Birdbrain (19 page)

I look at them from above, high up. Them and their tiny little world, each one of them running about, important, busy hurrying here and there. Then I push my stick into the nest and stir.

The path has risen up, twisting its way through hills covered in shrubs and bushes, and our journey is now clearly taking us further inland. Behind us, somewhere along the coast, was once Port Davey, now nothing but dust. People must have used this path to reach it since time immemorial.

The inclines along this path aren’t particularly steep, but there’s no shade in sight. Now that the rush of the sea is far behind us, I feel the full effect of the ear-splitting silence. I can sense fear lurking in the silence.

The proximity of the sea represents security. If I got lost in Tasmania — which would be the easiest thing in the world in all these undulating plains, dotted all the way to the horizon with identical bushes and scrub spewed up from the ground that remind me of those clusters of trees you see on the savannahs of Africa — I’d feel an immediate sense of relief upon hearing the roar of the waves, even if I were still in the middle of nowhere. The sea is always a thoroughfare, even if you don’t have a boat. The sea is water, even though you can’t drink it. At sea your eyes can gaze out into the distance, unhindered.

Here there’s no security.

Here the air seems obscured by a dim haze.

I push my sunglasses, which have slid down to the end of my nose, back into place. It occurs to me that I must have performed that same action hundreds of times in the last few days. What’s going on? These glasses fitted perfectly a couple of weeks ago.

‘Can a person’s head shrink?’

Jyrki turns his head and looks at me slowly. I can see myself reflected in his Serengetis as two small convex insects.

‘Your head? Shrink?’

‘Yes. Look at this.’

I clench the muscles in my face and again my glasses slip obediently down to the end of my nose.

‘Wipe away the sweat and suncream underneath.’

‘They didn’t seem to mind the sweat and suncream in New Zealand. Tasmania has shrunk my head.’

Jyrki stares at me.

‘I see. Well, I suppose your face could have become a bit thinner in that time.’

It must be true. I haven’t looked in the mirror for over a week. Because I’ve been wearing the same clothes all the time, I haven’t noticed any changes. If they’ve felt a bit loose, I’ve just put it down to them stretching from not being washed.

I look down. My thighs stick out of my shorts like a pair of lean snakes.

For her, Tasmania is an enormous magical creature that treats us whatever way it wants. She probably imagines we’re like two dogged inquisitive ants trekking across Tasmania’s belly. We trip over its body hair, get stuck in its pores and try not to disturb its sleep. And because we’re walking along Tasmania’s thin, sensitive skin, there’s always the possibility that at some moment, after some tossing and turning, the creature will wake up once and for all. Then a hand will appear above us, so huge and fast that we won’t even register it until just before it violently descends with a crashing, crushing thump.

I don’t know whether it’s a fact or whether I’m just imagining it, but today’s leg seems incredibly long compared with the previous couple of days, and my head feels giddy and woozy.

But it would be stupid to start complaining.

A solemn truce seems to have been established between us.

For some reason I start thinking about an apple.

It would be round and entertainingly smooth, so symmetrical it could almost have been made by human hands. It would be a Granny Smith or an Antonovka: greenish, sour and with crisp skin. As my teeth sink into it a chunk of apple would snap into my mouth, oozing sweet, acrid juices across my tongue and gums.

The succulent fruit would crunch between my teeth. I would eat right up to the core. I would gnaw every piece of flesh from around the pips, all the bits I wouldn’t normally eat. I might even eat the core, too, and enjoy the strong nutty flavour of the pips.

For the first half of the day the path winds its way through the hilly open country — I’ve seen plenty'of hills before, thanks very much — then we start our descent into wetlands where the path is overgrown.

And I mean really overgrown.

The knee-high scrub that smothered the path leading away from Melaleuca was one thing, but this is thick thorny bush reaching high above us and poking our ribs on both sides. Branches and twigs twine together in front of us, and all the while there is a terrific rattling and rustling as Jyrki attempts to clear the path using only his body mass. Branches freed from one another flick backwards and hit me in the face as soon as he has passed Them.

In places it’s hard to make out the path at all, you’ve just got to step in approximately the right direction and assume that your foot will find some flattish ground beneath the foliage.

The dips in the path are filled with mud — sometimes they’re pretty deep, too — and for the first time since crossing Red Point Hills Jyrki’s impaired hiking pole causes us real problems: it sinks deep into the ground without any warning, and because it’s hollow it’s always getting stuck.

This goes on and on and on. And on.

Out here you need a machete. Seriously.

I think about the leeches and shiver. Brainless creatures, but bloodthirsty ones. Lurking in the bushes. Fat and blood-sucking. But they normally only come out after rainfall, and the weather has been bone dry ever since the downpour at Cox Bight.

Leeches.

What would Mr Conrad say?

But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion.

I see something on the path.

At first I don’t even realize what it is, it’s so strange and out of place. But when I identify it my brain starts to boil with rage.

How can someone be so offensive, so indifferent, so ... I can’t even find words to describe someone that would do a thing like this.

Right there in the middle of the path is a used tampon. A cloud of flies is having a banquet on it.

Not only has someone had the nerve to throw something like that on the ground, they had to leave it right in the middle of the path, almost in protest. I’m surprised they didn’t have a shit next to it for good measure.

After everything that’s happened I suspect the culprit is very close indeed. It would make sense, but it’s also an impossibility. We’re already a good day’s trek from yesterday’s campsite.

It also annoys me that someone else has walked along this path so recently. I assumed we would be very, very alone.

I assumed a woman hiker would be something of a rarity out here.

I assumed what we had achieved was something profound.

The refuse is fresh. We’re only about an hour’s hike from the boggy river-banks at Watershed and the designated campsite waiting for us. There must be other people there now.

I’m so repulsed that I can’t even bring myself to say anything. I kick this desecration of the landscape into the bushes with a quick jolt of the foot, and the flies shoot upwards like a sheet of black upside-down rain.

I ask if the oil rag will burn for sure. Ante’s there; can’t see Kenu. The new guy’s called Liquorice Fish.

The Fish says he’s done it with crumpled bits of paper with candle wax inside. People don’t get post through the door these days, so there’s nothing to catch fire. Before you’d have had the newspaper and other bits of paper, letters and shit like that. Nowaday, you
’
re
lucky if there’s
a fucking doormat. If your luck’s out, it’ll be just a tiled floor. That’ll never ever light.

I’m like; it won’t light, man, ’cos I’ve just pissed through that letterbox. I get through dozens of them in a day, and the Fish cracks up.

He says there’s sometimes only a stupid gap between the two doors so, no matter how well you’ve got things started, the space is so small that only people’s shoes’ll burn before the fire runs out of oxygen and starts pouring smoke out into the stairwell.

Fuck stairwells and oxygen, says Ante. You seriously telling me you think about this shit?

Ante’s foot is twitching, although he’s not on nothing
—
not even coffee. His foot’s tapping the floor, dododododoom.

Ante doesn’t know what to do with himself if he’s got to sit still. His life disappears if he hasn’t got any action going down.

I ask about those outdoor letterboxes, what about them, but the Fish says they’re for fucking amateurs.

I awake to the pangs of an empty stomach.

I think I must have been dreaming about smoked ham. Its smell is sensual, intoxicating; I can feel it in my mouth and my nostrils. I open my mouth and try to take a bite. I want to feel the pink succulence all the way up to my gums; I want the slab of meat to be thick as a fist, complete with a strip of white shining fat.

My eyes snap open, and in the dark-green dim of the tent I realize — because I can just make out my hand moving towards my mouth — that it’s almost morning.

We’re at Watershed.

This is by far the most dismal of all the ‘campsites’ I’ve seen in Tasmania. This is nothing but a patch of damp mossy scrub. It was almost impossible to find a spot of ground flat enough to put up the tent among the fallen trees and the brush. We could easily have thought we were in the wrong place, but our position on the map by the shallow river and the timing of our arrival meant there was no doubt about it.

The aroma of smoked ham is still hanging in the air.

‘Jyrki?’

Jyrki rolls over in annoyance and mutters something indistinct. My overly tense tone of voice eventually has him wide awake.

‘Does it smell of smoke round here, or is it just me?’

Jyrki sits up in his sleeping-bag. His once so magnificent shaved head, now sprouting only the pitiable grey down of a condor fledgeling, nudges the top of the tent, although he’s not even fully upright. His nostrils widen, and again I find myself thinking of the kea in Kepler.

Jyrki sniffs the air.

‘But it’s just been raining. Pissed it down.’

‘But that was on Friday.’ ‘Yeah, and it was coming down in buckets.’

I listen to my heart pounding, its tiny little legs beating nervously and frantically against the floor of its non-existent room.

Conrad whispers in my ear.

We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, having hardly a sign
—
and no memories.

The air’s maybe a bit hazy, but I don’t really agree about the smell.

It could have been an illegal bonfire, but still — there’s nobody else around here. Watershed is hardly what you’d call an open-plan campsite, but although we might not have seen anyone it would still have been impossible not to hear other voices. In that case I’d have had a word with them about how to dispose of certain personal-hygiene items.

After putting my Crocs on and going for a slash, a dark-red mist flashes momentarily in front of my eyes as I glance down at my hiking boots standing in the vestibule.

So that’s her idea of humour.

The blue-black laces of one boot are neatly criss-crossed between the hooks, making it look like a daintily corseted waist. Compared with the other one, that is, which is missing something without which it is nothing: its bootlace.

The boot’s tongue droops, obscene and impotent.

Hang on a minute.

Nelson Lakes.

Speargrass Hut.

The hustle and bustle that filled the porch that morning when some of the rucksacks had been torn open and the bootlaces, keys and insoles had disappeared.

What was it the ornithologist said back at Melaleuca? And the ranger at Kepler?

‘Kea: The Open-Programme Bird’

by Jiselle Ruby and Anthony Verloc

For decades New Zealand farmers have considered the kea a pest that harms sheep. This notion has been widely criticized, as, particularly during the winter, flocks of sheep often graze unsupervised for months. During this time individual sheep can be lost for a number of different reasons.

Naturally, from the farmers’ point of view, it is important to establish whether the kea feeds on the bodies of sheep that have died of illness or in an accident or whether the kea, in fact, precipitates the sheep’s death. One would think that a relatively small bird would have difficulty killing an animal many times its size. However, there have been numerous reliable accounts of keas landing on a sheep’s back, using their talons to grab hold of its wool, then systematically beating a wound into the sheep’s skin with their beaks. These wounds are generally found in the area around the kidneys, where such a wound will in all probability cause massive trauma.

Examination of wounds of differing degrees of severity has demonstrated that the kea first tries to make a small incision in the sheep’s skin, then inserts its curved beak and uses a rocking motion to further hollow the wound out. Some sheep have been found with holes the size of a fist in their skin. In some instances the kea has passed as far as the sheep’s stomach cavity. More extreme theories have suggested, that, in these cases, the kea can then pull out the sheep’s internal organs until the animal eventually dies.

It is clear that such a substantial wound can lead to death, particularly in young or weak sheep. Recent research has, however, indicated that the kea’s actions may be considerably more complex than previously thought. Namely, sheep attacked by the kea do not normally die of the injuries sustained in the attack but of blood poisoning caused by the
Clostridium
bacteria living in the earth. According to one theory, the kea deliberately transfers
Clostridium
spores into the wounds via trace elements of soil in its beak. The increase in
Clostridium
infections has led some farmers to vaccinate their flocks against blood poisoning. There has also been a number of discoveries of carcasses which display wounds inflicted by the kea but which have been only partially consumed.

In terms of evolution, the kea’s carnivorous behaviour can be seen to stem from the time when moa birds dominated New Zealand’s fauna. At this time the moa competed with the kea for vegetation, although moa carcasses provided the kea with an additional source of nourishment. Once the Maoris had hunted the moa into extintion, a gap appeared in the kea’s protein-rich diet.This gap was only filled with the arrival of European settlers and their sheep. As masters of adaptability, in the intervening years the kea returned to its staple diet of vegetation, nuts, insects and slugs.

In any case, it seems clear that the arrival of the Europeans and their sheep provided the kea with a new, plentiful food source, the extensive use of which attests to a certain parallel between keas and humans: when there is plenty1 of food and obtaining it is relatively simple, the very act of hunting can become    a pastime in its own right.