Gone by Michael Blencowe

Author:Michael Blencowe [Blencowe, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

My 70-litre backpack is stuffed with enough food, water and sunscreen for four days ‘tramping in the bush’, but I’ve strapped my most essential item, my digital camera, to my hip like some sharpshooting sheriff. If a kōkako lands in front of me, I’ll need to be quick on the draw to get my photo before it reaches for the sky and flies back into oblivion. News arrives that just two days ago a Department of Conservation ranger heard ‘repeated kōkako-like flute calls’ about a day’s walk ahead. I envisage myself as the man in Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Explorer’, searching for ‘Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!’ Alone in a vast wilderness I’m eager to experience the freedom, the peace, the solitude.

This is hell. It’s 3 a.m. and I’m sharing a cramped wooden bunkhouse in the back of beyond with 13 complete strangers. My foam earplugs are powerless against their raucous snoring. In my bottom bunk I’m a prisoner in my own sleeping bag; all I can do is peer through the zipped opening to where a silver sliver of moonlight illuminates a poster pinned to the wooden wall. It’s the exact same poster that Liam Beattie saw after his sighting of a South Island kōkako ‘chilling out’ just behind this bunkhouse. Its masked face is the last thing I see as I finally slip into sleep and dream of orange wattles.

At first light I emerge from my cocoon, tiptoe past the snoring strangers and burst from the bunkhouse into another sparkling New Zealand morning. Behind the hut lies ‘The Enchanted Forest’, a fairy-tale woodland of waterfalls and caves where every tree and rock is festooned with soft mosses; I half expect to see a unicorn trotting past. I find a comfortable spot in a glade and sit, soaking up the silence, waiting for my own mythical creature, the Grey Ghost. It’s undeniably exhilarating, the feeling that, at any moment, the paths and destinies of a foraging kōkako and a wandering middle-aged Englishman could cross. I fantasise about returning to the Booth Museum, NZ$10,000 in my back pocket, opening that cabinet of extinct animals and reclaiming the kōkako for the land of the living. I’d raise the stuffed specimen above my head like the World Cup as I’m carried, shoulder high, through the cheering crowds along Dyke Road.

After a few hours of kōkako-free bird-watching, I relax my grip on my camera and despondently head back to the bunkhouse for some lunch. And that’s when I see it. I freeze. Standing right there in front of me, maybe just 3 metres (10 feet) away, is a bird. A bird that has been extinct for 50 years. And yet, there it stands, next to the bunkhouse’s outdoor toilet. It looks up and fixes me with a hard stare. I fumble for my camera, point and press the shutter button just as the toilet door bursts opens and a woman exits, the swinging door almost knocking the bird to the floor.

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