Last Chance to See (17 page)

Five in the morning is the most horrible time, particularly when your body is still desperately trying to disentangle itself from half a bottle of whisky. We dragged ourselves, cold, crabby and aching, from our bunks. The noise of sub-machine-gun fire from the main room turned out to be frying bacon, and we tried to revive ourselves with this while the grey morning light began to seep hideously up into the sky outside. I've never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I've seen a few and they're never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you're in the right frame of mind, which is usually about lunchtime.

After a lot of sullen fumbling with boots and cameras we eventually struggled out of the door at about six-thirty and trudged our way back out into the forest. Mark started to point out exciting rare birds to me almost immediately and I told him to take a running jump. A great start to a day of virtually unremitting ornithology. Gaynor asked me to describe the scene as we walked into the forest and I said that if she poked that microphone in front of me once more I'd probably be sick over it. I quickly found that I was walking by myself.

After a while I had to admit that the forest wasn't that bad. Cold, wet and slippery, and continually trying to wrench my legs off at the knees with some bloody tangled root or other, but it also had a kind of fresh glistening quality that wouldn't go away however much I glowered at it. Ron Tindal had joined us this time, and was busy striding his way through the undergrowth in an appallingly robust and Scottish manner, but even this ceased to make my head ache after a while as all the glistening began slowly to work a kind of soothing magic on me. Way ahead of us, half-glimpsed through the misty trees, the blue plaid windcheater moved silently like a wraith, following the busy clinking of Boss's bell.

After a longish while of trudging, we caught up with Arab, who had stopped again on a narrow path, and was squatting in the sodden grass.

'There's a fairly recent dropping here,' he said, holding up a soft, dark mottled bead for our inspection. `It's got that white on it which is uric acid, and it hasn't been washed off by the rain or dried out by the sun. That'll disappear in about a day, so this is definitely last night. This is just where we were, in fact, so I expect we just missed him.'

Great, I thought. We could have stayed out a little longer last night, and stayed in bed a lot longer this morning. But the early sun was beginning to glimmer through the trees and there was a lot of fragile beauty business going on where it glistened on the tiny beaded dewdrops on the leaves, so I supposed that it wasn't altogether bad. In fact there was so much glimmering and glistening and glittering and glinting going on that I began to wonder why it was that so many words that describe what the sun does in the morning begin with the letters 'gl', and I mentioned this to Mark, who told me to take a running jump.

Cheered by this little exchange we set off again. We had hardly gone five yards when Arab, who had already gone fifteen, stopped again. He squatted once more and pointed to some slight signs of digging in the earth.

`That's a very fresh excavation,' he said. `Probably last night.
Digging for this orchid tuber. You can actually see the beak marks through the bottom here.'

I wondered if this was a good time to begin feeling a bit excited and optimistic about the outcome of the day's expedition, but when I did it started to give me a headache so I stopped. The damn bird was just stringing us along, and it would be another gloomy evening of sitting in the but cleaning our lenses and trying to look on the bright side. At least there wouldn't be any whisky this time because we'd drunk it all, so we would be leaving Codfish the following day clear-headed enough to know that we had flown twelve thousand miles to see a bird that hadn't turned up to see us, and all that remained was to fly twelve thousand miles back again and try to find something to write about it. I must have done sillier things in my life, but I couldn't remember when.

The next time Arab stopped it was for a feather.

`That's a kakapo feather that has dropped,' he said, picking it lightly off the side of a bush. `Probably from around the breast by its being quite yellow.'

`It's quite downy isn't it?' said Mark, taking it and twirling it between his fingers in the misty sunlight. 'Do you think it was dropped recently?' he added hopefully.

'Oh yes, it's reasonably fresh,' said Arab.

`So this is the closest we've got yet... ?'

Arab shrugged.

`Yes, I suppose it is,' he said `Doesn't mean we're going to find it though. You can stand practically on top of one and not see it. The signs are that the kakapo was quite active in the early part of the night, just after we were here. And that's bad news because there was rain during the night, so some of the scent has been washed away. There's plenty of scent around, but it's inconclusive. Still, you never know your luck.'

We trudged on. Or perhaps we didn't trudge. Perhaps there was a bit more of a spring in our step, but as half an hour passed, and then an hour, and as the sun gradually crept higher in the sky, Arab was once more a floating wraith far distant from us in the trees ahead, and then we lost him altogether. The spring had certainly dropped from our step. For a while we stumbled on, guided by the very faint sounds of Boss's bell which were still borne to us on the light breeze sifting through the trees, but then that too stopped and we were lost. Ron was a little way ahead of us, still bounding with rumbustious Scottish gusto, but he too was now floundering for the right direction.

We were clambering over a bank that was thickly covered with ferns and rotten tree trunks, and which led down into a wide, shallow gully in the middle of which Ron was standing, looking perplexedly around him. Gaynor lost her footing as she negotiated the muddy slope into the gully, and slithered down it elegantly on her bottom. I got my camera strap caught in the only branch that didn't break off the moment you touched it. Mark stopped to help me disentangle myself. Ron had gone into bounding mode again and was hopping up the far side of the gully calling out for Arab.

`Can you see them?' Mark called out.

A thought struck me. We were lost because Boss's bell had stopped ringing. The same thought obviously hit Mark simultaneously and we both suddenly called out, `Have they got a kakapo?

A call came back.

Gaynor turned to us and shouted, `They've got a kakapo!'

Suddenly we were all in rumbustious bounding mode. With much shouting and hallooing we clambered and slithered our way hectically across the floor of the gully, hauled ourselves up the other side and down into the next gully, on the far side of which, sitting on a mossy bank in front of a steep slope, was a most peculiar tableau.

It took me a moment or two to work out what it was that the scene so closely resembled, and when I realised, I stopped for a moment and then approached more circumspectly.

It was like a Madonna and Child.

Arab was sitting cross-legged on the mossy bank, his long wet grizzled beard flowing into his lap. And cradled in his arms, nuzzling gently into his beard, was a large, fat, bedraggled green parrot. Standing by them in quiet attendance, looking at them intently with his head cocked on one side, was Boss, still tightly muzzled.

Duly hushed, we went up to them. Mark was making quiet groaning noises in the back of his throat.

The bird was very quiet and quite still. It didn't appear to be alarmed, but then neither did it appear to be particularly aware of what was happening. The gaze of its large black expressionless eye was fixed somewhere in the middle distance. It was holding, lightly but firmly in its bill, the forefinger of Arab's right hand, down which a trickle of blood was flowing, and this seemed to have a calming effect on the bird. Gently, Arab tried to remove it, but the kakapo liked it, and eventually Arab let it stay there. A little more blood flowed down Arab's hand, mingling with the rain water with which everything was sodden.

To my right, Mark was murmuring about what an honour it would be to be bitten by a kakapo, which was a point of view I could scarcely understand, but I let it pass.

We asked Arab where he'd found it.

`The dog found it,' he said. `Probably about ten yards up this hill, I'd say, under that leaning tree. And when the dog got close it broke and ran down to just here where I caught it.

`It's in good condition, though. You can tell that it's close to booming this year because of its spongy chest. That's good news. It means it's establishing itself well after being resettled.'

The kakapo shifted itself very slightly in Arab's lap, and pushed its face closer into his beard. Arab stroked its damped ruffled feathers very gently.

'It's a bit nervous,' he said. `Especially of noise probably more than anything. He looks very bedraggled because of being wet. When Boss first caught up with him he would have been in a dry roost up there and probably at the noise of the bell or the dog going too close, the bird broke out and ran down the hill, and was still going when I caught it. It's just gripping me a bit and that's all. If he wanted to put the pressure on... ' He shrugged. The kakapo clearly had a very powerful bill. It looked like a great horn-plated tin opener welded to its face.

`It's definitely not as relaxed as a lot of birds,' muttered Arab. 'A lot of birds are really relaxed when you've got them in the hand. I don't want to hold it for too long since it's wet and will get chilled through if the water penetrates to the skin. I think I'd better let it go now.'

We stood back. Carefully, Arab leant forward with the bird, whose big powerful claws stretched out and scrabbled for the ground even before it got there. At last it let go of Arab's finger, steadied its weight on the ground, put its head down and scuttled off.

That night in the wardens' but we jubilantly polished off the remaining beers, and pored, over the records of all the kakapos that had been transferred to Codfish. Arab had made a note of the identity number of the bird, which had been fastened to its leg - 8-44263. Its name was Ralph. It had been transferred to Codfish Island from Pegasus Harbour, Stewart Island, almost exactly a year ago.

`This is excellent news,' exclaimed Ron. `This is really very, very good news indeed. If this kakapo is coming up to booming condition just a year after being relocated, it's the best indication we've had yet that the transfer programme is working. You know that we didn't want you to come here, and that we didn't want to track kakapos and risk disturbing them, but as it happens... Well, this is very useful information, and very encouraging indeed.'

A few days later, standing on top of Kakapo Castle in Fiordland we tell Don Merton that we think we've been forgiven.

`Oh yes, I think so,' he says. `You may have bumbled around a bit and trodden on a few toes, but you've actually stirred things up a bit as well. The press conference was very effective, and from what I hear there's an imminent decision coming from quite high up to move the kakapo conservation programme to the top of the Department's priority list, which should mean that we get allocated more resources. I just hope it's not all too late.

`There are now twenty-five kakapos on Codfish, but only five of those are females, and that's the crucial point. There's only one kakapo that we know of left on Stewart Island, and that's a male. We keep searching for more females, but we doubt if there are any more. Add those to the fourteen birds on Little Barrier and we have a total of only forty kakapos left altogether.

`And it's so difficult getting the blighters to breed. In the past they bred very slowly because there was nothing else to keep their population stable. If an animal population rises so fast that it outgrows the capacity of its habitat to feed and sustain it then it plunges right back down again, then back up, back down and so on. If a population fluctuates too wildly it doesn't take much of a disaster to tip the species over the edge into extinction. So all the kakapo's peculiar mating habits are just a survival technique as much as anything else.
But only because there was no outside competition. Now that they are surrounded by predators there's very little to keep them alive, other than our direct intervention. As long as we can sustain it.'

This reminds me of my motorbike industry analogy, which I have tactfully kept to myself. There are remedies available to motorbike engineers that zoologists do not have. As we tread our way carefully back along the ridge to the helicopter I ask Don what he feels the long term prospects for the kakapos really are, and his answer is surprisingly apposite.

'Well,' he says in his quiet polite voice, `anything's possible, and with genetic engineering, who knows. If we can keep them going during our lifespan, it's over to the next generation with its new range of tools and techniques and science to take it from there. All we can do is perpetuate them during our lifetime and try to hand them on in as good a condition as possible to the next generation and hope like heck that they feel the same way about them as we do.'

A few minutes later our helicopter rises up above Kakapo Castle, puts its nose down and heads back up the valleys to Milford Sound, leaving behind a small scratched depression in the earth and a single, elderly untouched sweet potato.

Assumptions are the things you don't know you're making, which is why it is so disorienting the first time you take the plug out of a wash basin in Australia and see the water spiralling down the hole the other way round. The very laws of physics are telling you how far you are from home.

In New Zealand even the telephone dials are numbered anticlockwise. This has nothing to do with the laws of physics - they just do it differently there. The shock is that it had never occurred to you that there was any other way of doing it. In fact you had never even thought about it at all, and suddenly here it is - different. The ground slips.

Dialling in New Zealand takes quite a bit of concentration because every digit is where you least expect to find it. Try and do it quickly and you will inevitably misdial because your automatic habit jumps in and takes over before you have a chance to stop it. The habit of telephone dials is so deep that it has become an assumption, and you don't even know you're making it.

China is in the northern hemisphere, so its wash basins drain clockwise, like ours. Their telephone dials are numbered like ours. Both those things are familiar. But every single other thing is different, and the assumptions that you don't know you're making will only get you into trouble and confusion.

I had a kind of inkling that this would be the case from what little I knew of other people's experiences in China. I sat in the plane on the long flight to Beijing trying to unravel my habits, to unthink as it were, and feeling slightly twitchy about it.

I started buying copious quantities of aftershave. Each time the duty-free trolley came round I bought a bottle. I had never done anything like it before in my life. My normal, instinctive reaction had always been just to shake my head and carry on reading my magazine. This time I thought it would be more Zen-like to say, `Yes, all right. What have you got?' I was not the only person I caught by surprise.

`Have you gone completely mad? Mark asked me as I slipped a sixth different bottle into my hand baggage.

`I'm trying to challenge and subvert my own fundamental assumptions as to what constitutes rationally constructed behaviour.'

`Does that mean yes??

'I mean that I'm just trying to loosen up a bit,' I said. `An aeroplane doesn't give you much scope for arbitrary and alternative types of behaviour, so I'm just making the most of the opportunities that are offered.'

'I see.'

Mark shifted uncomfortably in his seat and frowned deeply into his book.

`What are you going to do with all that stuff?' he asked a while later over an airline meal.

`Dunno,' I said. `It's a problem, isn't it??

'Tell me, are you feeling nervous about something?

Yes.'

`What?'

`China.'

In the middle of one of the biggest, longest, noisiest, dirtiest thoroughfares in the world lives the reincarnation of a drowned princess, or rather, two hundred reincarnations of a drowned princess.

Whether these are two hundred different reincarnations of the same drowned princess, or the individual reincarnations of two hundred different drowned princesses, is something that the legends are a little vague about, and there are no reliable statistics on the incidence of princess-drownings in the area available to help clear the matter up.

If they are all the same drowned princess then she must have led a life of exquisite sinfulness to have had the conditions of her current lives repeatedly inflicted on her. Her reincarnations are constantly being mangled in ships' propellers, snared in fishermen's nets full of hooks, blinded, poisoned and deafened.

The thoroughfare in question is the Yangtze river, and the reincarnated princess is the Baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin.

`How do you rate our chances of seeing a dolphin? I asked Mark.

`I haven't the faintest idea,' he said. `It's very hard to get information about anything out of China, and most of it's confusing. But the dolphins are to be found - or not - in a just a few parts of the Yangtze. The main one is a stretch of the river about two hundred kilometres long centred on a town called Tongling in Anhui province. That's where there are people working on saving the baiji, and that's the main place we're headed for. We get to Tongling by boat from Nanjing, where there's a man called Professor Zhou who's a major authority on the animal. We get to Nanjing by train from Shanghai. We get to Shanghai by plane from Beijing. We've got a couple of days in Beijing first to get acclimatised and see if any of the travel arrangements are actually going to work out. We've got thousands of miles to cover and travel is meant to be insanely difficult.'

`Do we have much leeway if things go wrong?' I asked. `Which days are Professor Zhou and the others expecting us??

'Expecting us? said Mark. `What do you mean? They've never heard of us. You can't actually contact anyone in China. We'll be lucky to find them and even luckier if they agree to talk to us. In fact I'm only half certain they exist. We're going into completely unknown territory.'

We both peered out of the window. Darkness was falling over the largest nation on earth.

`There's just one last bottle left, sir,' said the cabin steward to me at that moment. `Would you like it before we close up the duty-free? Then you'll have the complete range.'

It was quite late at night as a rickety minibus delivered us to our hotel on the outskirts of Beijing. At least, I think it was the outskirts. We had no point of reference by which to judge what kind of area it was. The streets were wide and tree-lined but eerily silent. Any motor vehicle made a single and particular growl instead of merging with a general traffic hum. The streetlights had no diffusing glass covers, so the light they shed was sharp, highlighting each leaf and branch and precisely delineating their shapes against the walls. Passing cyclists cast multiple interweaving shadows on the road around them. The sense of moving in a geometric web was added to by the clack of billiard balls as they cannoned across small tables set up under the occasional street lamp.

The hotel was set in a small network of narrow side streets, and its facade was wildly decorated with the carved red dragons and gilded pagoda shapes which are the familiar stereotypes of China. We hefted our bags full of camera equipment, recording gear, clothes and aftershave into the lobby past the long glass counter displays of carved chopsticks, ginseng and herbal aphrodisiacs, and waited to check in.

I noticed an odd thing. It was one of those tiny little disorienting details, like the telephone dials in New Zealand, that tell you you are in a very distant and foreign country. I knew that the Chinese traditionally hold their table tennis bats the way we hold cigarettes. What I did not know was that they also hold their cigarettes the way we hold table tennis bats.

Our rooms were small. I sat on the edge of my bed, which was made for someone of half my height, and laid out my bewildering collection of aftershave bottles in a neat line next to two large and ornately decorated red and gold thermos flasks that were already standing on the bedside table. I wondered how I was going to get rid of them. I decided to sleep on the problem. I hoped I would be able to. I read a note in the hotel's directory of guest services with foreboding. It said: 'No dancing, clamouring, quarrelling, fisticuffings or indulging in excessive drinking and creating disturbances in public places for the sake of keeping a peaceful and comfortable environment. Guests are not permitted to bring pets and poultry into the hotel.'

The morning presented me with a fresh problem. I wanted to clean my teeth, but was a little suspicious of the delicate brown colour of the water leaking from the washbasin taps. I investigated the large flamboyant thermos flasks, but they were full of very hot water, for making tea. I poured some water from a thermos into a glass and left it to cool while I went to meet Mark and Chris Muir, our sound engineer, for a late breakfast.

Mark had already been trying to get through to Nanjing on the phone in an attempt to contact Professor Zhou, the baiji dolphin expert, and had come to the conclusion that it simply couldn't be done. We had two days to kill before our flight to Shanghai, so we might just as well be tourists for a bit.

I returned to my room to clean my teeth at last, to discover that the room maid had washed the glass I'd left out to cool, and refilled the thermoses with freshly boiled water.

I felt rather cast down by this. I tried pouring some water from one glass to another to cool it down, but even after doing this for a while the water was still hot, and the toothbrush wilted in my mouth.

I realised that I was going to have to come up with some serious strategic thinking if I was going to get to clean my teeth. I refilled the glass, carefully stuck it out of sight in the back of a cupboard, and then tried to get rid of one of the bottles of aftershave by hiding it under the bed.

We put on our sunglasses and cameras and went and spent the day looking at the Great Wall at Badaling, an hour or so outside Beijing. It looked to be remarkably freshly built for such an ancient monument, and probably the parts we saw had been.

I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn't weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.

'So it isn't the original building? I had asked my Japanese guide.

'But yes, of course it is,' he insisted, rather surprised at my question.

'But it's been burnt down?

Yes.

'Twice.'

'Many times.'

'And rebuilt.'

'Of course.
It is an important and historic building.'

'With completely new materials.'

'But of course. It was burnt down.'

'So how can it be the same building?'

'It is always the same building.'

I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.

I couldn't feel entirely comfortable with this view, because it fought against my basic Western assumptions, but I had to see the point.

I don't know whether this principle lies beneath the rebuilding of the Great Wall, because I couldn't find anybody who understood the question. The rebuilt section was swarming with tourists and Coca-Cola booths and shops where you can buy Great Wall T-shirts and electric pandas, and this may also have had something to do with it.

We returned to our hotel.

The maid had found my hidden glass of water and washed it. She must have searched hard for it because she had also found the bottle of aftershave under the bed and had placed it neatly back on the table by the others.

`Why don't you just use the stuff? asked Mark.

`Because I've smelt them all and they're horrid.'

'You could give them to people for Christmas.'

`I don't want to carry them round the world till then.'

`Remind me again why you bought them.'

`I can't remember. Let's go to dinner.'

We went to a restaurant called Crispy Fried Duck for dinner, and walking back through the city centre afterwards we came to a square called Tiananmen.

I should explain that this was October 1988. I had never heard the name Tiananmen Square, and neither had most of the world

The square is huge. Standing in it at night you have very little idea of where its boundaries are, they fade into the distance. At one end is the gateway to the Forbidden City, the Tiananmen Gate, from which the great iconic portrait of Chairman Mao gazes out across the vastness of the square, out towards its furthest point where there stands the mausoleum in which his body lies in state.

In between these two, beneath his gaze, the mood was festive. Huge topiary bushes had been imported into the square carved into the figures of cartoon animals to celebrate the Olympics.

The square was not full or crowded - it would take many tens or even hundreds of thousands of people to achieve that - but it was busy. Families were out with their children (or more usually, with their single child). They walked around, chatting with friends, milling about easily and freely as if the square were their own garden, letting their children wander off and play with others without an apparent second thought. It would be hard to imagine anything of the kind in any of the great squares of Europe, and inconceivable in America.

In fact I cannot remember any time that I have felt so easy and relaxed in a busy public place, particularly at night. The background static of wary paranoia that you take with you as a matter of unconscious habit when you step out into the streets of Western cities made itself suddenly apparent by falling silent. It was a quite magical silence.

I have to say, though, that this was probably the only time we felt so easy in China, or indeed easy at all. For most of the time we found China baffling and exasperating and perpetually opaque; but that evening, in Tiananmen Square, was easy. So the greatest bewilderment of all came a few months later when Tiananmen Square underwent that brutal transformation that occurs in the public mind to the sites of all catastrophes: they become reference points in time instead of actual places. `Before Tiananmen Square' was when we were there. `After Tiananmen Square' was after the tanks rolled in.

We returned to the square early the following morning, while the air was still damp and misty, and joined the queues that line up round the square each day to file into the mausoleum and past the body of Chairman Mao, lying in state in a perspex box.