The Peco Incident

by Des Hunt

  Then Nick slipped on some kelp and sprawled onto the sand. His screaming got louder as the beast came straight at him. One of the tourists moved forward to help, yelling and waving his arms furiously.

  It had no effect. The sea lion kept coming. I felt like turning away, not wanting to see my cousin savaged by a half-tonne raging carnivore.

  But it didn’t happen like that. When the sea lion got to where Nick was scrabbling in the sand, it just kept going, heading towards the sea. Apart from a flipper accidentally touching his foot, Nick was ignored as the animal rushed on. Then three other sea lions appeared, all seeking the safety of the water. Tourists ran everywhere, trying to get out of the way of the frightened animals. For a while people and animals were going all over the place, like in a scene from an old comedy movie. One woman was screaming her head off as she ran around in a panic.

  I laughed, partly from relief, but mostly at the mayhem I was witnessing below. No one except Nicholas Clarke could make dramatic entrances quite like that.

  CHAPTER 3

  By the time I arrived on the sand, Nick was on his feet talking excitedly.

  ‘Did you see its teeth?’ he asked of no one in particular. ‘They were huge.’

  He was surrounded by three tourist couples, all of whom were almost as excited as Nick.

  The woman who had panicked had now calmed. She didn’t look like the usual tourist. Her outfit was retro-sixties, as if she was some hippie time-traveller. The only modern thing about her was an expensive digital SLR camera hanging from her neck.

  ‘What were they?’ she asked.

  ‘Freaking big seals,’ answered the guy alongside her. He also wore retro hippie clothes, so I gathered they were a couple.

  ‘They weren’t seals,’ I said, always willing to show off my knowledge. ‘They were sea lions.’

  All eyes turned to me. ‘How do you know the difference?’ asked one of the older men.

  ‘Because the seals don’t come up on an open beach. Sea lions do. Seals always come out of the water near rocks.’ I looked at the waves washing into the shore. ‘If you want to see seals, then you’ll find them past those rocks there. You should be able to get around.’

  ‘Can you show us?’ asked one of the women. So, for the rest of the morning I became their tour guide.

  The two older couples were touring New Zealand together, in separate campers. They’d already done the North Island and most of the South. The younger lot, the hippies, had arrived only a week before. They had come straight to Dunedin, as they’d been told that the bottom of the South Island had the most interesting places. So far, they’d spent all their time on the peninsula and were enjoying it.

  We found three seals basking in amongst some rocks. They saw us almost at the same time and took off for the water, which was a relief because the hippie woman was beginning to freak out again.

  After that I took the tour group to see penguin tracks: those of the little blue penguins leading up into the cliffs, and the yellow-eyed penguin ones coming from the lupins. By then it was lunchtime and the older couples went back to their vans.

  The hippies had no food with them, but we had enough for four, so we sat down and had a shared lunch. They liked Mum’s scones, but wouldn’t touch the mince pies because they contained meat — they claimed to be vegetarians. We also learnt that they were from Scotland, which I’d sort of worked out from their accents. Brio and Roost were their names, although I got the feeling that these were nicknames rather than proper ones. Brio, the woman, said she was an artist who had come to New Zealand for inspiration. Roost was a plumber, who, it seemed, came only because Brio did.

  Even though they were both very skinny, they ate much more than I ever did. Brio had quick movements like some birds that can turn their heads so fast that you don’t see it happening. Roost also had funny movements; his limbs moved in a jerky way as if they were connected to strings. I figured that all this continuous movement must require more food than normal — something I’d noticed with Nick as well.

  The meal was friendly enough until right at the end. As I was repacking my backpack, Brio took a packet of gum out of her pocket, unwrapped a piece and put it into her mouth.

  ‘Can I have some?’ asked Nick, putting out his hand.

  ‘No!’ said Brio, stuffing the packet and wrapper back into her pocket. ‘They’re mine!’

  Nick’s jaw dropped. He was about to make a comment when Brio stood and started walking down the beach.

  ‘Come on!’ she yelled over her shoulder. ‘Show me those birds you were telling me about. I want to photograph them.’

  I’d earlier mentioned that birds sometimes congregated where the inlet met the sea. Now she wanted the guided tour. Despite her rudeness — or more likely because of it — the rest of us followed like lambs.

  Nick walked to one side of us, his head down as if deep in thought. Maybe he was thinking of Brio’s rebuff, or perhaps the sea-lion episode. I had the feeling that he’d been more frightened by the animal attack than he’d let on. If so, then maybe that was good. Perhaps he’d learnt his lesson and would stop doing stupid things.

  That hope lasted only as long as it took to walk halfway along the beach. There, he found a piece of kelp that was like a stock whip. Of course he had to try it out. To begin with, he was happy just to get a cracking sound. Then he had to whip things such as driftwood and other bits of washed-up rubbish. It was only when he turned it onto people that things got ugly.

  He started with a few gentle flicks at my bottom, before giving me a real painful crack. When I turned around to yell at him, he danced away, laughing as if it was a great joke. Next he did the same to Roost, who tried to make out it was good fun, even though his body language said otherwise. Then Nick gave Brio a flick.

  She whirled around at him, her face twisted with anger. He hardly had a chance to react before she’d ripped the whip from his hand and started lashing out at him. The first few strokes were around his legs and lower body — blows that were intended to hurt. Then she took aim at his head. Nick covered his face with his arms, backing away. She swung the whip from side to side, grunting as she applied each blow.

  Nick fell to his knees. ‘Sorry!’ he cried. ‘Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!’

  Just when I was about to move to help him, she stopped. For a moment she stood with her legs apart glaring down at him, chomping furiously on her chewing gum. Then she leaned over until her head was alongside his. ‘Don’t ever mess with me again,’ she snarled. ‘Next time, saying sorry won’t be enough. Do you understand?’

  Nick nodded.

  ‘Say it!’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes! I understand.’

  Instantly, she changed. ‘Goody good,’ she said in a little-girl’s voice. ‘Now let’s go find the birdies.’ With that, she dropped the whip and resumed walking along the beach as if nothing had happened.

  I was ready to toss it in; however, Nick and Roost trailed after her, so I did as well.

  The incoming tide had forced many of the birds off the mudflats to congregate on the shore. By far the biggest group were the godwits, probably more than a hundred of them. Again I gave the guided tour, telling them how the godwits migrated to Alaska so that they could breed in the Northern Hemisphere summer.

  ‘When they come back,’ I said, ‘they do it all in one trip. Almost twelve thousand kilometres without stopping. It takes them nine days.’

  Neither Nick nor Roost appeared at all impressed with this information. Brio, however, hung on every word I said.

  ‘Really!’ she said over and over. This reaction prompted me to give all the information I could recall, some of it even a little exaggerated. By the time I’d finished, Nick was sitting on the sand in a sulk, and Roost was walking around aimlessly.

  ‘We have lots of migrating birds in Scotland,’ said Brio. ‘Swallows, cuckoos, sea birds, and lots of ducks and geese.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Some of them spread diseases such as bird flu,’ she
continued. ‘It’s getting to be a real problem.’ She pointed towards the godwits. ‘Do they carry any diseases?’

  I shrugged. ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘It’s just that we saw some dead sparrows yesterday, and I wondered if it was bird flu.’

  At the mention of dead sparrows, Nick was on his feet. ‘We saw them, too,’ he said. ‘Was it around by the café?’

  Brio shook her head. ‘No, it was by some big sheds, on the other side of the inlet.’

  ‘Peco,’ I said. ‘The Peninsula Egg Company. It’s a big egg farm.’

  ‘See,’ said Roost, coming alive again, ‘I told you I could smell chickens. That’ll be where the sparrows got the disease.’

  ‘Yesss!’ said Nick. ‘I knew there was a killer disease around here. We’ve got to check this out, Danny.’

  ‘Hold on a moment.’ I turned to Brio. ‘Were there any other sorts of dead birds?’

  ‘Not that I saw. Did you see any, Roost?’

  Roost shook his head.

  ‘But there could be more,’ Brio continued. ‘We only saw what was on the road. We didn’t get out of the van and have a real look. Maybe you should go and check it out.’

  Nick tugged at my arm. ‘See! C’mon, let’s go.’

  This time I did go. I followed Nick for several metres before turning to see if they were following. They weren’t. Instead they were standing, smiling at each other. But it was not the pleasant smile of affection: it was the knowing, superior grin of people who feel that they have scored some sort of victory over others, and I had no doubts that in this case the others were Nick and me.

  CHAPTER 4

  Back at the car park our bikes were untouched. The only vehicle remaining was the dusty, multi-coloured van, which I figured had to be Brio and Roost’s.

  While I was getting my bike ready, Nick disappeared. I thought he must have gone somewhere for a pee until I found him behind the van. He was writing Clean me! in the dust with his finger. Not exactly the most original graffiti message, yet it was quite stylishly done.

  He stepped back to admire his work. ‘What do you think of that?’ he asked with a big grin.

  ‘I think,’ I said slowly, ‘that Brio might consider messing with her van much the same as messing with her as a person.’

  Instantly, the grin disappeared. ‘Oh, I didn’t think of that.’ He rushed forward to wipe it all out. But that made it even more obvious. So he ended up wiping the dust off the whole of the back panel.

  ‘I think you should do the whole van,’ I said with a straight face.

  He gave me a look of panic. ‘You really think so?’

  ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Leave it.’ I got on my bike. ‘Let’s go.’

  As I rode off, I chuckled to myself. Brio’s violent response to a flick on the bum sure had got through to Nick. Maybe that was the way to deal with him: respond to his outlandish behaviour with something totally over the top. Except I knew I couldn’t do that. It would make me no different to Brio, and already I’d decided she was not a nice person to know.

  The Peco chook farm was tucked away in a valley at the end of a dead-end road. Once there were signs telling everyone where to go, but they had been taken down after animal-rights activists picketed the place a couple of years before. Now it was surrounded by three-metre netting fences, topped with razor wire.

  Even before we got to the farm we began seeing sick birds, and not just sparrows. There were also finches and a couple of starlings.

  Surprisingly, there were no dead or dying birds directly outside the gates of the farm.

  ‘Where are the dead birds?’ asked Nick, sounding disappointed by their absence.

  ‘Maybe they picked them up?’ I replied.

  ‘Who? Brio and Roost? Doubt it!’

  ‘No — the farm people. They might be trying to hide whatever’s the problem.’

  Nick nodded. ‘Then we have to unhide it. C’mon, Danny, let’s explore.’ He dumped his bike on the side of the road and took off around the outside of the fence. I let out a deep sigh before doing the same.

  The fence sloped up a hill, giving us a clearer view into the enclosure. There were two huge corrugated-iron sheds, flanked by grain silos and a number of smaller buildings. We could hear the noise of fans and machinery working inside the nearest shed. There were no people to be seen, and no houses nearby. As we watched, a tractor with a front-end loader backed out of a shed carrying a messy load in the scoop. A moment later the smell hit us: chicken poo — very smelly chicken poo. The tractor dumped it in a large compost bin before disappearing back into the shed for a second load.

  We moved further around the perimeter. It was harder to walk there, as gorse on the hillside grew right down to the fence. That was where we started seeing dead birds again. Not in the open, but under the bushes, supporting my idea that someone had collected the visible ones.

  It was also in the shelter of one of these bushes that we found a gap in the fence. The chain-link netting had divided at the bottom to form a wedge-shaped opening, about a metre high — big enough for a person to crawl through.

  ‘Let’s go in and take a look,’ said Nick.

  I quickly shook my head and moved to block his way. ‘No, we’ll be caught. That front-end loader is working in there.’

  ‘We’ll go in the other shed.’

  Before I could answer, a vehicle drove out the end of the other shed. This was a mini-tractor pulling a trailer stacked high with trays of eggs.

  ‘We can come back later,’ said Nick. ‘Come back tonight. Make it a mission.’

  ‘No, Nick. We can’t. Didn’t you see that No Trespassing sign on the gate? We’ll get into serious trouble if we go in there.’

  ‘Wuss!’ he sneered. ‘What a wimpy wuss! Chicken of a chicken farm.’

  I didn’t reply. Instead, while Nick sulked, I studied the hole in the fence. There was no sign of rusting or anything else that could have caused the break, so I started looking in the weeds near the ground. Just a few seconds of searching located the cause — cut-up bits of wire. The hole in the fence was not accidental damage: someone had cut the wire and, from the shiny look of the cut surfaces, had done it not so long before.

  On the way back home, we came across Brio and Roost parked on the side of the road, not far from the turnoff to the chicken farm.

  ‘Hi!’ said Roost, stepping out of the van as we approached. ‘Did you see the dead birds?’

  ‘We saw some,’ I replied. ‘But it looks like they’ve cleaned them up around the gates.’

  ‘Hiding the evidence,’ said Brio through the window. ‘Never mind. I bet the birds keep on dying anyway. There’ll be more dead ones tomorrow.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ asked Roost.

  I looked at Brio, thinking he’d asked her. Clearly he hadn’t. ‘You mean us?’

  ‘Yes. We could tell the authorities, but we’re just visitors. It would be better coming from locals.’

  I nodded slowly. Now I understood the look that had passed between them as we left the beach.

  Brio saw my nod and took it as a yes. ‘You’ll get yourselves on TV. Headlines on the front page of the paper …’ She held her hands apart as if reading a newspaper. ‘Boys discover deadly outbreak!’

  ‘You’ll be heroes,’ added Roost.

  ‘Yeah!’ shouted Nick, excitedly. ‘And get a big, fat reward. Let’s go do it!’

  He was about to ride off when I said, ‘We’ll need to discuss it with Mum and Dad first.’

  ‘What! And let them get the credit? No way! This is our mission.’

  ‘Yes way!’ I said, glaring at him. ‘While you’re staying with us, you do things our way.’

  Brio looked at me, slowly chewing her gum. ‘It is a good idea to discuss it with your parents,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they’ll want you to do the right thing. But don’t leave it too long: bird flu can spread very, very quickly.’

  Without replying, I got on my bike and rode off, not c
aring whether Nick followed or not. He’d only been with us a day, and already I’d had a guts-full of his hyperactivity and his so-called missions. I’d also had enough of Brio and Roost. They could easily have reported the dead birds themselves. If it really was bird flu, then the authorities wouldn’t care who told them. And if it did spread as quickly as Brio said, then why was she messing about trying to convince us?

  CHAPTER 5

  It was still too early to go home, so after calming down and letting Nick catch up, I led the way into Portobello, where I thought we might see some more dead birds.

  We didn’t, but we did see Murph, and that was even better. Patrick Murphy has been called lots of things, ranging from ‘a local identity’ to ‘that crazy old coot’. I called him Murph, as that’s what he liked to be called. So, too, did Dad and Mum. Dad was probably his closest friend, having drunk with him in the pub on many occasions. Mum also kept an eye on him, as he didn’t seem to have any relations in or around Dunedin. In fact, if he had any family anywhere, he never spoke of them; nothing was ever said about his past. Apparently, he had turned up in Portobello more than twenty years before, bought a house, and from then on lived as if there had been nothing before. Of course there were stories about him. The one repeated most often was that he was hiding from the police, but there was no evidence to support this. Dad reckoned that Murph kept quiet about his previous life, not because he had been bad, but because others had been bad towards him. That would explain why he mostly preferred to be by himself than with others.

  By the time I got to know Murph, he was part of the local folklore. Most kids were scared of Murph as he would grump at anyone who went near his house. Basically, they were scared because he was different. So was I at first, but then I was lucky enough to get to know him and to find that, not only was he harmless, he was a good guy.

  It happened when I was seven. I was racing my bike down the hill by his place when I fell off. Murph, who was on his way to the pub, saw the accident and came to my rescue. He took me up to his house to clean and bandage the wound, and when that was done he showed me around the place. That’s how our friendship started. You see, if Murph was in any way crazy, it was about birds. He had cages and cages of them: budgies, canaries, finches, lovebirds, quail … almost every type of bird you’ll ever see in a pet shop. At times he even had a few native birds — injured ones that he looked after until they recovered.