Rat Island (6 page)

Two months would pass before the kakapo chick, so plump and defenseless, was ready to leave the nest. Two months, in a land increasingly prowled by predators, was a harrowing length of time to dodge the inevitable danger.

T
HE
W
EASEL

Reports from the mainland warned Henry that those dangers were fast heading his way. In 1897, a surveying party exploring an overland route to Dusky Sound came back with news that the invasion of the Fiordland coast had begun. “I do not know to what to attribute the scarcity of small birds,” reported the expedition's leader, E. H. Wilmot, though he hazarded a guess. “Ferrets or weasels are evidently scattered about, and one of my men says that a ferret paid him a visit in his tent one night.”

By then Richard Henry had already begun to suspect that something was amiss in his coastal paradise as well. “I think the ferrets have been down to Supper Cove. In 14 days I saw only one M
ā
ori hen and two kakapos … We were no distance from the hills and heard no birds at night.”

By November 1898, Henry had ferried 572 ground birds, most of them kakapos, to supposed safety. He had overcome the mountains of impenetrable brush, the “roaring fury” of the seas, the rats in his hair, the swarming sand flies, the fickle demands of his captive kakapos. Yet he had underestimated the tenacity of his enemy. In an interview with the
Otago Daily Times
, Henry had once bragged of the inviolate sanctuary of Resolution Island. “When the ferrets come along they will have miles to swim, and they will have, moreover, to battle with fish, gulls, and the tide, and the latter alone is sufficient to disturb the calculations of even good swimmers. On the islands the birds may survive for half a century, and by that time people in every corner of the world will realise their interest and value, and then there will be no fear of their becoming extinct.” Such was Henry's confidence when in February 1900 it was summarily crushed with a single blow.

It was then that the fifty-two-ton schooner the
Cavalier
, bearing fifteen tourists, sailed into Dusky Sound. The
Cavalier
met Henry's cutter on the open water and hailed the now-famous naturalist of Resolution Island. Henry shelved his schedule, took a few of the passengers aboard the
Putangi
, and escorted the
Cavalier
on a tour of the sound. He pointed out the mooring place of Captain Cook on Astronomer's Point, pointed them to hiking routes in the mountains.

Before setting sail for home, several of the
Cavalier
's passengers shared with Henry what to them had seemed a trivial observation. On the morning after mooring at Resolution Island, they had witnessed an interesting little episode, of a weka running along the beach. And bounding fast on its tail was a weasel.

Henry waited for the punch line to what he could only hope was a joke. But the story ended there. The
Cavalier
departed, leaving Henry alone with his living nightmare.

Henry tried to rationalize. There were still many wekas to be found on Resolution Island, a fact that in his experience should preclude the presence of weasels. But there would be no rest until the demon of Resolution Island, specter or reality, was vanquished. The next day, Henry set about making traps. He baited them with fish; he baited them with wekas. The traps lay empty. He mined the bush with the bodies of wekas laced with strychnine. No weasel tracks came near.

Henry held desperately to his hope that the tourists' tale had been hatched as a cruel hoax. “It is a vexatious story & has given me a lot of work,” he complained to his supervisor J. P. Maitland. “Why it was started I can't imagine. It spoiled my plans here and upset everything.” And after five months of chasing the phantom predator, he was about ready to consider the case closed.

Following a long and dreary July, waiting out an interminable siege of wind and rain, Henry ventured out with the first window of sunshine to check again on Resolution Island. And there he saw, on August 4, in the entrance of Goose Cove lagoon, scrambling upon the rocky shore, the lithe and tubular figure of a little carnivore, hunting in the herky-jerky style of a mustelid. Henry closed to within ten yards of what was now obviously the animal he had most feared, before the weasel caught his scent and disappeared.

For months afterward, Henry struggled with the desperation of a death row inmate. He set traps with dead bait and live, and found weasel tracks as close as ten yards away, but could never touch the creature of his nightmares. There was no escaping the inevitable. Where there was one weasel, there was bound to be more. The channel separating Resolution from mainland had been proven too narrow, the impenetrable fortress was no longer. The predators would keep coming.

Henry started putting birds ashore on other islands; he ventured north through Acheron Passage, to Entry Island of Breaksea Sound, with more birds. But for all the valiant intent, it amounted to the reflex of a man mortally wounded. After a brief vacation in Wellington, Henry returned to Pigeon Island with a broken spirit. Always the meticulous groundskeeper, he could not bring himself to paint his house or tend his garden. His life's calling in Dusky Sound had become nothing more than a job, a chore of tedium and attrition in the face of an unstoppable enemy. “I have not the old interest in it,” he wrote in January of 1902, “for I am not expecting a … long residence here, on account of that weasel.”

A month later, a beaten Henry sent his letter of resignation. “I feel I cannot stay here much longer, so I beg to resign my billet as caretaker of Resolution Island and propose to leave here by the next boat.”

Henry would rally once again, but only briefly. He agreed to reconsider, to stay on at Resolution, though the passion would never return. For the remainder of his days in Dusky Sound, he went through the motions. “I am 57 now and have made no worthy provisions so that my pleasant old dreams of getting married will all have to be buried and that will be alright,” he wrote. “I have the rheumatics in my hands, often lumbago and this wheezy chest so that I am not half my time fit for work. I have been building a dinghey and I could make myself so tired that I nearly always went to bed before dark.”

Out of a rote sense of duty, Henry continued to move kakapos and kiwis, shuffling birds like deck chairs on the
Titanic
. His tally surpassed seven hundred birds. It was a wonder there were any left to move. By then he had concluded that the kakapos and kiwis of Fiordland were on the skids. His favorite old hunting grounds on the mainland had fallen quiet. The refugees stranded on Resolution had become sacrificial lambs to professional killers. “Whatever has been the cause it has been the same everywhere I have been these last two seasons,” Henry reported.

Richard Henry would die twenty years later, alone and confused in a nursing home in Avondale. Back in Dusky Sound, his kakapos were abandoned to their fates, the walls of their last little fortress falling before the vandals.

Chapter 3

FOX FIRE

N
EARLY FORTY YEARS
after a beaten Richard Henry surrendered Resolution Island and his country's tailspinning avifauna to their fate, there began an eerie repetition of history. A lone man in a little wooden boat began crossing treacherous seas between islands of snowy peaks, on a mission to save a spectacular kingdom of birds.

His name was Bob “Sea Otter” Jones, and in 1947, in a faraway island wilderness a hemisphere and six thousand miles north of New Zealand, the sturdy little seaman Jones took up sailing a twenty-foot dory through the storm-battered archipelago of the Bering Sea, as the resident first manager of the Aleutian Islands National Wildlife Refuge.

Jones had accepted the Herculean task of managing the Aleutians' sanctuary of seals and seabirds, gathered on a chain of cold and rocky islands arcing eleven hundred miles, from the Alaska Peninsula to the farthest American outlier of Attu. Jones's work environs had a temper to match the squalling tantrums of Richard Henry's Fiordland. His was the domain of the infamous Aleutian fog that lured lost pilots into mountainsides, whose peaks occasionally rained boulders of lava and harbored a beastly wind with a name all its own. The williwaw was a meteorological phenomenon born in the icy mountain peaks, a cold, dense slug of air hurtling downward over shore and sea—an avalanche of wind. On the decks of boats bobbing off the coastal swells, sailors would come to fear that certain sudden calm of a hurricane's eye, heralding the rumble of an oncoming freight train. They would batten down the hatches and brace themselves for the williwaw to come roaring, a mast-snapping, boat-flipping force sometimes reaching speeds of 140 miles an hour.

Williwaws and erupting volcanoes, blinding fogs and fifty-foot seas—these were as much a part of the Aleutian experience as the rare windows of sunshine that revealed the most ethereal of landscapes. Those few who could roll with the punching winds and shrug off the tenacious chill found seduction in an Aleutian majesty. One of those was Bob Jones.

Jones had been educated as a biologist at South Dakota State University. The cold, windswept plains of interior North America served as fair training ground for an Aleutian tour of duty. Jones welcomed the stormy moods of the Jekyll and Hyde paradise. There were beaches in the Aleutians harboring bawling herds of northern fur seals by the hundreds of thousands. There were sea cliffs crammed wing to wing with nesting murres and kittiwakes, puffins and auklets, amassing by the millions. Even in the forbidding winter swells of the Bering Sea, flocks of floating seabirds would stretch to the horizons as the bison had once blanketed the Great Plains.

One could only imagine the Aleutians at their wildest, for their heyday had long passed. However stunning the show, the wildlife multitudes that Jones had inherited were in fact the withered vestiges of an epic plunder.

B
ERING

In June 1741, the Russian ship
St. Peter
, with a crew of seventy-six commanded by Vitus Bering, sailed from the Siberian shores of Kamchatka in exploration of the North Pacific. Nearly six weeks later, after reaching the Alaskan shores of what is now America, a mysteriously indifferent Commander Bering celebrated the discovery of his lifetime with an inexplicable impatience to head home. After a brief foray along the Alaskan coast, the
St. Peter
weighed anchor and headed back across the sea that would take Bering's name, as well as his life.

Bering's premonitions soon became prophecy. By late September, halfway home across the Aleutian chain, a third of Bering's crew were lying in the hold, joints aching, teeth loosening, faces yellowing with the slow death of scurvy. Bering himself was bedridden with a mysterious malady all his own. With ship and crew at half-mast, the signature williwaw of the Aleutians came crashing. “We could hear the wind rush as if out of a narrow passage,” noted the ship's naturalist, Georg Steller in his journal, “with such terrible whistling, raging and blustering that we were in danger of losing masts or rudder or else of seeing the vessel broken by the waves, which pounded as when cannons are fired, so that we were expecting every moment that last stroke and death. Even the old and experienced pilot Hesselberg could not recall among his fifty years at sea having passed through a storm which even resembled it.”

On the morning of September 30 a williwaw more ferocious than the last struck the
St. Peter
. “No one could lie down, sit up, or stand,” wrote Steller. “Nobody was able to remain at his post: we were drifting under the might of God wither the angry heavens willed to send us. Half of our crew lay sick and weak, the other half were quite crazed and maddened from the terrifying motion of the sea and ship. There was much praying, to be sure, but the curses piled up during ten years in Siberia prevented any response. Beyond the ship we could see not a fathom out into the ocean because we continuously lay buried among the cruel waves. Under such conditions no one any longer possessed either courage or counsel.”

The siege extended through October. Under barrage of wind and wave and scurvy, their food running short, minds and bodies unraveled. Corpses began going overboard with nearly daily routine.

Finally, on November 4, dead ahead of the storm-tossed ship arose a mountainous land, mistakenly imagined by the desperate crew as the shores of their homeland. “It is impossible to describe how great and extraordinary was the joy over everybody at this sight,” Steller wrote. “The half-dead crawled up to see it, and all thanked God heartily for this great mercy.”

Celebration soon turned to panic. Before dawn, heavy surf snapped the
St. Peter
's anchor and began sweeping ship and crew toward the rocks. Sea-hardened sailors ran crying and babbling. Two corpses being held for burial on land but now arousing superstitions “were thrown without ceremony neck and heels into the sea.”

In the moment when all braced to be dashed to their deaths upon the rocks, providence intervened. The
St. Peter
rose on the benevolent crest of a rogue wave, lifting the wounded ship and crew over the jaws of the reef and depositing them at sudden peace in a quiet pool before the beach. The wind calmed, a crescent moon shone above a majestic horizon of sandy dunes and snowcapped peaks. The crewmen of the
St. Peter
had just experienced the luckiest moment of their lives. The natives of the land before them, however, had just experienced their most unfortunate.

The next day Steller and a small crew rowed a longboat from the wreck of the
St. Peter
to the beach to begin exploring what the wishful among them were praying was the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia. What Steller soon saw told him it was not. The crew was greeted by a company of curious sea otters, mindless of any danger. Steller's suspicions grew with the appearance of a huge dark creature wallowing in the shallows, a mysterious animal the shape “of an overturned boat,” its snout occasionally surfacing to draw breath “with a noise like a horse's snort.” The sea cow, as Steller came to call it, treated the boatloads of armed men as mere logs of driftwood.

Once ashore the men were besieged by arctic foxes , snapping and barking. The crewmen kicked them, to no avail. They hacked and stabbed the little creatures with axes and knives. The fearless foxes kept coming.

As the survivors of the Bering voyage settled into their new task of surviving on what would one day be named Bering Island, the foxes became the most intimate and incessant reminder that this strange and hostile land was someplace other than home. The foxes feared nothing in the men who now attacked them. Steller and a shipmate killed sixty in a day. And still they swarmed, bold with hunger and mindless of consequence. “When we first arrived they bit off the noses, fingers and toes of the dead while their graves were being dug,” wrote Steller. “While skinning animals it often happened we stabbed two or three foxes with our knives because they wanted to tear the meat from our hands.” Men learned to sleep with club in hand. Steller continued: “One night a sailor on his knees wanted to urinate out of the door of the hut, a fox snapped at the exposed part and, in spite of his cries, did not soon want to let go. No one could relieve himself without a stick in his hand, and they immediately ate up the excrement as eagerly as pigs.”

Mad with vengeance, the castaways resorted to torture, gouging the foxes' eyes, hacking off limbs and tails, and hanging pairs of foxes by their feet to watch them “bite each other to death.” For their efforts the men were thereafter haunted at their huts by tail-less foxes and foxes hobbling on three or two legs, advancing with a zombie's resolve.

As the plague of scurvy abated and strengths recovered under Steller's doctorly care, the castaways turned the natives' fearlessness to their favor. Sea otters and fur seals, lounging and napping so trustingly upon the rocks and sands, allowed the men to tiptoe down and club them. The otters became such predictable fare that the men began throwing away the half-palatable meat and collecting hides as poker chips. “The sickness had scarcely subsided when … worse epidemic appeared,” recorded Steller. “I mean the wretched gambling with cards, when through whole days and nights nothing but card-playing was to be seen in the dwellings, at first for money, now held in low esteem, and when this was gambled away, for the fine sea-otters, which had to offer up their costly skins.”

Faced with the relentless slaughter, the otters and innumerable rookeries of seals that Steller had noted at the onset steadily evaporated. Hunters found themselves journeying farther for their meat, trudging miles over rocky tundra to new shores in pursuit of the retreating herds. On the way, they hunted by the hundreds the ptarmigan, the snow grouse of the Arctic, until the ptarmigan too grew hard to find. They chased down the island's strange species of cormorant, a fish-eating bird big enough to feed three and, to its ultimate demise, flightless.

Eventually the men of the
St. Peter
turned their attention to the most tempting mass of meat on the island, which came in the form of a sea beast thirty feet long and some four tons heavy. The sea cow, a gigantic cousin to the manatee, lolled in familial pods along the shallow shores. Steller, ever the naturalist, had been observing them daily from his hut. He would come to know these animals as no other human ever would.

“They come in so close to shore that not only did I on many occasions prod them with a pole or a spear, but sometimes even stroked their back with my hand,” Steller wrote. “If badly hurt they did nothing more than move farther away from shore, but after a little while they forgot their injury and came back.”

After a string of frustrated bunglings and escapes of wounded sea cows, the hunters eventually honed a crude but lethal technique. It amounted to live butchery, which Steller seamlessly recorded with compassion and chilling candor. “These … gluttonous animals keep head under water with but slight concern for their life and security, so that one may pass in the very midst of them in a boat even unarmed and safely single out from the herd the one he wishes to hook … Their capture was effected by a large iron hook the point of which somewhat resembled the fluke of an anchor, the other end being fastened by means of an iron ring to a very long and stout rope, held by thirty men on shore. A strong sailor took this hook and with four or five other men stepped into the boat, and one of them taking the rudder, the other three or four rowing, they quietly hurried towards the herd. The harpooner stood in the bow of the boat with the hook in his hand and struck as soon as he was near enough to do so, whereupon the men on shore, grasping the other end of the rope, pulled the desperately resisting animal laboriously towards them. Those in the boat, however, made the animal fast by means of another rope and wore it out with continual blows until tired and completely motionless, it was attacked with bayonets, knives and other weapons and pulled up on land. Immense slices were cut from the still living animal, but all it did was shake its tail furiously and make such resistance with its forelimbs that big strips of the cuticle were torn off. In addition it breathed heavily, as if sighing. From the wounds in its back the blood spurted upward like a fountain.”

Finding their stricken mates and family members under assault, the sea cows would surge heroically to their rescue. “To this end some of them tried to upset the boat with their backs, while others pressed down the rope and endeavored to break it, or strove to remove the hook from the wound in the back by blows of their tail, in which they actually succeeded several times. It is a most remarkable proof of their conjugal affection that the male, after having tried with all his might, although in vain, to free the female caught by the hook, and in spite of the beating we gave him, nevertheless followed her to the shore, and that several times, even after she was dead, he shot unexpectedly up to her like a speeding arrow. Early next morning, when we came to cut up the meat and bring it to the dugout, we found the male again standing by the female, and the same I observed once more on the third day when I went there by myself for the sole purpose of examining the intestines.”

T
HE
R
USSIAN
I
NVASION

By January 1742, having recently lost their commander, Bering, to intestinal gangrene, the survivors had come to realize that they would either rescue themselves from their island prison or die a miserable death there. They began to disassemble the wreck of their ship, to build a new boat from its remains. Come August, nine months after their stranding, with their energies freshly bolstered by the meat of the sea cow, the forty-five remaining seamen of the Bering expedition crammed themselves into a forty-foot boat resurrected from the bones of the
St. Peter
and sailed westward for home. Fourteen days and sixty miles later, furiously bailing to keep their jury-rigged lifeboat from sinking, the survivors of the Bering expedition at last reached the familiar shores of Kamchatka.