Such caution—fear, even—surprised Loftgren. Having carried out important fieldwork in both Papua New Guinea and the western Amazon, he was hardly about to be intimidated by the prospect of working on Kauai, with a profusion of Sheratons and Hyatts sprawling not two hours’ drive from where they’d parked the rented van. He’d been planning this trip for more than a year and had prepared himself by reading everything extant in the limited literature about the Alakai.
He’d also encountered the stories—true, apparently. About the honeymooning couple whose car had been found at the nearby Kalalau Lookout a few years ago and who had never been seen again, alive or dead. About the US Geological Survey engineer who died of a heart attack three hundred yards from the summit of Mount Waialeale in 1948 and because of the difficulty of the terrain had to be left tied to a tree until his companions could return with adequate help to bring him out. It took sixteen men three days to get his body off the mountain. About the attempt to push a road through the swamp back in the 1950s. The construction crew had smashed their way into the forest and quit for the day, only to return the next morning to find their bulldozer missing. A brief search revealed that it had simply sunk out of sight.
Then there were his unsuccessful predecessors. Kinkaid of the University of Hawaii first, and two years ago Masaki of UC Riverside. Brazen to the end, Kinkaid had gone in alone, while Masaki had wandered away from his companions one day, never to be seen again. Kinkaid had been too brash for his own good, and Masaki—well, it was felt that Masaki had been the victim of either bad judgment or bad luck, neither a fault to which Loftgren was heir.
It was raining harder now and he found himself having to concentrate more closely on the trail. They were off the ridge and advancing through dense forest. Uluhe and ekaha ferns grew thickly in the underbrush, and the occasional flash of brilliant red ohi‘a lehua or waxy yellow-white lobelia flower flared like strobe lights among the green walls through which they were moving. Occasionally he picked out the bright orange berries of the Astelia lily gleaming among the sodden verdure.
“Starting to get a little sloppy. Watch your step,” Fanole called back to them.
An instant later Sanchez slipped off the rotting log along which he had been tiptoeing and plunged waist-deep into thick, soupy, organic muck. Fanole edged carefully around the inadequate pathway, clinging for balance to the overhanging branches of dripping trees, and reached down to give the embarrassed student a hand up.
Beneath the transparent rain slicker the young man’s waterlogged jeans were now stained brown from the waist down. Shreds of bark and leaves and other unidentifiable macrobiotic matter in various stages of decomposition clung to his legs and shoes.
An unsympathetic Fanole offered one of his typically terse observations. “Warned you. In here if you don’t get soaked from the top down, sooner or later you get soaked from the bottom up.” With that he turned and started back up a trail that had already diminished to little more than a narrow tunnel between the trees. “Might as well get used to it!” he yelled back.
The now saturated graduate student looked unhappy. “Sorry. I thought I could keep dry for one day, at least.”
Loftgren tugged the brim of his slicker down over his forehead. His face was wet, but the rest of him still held back the best efforts of the swamp to drench him. On the other hand, he was already soaked with sweat.
The Alakai was where dryness went to die.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Julio. Both Fanole and I have a lot more experience in this kind of country than you do.”
Twenty minutes later Loftgren stepped over a log and onto a seemingly solid patch of ground that turned out to consist of cloying thigh-deep sludge. Fanole and Sanchez stood off to one side, looking on as he slowly pulled himself out and worked his way through the trough. No one said a word.
By nightfall they’d reached the junction of the Pihea and Alakai trails. Here the Forest Service had helicoptered in thick beams and wood planks. Securely strapped together, these formed a level, solid, platform at the trail juncture.
Fanole set up the tent, somehow managing to keep the interior halfway clear of rain. Beneath the extended, oversized storm flap they stripped nude and deposited their equipment outside on the redwood six-by-sixes.
“Any other wood’d rot out inside a month,” their guide pointed out unnecessarily. “Except cypress and mahogany. But we can’t get cypress here, and mahogany’s too expensive. So we have to import the redwood.”
Using clean towels they dried themselves, then crawled into the tent to settle down around the camp stove Fanole ignited. By the time dinner was ready it was darker outside than the inside of a cave. A drenching, dripping, soaking dark. Steady rain pattered like dancing mice on the top of the tent, falling harder at night than it had during the day. Except for the monotonous thrumming of the continuous downpour—the heartbeat of the Alakai—it was dead silent outside the shelter.
Fanole poked leisurely at his reconstituted freeze-dried supper, looking on as Sanchez ravenously devoured his and Loftgren made a more considered go of his own. The guide was nearly fifty, with a receding forehead of thinning brown hair and dark eyes the color of aged bourbon that seemed to pierce whatever crossed their path, be it human or rock or tree. His sun-seared appearance left his ancestry open to some question, but he was certainly at least part Hawaiian. He had a slight bulge around his middle: spare tire for a bicycle rather than a sedan. Otherwise he was surprisingly muscular.
“You don’t mind my saying so, I think you’re both crazy.”
Loftgren grinned. It wasn’t the first time that opinion had been expressed in regard to the expedition. “You’re entitled to your opinion. If you feel that way, why did you agree to guide us?”
Fanole finished the last of his dinner and set the plate carefully to one side. “Because no one else would. I know you academic types. If you couldn’t get any help, you’d eventually have tried it on your own.” He glanced up at the roof, listening to the rain tap-dancing relentlessly outside. “You’d never have gotten out of this place alive.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Loftgren told him. “I’ve been in rougher places than the Alakai. There are no snakes here, no hostile natives. Not even any dangerous bugs, and the mosquitoes quit climbing at the thirty-five-hundred-foot level.”
Fanole nodded. “That’s right. Nothing dangerous here but the place itself. Don’t need any snakes or tigers. The swamp’ll kill you all by its lonesome.” He looked toward the entrance and nodded knowingly. “No landmarks, either. No sky overhead; only clouds. No ground underfoot; only a bottomless pit of composting plant matter. Even compasses act funny in here.”
Sanchez felt compelled to speak up. “Begging your pardon, sir, but we got through the first of the bogs okay.” He smiled apologetically. “Didn’t stay very dry, but we got through.” Reaching over, he tapped his pack. “Hard to get lost with a GPS.”
Fanole shook his head once. He didn’t smile. “‘The first of the bogs’? We haven’t even reached the bogs yet, kid. That was just muddy trail. I’ve personally sounded bogs here that were twenty feet deep. There are deeper still, but they ain’t been plumbed yet.”
“How come?”
“Nobody’s ever brought in a long enough measuring probe. Remember: we’re walking across the throat of an old volcano. Might be bogs a hundred feet deep. Maybe a thousand. Nobody knows. In the whole swamp there’s only two barely-there east–west trails and nothing at all running north to south. Your plan is to head off-trail and follow the line of the Wainiha Pali. Nobody’s ever gone in there and done that.” He snorted softly. “With or without a GPS.”
“Kinkaid went in,” Loftgren corrected him, “and Masaki.”
“Nobody knows that for certain.” Fanole’s eyes burned into those of the ornithologist. “Masaki got to the Kilohana Lookout. Nobody’s sure about Kinkaid. If you try to go north from there, you’ve got sheer cliffs on one side and unplumbed bogs on the other. I give you
haoles about a day before you give up on it. If we make it that far.”
“I once spent a month in the highlands of New Guinea, Fanole. Don’t try to scare me.”
“I’m not.” The guide leaned back on his light sleeping bag. “You hired me for advice. I’m giving it. Just think it’s a lot to go through for a glimpse of a bird that’s probably been extinct since the ’seventies.”
“There have been reports of song-sightings since then,” Sanchez pointed out. “The survivors of Masaki’s party all confirm it.”
Fanole rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one big, weathered palm. “You stay out here long enough, it’s easy to start hearing things as well as seeing them.”
“Masaki vanished while tracking a singing akialoa,” Loftgren insisted stubbornly.
“Maybe.”
“Those with him heard it, too. The weather and the terrain got so bad, they all gave up and fell back, except Masaki. But they heard it.”
“Maybe.” The guide was incorrigible. “Next you’ll be telling me you expect to find an o‘o‘a‘a, too.”
“No.” Loftgren’s voice dropped. “No, I’m afraid the o‘o‘a‘a is gone. But not the akialoa. I won’t accept it. It’s too beautiful to not exist any longer.”
From his file pouch he drew forth a folded eight-by-ten. Like every other picture he carried, like every map, it was laminated to protect it from the all-pervasive, all-destroying moisture. Unfolded, it revealed a painting of a small bird with a distinctive brown patterning and a lighter buff underbelly. Attractive but hardly spectacular.
Except for the downward-curving sickle-beak, which was fully one-third the length of the creature’s body. It was this remarkable protuberance that set the akialoa apart from its immediate relatives and for that matter, from all but a few other birds in the world. It had last been seen in the Alakai in 1973, and the possibility of its continued existence was the reason for Loftgren’s university-sponsored expedition.
To find the akialoa, he mused as he gazed at the painting, the details of which he knew as intimately as those of his own body. Finding it would guarantee publication in Science, Natural History, the Smithsonian, National Geographic—they would be fighting one another for the right to be first to publish his words and pictures. A coup for the department and for the entire university. Perhaps a chair dedicated in his name. Promotion to professor emeritus of ornithology. The world would be his—or at least that small portion of it that concerned itself with birding.
Kinkaid had plunged into the Alakai seeking the elusive scimitar-billed bird and had vanished. So had the esteemed Masaki. Now it was his turn, and he fully intended to succeed where they had failed. If the akialoa still lived, it would be left to professional ornithologists such as himself to devise a scheme for ensuring its survival. Only they had the knowledge and ability to do so.
But first he had to find one.
The rain was lighter when they awoke. Carefully, they packed their equipment and set out again. Halfway up a steep, slippery, moss-bedecked slope he was delighted to find an outcropping of ohi’a trees. Fully mature at eight inches high, they were all more than a hundred years old. Later he spotted a thriving specimen of gunnera, the world’s largest herb, with its unique eight-foot leaves. Miniature trees and giant herbs. Reversed proportions, he reflected, were the norm in the Alakai.
Later that day the sun came out and they saw their first birds. Sanchez picked up a pair of bright red apapane, but it was Fanole who pointed out the endemic anianiau and the rarer i’iwi. Loftgren felt left out until he saw a tiny elepaio sheltering from the sun beneath a palapali fern.
Of the akialoa, however, there was no sign.
It was raining seriously when they entered the first bogs, edging around them where possible and wading through—sometimes up to their waists—when it was not. Fluttering fragments of fluorescent tape tied to tree branches were all that marked the trail, and these were hard to see in the fog that had settled over the swamp. Several times Loftgren had to admit he would have been lost without Fanole to lead the way.
On the third morning they turned off the intermittent trail and plunged into abject wilderness.
No one bothered to comment on the damp anymore because they were all soaked from head to foot. It was a distinctive, all-pervasive dampness that made you feel as if your skin were slowly sloughing off your body. White ridges appeared on palms and fingers; it felt as if at any minute your flesh would burst into flagrant, pustulant bloom. Forward progress was now measured in yards instead of miles.
By the end of the week the formerly resolute Sanchez had had enough.
“I want out, Martin.” Despite the protection offered by the battered but still-intact slicker, water trickled down the graduate student’s sensitive face into his eyes and mouth and ears.
Loftgren regarded him sternly. “There’s no ‘out,’ here, Julio. This isn’t a library research project. We stay until we’ve found what we came for or until we run out of supplies.”
Fanole materialized silently at the frustrated student’s shoulder. “The kid’s right. We’re in too deep as it is. If we keep going this way and don’t manage to hook up with the Mohihi Trail, we won’t get out of here.”
“You’ll find the Mohihi.”
“Maybe. I’ve never gone this way before. No one ever has. We could step right off the damn Pali or stumble into Waialeale. You know damn well nobody’s gonna spot us from the air because the cloud cover only breaks fully maybe once, twice a year. No emergency helicopter pickups in here, mister. I say it’s time to leave. You got what you paid for.”
“I paid for an akialoa. We have plenty of food left.”
“We’ve been slogging and bogging for four days and we haven’t seen a hint of one. Nobody knows exactly where we are, and in an emergency it wouldn’t matter if you could raise someone on that satellite phone tucked in your pack anyway. It’s time to go.”
“If we don’t save the akialoa, no one will. Even in the academic community people are losing interest.”
“You can’t save what doesn’t exist,” Fanole replied evenly. “People have been reducing the native birds’ range and food supply for hundreds of years. You know that. Even if there are a couple left, we don’t know if there’s enough of whatever they specialize in feeding on to support them. Long-petaled flowers, bugs, whatever. There’s so little information about the akialoa that we don’t even know for sure what the hell they eat. But that hook of a bill evolved to feed on something specific. We don’t know anything about it from the old Hawaiians because they almost never came up here. Country’s too rough, too many dangerous spirits. Too many feather-hunters who never made it back. Birds like that don’t just switch specialized feeding habits to lobelia or ohi’a in a few decades. The o‘o‘a‘a had a better chance in that respect and it didn’t make it. Be reasonable, man.”
Loftgren regarded his companions. Fanole was unyielding. Sanchez’s expression was a mixture of pleading and anger. Bits of dark, decomposing plant material clung to his forehead and hair, giving him the aspect of a drowned Hispanic dryad.
“All right. But first we finish out the day and then camp. We can start back tomorrow.”
Fanole grunted, willing to concede an afternoon. An exhausted and relieved Sanchez merely slumped to the ground where he stood. Beneath him, the spongy earth immediately began to give way, oozing up around his hips and shoulders. Hastily he rose to search for more solid ground. With the intensifying rain shrouding them in wet shadow, they made camp.
The song woke him. It was sharp, piercing, utterly distinctive. At first Loftgren thought it might be an akepa, but decided the concluding notes were too high.
Hauling himself to the front of the tent, he unzipped the flap and crawled outside. Fog swirled around the temporary shelter, coiling smoke-like through the trees, reducing visibility to a few yards. An errant shaft of sunlight shining momentarily through the clouds briefly pearlized the drifting fog.
It sat in a tree not ten feet away, singing energetically, that remarkable bill parting slightly to emit each series of notes. He stared breathlessly, hardly daring to move. Then it turned to regard him momentarily out of tiny blinking eyes before flying off into the enveloping mist. Alighting somewhere unseen, it resumed its cheerful song.
Loftgren flung himself back into the tent and pawed at his camera bag until he’d extracted the digital unit. Fanole sat up and blinked at him as the ornithologist struggled feverishly with a fresh storage card. Sanchez stirred sleepily nearby.
“Nude Menehune nymphs cavorting in the bogs?” the guide inquired.
“I saw it.” Trying to steady shaking fingers, Loftgren slid the camera into its protective housing, checked the telephoto, then began to tighten the knobs on the aluminum strip that would make the plastic airtight and waterproof. “I heard it first and crawled outside, and I saw it.”
Fanole sat up sharply. “What do you mean, you saw it?”
“On a branch, right outside the tent. It was still singing when I came in for the camera.” He rose, checked to make sure the card was more than half empty, and started for the tent flap.
“Hey!” Naked, Fanole scrambled out of his bag. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
Loftgren paused in the entrance. “Can’t wait. Might never see it again.”
“You idiot, hold up!” Fanole lurched to the opening and outside, where it was beginning to rain afresh. On hands and knees, Sanchez blinked out from behind him, trying to wake up.
“What’s happening? Where’s Professor Loftgren going?”
Fanole stared into the intensifying shower. “He said he heard his damn bird. Says he saw one.”
“Saw one?” Sanchez emerged, arms wrapped across his naked chest, shivering slightly in the early-morning chill. “An akialoa?”
“I guess.” The guide turned and reentered the tent. Sanchez gazed into the fog and drizzle for a moment longer, then retreated.