High Country Lark Read online

  ‘A possum then?’

  ‘I doubt it. This was daytime, and possums don’t really make sounds like that in daylight hours. Did you hear the swinging gate calls?’ says Johnny.

  I’m not sure whether I did or not. I’m flummoxed enough as it is.

  The tape goes on to deliver a descending three-note melody, with the last note repeated — rather tūī-like — and another series of chime-like calls with harmonic qualities sweet to the ear. There are bellbird alarm calls going off at the same time. These alarm calls are rowdy when you hear them in person in the forest but now, on this tape, much less powerful than the ‘presumed kōkako’ chimes. I am reassured. I am also now thinking that when it comes to the sounds they make, South Island kōkako are off the planet.

  After a rodent-ridden night in the Bushveldt at Paradise, I drive around to the Routeburn Valley. The weather is holding fine. You enter Mount Aspiring National Park to get to the start of the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand’s most popular alpine treks. It’s a trampers’ highway, walkable two abreast for most of the way. The Sugarloaf Pass track, I’m guessing, will be less civilised. The turn-off for the pass is before you get to the stream. Cagan’s kōkako sighting took place a little farther on from the turn-off. I’ll have all ears open for swinging gates and animals coughing. Looking at the distance on the map and the 600 metre climb to the pass, I predict it will take me about two hours to make the Lark’s rendezvous point at noon. I’m good for time.

  Walking through red beech forest of the kind you encounter at the start of the Routeburn Track is a magnificent experience. You stroll among giants — huggable but impossible to get your arms around. High up, their foliage is more open, airy and carefree than that of the podocarps, rimu and totara, and a lighter green. In a breeze they are scintillating. Moist podocarp forest is invariably a jungle; the beech forest understorey, typically sparse, is easier to negotiate, with carpets of moss and lichen softening the way. From logs and branches, miniature forests of beech seedlings sprout red-leafed progeny from the same seeding year.

  I know this red beech experience won’t last because these trees are not as hardy as mountain and silver beech, which are found higher up the mountainsides, indeed all the way to the tree line. The reds, largest of the beech species, reaching a height of thirty metres, prefer lower elevations, moist but generally more fertile soils, and a reasonable climate.

  The red beech is where the robins live. And falcons, it seems. Crossing the swing-bridge over the river at the track entrance, I fluked a fleeting view of a falcon — it looked like a young male — gliding on dappled, rounded wings down the river’s avenue of beech trees, towards the mouth. My mind diverted to the Lark and his interest in falcons. I wonder which way he will come to get to the pass. There is a trail from the next valley, the Rock Burn.

  I’ve been walking just a few minutes after crossing the swing-bridge, when a robin alights nearby on wings gossamer-quiet and legs as thin as match-sticks. Its close approach is astonishing. Few native or introduced birds are as confiding. This one flicks its bill at the leaf litter, bidding me do the same, it seems. Having been in robin habitat many times before, I oblige with my hands then draw back, knowing the bird will fly at once to the disturbance and feast its beady black eyes, with its head tipped, on whatever is crawling there. It pays to be pushy if you are a foraging robin; trouble is, its ground-foraging habit makes it vulnerable to rats and stoats. When I get back I’ll try to find out whether the Routeburn robins are holding their own in the face of predation. They deserve to be. They have enchanted echelons of day-trippers and trampers since the first visitors explored the Routeburn on horseback in the 1880s.

  It’s a Friday, and the last day of the working year for most people. I have a head start on outdoor recreation this Christmas. Bright red plastic triangles, nailed to trees at intervals, mark the track, which is criss-crossed by tree roots and faint in places. It’s a steady grade.

  No, hurry — I’m all ears for bongs or the banging of sticks. The commonest calls are the chattering of the ubiquitous, introduced chaffinch and the softer voices of two native species: rifleman and grey warbler. The rifleman, smaller than mice and all but tail-less, was named by European settlers who thought their plumage resembled the colours of a rifle-toting colonial regiment. The grey warbler’s nest could be filled at this time of year with a couple of shining cuckoo chicks that are bizarrely larger than the foster parents. A melodic call in the distance pulls me up, and my ears really are now on full alert — until I realise the song is coming from a tūī or perhaps a bellbird.

  In half an hour I reach a ford above the junction of two branches of Sugarloaf Stream. For much of this first leg of the climb, the roar of the Routeburn charging through its gorge of boulders has been filtering through the forest canopy. The river’s voice runs out more or less where the red beech trees disappear from the canopy, leaving the small-leaved mountain beech in charge. The oldest trees, red beech in particular, develop holes in their trunks that are suitable for nesting mohua/yellowheads and parakeets. The canary-yellow mohua, like the grey warbler, may host cuckoo eggs and chicks — in the mohua’s case, not shining cuckoo but long-tailed cuckoo, which, uninvited, will present eggs for the mohua to hatch, and outsize chicks to raise.

  The understorey here, above the red beech zone, is sparse: small prickly totara, flat-leaved celery pine, coprosma bushes and beech saplings that are canopy trees in waiting. They wait for a windfall, the felling by old age or windstorm of one of canopy trees. This creates a well of light and an inevitable growth spurt for the next generation of trees.

  Not far above the ford I sit down to rest amid sunbeams penetrating the canopy. I take a drink and knot the corners of a handkerchief for a makeshift hat. Regrettably, my sunhat is back in the wagon. Being among the folliclely challenged, I will need some sort of protection from the sun when I get above the tree line.

  Still seated on a bank of clubmoss, I glimpse a movement about five metres ahead, just off the track. It is a flicker, nothing more, and perhaps I am deceived by a falling leaf. The forest is hushed. No, there it is again. A furry face appears at the entrance to a hole that is a tight fit for it. I’m looking at a chestnut-brown head, popping black eyes and short ears curled forward. Stoat!

  We eye each other. In an instant the face is gone. It is hard to believe the animal can back up so quickly. There it is again, momentarily, a puppet-head with whiskers: small, cute and deadly to just about every living thing in this forest: bird, mouse, rat, gecko, weta, beetle, even possum.

  I ready my camera with a telephoto lens and lie propped on elbows, hoping for a shot. I wait for some minutes. The puppet show seems to be over.

  I presume I have come upon a stoat at its den. You don’t often see stoats in the forest. They are supremely clever and efficient hunters, able to climb trees, manoeuvre in tight spaces, swim rivers, and outrun most things. Heart-lung rhythm is phenomenal — about one hundred breaths and an unbelievable 400 heartbeats a minute when at full stretch hunting. They live where they can find food. That means practically every habitat, wet or dry, hot or cold, between sea shore and alpine zone in the North and South Islands.

  Stoats, in the same family as ferrets and weasels but more versatile and pervasive, are called ermine back in Europe and valued for their fur, white in winter. They were introduced into New Zealand from Britain in the 1880s to combat a rabbit plague in southern districts. The Wakatipu area received the first official lot to be imported. Stoats everywhere had government blessing and protection in the early years. Not so today. Stoats have paid much less attention to rabbits than to vulnerable native birds and other fauna. They have caused disastrous decline across an array of species. Falcons and feral cats are about their only predators in the wild, and a cat might rather choose to stalk a bird before bothering with a wily stoat.

  I continue on my way. The canopy grows thinner and the forest floor is better lit, with low-stature silver beech replacing mountain be
ech towards the tree line. Silver beech predominates at the tree line through southern New Zealand, a species tolerant of snow, icy temperatures and the high rainfall. An exceptionally hardy tree, silver beech, and near the tree line it is festooned with pale-green old man’s beard lichen, called Usnea, giving the forest a ghostly touch, especially in misty conditions. The sun beats down on the lichens now, evoking a fairyland rather than a hall of ghosts.

  The tree line is a place worth savouring, a natural boundary where, typically, life revs up. Birds chase increased insect life, and the riflemen are plentiful on this Sugarloaf Pass section of the tree line today. I see a couple of tomtits and a bellbird. I hear parakeets and, distantly, a kea.

  Then another surprise. Someone is coming down the track towards me. It’s not the Lark. This guy is too tall, too clean-shaven. With designer sunglasses, a woollen shirt that looks newly purchased, and a bright-blue pack, he could be stepping out of a Queenstown hotel to go for a day hike up Ben Lomond. The tramper is German. He tells me he camped just down from the pass last night after being dropped off by the Dart Jet where the Rock Burn meets the Dart River. He planned to do a loop up the Rock Burn Valley and over Sugarloaf Pass to the Routeburn, where he expected to camp the night. But the climb to the pass took him longer than he expected — ‘It was not like the German woods, it was hard’ — and in cool, drizzly weather he was benighted on the pass.

  ‘I was a bit, aah, nerved by the conditions,’ he says in tentative English. ‘No good place for my tent. And there was a mouse …’

  ‘A mouse?’

  ‘Yes, a mouse in my sleeping bag in the morning. It must have come in when I went out for a pee in the night. It ran out when I got up for breakfast.’

  ‘Lucky mouse,’ I say, ‘getting warm lodgings for the night.’ I want to share with him my overnight experience of marauding mice but think I shouldn’t try to top his story. He is keen to keeping moving anyway and perhaps warm himself up, and I need to continue on my way, too, aware that my midday rendezvous time is rushing up.

  Above the forest, there is a shrubland of juniper-scented manuka, orange-berried coprosma bushes, green skull-caps of subalpine hebe, filmy ferns and swathes of snow tussock grasses. The track is now a route marked by steel fence standards painted orange. It is muddy in places. Large white celmisia daisies, with prominent yellow centres and thick leaves that are furry underneath, appear amongst the tussocks — a sure sign of an alpine environment.

  Catching my eye off the trail, in a bare patch among the tussocks, is a faded yellow object, foreign to these surroundings. My first thought is that it could be a discarded piece of bread or toast left behind by the German camper. It turns out to be the plastic lid of a can of Sustagen, the powder base for an American energy drink. I remember it from the 1970s and 1980s, and marathon running. The can, rusty now and squashed flat, has been here a long time. The brand name imprinted on the lid is only just legible. I leave it there, historic refuse. Carry out all you take in — that’s the imperative today, especially in remote places like this. At least someone, way back then, felt compelled to squash the can, and reduce the footprint.

  I can see a dip in the skyline where the pass must be. I am going to be a bit late, maybe ten minutes.

  Sugarloaf Pass pulls into view. It arches smoothly from the Routeburn side to the Rock Burn, allowing a tramper to transit quickly between one valley and the other. Any mountain pass or saddle newly encountered is always a discovery, and, for me, as impressive as arriving at a summit. The surprise element is often on the cards. At the Cascade Saddle near the head of the Dart Valley on a fine afternoon a few years ago, I came upon a group of German women trampers stretched out in a grassy basin, enjoying the alpine sun — topless. And a little farther on, three men in kilts wandered up from the Matukituki side on weary legs, bound for Dart Hut. They were card-carrying members — the leaders in fact, from Hamilton — of the McGillicuddy Serious Party, which added a ‘Great Leap Backwards’ brand of creativity and levity to general elections in the 1990s.

  Yes, passes can sometimes funnel offbeat experiences. The Sugarloaf’s natural doorway is far from dramatic. There are no bluffs or towering tors, just a tawny fur coat of snow tussock, with low shrubs of Dracophyllum interspersed. Sugarloaf Pass looks decidedly lonesome under a high sun. High noon, summer solstice.

  ‘Long time, no sea lions!’

  The voice — and there is no mistaking either voice or message — comes at me from one of the few schist outcrops in the pass, a hundred metres off to the left. In that direction, on the distant skyline, is one of the signal peaks of the northern Humboldt Mountains: Momus, which my research into the landmark names around here tells me is the Greek God of Ridicule!

  I haven’t seen the Lark since the sea lion episode at Taieri Mouth around the millennium summer. Now, sitting on tussocks beside a sloping grey rock the size of a musterer’s hut, he seems much the same: ginger complexion, a touch lighter perhaps (and presumably ginger hair under his hat), pale-blue eyes and a few days’ growth of whiskers. The blue denim cap of the Strath Taieri days has given way to an oilskin canvas hat, Southern Man style, with a brim to fend off the high-country sun as well as serious rain. He’s wearing a black Swanndri, sleeveless out of respect for summer temperatures, I guess. His trousers look serviceable, made of moleskin or similar material. On his feet are calf-length gumboots, the lace-up kind but modified with two short lengths of wire instead of laces binding the eyelets — a durable invention, good for wet going or rocky places, sturdy enough for long stretches, and convenient if you want to get into and out of the boots in a hurry.

  ‘Solstice greetings,’ I say, searching for a line appropriate to the occasion.

  ‘Yeah, sun’s all downhill from today,’ says the Lark. ‘Take a pew.’ I nestle into the tussock. He tips back his hat. ‘This beats the Christmas rush, eh? You got my invitation, then.’

  ‘Sure did. I’m intrigued. A new lair for the Lark, is it?’

  Instead of answering my question, he has one of his own that threatens to invoke Momus. ‘Nice hat. Where’d you get it?’

  ‘Left the real one in the car. It’s not going to be much protection if a falcon attacks me.’

  I tell him about the notice I’d seen at the DOC office in Glenorchy warning trampers to look out for dive-bombing falcons on the Rees-Dart Track, particularly at Shelter Rock and Cattle Flat. The notice cautioned trampers to ‘avoid injury’ without saying how exactly. Recalling images of his hang-gliding pastime in the Strath Taieri and his aerial connection with a falcon called Freefall, I ask, ‘Tried any of your gliding stuff in this area?’

  ‘Nope. The forest makes things a bit tricky here. Winds are unpredictable, too. You should see what it’s like when a decent storm hits. Besides, the years are piling up on me. Better off walking these days. How about a bite to eat?’

  From my day-pack I haul out home-made sandwiches and some fruit. As the Lark reaches for his supplies, he says: ‘Hope you’re set for tucker. I’m a sandwich short of a picnic.’

  There is much to catch up on with the Lark, and in the circumstances, food seems like a minor and mechanical detail, a refuelling. Falcons are still on my mind. I tell him about the bird I saw gliding down the Routeburn this morning. No doubt he knows something about the falcons in this area. He starts telling me about a falcon nest he discovered near the bridge to Lake Sylvan, three kilometres downstream of the Routeburn Track entrance.

  ‘It was under a log.’

  ‘A log? Wouldn’t that be unusual?’

  ‘Too true. For this area anyhow. The nest was on the ground, nothing more than flattened grass tucked under the thick end of the log. The pair was smart enough to know the site was protected from rains from the north. They raised a couple of young.’

  The Lark says that apart from the fact it was at ground level, the nest site had the dimensions of a rock ledge on a schist outcrop, with a view south over a paddock where the Sylvan sawmill operated in the 1920s. The
Central Otago rangeland falcons favour nest sites on cliffs or at the base of overhanging rocks. They like settings people pay big money for — a view with water in it.

  ‘Round here,’ the Lark says, ‘falcons generally build their nests in the trees. But not this pair. Guess that’s nature for you. As soon as you think you’ve got nature worked out, she’ll contradict you, throw up something strange and unheard of. That, I like. Around nature you can’t sound too certain of your facts, or too much of a know-all. You could get your theories blown away.’

  ‘Know-all’ is certainly not a label I’d put on the Lark. He’s a practical guy, in touch with the land. I know him as a musterer with dog at heel, a general farm hand and a shearer, too. He even does water divining for farmers during dry spells on the Strath Taieri. Not much call for that talent in the Head of the Lake area. Rainfall is pretty well assured, and the rivers run steadily. So what kind of life does he have in this region?

  ‘Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here?’

  ‘Bits and pieces,’ says the Lark, dismissively. ‘Tell you what, let’s get moving. I’ll show you some of the sights.’

  ‘Okay, but I’ll need to be heading back in a couple of hours. My family want me back for Christmas. What are your plans?’

  ‘Show you in a mo, when we get higher.’

  We pack up the lunch things. The Lark rehooks his gumboots. I’m aware of a northerly breeze fanning the pass — little more than a puff. But it may be signalling a change in the mild, pleasant weather. There’s a build-up of high cloud in the north and west, where the heavy-duty clouds and rain mostly come from. For the moment, though, the tops are clear, the views jaunty to say the least.

  North of the lunch spot, through the dish that is the pass, the peaks rising to Mt Nox, Roman Goddess of the Night, are lined out on the other side of the Rock Burn Valley, surprisingly close in the mountain air. Their steepness is evident from the rock screes spilling into the gullies and from the waterfalls — vertical silver threads through the dark skirt of forest. White splotches around the tops suggest the spring snows might have run into summer. I know from the map that Mt Nox and its cohort, Minos, who was an ancient King of Crete, conceal one of the region’s highest alpine lakes. With the tantalising name of Lake Unknown, it occupies a cold, cliff-bound crucible at the same elevation as Sugarloaf Pass. I’ve heard it is a very steep climb from the Beans Burn, and may have to remain unknown to me.