known. It had no instinct to serve it. It had no direction home. It had gone to Europe in the hold of a 747 as an egg. And flown home as a bird.

I have come up with several theories, all of which smack of anthropomorphism, and none of which satisfy me. He may have flown blindly east on the prevailing September winds into Russia and the Arctic, where, by
chance, he hooked up with the dwindling flocks of the Bar-tailed Godwit as they began their migration south. If this scenario is to hold water the Godwits must recognise an Australian accent and allow him to hitch a ride on their migration, for the wader is not happily accompanied by the raptor.

He may have teamed up with the Eastern Curlew or Latham's Snipe flying in ever-diminishing flocks out of China and Japan for the Australian summer. But, in truth, I am bestowing a national identity on creatures that have none. The Eastern Curlew and Latham's Snipe are not Aussies abroad, and the lamb would sooner lie down with the lion than either of these two gentle birds hook up with a falcon. No. It is, looked at from any angle, a most singular migration. Singular enough to ignite a fevered email chatter among the ornithologists of the world.

But if my wonder is deep, if my disbelief at this bird quickens my breath and furrows my brow – and it does – then imagine the shock Wolfi must have felt when he discovered it.

So let it now be 2008. And Wolfgang Stemple, at face value a serial tourist and outback enthusiast, has returned to the Western Desert. In the pocket of his cargo pants is a Garmin eTrex GPS navigator and in this device are programmed two-hundred and twenty-eight sets of coordinates, each pinpointing the nest of a pair of birds. The coordinates remain valuable for the life of the breeding pair, because most birds out here use the same nest site year after year. The coordinates are the
product of years of hunting and this GPS can walk Wolfi to any nest of any species of bird he has an order for. It is a modern-day treasure map.

Already nestled in electric blankets in his room in the Oasis Hotel in Alice Springs incubating at a constant 34 degrees Celsius, Wolfi has the eggs of crimson chats, rainbow bee-eaters, pink cockatoos, whistling kites, wedge-tailed eagles, Australian hobbies, galahs, princess parrots, ringneck parrots, pied honey-eaters, dusky woodswallows, boobook owls and zebra finches. Loot worth probably two-hundred thousand euros on the EEC black market.

This August day, wearing a slouch hat, Wolfi is riding a hire horse called Cards along the Larapinta Trail out west of Alice Springs to harvest peregrine falcon eggs. As he rides past the Ranger Station at Big Hole he leans out over the solar panels and checks his reflection against the sky and salutes himself.

Five more hours of riding into the wilderness of the West MacDonnell Ranges, mountains of red rock spattered with spinifex and cut with towering gorges. In this country it is usual for a falcon to nest high on a cliff. These nests are dangerous, almost impossible to get at. But eight years ago, having scoured the sky with his binoculars for many days, Wolfi located a breeding pair nesting in a hollow in a desert oak only three metres off the ground. It is from this nest that Wolfi has stolen seventeen eggs over the intervening years. And it is from this nest the wonderful falcon of our story was taken.

The country is hard to navigate, monotonously
spectacular. One could easily become lost. Cliff after cliff, boulder after boulder. One could never relocate a nest in this vast land without a GPS. Wolfi types FALCON TREE into his Garmin eTrex and a set of co-ordinates appears on the screen. He presses another button and the machine tells him 6KM and points toward the falcon tree with an arrow. He walks Cards onward following the arrow throughout the afternoon … 3KM … 1KM … 200M … until the device tells him YOU ARE HERE. He has ridden out of the chasms and gorges of the West Macs to an undulating sand plain of oak and gum.