‘You joost are like Wolfi. A zealot for the birds.’
‘I’m not anything like Wolfi. He was a slaver. He stole them and sold them into captivity. I’m not a man who could lock a bird in a cage. A creature with a vast mosaic interplay of wind and gravity laid out in its soul. I’m not anything like him. We were enemies.’ I lean toward Lars across the table. ‘I never met Wolfi. But when I found him, I danced a little jig in the pool of his secretions.’
Lars takes his hands from his face, open-mouthed, and extends his left hand and shows me a gold ring on his finger inlaid with a purple stone. ‘Please … he was my husband.’
‘Congratulations.’
He sighs, ready to speak. ‘All since I knew him he was much a lover of birds. He studied the avian biology in Munich. Our walls are covered with the paintings of the birds.’
‘But he came out here to the desert to raid their nests?’
‘You sometimes must relocate individuals to ensure the survival of the species, Mr Smokey Bear.’
‘Oh? An environmentalist was he? An eco-warrior? And just as a by-product of his environmentalism he makes a pile of euros you couldn’t jump over. And our skies are empty. And a bird, somewhere, a bird that had an instinctive expectation it might wake to life looking off an escarpment over a red plain, made happy by the breeze in its down that promised the sky was a labyrinth of pathways and journeys … this bird breaks from its shell into … a cage. It wakes blinking through wire at four white walls and listening to Mahler.’
Lars cocks his head at me. ‘You are very poetic.’ He shrugs. ‘Is true. Wolfi made much money. Yes, we live in Hamburg at the waterfront, among bankers and others. There is a great hunger for your exotic birds in Europe. But I do my little bit with the fabric design, remember. Curtains bearing my break-dancing-rabbit motif were chosen by the foremost kindergarten in Hamburg. And anyway, most of the buyers of your birds were zoos and wildlife parks and researchers … the well-regarded carers of birds.’
‘Bullshit. Fat frauleins in housecoats poking marshmallows through bars to pink cockatoos. Pudden-head sons of technocrats bored with Xbox who want an eagle for Christmas to toss rats at. Pole-dancers looking for a new angle who think it’d be cool if they could train a parrot to pull the bow on their bikini undone. Shopping centres using pretty birds to distract shoppers from ugly prices. CEOs who think because their company logo is a falcon it’d be a good idea to imprison a real one in the atrium of their skyscraper. I met a hotelier in Düsseldorf who ordered an egret for his fibreglass lake from your Wolfi. It was tethered there in the sparkling blue chlorinated water while kids splashed at ball games all around it.’
‘You think Wolfi didn’t care for birds?’
‘I think Wolfi was a treasure hunter and Wolfi thought falcons were diamonds and kites were emeralds and parrots were sapphires. He thought they were pretty. He knew they were valuable.’
Lars shakes his head at me to let me know how wrong I am. ‘Wolfi loved birds. Is what makes his death so cruel. That disgusting falcon …’ The tears that begin to bloom in Lars’ eyes only make me angry. I can’t help myself.
‘Lars … I mean, sorry, him being the love of your life and all, but his death … His death is from Greek myth. It’s justice from the gods.’
A moment after this outburst I soften. I curse myself silently. I reach out and lay my hand over his and give it a friendly squeeze. ‘Sorry. You’re right. I’m a zealot for birds. Sometimes I lose sight of, you know, people.’ This German fabric designer, whose break-dancing-rabbit motif is currently beguiling the tots of Hamburg, is in possession of a treasure map I want.
How Wolfi died is a mystery to rank alongside those tales of ghost ships and lost tribes and Egyptian curses that used to fill the Boy’s Own Annual when I was a child. The facts I gathered are these: Lars, who admits keeping the financial books for their little family of two, recalls Wolfi returned from Australia, from the Western Desert, with a smuggled shipment of eggs in February 2006. In May of that year it is recorded Wolfgang Stemple, a registered bird breeder from Hamburg, sold a peregrine falcon chick to the Hamburg World Wildlife Park. The HWWP is an internationally recognised, state-registered animal research centre and asylum. Needless to say since the scandal broke that Wolfi was a bird smuggler there has been much embarrassment and finger-pointing at that facility regarding the way they procure their wildlife. The director, name of Grupp, has been suspended on half pay while an investigation is held. I like the thought of Grupp on half pay.
The nest from which Wolfi obtained the 2006 falcon eggs (there were two eggs that year, he sold the other to a Kazakhstani oil baron) had proved prolific. His records show he had already harvested fifteen eggs over eight years at an average sale price of nine thousand euros for a total revenue of one hundred and thirty-five thousand euros from that one nest in a remote location in a distant land.
In mid 2007 zoologists at the Hamburg World Wildlife Park, having banded the young peregrine falcon with their distinctive triple-crown leg band, released it into the raptor aviary, a vast dome of netting that takes an impressive bite of sky. At showtime, it haggled mid-air with buzzards, eagles, hawks and owls over euthanised gerbils that were fired into the sky from a pneumatic mortar by gloved ornithologists as the tourists wowed and oohed at the aerobatics. It endured a year of this pitiful lolly-scramble before plumbers using a backhoe tore a hole in the netting of the aviary and it and two other raptors escaped. The Steppe Eagle and the Caledonian Osprey didn’t get far. They died of probable heartbreak in the endless geometries of industrial Hamburg. Citizens found their remains and called the phone number on their leg bands to report the fatalities.
But the young falcon took to the unfettered air, feeling bliss, I guess, at home at last in the grand architecture of the sky.
It disappeared for a year, before a ranger with the Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife Service called from the bottom of the world to report its discovery. That ranger was me. The ornithologists at the Hamburg World Wildlife Park wouldn’t believe I was calling from Australia to report I had found their falcon. Likewise I could barely believe I had called Germany. I had to email them photographs of the leg band, still attached to the desiccated raptor, so they could read its identification number for themselves.
How did that falcon get back to Australia from Germany? Falcons are not migratory birds. It had no electro-magnetic template of the world in its bones. It had no map of the world behind its eye. Alfven waves from the sun could not have charted its course. Global wind patterns, so orderly and knowable to some species, should have been a trackless mishmash to it. The stars of the north were not stars its ancestors had known. It had no instinct to serve it. It had no direction home. It had gone to Europe in the hold of a 747 as an egg. And flown home as a bird.
I have come up with several theories, all of which smack of anthropomorphism, and none of which satisfy me. He may have flown blindly east on the prevailing September winds into Russia and the Arctic, where, by chance, he hooked up with the dwindling flocks of the Bar-tailed Godwit as they began their migration south. If this scenario is to hold water the Godwits must recognise an Australian accent and allow him to hitch a ride on their migration, for the wader is not happily accompanied by the raptor.
He may have teamed up with the Eastern Curlew or Latham’s Snipe flying in ever-diminishing flocks out of China and Japan for the Australian summer. But, in truth, I am bestowing a national identity on creatures that have none. The Eastern Curlew and Latham’s Snipe are not Aussies abroad, and the lamb would sooner lie down with the lion than either of these two gentle birds hook up with a falcon. No. It is, looked at from any angle, a most singular migration. Singular enough to ignite a fevered email chatter among the ornithologists of the world.
But if my wonder is deep, if my disbelief at this bird quickens my breath and furrows my brow – and it does – then imagine the shock Wolfi must have felt when he discovered it.
So let it now be 2
008. And Wolfgang Stemple, at face value a serial tourist and outback enthusiast, has returned to the Western Desert. In the pocket of his cargo pants is a Garmin eTrex GPS navigator and in this device are programmed two-hundred and twenty-eight sets of coordinates, each pinpointing the nest of a pair of birds. The coordinates remain valuable for the life of the breeding pair, because most birds out here use the same nest site year after year. The coordinates are the product of years of hunting and this GPS can walk Wolfi to any nest of any species of bird he has an order for. It is a modern-day treasure map.
Already nestled in electric blankets in his room in the Oasis Hotel in Alice Springs incubating at a constant 34 degrees Celsius, Wolfi has the eggs of crimson chats, rainbow bee-eaters, pink cockatoos, whistling kites, wedge-tailed eagles, Australian hobbies, galahs, princess parrots, ringneck parrots, pied honey-eaters, dusky woodswallows, boobook owls and zebra finches. Loot worth probably two-hundred thousand euros on the EEC black market.
This August day, wearing a slouch hat, Wolfi is riding a hire horse called Cards along the Larapinta Trail out west of Alice Springs to harvest peregrine falcon eggs. As he rides past the Ranger Station at Big Hole he leans out over the solar panels and checks his reflection against the sky and salutes himself.
Five more hours of riding into the wilderness of the West MacDonnell Ranges, mountains of red rock spattered with spinifex and cut with towering gorges. In this country it is usual for a falcon to nest high on a cliff. These nests are dangerous, almost impossible to get at. But eight years ago, having scoured the sky with his binoculars for many days, Wolfi located a breeding pair nesting in a hollow in a desert oak only three metres off the ground. It is from this nest that Wolfi has stolen seventeen eggs over the intervening years. And it is from this nest the wonderful falcon of our story was taken.
The country is hard to navigate, monotonously spectacular. One could easily become lost. Cliff after cliff, boulder after boulder. One could never relocate a nest in this vast land without a GPS. Wolfi types FALCON TREE into his Garmin eTrex and a set of co-ordinates appears on the screen. He presses another button and the machine tells him 6KM and points toward the falcon tree with an arrow. He walks Cards onward following the arrow throughout the afternoon … 3KM … 1KM … 200M … until the device tells him YOU ARE HERE. He has ridden out of the chasms and gorges of the West Macs to an undulating sand plain of oak and gum.
Wolfi has hired Cards on many occasions and knows him well. He is an affectionate chestnut gelding of nine years with the temperament of a sloth. Wolfi pats his neck and walks him alongside the desert oak. Whitewash down the tree trunk proves the birds are in residence and he ruffles Cards’ mane and speaks to him of their good luck in German. Then, one arm wrapped around the tree trunk for balance, he stands on the saddle, reverting to English in this serious moment, ‘Whoa … Whoaaa, boy.’ He reaches with his left arm to the hollow in the tree just above his head and puts his hand inside. The rapid cacking alarm of the peregrine rings out and Cards shuffles his hooves and Wolfi tells him, ‘Whoaa … whoa. Is our friend who lays the golden egg.’ Waggling his fingers to distract the bird he snakes his hand down the hollow until he grasps the falcon.
Standing on tiptoe on horseback, he feels a band on the falcon’s leg and takes hold of it and smooths his fingertips over it reading it in Braille. The triple crown of the Hamburg World Wildlife Park. That is enough for him to know exactly which bird this is. And cannot be.
Understandable that he jumps, swears, squeals, reels. Wolfi is a man with a snarling impossibility coursing his veins. One suspects conspiracy when one is confronted with the impossible. One feels people or gods are treating you as their plaything, watching from behind a rock, sniggering.
A current of fear is fed into Cards from the man on his back. He bolts and Wolfi is left hanging from the desert oak, his arm bent at the elbow down the hollow. Unable to straighten his arm, unable to lift himself to pull it out, he scrabbles at the ferrous bark with his boots and free hand for purchase and finds none.
Hanging by your elbow from a tree in the desert it is improbable you will find the equanimity to entice a horse to come to you. Even a hire horse of insurable disposition. Instead you will writhe and heave and scratch and kick and shout and curse that horse in your several languages. You are a monkey on a hotplate and an unsettling exhibition for a horse. He will whinny nervously and snort and trot to a distance that allows his uneasiness to subside. Which might, if your contortions are violent, be a great distance. Cards was found wandering with a herd of brumbies in the Western Desert.
We knew Wolfi was out there somewhere. After he didn’t return to his room the police were called and when they found the eggs they called me. I found him hanging from that desert oak six weeks later, a black husk swinging in the wind out beyond the West Macs with his riding boots still on. I didn’t dance in the pool of his secretions as I told Lars. But I didn’t shed any tears, either. After I took him down I trousered his Garmin eTrex GPS, hoping all those hundreds of nests were now lost in the desert once more, all those thousands of birds were saved from the culture of Europe and similar privations.
I found the falcon dead in the bottom of the tree hollow. The opening having been blocked by Wolfi’s arm, it had been trapped. Evidently it lived on his flesh for some days, his hand was stripped, several fingers missing entirely. But the bird would have succumbed to thirst inside a week. I phoned the number on its leg band and was astounded to be talking to Germany. The mystery opened up before us. The ornithological blogs began to chatter and regrettable suggestions were made about my honesty by Twitcher Lad of Kent, whose eye I have promised to blacken if we ever meet.
Viewing the body of his darkly leathered lover in the Alice Springs morgue, Lars breaks into a style of mourning befitting a designer of a semi-successful break-dancing-rabbit motif. Throws himself down on his knees and bangs his head against the aluminium framework of Wolfi’s trolley, shaking and rattling it and wailing, rocking Wolfi back and forth like the dead-come-to-life in a showground Haunted House, his skeletal hand clawing two-fingered at the air. Senior Sergeant Walker and Doctor Hutchins back right out of the room by way of showing respect and by way of not wanting to have anything to do with this display, and I’m damned if I don’t find myself lone comfort to this fabric designer and throwing a consoling arm across his shoulders and asking if there’s anything I can do.
‘The ring I give him.’ He points to Wolfi’s denuded hand. ‘Where is? The matching ring of mine?’ He holds his hand up, the ring finger extended. ‘Spun gold with a Horst-faceted amethyst. Design of Juan Hoogenfeld. Especial for Wolfi/Lars union.’
‘A ring, Lars?’ I try to maintain a sad tone, keep the excitement from my voice. ‘A matching ring. Sacred to your memory of Wolfi. That’s … that’s … I’m not married, but that’s lovely. You’ve got to have that ring, man. And I know where it is.’ He looks up at me from his knees, gratitude in his wet eyes. ‘And I can get it. That sacred ring. Would it be right to call it “sacred”?’ Lars nods emphatically. Good. A sacred ring. Now I have some leverage on the guy. A treasure with which to buy the treasure map I suspect this weeping, chubby, parrot-haired, anally-herniated Hamburger possesses.
‘Raptors regurgitate pellets of non-digestible material, Lars. Wolfi’s ring will be in the tree hollow. I’ll take you there. We’ll get it. But I want something from you, too.’
He stands and takes hold of my hand in his and nods, eager to comply, nothing is too much to regain his precious relic. ‘You will have, at home in Hamburg, a micro SD data card. A little card that fits into Wolfi’s handheld GPS system.’
‘Ja, yes, yes,’ he nods. ‘In Wolfi’s sock drawer. The backup of all the valuable information he has worked so hard to create.’
‘I want it. I give you the ring. You give me the data card.’ He nods again, this time not looking at me, his mind away, in contemplation, clearly running through all the possibilities. When he snaps out of this reverie he take
s my right hand and we shake. ‘We have the deal,’ he confirms. ‘You give to me Wolfi’s ring. I give to you the freedom of all those little future birds.’ The freedom of all those little future birds. So, he knows exactly what this data card is worth.
Next morning Lars greets me at his hotel reception outfitted in a sort of Arab burnoose and sandals ready for a Lawrencian Middle-Eastern adventure. I mean, a German in a burnoose. Such a sight hasn’t been seen since they were looting the Valley of the Kings.
We ride out to that tree on a quad-bike with an aluminium ladder strapped to the front, following the eTrex directions. Lars sits behind me with his arms around me, hanging on. I ride fast and the ground is rough and he whimpers in my ear at every jounce and corrugation, calling over the engine noise, ‘Mine piles, Smokey Bear. Mine tenderness.’ I find I am actively seeking out the fiercest terrain. Thrice we are airborne, Lars’ burnoose trailing in the air like a loose sail while he squeals disapproval. When we arrive at the falcon tree he climbs off the quad gingerly, white-faced, and insulted, as if a queue of homophobes stretching all the way from here to Alice Springs had taken turns to kick his arse as we rode past.
‘So, this is where my Wolfi died.’ He looks sorrowfully at the tree. The panicked scrabblings of his husband’s boots are still visible in the ferrous bark a metre off the ground. He looks out across the rolling red land. ‘So lonely. Like to be in an ocean.’
‘In there,’ I point up at the hollow, ‘is his ring. It’ll be in a pellet of feathers and bones and other indigestibles. About marble size.’
I set the ladder against the tree and work its feet into the sand. ‘Go on. Don’t worry. The nest’s empty.’ He makes sure the ladder is stable before stepping onto it, almost tripping himself on the hem of his burnoose. ‘Take that off, man. That’s an accident waiting to happen.’
Pepsi Bears and Other Stories Page 6