High Country Lark

by Neville Peat

  ‘This way,’ says the Lark.

  We leave the poled route, heading east in the direction of the Dart Valley. Mount Earnslaw and Turret Head dominate the skyline. I can see immediately the Lark is still a smart mover through tussock country. He walks with an even, gliding motion.

  There are faint animal tracks through the grassland as we climb a spur. I start up a hare from under a tussock, a creature not often associated with the low-alpine zone. It’s huge — the size of a fox — and bounds away till it is out of sight. The plant life becomes more diverse the higher we go, with the snow grasses now competing for space with native edelweiss and buttercups, celmisia daisies, snowberry, white lichens and multi-coloured cushion plants.

  Across an open patch a pipit, crying ‘scree’, runs off in a jerky manner with its tail flicking nervously. These native birds, typically found in rangeland and low-alpine zones but occupying other habitats as well, are often mistaken for the introduced skylark, and vice-versa. The birds are similar in size and colour, mottled buff brown with creamy streaks, and both build simple nests on the ground, lined with grass, lichens and other camouflaging vegetation. The pipit is the more slender of the two. It also has a distinctive dark stripe through the eye area. I remember the Lark — his mispronunciation of Alec when he was a child — informing me during his hang-gliding days in the Strath Taieri that the collective name for a group of larks is an exaltation. Perhaps a group of pipits might be called a ‘palpitation’ on account of their flicking tails.

  ‘That’s the Rock Burn,’ says the Lark.

  Puffing a little, and noticing the Lark exhibiting no sign of having climbed through the herbfields and grasslands, I look back. The straight middle reach of the Rock Burn is picturesquely laid out. Glacier ice, not water, carved the valley — large-scale landscaping — before departing in rather a hurry, say, 12,000 years ago, as the climate warmed. The Rock Burn is a sizeable river, and beech forest cuddles it through this reach except for a grassy river flat that the Lark is now pointing out.

  ‘Blue ducks live there,’ he says. ‘They’ve gone from a lot of places now but the pair down there seem to be holding on. The yellowheads are mostly this side of the patch of river flats you can see. Kākā love the place, too.’

  ‘You seem to have a good handle on the birdlife.’

  ‘Yeah, at times I work with the conservation crowd. Volunteer for the yellowhead monitoring stuff. Bit of stoat trapping, that sort of thing. There’s a line of traps through the whole of the Rock Burn, right up to the basin under Park Pass. Hens’ eggs for bait. Someone’s got to check the traps every few months. Up the top end they’re protecting blue ducks; yellowheads at the bottom. Kākā, too. Gets me out and about, this caper. Yeah, I’m on the “super” now — a superant. Bloody marvellous, having the taxpayer fund my lifestyle.’

  Yes, the Lark is certain to have low overheads — and he hasn’t got much need for infrastructure, either. From what he tells me, there are rock shelters in most valleys that are dry and inviting, with a north-facing one beneath an overhang at Theatre Flat exceptionally good for a night or two. Despite his advancing years he seems in good shape for an outdoor life.

  His knowledge of local birds has me thinking he might have heard of kōkako sightings in the past, maybe even the 1995 record from the Sugarloaf catchment.

  ‘A long shot, I know, but what’s your opinion on the kōkako? There was a reported sighting a few years back in the Sugarloaf Stream area.’

  I am taken aback by his response.

  ‘There’s every chance they’re still around. Won’t be many left, mind. Mysterious bird, the kōkako. Likes to hide from people. I heard something in the Earnslaw Burn back in the ’eighties. A loud bonging bell sound that turned kind of mournful. It hung in the air like it was bouncing off the foliage. Seemed to stay with me for some time after the bird had stopped uttering it. Later on, there was a “crraaaww”, repeated a few times. You’d swear it was an animal sound or a crow. I read they’re related to crows.’

  ‘Distantly, they are…’

  ‘Never saw anything of the bird myself that time. A year or two before that, a couple of trampers from Otago, father and daughter, reckoned they came upon one in the Earnslaw Burn forest.’

  The Lark describes what they saw — a greyish bird fitting the description of a kōkako. They’d stopped on the forest track for a rest when they suddenly realised there was a fairly large bird looking at them. It moved about the lower branches then disappeared. It had an ‘apricot’ splash of colour on it, presumably the wattles. The bird was silent the whole time.

  ‘That would have been about nineteen seveny-nine,’ says the Lark. ‘Years later, the man climbed Mount Earnslaw — at the age of seventy-six, I heard. From what I know about kōkako, the chances of hearing and seeing a bird at the same time … well, you’d win Lotto before you’d strike that. Say, why don’t I show you the Earnslaw Burn rock shelter in the new year? It’s about the flashest starlight hotel in this area, right down to wire bed bases and mattresses these days.’

  I tell him I could probably make it late February or March, if, somehow, he could phone or email me with a time and day. Communication is not a strong point of his. He has no fixed abode.

  Meanwhile, a plane is buzzing somewhere overhead, bound for Milford from Queenstown no doubt. Bouncing off the valley walls, the engine noise is amplified and difficult to pinpoint. It’s a well-worked tourist route, this one, with passengers willing to pay the extra dollars to get to Milford by air rather than the long haul by road. The Lark is looking upwards, too.

  ‘Imagine,’ he says, ‘going non-stop from one lot of tarsealed busyness — Queenstown, that is — to another place that’s also teeming with people, Milford. Suits me that they leave all this wilderness alone.’

  Off to the south the Dart River’s delta heaves into view. I can make out the road bridge over the river, and the hillocks nearby created by the Dart Glacier dumping separate loads of rock debris when its progress was stalled. The glacier, a remnant of its original size, has since retreated forty-five kilometres back into its snowfield cirque or head basin. On the far side of the Dart Valley from the Sugarloaf hills is the line of mountains flanking Paradise. We come to a couple of small alpine ponds and soon afterwards, on the other side of a low rise, there is a much larger tarn filling a curved basin, about 200 metres long. The north wind is ruffling its surface.

  ‘That’ll be far enough today,’ the Lark says. ‘But look out to the right. That’s Sugarloaf. No time to get there now. The route crosses a couple of gullies. But it’s a powerful place, a footstool for the mountain gods, I reckon. Like Smooth Cone in the Strath Taieri, it’s got some energy associated with it. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Intersecting lay lines, that sort of thing?’ I say.

  ‘Something like that … always feel pretty good going up these hills.’

  There are certainly plenty of lines on any map around here, with Mount Aspiring and Fiordland National Parks sharing a boundary on the Main Divide. Both parks form a World Heritage site, as well. The Lark points out Park Pass at the head of the Rock Burn Valley. We can just make it out. White clouds are starting to spill over from the Hollyford catchment in Fiordland. There’s rain on the way.

  ‘Where are you headed now?’ I ask.

  ‘Back to the Rock Burn. People called the valley the Rocky Burn at one time. Reminds me of my old collie — remember him? Rocky, the black-and-white job. Best dog I ever had. Best co-pilot, too. Old age got to him during a muster, and I buried him by the hut. Being mostly up this way now and in the national park — dogs not permitted — I haven’t bothered replacing him.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that. He was your one-good-dog-in-a-lifetime dog, I think you said.’

  The Lark says he’s going to join a couple of young fellows doing a bird survey, then head out to one of the sheep stations for Christmas, probably after a night down at the hut by the Rock Burn mouth.

  ‘Not much of a hut, that
one. Dark hole of a place. But a roof in the rain. Rodents own it just now. There’s a mouse plague.’

  I tell him I’ve seen a few mice myself. But I’m more interested in his plan to spend Christmas on a high-country station. ‘You’d be following in the footsteps of Arawata Bill, you know, doing that kind of thing. Have you heard of him? Bill O’Leary — prospector, bush ranger, legendary loner. He used to come out of the mountains for Christmas.’

  ‘Sure I’ve heard of him. Relatives of mine talked of Arawata. They’re the reason I’m here, the rellies.’

  The Lark goes on to say he had an uncle on land near Glenorchy, and during school holidays in the 1950s he would visit him and his cousins, travelling up on the old lake steamer, Earnslaw. It made a change from schooling in Oamaru. The ’fifties are a bygone era, the likes of which Glenorchy will never see again. There was no road then.

  But there is now, and I need to be on it soon enough. With the Earnslaw Burn rendezvous agreed, and another opportunity to hear more of the Lark’s life after Middlemarch, I am glad we’re turning back to the saddle.

  My impressions of him as a man alone are confirmed — a man of mountains tall and sharp now, not of the hump-backed ranges of Central Otago. Except that ‘man alone’ seems a rather desolate and piteous image. ‘Man alive!’ is nearer the mark. He’s still getting round the hills at a clip; still travelling light.` And still keen to keep in touch with me from time to time, it seems.

  We diverge near the small tarns and begin angling back to meet our respective trails, one north, one south, both downhill. A few minutes later, I pass close to something shining amongst the tussocks. It’s a map of the Dart/Routeburn area at 1:50,000 scale (one kilometre to twenty millimetres), protected by plastic lamination — an extraordinary find given the remote location. It has been folded twice for easy reference while backpacking. Did it belong to the German tramper? No, the water staining round the edges and the black mould suggest it has lain here for months, perhaps years.

  Intriguingly, Sugarloaf Pass lies right at the centre of the folds. A hare or mouse has chewed a small hole clear through the map in the area near Lake Unknown. Paradise and the Earnslaw Glacier are on the right hand side; Lake Harris and the Harris Saddle, which the Routeburn Track crosses into Fiordland, are on the left.

  It is a mystery map, for sure. I take it as a souvenir. Maps are worth cherishing and poring over. Before printed maps in this country there were the oral maps of the Māori, with landmarks, including mountain peaks and river bends and confluences, remembered in song and chant — the land’s first poetry. Early European explorers relied on Māori guides who knew those maps. It amazes me how long it took Europeans to find their way to the Wakatipu district following the settlement of Dunedin, coastal Otago and Southland — five years! It was late in 1853 when Nathanael Chalmers, an adventurous twenty-two-year-old Scots farmer and sheep importer, engaged two Māori guides from Southland, Reko and Kaikoura Whakatau, to show him the way inland to lakes that were roughly configured on white settlers’ maps but which had never been seen by European eyes. Chalmers climbed the Hector Mountains after a few days’ travel north from the Mataura area for a view he described as ‘a lot of water and snowy mountains’. He was looking at Lake Wakatipu and the Alps beyond, known to moa-hunter Māori for centuries. It took the trio three weeks to make a 500-kilometre loop through the interior, taking in Lakes Wakatipu, Wanaka and Hawea. They completed it by rafting the Clutha River back to Balclutha, a heart-stopping experience through the gorges.

  A modern topographical map at 1:50,000 scale (one kilometre to two centimetres) conveys a sense of place. It allows the reader to picture the lie of the land, and the nature of it, too, through symbols for forest, swamp, scree, cliffs, gravel bed, sand hill, ice and so on. Go to internet maps today, like Google Earth, and you can zoom into people’s backyards and washing lines through powerful satellite images. You could argue there’s too much definition: it’s too much in your face. Imagination is stifled, and with it the prospect of adventure.

  The map I retrieve from the furry embrace of the Sugarloaf tussock has an added and mysterious dimension: where had its owners come from, and where were they going? Apart from an animal’s nibbling there are no marks on it.

  The pass recedes behind me as I regain the forest. The day has grown dull and the breeze is a moderate gusty wind now. It causes the canopy to whisper in fits and starts and the branches of some trees to grind together. Although annoying to anyone listening out for bird calls, these are encouraging sounds for the forest’s next generation of canopy trees, living a stunted life in the hope of a windfall.

  ‘… departed spirits’

  ‘The cry of the crow is indiscribably mournfull [sic]. The wail of the wind through a leafless forest is cheerful compared to it. Perhaps the whistling of the wind through the neck of an empty whisky bottle is the nearest approach to it, and is sadly suggestive of departed spirits.’

  Charlie Douglas, bushman-explorer, South Westland Journal entry, about 1890

  CHAPTER 3

  Character town

  In the 1950s, when the Lark spent school holidays at the Head of the Lake, life was simple for Glenorchy folk. The days of the week were basically of two kinds — Boat Day and No Boat Day. On Boat Day, the steamer Earnslaw, approaching fifty years of age, pulled into the Glenorchy wharf accompanied by a plume of black coal smoke (she could burn a tonne of coal an hour) and the sound of the telegraph on the bridge dinging signals to the engine room. Brass fittings gleamed, and the ship listed as passengers pressed against her wharf-side rail to see who was at the wharf to meet them. Sometimes the whole village turned out, or so it seemed. There were three return sailings a week in summer, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and two in winter, Monday and Friday. Depending on the number of calls at lakeside sheep stations, the trip would take about two hours one way.

  With the road to Queenstown little more than a bridle track and stock route, the steamer service was the Head of the Lake’s conduit to the outside world. Smaller and slower than the Earnslaw, another steamship, the Ben Lomond, alternated with the Earnslaw on the service before 1951. The Ben Lomond, formerly the Jane Williams, was withdrawn that year, leaving the Earnslaw as the only large vessel left for the run to Glenorchy and Kinloch on the opposite side of the lake. Glenorchy people were not sorry to see the Ben Lomond’s withdrawal from service. She had scared the living daylights out of a fair number of them on trips that were unfortunate enough to encounter a severe northerly storm.

  The way the Lark heard it from his uncle, the Ben Lomond was ‘a bugger to pitch and roll’. In a really violent storm, no one could move around the ship as she battled up the north arm of the lake. The fetch of twenty-five kilometres, in storm-force winds, could generate waves over three metres high. The Ben Lomond would round White Point to face the waves bow on, and the propeller sent a shudder through the whole ship as it neared the surface whenever the bow dipped into a big trough. There was no turning back, no deviating to a station wharf along the way (Mount Creighton, Elfin Bay, Greenstone) — and no morning tea.

  Typically, for morning tea, scones were served on the outward sailing, crackers and cheese on the return trip in the afternoon. The tea came in fine china, laid out on tables with a lip around the edge to stop the crockery falling off in rough weather. The chairs were bolted to the deck. These precautions, it should be noted, were for a passenger and freight vessel plying a body of fresh water — not the open ocean. Clearly, their owners and builders had respect for weather ‘bombs’.

  The Lark’s cousins told him about their worst trip to Glenorchy. Not only was there no morning tea, the tea lady was lying flat on the floor so she wouldn’t be tossed around. Most people were seasick. The captain, confined to the wheelhouse, slowed the ship’s speed till they seemed to be barely making headway into the gale and spray. The cousins were cowered and frightened by the violence of the storm, the thunder and occasional lightning, and the violent response of the ship to
it all. When their father realised the Ben Lomond was two hours late, he climbed the hill behind the town to see if there was any sign of the vessel. He feared a tragedy. The children were put to bed soon after they came down the gangway at Glenorchy, ashen-faced, on trembling legs.

  In earlier decades, the steamships would bring women in furs and hats, and men in suits, some of whom were bussed to Paradise for a holiday at one or other of the famous guest houses.

  When the Lark holidayed at Glenorchy in the 1950s, the run from Queenstown was undertaken by the Earnslaw and a fleet of smaller launches, Meteors I, II and III. The dreaded Ben Lomond had been scrapped. Students at distant boarding schools were usually given the Friday off — the last Friday of the term at least — so they could make the Friday sailings from Queenstown.

  Meat and bread was delivered to Glenorchy on Boat Days, and the appetising, homely smell of freshly baked bread carried right through the interior of ship or launch. The bread was often still warm when it arrived at the Glenorchy wharf. Years earlier, an entrepreneurial Queenstown woman would bring a stock of clothing on the steamer — functional rather than fashion garments, intended for farm and outdoors use. She would set up shop at the Mount Earnslaw Hotel, a short walk from the wharf.