Rat Island

by William Stolzenburg

  Back at Pigeon Island, the comforts of home were short-lived. Henry would shave and dry his clothes and begin preparing for the next trip, baking bread and biscuits, preserving penguin eggs, and stocking his food box with stores of bacon and corned beef and potatoes and greens from the garden. Then out into the stormy passes he and Burt would sail again in search of flightless birds.

  Upon landing ashore with promising habitat, he would muzzle Foxy, tie a bell to his neck, and, in a routine harking back to his halcyon days at Lake Te Anau, send him coursing and clanging through the bush. And somewhere along the trail, if all went well, at the end of a muzzled nose, would crouch the kakapo.

  Henry would lift the bird, as soft as a swaddled infant, and place it in a wooden cage, sending Foxy afield again. Sometimes the team would capture a bird an hour. Other times they would go a day or more empty-handed. But eventually the Putangi would sail home to Pigeon Island bearing cages full of kakapos.

  The kakapo, Henry quickly learned, was a solitary beast that fought when confined with others. Every bird demanded and thereafter got its own quarters, a fact somewhat comically illustrated by the little Putangi, valiantly battling the whitecaps, top-heavy with kakapo cages. Home on Pigeon Island, Henry would sometimes feed and fatten his charges in his open-air aviary, before sailing them one last time across the channel to their new home on Resolution Island.

  Feeding the temperamental kakapo presented new problems. Ever the individuals, no two kakapos agreed on cuisine. After one of his early captives died in his care, Henry the host pained himself to satisfy the slightest whims of his guests. He hunted and foraged as a kakapo, stooping to harvest the bird’s native foods. When the berry crop of the forest petered out, Henry offered bread and potatoes from the Pigeon Island pantry.

  Henry’s tally of transfers swelled. In July the team spent a week hunting new territory in Cascade Cove (where it rained every day) and came home with two dozen more birds. Three months into his work, seventy-five birds had been whisked out of reach of the predators. By October of that year, the count had surpassed two hundred.

  BOWERS AND BALLROOMS

  Henry through his hunting and chasing grew to know the kakapo as no other naturalist of the field or pretender from academia had ever known it. Beyond the more commonly held facts of this singular bird—this solitary, nocturnal, owl-headed parrot that waddled like an elf through dwarf forests of scrub—the kakapo was still queerer by far than any could have imagined. In January 1898, while high on a mountain spine, Henry came upon a network of paths beaten firmly into the spongy earth. They ran for half a mile, interrupted at intervals by round depressions, as if the ground had been stamped by an elephant’s foot. Henry measured the depressions at eighteen inches across. He had once imagined these as kakapo dust baths, a hypothesis that now struck him as absurd. No particle of dust stood a chance on a hill that received, by the sodden Henry’s estimation, an inch of rain a day.

  “So ‘dusting-hole’ is, I think, therefore, a bad name,” Henry wrote. “ ‘Bower’ would be more suitable.” To Henry these were the ballrooms of the kakapo in courting. It was from these ballrooms that the booming voice of the kakapo had serenaded him as he lay alone on those late nights at Lake Te Anau. He could now envision the underlying spectacle behind the mysterious crooning in the darkness. “I think that the males take up their places in these ‘bowers,’ distend their air-sacks, and start their enchanting love-songs; and that the females, like others of the sex, love the music and parade, and come up to see the show—that is, if they can see the green and yellow in the dark; if not they can tramp along the pathways, listen to the music, and have a gossip with the best performers.”

  Henry raised questions that hardly occurred to the curators of museum skins but would one day bear heavily on the kakapo’s precarious future. Why, he asked, did the kakapo not boom and breed every year? “Can it be that they have curious social laws as mysterious as those of ants or bees—that they have a captain or queen to foresee a season of scarcity or abundance and order their conduct accordingly?”

  The kakapo’s sporadic breeding schedule, combined with a habit of laying but one or two eggs on average, suggested a species betting heavily on every chick. Which in turn helped explain their plummetting numbers in a countryside newly swarming with predators.

  Henry began to realize the depths of the kakapo’s vulnerability. Never mind that here was a big, meaty, flightless bird with a fetching scent and eons of ingrained innocence. Compared to its eggs and chicks, the adult kakapo was a veritable fortress. The mother kakapo, Henry discovered, as a habit received no help at the nest. At night, off she would wander, leaving behind eggs or helpless chicks. The father kakapo, Henry noted, “won’t even keep off the rats while the mother is tramping away for food for her little ones.”

  Two months would pass before the kakapo chick, so plump and defenseless, was ready to leave the nest. Two months, in a land increasingly prowled by predators, was a harrowing length of time to dodge the inevitable danger.

  THE WEASEL

  Reports from the mainland warned Henry that those dangers were fast heading his way. In 1897, a surveying party exploring an overland route to Dusky Sound came back with news that the invasion of the Fiordland coast had begun. “I do not know to what to attribute the scarcity of small birds,” reported the expedition’s leader, E. H. Wilmot, though he hazarded a guess. “Ferrets or weasels are evidently scattered about, and one of my men says that a ferret paid him a visit in his tent one night.”

  By then Richard Henry had already begun to suspect that something was amiss in his coastal paradise as well. “I think the ferrets have been down to Supper Cove. In 14 days I saw only one Māori hen and two kakapos … We were no distance from the hills and heard no birds at night.”

  By November 1898, Henry had ferried 572 ground birds, most of them kakapos, to supposed safety. He had overcome the mountains of impenetrable brush, the “roaring fury” of the seas, the rats in his hair, the swarming sand flies, the fickle demands of his captive kakapos. Yet he had underestimated the tenacity of his enemy. In an interview with the Otago Daily Times, Henry had once bragged of the inviolate sanctuary of Resolution Island. “When the ferrets come along they will have miles to swim, and they will have, moreover, to battle with fish, gulls, and the tide, and the latter alone is sufficient to disturb the calculations of even good swimmers. On the islands the birds may survive for half a century, and by that time people in every corner of the world will realise their interest and value, and then there will be no fear of their becoming extinct.” Such was Henry’s confidence when in February 1900 it was summarily crushed with a single blow.

  It was then that the fifty-two-ton schooner the Cavalier, bearing fifteen tourists, sailed into Dusky Sound. The Cavalier met Henry’s cutter on the open water and hailed the now-famous naturalist of Resolution Island. Henry shelved his schedule, took a few of the passengers aboard the Putangi, and escorted the Cavalier on a tour of the sound. He pointed out the mooring place of Captain Cook on Astronomer’s Point, pointed them to hiking routes in the mountains.

  Before setting sail for home, several of the Cavalier’s passengers shared with Henry what to them had seemed a trivial observation. On the morning after mooring at Resolution Island, they had witnessed an interesting little episode, of a weka running along the beach. And bounding fast on its tail was a weasel.

  Henry waited for the punch line to what he could only hope was a joke. But the story ended there. The Cavalier departed, leaving Henry alone with his living nightmare.

  Henry tried to rationalize. There were still many wekas to be found on Resolution Island, a fact that in his experience should preclude the presence of weasels. But there would be no rest until the demon of Resolution Island, specter or reality, was vanquished. The next day, Henry set about making traps. He baited them with fish; he baited them with wekas. The traps lay empty. He mined the bush with the bodies of wekas laced with strychnine. No weasel tracks came
near.

  Henry held desperately to his hope that the tourists’ tale had been hatched as a cruel hoax. “It is a vexatious story & has given me a lot of work,” he complained to his supervisor J. P. Maitland. “Why it was started I can’t imagine. It spoiled my plans here and upset everything.” And after five months of chasing the phantom predator, he was about ready to consider the case closed.

  Following a long and dreary July, waiting out an interminable siege of wind and rain, Henry ventured out with the first window of sunshine to check again on Resolution Island. And there he saw, on August 4, in the entrance of Goose Cove lagoon, scrambling upon the rocky shore, the lithe and tubular figure of a little carnivore, hunting in the herky-jerky style of a mustelid. Henry closed to within ten yards of what was now obviously the animal he had most feared, before the weasel caught his scent and disappeared.

  For months afterward, Henry struggled with the desperation of a death row inmate. He set traps with dead bait and live, and found weasel tracks as close as ten yards away, but could never touch the creature of his nightmares. There was no escaping the inevitable. Where there was one weasel, there was bound to be more. The channel separating Resolution from mainland had been proven too narrow, the impenetrable fortress was no longer. The predators would keep coming.

  Henry started putting birds ashore on other islands; he ventured north through Acheron Passage, to Entry Island of Breaksea Sound, with more birds. But for all the valiant intent, it amounted to the reflex of a man mortally wounded. After a brief vacation in Wellington, Henry returned to Pigeon Island with a broken spirit. Always the meticulous groundskeeper, he could not bring himself to paint his house or tend his garden. His life’s calling in Dusky Sound had become nothing more than a job, a chore of tedium and attrition in the face of an unstoppable enemy. “I have not the old interest in it,” he wrote in January of 1902, “for I am not expecting a … long residence here, on account of that weasel.”

  A month later, a beaten Henry sent his letter of resignation. “I feel I cannot stay here much longer, so I beg to resign my billet as caretaker of Resolution Island and propose to leave here by the next boat.”

  Henry would rally once again, but only briefly. He agreed to reconsider, to stay on at Resolution, though the passion would never return. For the remainder of his days in Dusky Sound, he went through the motions. “I am 57 now and have made no worthy provisions so that my pleasant old dreams of getting married will all have to be buried and that will be alright,” he wrote. “I have the rheumatics in my hands, often lumbago and this wheezy chest so that I am not half my time fit for work. I have been building a dinghey and I could make myself so tired that I nearly always went to bed before dark.”

  Out of a rote sense of duty, Henry continued to move kakapos and kiwis, shuffling birds like deck chairs on the Titanic. His tally surpassed seven hundred birds. It was a wonder there were any left to move. By then he had concluded that the kakapos and kiwis of Fiordland were on the skids. His favorite old hunting grounds on the mainland had fallen quiet. The refugees stranded on Resolution had become sacrificial lambs to professional killers. “Whatever has been the cause it has been the same everywhere I have been these last two seasons,” Henry reported.

  Richard Henry would die twenty years later, alone and confused in a nursing home in Avondale. Back in Dusky Sound, his kakapos were abandoned to their fates, the walls of their last little fortress falling before the vandals.

  Chapter 3

  FOX FIRE

  NEARLY FORTY YEARS after a beaten Richard Henry surrendered Resolution Island and his country’s tailspinning avifauna to their fate, there began an eerie repetition of history. A lone man in a little wooden boat began crossing treacherous seas between islands of snowy peaks, on a mission to save a spectacular kingdom of birds.

  His name was Bob “Sea Otter” Jones, and in 1947, in a faraway island wilderness a hemisphere and six thousand miles north of New Zealand, the sturdy little seaman Jones took up sailing a twenty-foot dory through the storm-battered archipelago of the Bering Sea, as the resident first manager of the Aleutian Islands National Wildlife Refuge.

  Jones had accepted the Herculean task of managing the Aleutians’ sanctuary of seals and seabirds, gathered on a chain of cold and rocky islands arcing eleven hundred miles, from the Alaska Peninsula to the farthest American outlier of Attu. Jones’s work environs had a temper to match the squalling tantrums of Richard Henry’s Fiordland. His was the domain of the infamous Aleutian fog that lured lost pilots into mountainsides, whose peaks occasionally rained boulders of lava and harbored a beastly wind with a name all its own. The williwaw was a meteorological phenomenon born in the icy mountain peaks, a cold, dense slug of air hurtling downward over shore and sea—an avalanche of wind. On the decks of boats bobbing off the coastal swells, sailors would come to fear that certain sudden calm of a hurricane’s eye, heralding the rumble of an oncoming freight train. They would batten down the hatches and brace themselves for the williwaw to come roaring, a mast-snapping, boat-flipping force sometimes reaching speeds of 140 miles an hour.

  Williwaws and erupting volcanoes, blinding fogs and fifty-foot seas—these were as much a part of the Aleutian experience as the rare windows of sunshine that revealed the most ethereal of landscapes. Those few who could roll with the punching winds and shrug off the tenacious chill found seduction in an Aleutian majesty. One of those was Bob Jones.

  Jones had been educated as a biologist at South Dakota State University. The cold, windswept plains of interior North America served as fair training ground for an Aleutian tour of duty. Jones welcomed the stormy moods of the Jekyll and Hyde paradise. There were beaches in the Aleutians harboring bawling herds of northern fur seals by the hundreds of thousands. There were sea cliffs crammed wing to wing with nesting murres and kittiwakes, puffins and auklets, amassing by the millions. Even in the forbidding winter swells of the Bering Sea, flocks of floating seabirds would stretch to the horizons as the bison had once blanketed the Great Plains.

  One could only imagine the Aleutians at their wildest, for their heyday had long passed. However stunning the show, the wildlife multitudes that Jones had inherited were in fact the withered vestiges of an epic plunder.

  BERING

  In June 1741, the Russian ship St. Peter, with a crew of seventy-six commanded by Vitus Bering, sailed from the Siberian shores of Kamchatka in exploration of the North Pacific. Nearly six weeks later, after reaching the Alaskan shores of what is now America, a mysteriously indifferent Commander Bering celebrated the discovery of his lifetime with an inexplicable impatience to head home. After a brief foray along the Alaskan coast, the St. Peter weighed anchor and headed back across the sea that would take Bering’s name, as well as his life.

  Bering’s premonitions soon became prophecy. By late September, halfway home across the Aleutian chain, a third of Bering’s crew were lying in the hold, joints aching, teeth loosening, faces yellowing with the slow death of scurvy. Bering himself was bedridden with a mysterious malady all his own. With ship and crew at half-mast, the signature williwaw of the Aleutians came crashing. “We could hear the wind rush as if out of a narrow passage,” noted the ship’s naturalist, Georg Steller in his journal, “with such terrible whistling, raging and blustering that we were in danger of losing masts or rudder or else of seeing the vessel broken by the waves, which pounded as when cannons are fired, so that we were expecting every moment that last stroke and death. Even the old and experienced pilot Hesselberg could not recall among his fifty years at sea having passed through a storm which even resembled it.”

  On the morning of September 30 a williwaw more ferocious than the last struck the St. Peter. “No one could lie down, sit up, or stand,” wrote Steller. “Nobody was able to remain at his post: we were drifting under the might of God wither the angry heavens willed to send us. Half of our crew lay sick and weak, the other half were quite crazed and maddened from the terrifying motion of the sea and ship. There was muc
h praying, to be sure, but the curses piled up during ten years in Siberia prevented any response. Beyond the ship we could see not a fathom out into the ocean because we continuously lay buried among the cruel waves. Under such conditions no one any longer possessed either courage or counsel.”

  The siege extended through October. Under barrage of wind and wave and scurvy, their food running short, minds and bodies unraveled. Corpses began going overboard with nearly daily routine.

  Finally, on November 4, dead ahead of the storm-tossed ship arose a mountainous land, mistakenly imagined by the desperate crew as the shores of their homeland. “It is impossible to describe how great and extraordinary was the joy over everybody at this sight,” Steller wrote. “The half-dead crawled up to see it, and all thanked God heartily for this great mercy.”

  Celebration soon turned to panic. Before dawn, heavy surf snapped the St. Peter’s anchor and began sweeping ship and crew toward the rocks. Sea-hardened sailors ran crying and babbling. Two corpses being held for burial on land but now arousing superstitions “were thrown without ceremony neck and heels into the sea.”

  In the moment when all braced to be dashed to their deaths upon the rocks, providence intervened. The St. Peter rose on the benevolent crest of a rogue wave, lifting the wounded ship and crew over the jaws of the reef and depositing them at sudden peace in a quiet pool before the beach. The wind calmed, a crescent moon shone above a majestic horizon of sandy dunes and snowcapped peaks. The crewmen of the St. Peter had just experienced the luckiest moment of their lives. The natives of the land before them, however, had just experienced their most unfortunate.