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 grass.
‘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 damn 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 passed, 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.