‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Equipment down to the landing stage. They’ll be picking us up in about half an hour.’
‘Wonderful!’ said Chris, ‘but is the weather O.K. for flying?’
‘Not really,’ said Brian carelessly, ‘but they say better to go now and chance it than wait and have it close down on us so much that we can’t get into the valley. The pilot thinks we should just about do it.’
‘Quite delightful,’ said Jim to Jacquie enthusiastically. ‘Aren’t you sorry you’re not coming, my dear – zooming up into all that cloud, looking for a valley you won’t be able to see, and then when you get there, looking for a bird that you won’t be able to see as well? It’s been just one long series of thrills, this trip has. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’
We got the equipment down to the jetty and it was there that Brian explained that the float plane, being minute, could only take two passengers as well as the pilot.
‘Well,’ said Chris, ‘I want you to go first, Jim, with the equipment . . .’
‘Why is it always me?’ demanded Jim indignantly. ‘Aren’t there any other volunteers around here?’
‘Get as much film as you can of flying into the valley,’ continued Chris, ignoring Jim’s indignation, ‘and then get set up and get shots of the plane coming in with the rest of us.’
‘What happens if they dump me up there and then can’t get back?’ asked Jim. ‘Have you thought of that? I’d be stuck up there in a deserted valley full of ferocious birds . . . no food . . . no companionship . . . and then in about ten years you come strolling up there, I suppose, and find my whitened bones stretched out in the mist . . . that’s old Jim, you’ll say . . . nice enough chap in his way . . . better send a postcard to his wife. Ruddy unfeeling lot.’
‘Never mind, Jim,’ said Jacquie consolingly. ‘If you’re going ahead with the supplies, you’ll have Gerry’s bottles of Scotch.’
‘Ah!’ said Jim, brightening, ‘I don’t mind waiting a bit up there if I’ve got something to eat – that’s different.’
Presently a rather peevish humming made itself heard and soon the float plane appeared, zooming towards us, looking and sounding rather like an infuriated dragonfly. It touched down neatly on the lake, turned and then came drifting up along the landing stage. We loaded the equipment while Jim asked the pilot which one of the Wright brothers he was, and did he think that the flying machine would ever take the place of the horse. At length we bundled Jim, still protesting, into the plane and watched it skim across the surface of the lake and then rise into the air, leaving a trail of white foam and tiny ripples behind it. In half an hour the plane was back, and this time it was Chris’s turn to go, taking the rest of the film gear with him. The pilot said that conditions in the valley were perfectly all right for landing and take-off, but that the weather was closing in rapidly and we would have to get a move on. Chris flew off to join Jim, and Brian and I paced the landing stage and peered anxiously at the dark clouds that appeared to be getting thicker and blacker with each passing second. At last the plane returned, Brian and I clambered hurriedly into it, and we were soon shooting away across the lake.
Te Anau is a long lake and for some considerable time we flew along over the water, watching the steep, thickly forested mountains on either side of us. The forest was mainly composed of beech, which had a dark green leaf, so the towering mountains looked rather gloomy and sinister. Then the pilot banked the plane and tucked it in closer to the mountainside which now looked twice as gloomy and twice as steep. I have the normal person’s reactions to flying; that is to say, I am always convinced that either the pilot is going to die of heart failure at a crucial moment or that both wings are going to drop off when one is taking off or landing or halfway there – this, of course, in a big plane. In a small plane I feel fairly safe: it’s like the difference between riding in a high-powered car and on a bicycle. If you fall off a bicycle you think you won’t be hurt and so I always get the ridiculous but comforting feeling that to crash in a small plane would be something you would scarcely notice, except for a few small bruises. However, our pilot now started to fly the plane closer and closer to the towering hillside and I began to wonder if crashing in a small plane was quite as painless as I had always thought. Then, quite suddenly, the thing that I had dreaded for years happened: the pilot appeared to go mad at the controls. He banked sharply and then started to fly straight at the mountainside. At first I thought he was merely going to fly up and over them, but he kept heading for them determinedly. By now we could see the tops of the individual trees quite clearly, and they were approaching at an alarming speed. Just as I had accepted death as the inevitable result of the pilot’s manoeuvres, and the trees were only a few hundred feet away, a narrow crack (it can be dignified with no other term) appeared in the mountainside and into this we zoomed. This crack was the gorge that led into Takahe Valley and through which the lake drained down into Te Anau far below. The gorge had high, waterworn cliffs on each side, thickly covered with beech, and it was just – but only just – wide enough to take the plane. At one point the trees were so close to our wingtips that I swear you could have leant out and gathered a bunch of leaves. Mercifully, the gorge was not very long and within half a minute we emerged, unscathed, and there ahead of us lay Takahe Valley.
The valley is some three miles long, somewhat oval in shape, surrounded by steep hillsides thickly covered with beech. The floor of the valley is astonishingly flat and the greater part of it is covered by the calm and shallow waters of Lake Orbell. The lake, of course, lay at the end nearest to the gorge up which we had flown, but at the other end of the valley the flat ground was covered with great meadows of snow grass. As we flew over the lake the view was breathtakingly beautiful: in the distance, against a dark and stormy sky, we could see the higher peaks of the Murchison mountains, each wearing a jagged crown of snow; the mountainsides that sloped into the valley were this sombre dark green, relieved here and there with patches of paler, sage green; the lake was silver and looked as though it had been varnished, and the meadows of snow grass were golden and bright green in the fitful sunshine that kept trying to break through the dark skies. We had to fly down the full length of the valley and then bank and turn to come in to land, for this was the only way you could get down to the lake. Just as the plane was dropping lower and lower and the silver waters of the lake were coming rushing up to meet us, the pilot, in a laconic manner, obviously thinking that the information would be of particular interest to me at this juncture, told me that the lake was about twelve hundred yards long – just long enough, in fact (provided you did not misjudge in any way), to land the plane on. A slight miscalculation and you would go gliding gracefully off the end of the lake and into the gorge we had just flown up. I could see what he meant, for we touched down and raced along the water, leaving an ever-widening isosceles triangle of silver ripples behind us, and eventually came to a halt with a hundred feet or so to spare at the other end of the lake. The pilot switched off the engine and grinned over his shoulder at us.
‘Well, here you are,’ he said, ‘Takahe Valley.’
He opened the door of the plane and the thing that struck me immediately was the complete and utter silence. If it had not been for the very faint lapping of the water around the floats of the plane you would have imagined that you had been struck deaf. In fact, so acute was the silence that I swallowed hard several times, thinking that the altitude had affected my ears. Two hundred feet away, on the banks of the lake, Jim was filming our arrival and we could hear the noise of his camera as clearly as if he had been standing next to us. This silence had an extraordinary effect on one: we instinctively lowered our voices, and as we started to unload the gear every slight sound we made seemed magnified out of all proportion. The only way to get the gear ashore was to take off our shoes and socks, roll up our trousers and hump the stuff on our backs. Stepping out of the plane into eighteen inches of lake water was an experience I prefer to for
get; I had never realised that water could be so cold without actually turning into ice. Brian and I made two trips out to the plane and back before we got the gear landed, and by then my legs were so numb with cold from the knees downwards that I felt as though they had been amputated. Also I had dropped one of my shoes in the lake, which had not improved my temper. Chris, standing behind Jim and the camera, wore his dispeptic llama look.
‘Er – Gerry?’ he called. ‘I wonder if you’d mind just doing that once more. I wasn’t satisfied with the angle of the shot.’
I glared at him with chattering teeth.
‘Oh, no, I don’t mind a bit,’ I said sarcastically, ‘my dear fellow – anything for art. You wouldn’t like me to take all my clothes off and swim across the lake, would you? You’ve only to say the word. They say with all these new drugs pneumonia’s easy to care nowadays.’
‘Do it a bit slower this time,’ said Jim, grinning. ‘You know, as if you’re really enjoying it.’
I made a rude gesture at them and Brian and I picked up our things and trudged back to the plane. Eventually Chris was satisfied and we were allowed to climb out of the lake.
The pilot gave us a final wave, slammed the door of the plane shut, taxied down to the other end of the lake and then roared towards us. He flew about seventy feet over our heads and then vanished into the gorge; gradually the sound of his engine became fainter and then, blanketed by the trees, disappeared altogether and the silence enveloped us once more: suddenly the valley seemed very lonely and remote.
Just around the other side of the lake from where we stood with the piled equipment we saw a small, corrugated hut, about the size of the average garden toolshed, standing at a point where the tree line ended and the snow grass rim of the lake began.
‘What’s that?’ enquired Jim with interest.
‘That’s the hut,’ said Brian.
‘What, you mean the place we’ve got to live in?’ asked Jim incredulously. ‘But it’s not big enough for one person let alone four.’
‘There’ll be seven of us in it tonight,’ said Brian. ‘Don’t forget the deer hunters.’
‘Yes, where are they by the way?’ I asked, for the hut had all the appearance of being deserted, and the long tin chimneystack (that looked as though it had been borrowed from one of the very early steam engines) was innocent of even the faintest wisp of smoke.
‘Oh, they’ll be out in the hills somewhere,’ said Brian. They’ll be back this evening I expect.’
The hut, when we finally got to it, turned out to be a structure approximately eight feet wide by twelve feet long. At one end were two wooden bunks that looked as though they had been filched from one of the lesser known and more repulsive concentration camps. In one side of the hut was a largish plate-glass window, an astonishing refinement that gave you a magnificent view down the full length of the valley, and at the opposite end from the bunks was a fireplace. It seemed to us, at first sight, that by the time we had got all the equipment inside we would all have to sleep outside, including the deer hunters. However, after much arguing and sweating, we managed to get all the equipment stacked into the hut and leave the bunks and a medium-sized area of floor space free. But for seven people to sleep in there was obviously going to be an extremely tight squeeze, to say the very least. The hunters had left a note pinned to the table, welcoming us and saying that they had left firewood and water ready, and for this we were extremely grateful. So while Jim and Chris went over the camera and recording gear, Brian and I hung out various wet garments on an improvised washing line in the fireplace, lit the fire and put the kettle on for some tea.
The sky had grown steadily blacker and the valley darker, with faint shreds of mist floating across the surface of the lake. We lit the lamps and in the soft, yellow glow of their light we set about making our evening meal. Presently we could hear voices and they sounded as if their owners were just outside the hut but, venturing out into the gloom, we could dimly see three figures making their way along the edge of the lake some quarter of a mile away. We shouted greetings to one another, then went in and put on the kettle for the deer hunters and within fifteen minutes they had joined us.
It is always wrong to say that a person looks typical of a country, for within any country you get so many different types, but nevertheless, these three were, as far as I was concerned, fairly typical New Zealanders. They were tall, muscular, their arms and faces reddened by wind and sun, and they looked extremely tough in their thick shirts, cord trousers and heavy boots, with their battered hats pulled down over their eyes and their rifles slung over their shoulders. They carried no gory carcasses, but this did not surprise me, for Brian had already explained that the deer corpses are left where they fall. To try to keep pests such as deer or opossums under control would mean that the Wildlife Department would have to employ a colossal band of hunters who did nothing else all day long. This, financially speaking was impossible, but there were many people who enjoyed hunting, and from these the department recruited their hunters, covered their out-of-pocket expenses and let them hunt in whichever areas the pests were getting out of control. This deer hunt they had just returned from (not a very good one, apparently, for they had only managed to get sixteen deer) thus fulfilled two purposes: they got the pleasure of hunting, and they were cutting down the deer population around the valley so that it did not get out of control and swamp the Takahe out of existence permanently. Presently, full of food and tea, we sat back in front of the roaring fire (for the night was bitterly cold) and I opened one of the bottles of Scotch which I had had the foresight to bring with us.
The next morning, stiff and cramped from the weird positions we had had to adopt on the floor of the hut all night, we got up and cooked breakfast. Outside, the valley was full of mist, so we could not see more than a few feet from the hut door, but Brian seemed confident that this would rise as soon as the sun got up. Breakfast over, the deer hunters left us, trudging off through the mists down the gorge towards Te Anau, where a boat was waiting for them. They had been pleasant company but we were glad to see them go, for it gave us just those few more spare inches of breathing space in the hut that we felt we could do with.
Brian’s forecast was right, for by about eight o’clock the mist had lifted sufficiently for us to be able to see most of the lake and some of the surrounding mountains. It even began to look as though it was going to be a fine day and so, full of high spirits, we set off along the edge of the lake towards the great meadow of snow grass where, Brian said, the first takahe nests had been found. As I say, we set off in high spirits, for in that milky, opalescent light the lake seemed smaller than we had imagined and our destination a mere half hour’s stroll away. We were soon to learn that Takahe Valley was deceptive. In the many years that I have been hunting for animals in various parts of the world, I can never remember being so acutely uncomfortable as I was during our sojourn in Takahe Valley, and that first day was a pretty good sample of what any prospective takahe hunter has to put up with. To begin with there were the clouds: they would drift over the edge of the mountains, take a look into the valley and decide that this was a suitable resting place, so they would pour themselves in like a slow-motion wave, enveloping both you and the landscape and drenching you to the skin. This was one of the minor irritants. The snow grass, which grew in huge, waist high, barley-sugar coloured clumps, seemed to collect water with the enthusiasm of a sponge and then, as you pushed through the clumps, this water would be shared with you in the most generous fashion. To add to the pleasure of all this, there was the sphagnum moss. This thick, brilliant green moss grew like an extremely expensive fitted carpet around and between the snow grass clumps, looking as smooth as a bowling green and just as comfortable to walk on. True, it was thick – about six or eight inches in places – and your feet sank into it as though it were a magnificent pile carpet, but once your feet had sunk into it, the moss was reluctant to release its hold and it required quite an effort to extract one foo
t from the moss before you could take the next step. Just to make the whole thing more difficult, this mossy carpet was, of course, growing on water, so that with every step you not only got a shoe full of water, but the sound of your feet being extricated from the moss resounded with a liquid plop that echoed through the valley like a gunshot, and after half a mile of this I would not have thought there was a takahe within fifty miles that was not appraised of our arrival and progress. So, yard by yard, we progressed along the side of the lake and through the meadow of snow grass. Occasionally we would leave the snow grass and make short sorties into the edge of the beech forest, for in the non-breeding season the demarcation line where the snow grass reaches the forest seems to be a favourite haunt of the takahe. The dark, grey-green boles of the trees were covered with moisture, as were the small, dull green leaves. Here and there the branches would be festooned with great, hanging masses of lichen, like some weird coral formation along the bough. At first sight this lichen looked white – indeed, from a distance some of the trees looked as if they were covered with snow – but on close inspection the delicate, branched filigree was a very pale greeny-grey, a delicate and rather beautiful colour.
For the rest of the day we plodded on through the damp snow grass and through the gloomy beech woods with their Martian growths of lichen. We were icy cold and drenched to the skin, and we found just about everything except a takahe. We found fresh droppings at one stage and clustered round them with all the mixed feelings that Robinson Crusoe had when he discovered the famous footprint; we found places where the birds had recently been feeding, shredding the long stalks of snow grass through the beaks; we even found empty nests, placed on the ground and constructed out of snow grass, each one cunningly concealed under the drooping stalks of a massive clump of grass; Brian, at one point, even said that he heard a takahe, but as it was growing towards evening and the valley was so silent you could hear a pin drop, we thought he was merely saying this to cheer us up. At length the weather started to close down on us and the light became too bad for photography, even supposing there had been anything to photograph. We were right down the far end of the valley by now and Brian thought we ought to turn back for, as he pointed out cheerfully, if a cloud descended into the valley suddenly we might well get lost and have to spend the night wandering round in ever-decreasing circles, up to our waists in wet snow grass. Spurred on by this horrid thought, we retraced, with considerable distaste, our squishy footprints through the meadow and along the shores of the lake. When we reached the hut about which we had been so disparaging the day before, we were so tired, cold, wet and dispirited that it seemed the very height of luxury. To be able to strip off our wet clothes and sit in front of a roaring log fire, gulping hot tea liberally laced with whisky, was ecstasy, and we were soon telling ourselves that today had been an exception. The bad weather conditions had made the takahe more than normally secretive. The following day, we assured each other, the valley would be so full of takahe that we would hardly be able to walk.