‘I said, “What did you say?”‘
`I just said, “Do you come here often?” but let it pass.’
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 shining 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 God 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 buggers to like us if it killed me.
Over our lunch of tinned ham, boiled potatoes and beer we launched a major conversational assault, 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 assistance, 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.