Off the Radar

by Te Radar

  I’m not planning anything as extensive as a blanket. All I want is enough skins to fashion a hot-water bottle.

  The reason I want a possum-fur hot-water-bottle cover is that the caravan is freezing and I can hardly install the potbelly in there, although the thought has crossed my mind. Nor have I enough electricity to run a heater.

  I do, however, have enough solar electricity to power my laptop and some LED lights. The solar system has been installed by Walter, a sun lover from Germany. By sun lover I mean, of course, a solar enthusiast, not a nudist.

  At least, as far as I know he isn’t a nudist. He might be, I guess, but that is really up to him.

  He was certainly wearing pants when I visited him at his house one overcast day to discuss installing a solar set-up that would produce enough current to power my laptop and recharge my cellphone, because even when living in a field there are moments when those two appliances are important.

  We chatted about the idea over a cup of tea made from water that he had boiled with the power of the sun, harnessed by tin foil, which when laid in the correct concave shape has the ability to focus the sun into one heat-inducing spot.

  He thought that my solar power ambitions would be no problem at all, and within a short time he had installed a system.

  Now, for the first time in months, I have the ability to generate light other than with a temperamental battery or gas-powered lamp. Happy days are here.

  However, the LED lights emit a cold blue light that makes you feel chilly all the time. I would have preferred them to have been warmer. Red would have been awesome, as it would have made it seem as if I were on the bridge of a submarine permanently at action stations. I would have had an enduring sensation that something could happen at any minute.

  I tolerate the LEDs for some time until one night I am struck by the thought that as I am able to charge my laptop, there is no reason why I can’t plug in a lamp. I haven’t told anyone else about the length of time it took to come to this revelation, because it might make me appear a little dim.

  I did wonder if the system had the power to electrocute me. That would have been an embarrassing way to go.

  I have also decided to reduce my battery use when powering little essentials like my transistor by investing in a wind-up radio. It is excellent. No longer do I have to suffer the inconvenience of flat batteries. I simply wind it up.

  Instead, I now suffer the inconvenience of having a tranny that isn’t very good at picking up stations. Every station sounds like it is being broadcast from the moon, which is also, inexplicably, under water. I have to hold the tranny continually, usually in a position of mild discomfort, in order to hear the news headlines.

  But the solar power system is unable to support a heater, which means I am still cold.

  At one stage, it occurred to me that I could be warm in a garment knitted from the wool of my sheep.

  I’d taken the fleece up the hill to Sharon, a wool carder. Fittingly, she was a card. Hailing from Australia, she was a bundle of energy. One only had to ask something and she would do it. ‘No problem,’ she would enthuse.

  She was a necessary cog in a home spinning wheel, because in a small shed on the back of her section Sharon had installed a wool-carding machine. She would wash the wool, and then the machine would brush the wool ready for spinning.

  She invited me to join the spinners.

  In a small church hall, as the twilight became night, I sat with the gentle rhythm of the spinning wheel, clickity-clacking, as the toes of several women of a certain age rhythmically massaged the treadles of their spinning machines. They were kindly attempting to teach me to spin, a task that seemed to involve a little too much multitasking for me to fully master. I would master one part of it, but would then forget to breathe. When I remembered to breathe, the part I had mastered fell apart.

  I had baked them an apple crumble in the mud oven, and I was hoping that I hadn’t dropped any of the rock-hard door grit into it, as it had the ability, fired concrete-like by the heat, to break a tooth if it was bitten. That would have put a damper on the evening.

  By the end of the evening, I had a small ball of twine of no specified nor uniform thickness, and a bag of carded wool that appeared not to have been touched.

  This was disappointing as I had wanted to have spun enough wool to have been able to knit some glittens—half-gloves, half-fingerless mittens. The glove portion folds over the fingerless fingers to keep them warm. The small flaw in that plan was that at that stage I wasn’t quite sure how to knit.

  I failed, too, in converting the rest of the wool into felt. I thought perhaps a nice felt poncho could have been a snug winter fashion item. I managed to ruin a large hunk of my carded wool with soap and water before Sharon informed me that it was not the right kind of wool for making felt.

  Either one of these sadly non-existent garments would have been perfect for the situation where I now find myself with Shawn, one icy night. As I’ve had no luck with my Timms trap, he has offered to take me to a forestry block he is overseeing to see if I can shoot some possums.

  ‘There might be few deer here too,’ he says. ‘We could get you one.’

  Sure enough, on the brow of the hill at the edge of the headlights’ brightness, the fleeting shape of two young stags sweeps through. They’re a majestic animal, whose speed and grace make them appear as if they are flying low over the landscape, vaulting fences, gliding over scrub, and disappearing in the blink of an eye.

  ‘If we do go for a deer, you’ll have to shoot it in the head or the neck,’ counsels Shawn, ‘and you won’t get much time. If you can’t get a clean shot, don’t shoot.’

  I couldn’t agree more. There’s something noble about the deer, and I don’t want to wound one. It will be a clean kill or nothing at all.

  But it is not to be. By the time I have exited the vehicle, the deer are spooked. I barely have time to line one up in the scope and it is gone, disappearing silently into the night. I don’t mind. There is always next time.

  There is no such problem with the possums. They are everywhere. Some stand their ground in the middle of the road, others scamper off, some mooch about, whilst others climb the nearest tree as fast as their little legs can propel them.

  I want to kill them cleanly too, with a shot to the head, and they seem to know this. They have a superb defence mechanism, which consists of walking slowly away from me with their heads down, so that all that fills the scope is their fluffy rump.

  The .22 isn’t really powerful enough for shooting right through them, so it is a matter of waiting to see if they turn around to look at what is going on. Sometimes a whistle works, and at other times they march slowly on, turning only when they come to a fence.

  I shoot them on posts. I shoot them in paddocks. I shoot them out of beeches. It is carnage. It isn’t that I stop counting how many I shoot, but I simply lose count.

  Is it simply killing for sport, or do I do it because of some perceived notion that the more possums I destroy, the more I will help the bush? It isn’t like I will clear the area of them. A few nights later we will head back out again, and there will be no shortage of them then either. All that we can do is create a vacuum into which more will flow.

  So why kill so many? For fun? I really don’t know.

  One childhood night out hunting, I’d picked up a possum that I had shot by the tail. Spooked by the dark at the best of times, I leapt nearly high enough to clutch the moon when the supposedly dead possum had swung around and scraped my leg. Since then I have been wary of any animal playing possum, pretending to be dead when they are most certainly not.

  Especially possums playing possum. They are good at that.

  Whilst out with Shawn, I also take the opportunity to bag a few rabbits for a casserole. Shawn checks the rabbits carefully before I shoot them to make sure they are not a little ginger one that he has seen around, and that he and his daughters have informally adopted. Once again, the odd one out is saved
by virtue of its freakishness.

  I gather up the best possums to take home to skin. I could have plucked the rest of them, as possum fur can be plucked while the corpse is warm quite easily, with the fur coming off in great handfuls.

  I’ve hunted possums for years and never realised this.

  I have invested in a bottle of hide tanning solution. This is not a bronzer to make me appear a little more sun kissed, but a product to turn skins into leather.

  The instructions are, to be generous, scant. I expect more information, but they seem to assume that whoever is doing this has some kind of knowledge prior to purchasing the formula.

  First, I need to salt the skins, which I do by staple-gunning them to a piece of plywood, fur side down, and coating them liberally with salt. Then I leave them to season, mix up the solution, put the skins in, forget to agitate them, take the skins out, and wash and dry them.

  It’s not a dismal failure, but nor is it the result I was expecting. Clearly it’s not as simple as the lack of directions would lead one to believe.

  Jane is still insisting that I savour the meat of one, and I have to confess to a certain curiosity. I would hate to think that it was delicious and that I had been missing out on a free meat treat all of these years. At one stage some years prior, my local Chinese greengrocer had been selling them in frozen and bagged form, only they were calling them ‘apple-eating tree bears’.

  In hindsight, I’m amazed I could resist.

  I’ve always enjoyed eating an animal small enough to be served whole. There’s no mistaking what it is. This is the case with possum.

  I’ve checked its liver for any signs of lesions that might indicate tuberculosis, as I have no wish to contract TB and become a frail male Katherine Mansfield, coughing blood as I linger over my work of great New Zealand literature.

  There is no disguising the smell though. It’s possum through and through.

  It’s a smell that takes some getting out of the pores of the skin. Having spent the better part of a day skinning a pile of them, I find the scent has worked its way into my skin, and I smell for days. I’m surprised I’m not ravaged in my sleep by randy possums mistaking me for one of their own.

  I have looked on the Internet for recipes, and many mention the need to remove the musk glands, located in the small of the back and on its front, but I can’t find them. All I know is that when selecting a possum to eat, you have to ensure it’s a female. There’s nothing like the taint of testosterone to ruin meat.

  In the end I merely slather the carcass in olive oil and garlic, stuff the belly cavity with par-boiled potatoes and carrots, and fold it up to fit in the roasting tray. The unfortunate thing is that the corpse lies on its back, with its back legs spread akimbo in what can only be construed as a posthumous tribute to Hustler magazine. It is positively exploitative.

  Having left its furry paws on like little hairy mittens, I am bemused to note that the hair hasn’t burnt off them when I withdraw it from the kiln. What I hadn’t expected was that the tail would curl up completely, like a little crispy koru. So grotesquely cute.

  There is a surprising amount of meat on the possum, and most of it serves only to prove why it is that not many people choose to eat it.

  Not even a considerable amount of the applecohol I have brewed with Rudolph can remove the lingering taste.

  The only drawback to the possum-fur hot-water-bottle cover is forgetting you have filled it and put it in your bed. It can seem, as you slide your toes down under the blankets, that something has come in from the wild and snuggled into your bed.

  Believe me, that can be frightening, especially when you smell as I do.

  29

  Lambs to the slaughter

  Standing in the door of the local hall with the collective eyes of the room running from the feathered plumage of my headdress, down past the clinging tightness of my sequined mini-dress, and lingering on my shapely, pantyhose-clad legs and high-heeled feet, I realise that I may not be dressed entirely appropriately in my quest to borrow some local children.

  Instead it appears that I am the horror of the local menfolk and the envy of the local women, as I have always had wonderfully shaped ladylike legs. It’s both a blessing and a curse.

  I had volunteered my services as the MC at a Las Vegas-themed fundraiser for the local playcentre, and I’d simply assumed that such an event would entail people dressing to the theme. I was obviously wrong.

  As part of the proceedings involve a charity auction, I thought what better way to raise money for them than by auctioning off a chance for some of the children to live the television dream by appearing in my programme for a few short moments. It will raise some much-needed cash for the playcentre, and I will gain a little free labour to help me around the farm. Everybody will win.

  Over the course of the next few hours, through a combination of subtle flirtation and threats, I help to empty the pockets of the assembled masses. By the time the auction rolls around I have redeemed myself to such an extent that a flurry of bidding results in the splitting of the prize between two families, who promise to bring their offspring to the farm the next weekend. I spend the following week envisaging myself being carried from task to task on a litter, reclining with a fruity cocktail as I direct the children in their labours. Sadly, when they arrive, they are slightly smaller than I had imagined, and I have to scale back my plans as I don’t wish to send them back to their parents any more damaged than is necessary.

  The main reason I need the help is that I am in the last days of my sustainability experiment, and I require assistance in a final push to finish such tasks as tidying the gardens before replanting them so that the next occupier of the land has something in place when they arrive. After all, one of the tenets of sustainability is leaving the land in better condition than when you found it, and that at least is something I feel I can achieve.

  More importantly though, I need help in wrangling my two remaining sheep. In lieu of a dog, what could be better than a few energetic children? My only concern is that they will prove wildly more undisciplined and difficult to control than a dog.

  I need to pen the sheep as their presence is required at an event to be known as ‘Te Radar’s Last Supper’. What better way to say thank you to the community that has so generously helped me to survive than by impaling an animal on a pole and roasting it over hot coals, so that we can then break bread and share meat and drink booze over the course of an evening.

  Of course, I don’t think it entirely wise to inform the children of the reason they are rounding up the sheep.

  The children have a rather misguided notion of how easy the task in front of them will be as we head up to The Tops to muster the hapless sheep. Clearly they have not met my sheep.

  As soon as we enter the paddock, the sheep stand up, then as I encourage the kids to ‘Get away back’, the sheep turn tail and bolt to the top of the paddock, followed closely by the children.

  Up to the top they all run, and once there the sheep run all the way back down again, followed by the puffing children, who, once they reach the bottom, can only look on as the sheep elude them and once again run back to the top of the hill, where they stand watching as the children, encouraged by my shouts to ‘Go round’, stagger back up after them.

  Using all the skills I can recall from a childhood spent transfixed by the iconic New Zealand television programme A Dog’s Show, a riveting half-hour of sheep dog trialling that would hold the nation enthralled of a Sunday evening as men and dogs pitted themselves against the unpredictable sheep, I try to position the children so that they can bring the sheep back with minimal effort.

  ‘Steady…steady,’ I yell at them. ‘Go round, that’s it…steady, go right…sit down, SIT! Good boy.’

  Tentatively the kids work the sheep down the hill and into the pen. I close the gate, and we are done.

  ‘Good kids,’ I say, patting them on their tousled heads. ‘Now, go home.’

  With the kids
gone, there’s nothing to do but wait until Shawn arrives the following day to help me prepare the sheep for the party.

  As the sheep loiter in their pen, nibbling at hay, unaware of their impending fate, I realise that in a way, the Agrodome celebrates only half the sheep’s contribution to the country, for it only tells the story of their fleece. While sheep have served us handsomely with their wool, they have also laid down their lives for the meat industry.

  Thankfully, this part of their legacy is celebrated at the place that I rate as one of the nation’s greatest theme parks, Totara Estate. Nowhere else in the world would I imagine has an abattoir been converted into a fun family day out.

  Nestled beneath a hill just south of Oamaru, Totara Estate is the site where the sheep were mustered and slaughtered to produce the meat required for the first consignment of frozen lamb to be exported from New Zealand.

  A few of the original buildings remain. One is the original killing shed. As you approach the building, you notice some clay spouts jutting from the building at the level of the internal floor. These served the simple purpose of allowing the blood and offal to flow out of the shed and into large troughs that serviced the half-acre pen reputed to contain some of the most ferocious pigs you were ever likely to encounter.

  This was no doubt considered at the time to be a state-of-the-art and highly efficient waste disposal method, and when dealing with dead sheep, there is an awful lot of waste to dispose of.

  At one point, I happened to be away from the farm filming Homegrown, and Jane had booked in the home-kill butcher to dispatch a couple of my sheep. She had forgotten that the home-kill people only take away the dressed carcasses, and so she was left with a wheelbarrow filled to the rim with the voluminous contents of the sheep’s innards. These require quite a large hole in which to bury them, and I’m sure that as she laboured away digging it, she must have been thinking that this was not quite the glamour of the television industry that she had run away from Taranaki to find.