Birdbrain (16 page)

I show her the day-leg suggestions on the other side of the map. Although the leg from Farrell Point to Watershed Camp is split across two days, it’s only twenty-four kilometres. For us that’s barely a day’s walk.

Her jaw hits the floor. She’s about to say something, but I continue now that I’m in my stride.

From Louisa River to Cox Bight was eighteen kilometres, I remind her. We covered that in six hours, and this terrain looks pretty similar. Mathematically that means twenty-four kilometres should take us eight hours. That’s an average day’s stretch. So if we just behave ourselves and carry on now we’ll cover the two-day stretch tomorrow, and what do you know — we’ll be in Scott’s Peak on Tuesday.

I look at the buildings in Melaleuca, only a tantalizing stone’s throw away. At the same time I realize that if we follow Jyrki’s new plan we can be out of here two days ahead of schedule.

I think about Ironbound. I think about it for a long time. Then the previous horrendous sticky night, the flooding Rivulet, the steep incline at Granite Beach. I think about the leeches, the pit toilet at Deadman’s Bay, and it all makes me shudder. I think of Ironbound once again, and the shuddering continues. I think about the endless — can it really have taken us only six hours? — trudging across the tussocks and bogs on the plains after leaving Louisa River and the lung-wrenching climb across Red Hill, which Jyrki seemed to think was a piece of cake. Cox Bight, which was like a tiny little paradise before the snake of the thunderstorm appeared and ruined everything.

I think of my back and my shoulders.

I think of my period.

I think of walls and roofs.

I think of Tuesday and Thursday.

I think of Forneaux Lodge and Punga Cove back at Queen Charlotte Track. This is like leaving Forneaux Lodge without the promise of Punga Cove.

And while we’re on the subject of New Zealand and Sabine Circuit and Granite Beach, how many times has Jyrki said, as if in passing, that this was nothing, nothing at all, we might as well do another ten-kilometre stretch now that we’ve warmed up properly?

I’ve had enough. I won’t hear a single ‘If you managed that, you’ll manage this, too,’ comment ever again.

I look at Jyrki.

He looks weird with a week’s worth of stubble, and his hair, instead of being carefully shaven, is now a short crop the colour of the dirt track.

‘Can’t we even go and have lunch in one of the huts?’

Jyrki sighs and glances at his watch for the umpteenth time. For someone so thrilled about living rough his attachment to his watch is unhealthy, to say the least. He slings his rucksack over his shoulder, and we stride off along the crunching gravel road.

The corrugated iron hut is, well, made of corrugated iron, and the air inside is hot and stuffy, but still it feels like walking into a hotel. The first thing I see is the kitchen work surface with a shelf above it. On the shelf people had left a few boxes of matches, several half-burnt candles and . ..

Half a dozen different-sized gas cylinders.

It makes sense. People have ended up with leftover gas that they don’t want to take on to the aeroplane. Or for some reason they might have simply wanted to lighten their load. Either that or they haven’t seen the sense in carrying a half-empty gas cylinder all the way home when someone else could use it.

My eyes dart around the hut like a guppy. A couple of sleeping-bags and rucksacks have been laid out on the bunks, but there’s plenty of room. People starting out along Southy tomorrow; people waiting for the plane home; birdwatchers. You could count them on one hand. Yee-haa!

On the table there’s an old small-format magazine,
Natural History Digest.
Small print but something to read all the same. And great paper. There’s only one crumpled scrap of the religious pamphlets left in the side pocket of my rucksack.

I take another look at the gas cylinders. Their combined contents, even if there’s nothing more than a fart in each of them, represents eight whole minutes of free cooking time at the very least. Cooking time in a place where the wind and the rain cannot,
cannot
reach the cooker’s flame.

And that’s not all, I realize. We could even afford to heat up a pot of water and have a decent wash, pour something almost body temperature over our necks and heads and backs.

I lower my rucksack to the floor and make a mental note of which bunk I’m going to have. The one up there on the left looks good enough.

‘So I suppose we should take the boat across to Bathurst Narrows today then?’

My voice is steady and business-like, my PR skills coming to the fore. Jyrki nods. He seems not to know whether to be happy about my knowledge of the route or worried about my tone of voice.

‘I mean, we should make sure we set aside enough time. You never know what could happen. It’s a much longer crossing than the one at Prion Beach, and the channel is probably much deeper. What if the wind whips up or there’s a storm? What if there’s a problem with the boat or we arrive there and find there’s no boat at all? We need to leave ourselves some leeway. If there’s no drinking water at Joan Point, what are we going to do if we’re still stuck there by sunset? Think of how quickly the weather turned yesterday.’

I look at Jyrki with large calculating eyes.

‘We could make ourselves a proper meal. Look!’ I gasp and gesture towards the row of gas cylinders as if I’d only just seen them. ‘We could boil up some of that pasta.’

I know I’m really close to winning him over. He’s the one who bought the orzo in his great wisdom.

‘And we could visit the bird-watching hut and see if we can spot the famous rare orange-arsed parrots the guidebooks were raving about. It’s not every day you get to see super-endangered orange-arsed parrots.’ I almost squeal, because now’s the time to put the icing on the cake, now’s the time to play it up, to bring home the victory.

Jyrki sniffs.

‘It’s the
orange-bellied
parrot.
Neophema chrysogaster!

How does anyone know stuff like that?

Jyrki shrugs his shoulders. ‘I suppose we do need to let the tent dry out.’

For once people and buildings don’t necessarily mean that someone’s trying to make a quick profit.

When the weather’s bad and planes are delayed, people waiting for a return flight can sometimes find themselves with absolutely nothing to eat. Even though they’ve got walls to protect them and a roof above their heads. Even though there are dozens of people in the same place, that doesn’t automatically translate into shops and kiosks.

Everybody out here has a carefully calculated amount of food with them. If somebody who’d missed their flight because of yesterday’s storm came in here and asked for a rice cake, I wouldn’t be able to give him one. If he offered me a hundred dollars, I couldn’t sell.

Out here I might as well use banknotes to wipe my arse instead of those pamphlets.

There would be something poetic about that.

The cooker is hissing on full blast. The gas cylinder is twice as big as ours, and it must have about a quarter of its contents left. Let it cook away.

This is going to be a banquet. First a handful of shredded salami to grease the bottom of the pot. Then plenty of garlic and some chopped onion. Saute it for a moment, stirring occasionally. Then fill the pot with water and add a meat stock cube. Once it’s dissolved, add a cup of orzo and a good squirt of tomato puree. Then sprinkle with mixed spices from the film tube.

The smell is quite dizzying.

While we’re waiting for everything to cook, she brings in the hut’s registration log. The log is large and hardbacked, different from the lame squared-paper jotters we’d found in the past. She leafs through the book, laughing at some of the comments and looking for any mentions of Finland. When she can’t find any she convinces me to write down our names and our projected timetable for the trip to Scott’s Peak, so that we will go down in history as perhaps the first Finns to travel along this trail.

The first pot of food disappears from our plates as we’re waiting for the next one to cook. We only slow down once we’re on the second plateful.

We lick our plates.

We afford ourselves the luxury of warming some water for the dishes. We take care of the washing-up a good distance into the bushes behind the hut, making sure not to leave any grain of pasta or sliver of onion on the ground. The water, smelling slightly of salt, tomato and fat, soaks into the earth.

The magazine on the table has disappeared. I see a corner of it jutting out from beneath a sleeping-bag laid out on the upper bunk.

There’s still a shitload of daylight left.

According to the log in the bird-watching shack, the last person to visit this place sat on his arse for six hours without catching sight of a single orange one.

Deny King Memorial Hide is a surprisingly large wooden building in the middle of the bushes; it must be over fifteen square metres in size. One of its walls is half made of glass, and beneath the observation wall someone has built a shelf of some sort, a work surface where people can set up tripods and other bird-watching paraphernalia. On the other wall there’s a slanting shelf bearing the observation log, and the walls themselves are covered with aged photographs of different birds and their names. I look around for a photograph of the orange-arsed parrot — I wouldn’t know what it looked like otherwise.
Neophema chrysogaster.
It’s a spectacular looking creature with splashes of pure turquoise on its beak and wings. Then, true enough, right between its legs is a rusty, orange blob, as though the bird, too, was having its period.

Jyrki is, of course, watching the feeding spot like a hawk. Now that we’re here I drop hints that it’s really important for him to see one of these chicks.

He protests, saying a shack like this isn’t the real way to spot rare birds. They must be being fed, if not overtly then in secret. Jyrki probably thinks that if you pamper a threatened winged creature too much, sooner or later it’ll rise up against its keepers, and before you know it all local species of parrot will gather on the roofs of Melaleuca and start attacking unsuspecting hikers’ rice cakes in some great Hitchcockian scene.

As Jyrki presses his nose up against the glass I notice a small space, separated off from the rest of the shack, with a screen and containing a table and a couple of chairs, presumably a place where people can eat their sandwiches while waiting their turn or having a break from staring into the camera finder.

Hang on a minute. A space to have lunch.

There’s one particular item in the room that I allow to take shape in my consciousness, something that’s almost too familiar to notice, except when it’s something you haven’t seen for a while. For weeks. Ages.

‘Bloody hell. Bloody hell!’ I hear Jyrki hissing. ‘That’s it!’

I look at his hand as he scoops the air, come over here, quickly, and I just about manage to tear my eyes away from something far more interesting.

To hell with the orange arses.

‘Kea: The Open-Programme Bird’

by Jiselle Ruby and Anthony Verloc

During the time of the Gondwana continent, over eighty million years ago, New Zealand was part of a mainland whose closest neighbours were Eastern Australia and part of what is now the Antarctic. When Gondwana split up through the forces of continental drift, many entire ecosystems of trees and animals moved with the sailing landmasses. Certain forest types common in New Zealand have also been found in Chile and Tasmania. To this day, despite the considerable distance, Australia and New Zealand share around 80 per cent of their most highly evolved flora.

It’s odd waking up in Melaleuca — no whispering or murmuring of the trees around us, no waves lapping against the shore in the background as though they were keeping count of our heartbeats.

At night you could hear the drone of the mosquitoes. We never had any trouble with them in the tent, as long as you remembered to open the mosquito net only when absolutely necessary. Here it only takes your hut-mates to pop out for a slash in the night. Especially coming back into the hut, once the mosquitoes have picked up the scent of their victim, the opening and closing of the door brings in a legion of bloodsuckers every time.

The leg ahead of us will only take a few measly hours. It feels strange and wrong. We’ve got used to waking up before sunrise, drinking tea as day breaks and being on the road by seven o’clock. We’ve woken up to the sound of birdsong and the gradually strengthening light filtering in through the tent wall.

It’s half past seven. I stretch and laze in my sleeping-bag. The bunk is harder than the ground, usually softened with layers of eucalyptus leaves. My sides ache despite the sleeping-bag and the mat.

Wow, she’s awake. She’s already taken the breakfast stuff out and is now boiling up some water. Not using our gas cylinder, of course, but one of those left on the shelf. She’s learning.

My nostrils are filled with the smell of instant coffee. Coffee! Again, she hasn’t even bothered asking me.

She walks up to the bunk with her coffee cup in one hand and our gas cylinder in the other hand. She holds it out towards me and asks whether we should pack one of the leftover cylinders from the shelf as well, just in case.

I shake the cylinder and weigh it in my hand. It feels like it’s still half full.

We’re not going to start lugging another two hundred grams of metal around just for fifty grams of liquid gas, I tell her. She nods and slurps her coffee, happy as a lark.

‘Go and fill up the water bottles. I’m going to pop back there one last time.’

We’ve carried our rucksacks out to the fork in the path near the bird- watching shack. I point in that direction.

‘What for?’

‘Just want to see whether there have been any more sightings of the orange arses.’

Jyrki’s brow sets in a furrow, but he can’t say anything. He was so chuffed and excited about our two-second sighting of the orange bums that I’m sure he’d be pleased to know that nobody else has seen them since. Besides, filling the water bottles takes time, and you don’t need two people to do it.

The observatory is quiet. Nobody around at the moment. Good. On the other hand, I would have done this no matter who else had been around.

I got everything ready back at the hut while Jyrki was checking whether the tent was dry. It’s a good job my shorts have such large cargo pockets.

In the corner of the observatory shack there is a real
bona fide
rubbish bin.

There they fly, happily, carefree, straight into the pale-green plastic bucket lined with a black bin-liner. In go the thin plastic fruit bag stuffed with the empty remnants of a sachet of noodles, the used teabags, the plastic processed- cheese wrappers, tin foil that had once contained tuna, packets of instant mash, tissues (used to clean plates and knives) that we couldn’t reuse in the pit toilets, even the greasy plastic wrapper from the missing pepperoni sausage. And in goes the resealable bag with three used tampons lying next to one another like dark, fat, carmine red caterpillars, and alongside them a couple of brown-stained panty liners complete with their backing papers rolled into tight little spirals.

Goodbye, farewell,
auf Wiedersehen,
adieu to the muesli-bar wrappers floating at the bottom of my pocket, the chewing-gum wrappers, the remains of a couple of plasters, their protective papers and bits pulled off my skin. The cotton wool bandage and the skin tape from the back of my knee.

This is a magic receptacle where rubbish disappears by itself and travels far out into a distant universe.

I feel a hundred times lighter as I all but dance out on to the path alongside the runway.

This airport terminal is just a shack, completely open on one side and with a couple of wooden benches — nothing but a glorified bus shelter. There’s a guy with a dark beard in his thirties sitting there with a rucksack waiting for the day’s plane. Tied to the side of the rucksack is a robust-looking tripod. Next to him on the ground is a large aluminium camera case.

I say hello. The guy starts chatting straight away. A clear case of extreme social deprivation, so clear that I can’t help smiling. Even without all the photography equipment, his chubby, tidy appearance reveals he’s not one of our hiking colleagues.

The guy is from the USA, out here on a research grant to photograph birds in the wild for a book. He excitedly tells me how, in his whole life in the States, he’s spotted about three hundred different species, and in five weeks in Australia he’s spotted the same number again. Tasmania is his final stop before flying home.

I ask him whether he’s seen the orange-bellied parrot. He claims he has, at the observatory of course. But he seems far more excited about a different sighting altogether. A nocturnal species, one he hasn’t yet been able to identify. It’s not the
Pezoporus occidentalis,
apparently, which is only found in mainland Australia. But it can’t be the
Pezoporus wallicus
either, which is a local species that moves around during the day. I remember my friend Juha Lehtinen, the most enthusiastic amateur ornithologist I know, mentioning that one. The ground parrot is an especially rare bird, and it’s name states the obvious about its nesting habits. This means these birds are directly affected by bush fires, too. I can’t recall whether they suffer because of them or benefit from them. There was plenty of information on Australian parrot species on the internet. I couldn’t avoid it when I was looking for the Finnish name for the orange bellies. Just to make sure. Now I’ve seen one I can drop it into a conversation with Juha and tell him in passing that there are barely two hundred of them in the world.

I hear the crunch of footsteps. I look behind me. She’s coming out of the observatory and raises her hand in an exaggerated wave to our photographer friend. Without saying a word she starts stuffing the newly filled water bottles into her rucksack pockets.

The photographer carries on with his incessant chit-chat. There are still lots of deserted areas of Australia and Tasmania, and it wouldn’t be surprising if there were still some species that hadn’t been discovered and identified.

Apparently there are some migratory species that fly over from the mainland and nest here for the summer. There might be species that only live in areas so remote that they have never been identified by science, let alone documented. There are species with only small populations, ones that ornithologists have simply never come across.

To interrupt his flow of consciousness for a moment, I mention the keas of New Zealand. At that he becomes even more excited and explains that research has shown that many species of parrot can reach the cognitive level of a five-year-old.

Sounds like a bit of an exaggeration to me. Lots of five-year-olds can read. Or at least operate the video recorder. Birds are primitive animals, only slightly more evolved than reptiles.

I say that any researcher that comes to that conclusion must have pretty interesting children themselves.

The guy doesn’t get the joke.

We haul our rucksacks on to our backs. He says he hopes we have a nice day, as if we were going off for a picnic. Doughnut Boy hasn’t got the faintest idea where we’re headed. He can’t put things in any order of importance.