by Des Hunt
‘OK, I suppose so,’ I said, choosing the easiest option. ‘Bring them along here.’
I chose a spot about fifty metres from the stream where the sand had blown in over the grass. It would actually help if that was covered for a while.
Dumping the load made a screeching, rumbling, crashing sound. It made me realise that here was another threat to the birds—the noise of construction. If it was starting now, it would continue into the breeding season. It couldn’t help but disturb the birds.
Professor Waghorn must have been concerned that he was out of the news for a few days, because he published his report much sooner than expected.
I was sitting reading in Treetops when I heard Dad’s voice calling out to me. It was most unexpected; he hadn’t been down there for months. ‘I wonder what he wants,’ I mumbled.
When I climbed down I found he was not alone. There was a TV news crew with him.
‘These people want to interview you.’ He was not angry. He was more sad than anything else.
‘What about?’
Tim Bourke, the interviewer, took over. ‘If you’ll just stand over here, we can do it with the estuary in the background. Yes, that’s good.’
The camera started to roll. ‘Ben, are you aware that Professor Waghorn has released his report?’
‘No.’
‘It says that the two pieces of pottery could not have been in the ground for two thousand years and that there is evidence that they were placed there only recently. Have you anything to say about this?’
I lowered my eyes to the ground. This was just what I had feared. ‘No,’ I said softly.
‘No!’ he sounded incredulous. ‘Do you not know how they could have got there?’
I kept looking at the ground.
‘Ben?’
‘He put them there,’ Dad interrupted.
The camera spun around to him and the interviewer said, ‘Can you repeat that?’
‘He put them there. My son did it.’
The camera came back to me. ‘Do you have anything to say about that?’
There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t get others into trouble, so I kept my mouth shut.
‘Do you know where they came from?’
‘That’s enough!’ yelled Dad, losing his temper. ‘You can get out of here now. You’ve caused enough problems for this family.’
They went. So did Dad, leaving me standing by myself and shaking with shame.
We got more information in the news that night. Again Professor Waghorn was the main item, which I’m sure is what he intended all along.
His evidence was damning. One, the clay surrounding the artefacts had been recently loosened as if dug out and filled back in. Two, the artefacts had another, much harder, clay on the surface and this matched a clay from Papua New Guinea. Three, the design matched those of other pots found in that same place in Papua New Guinea. There was no doubt that the thing was a hoax.
Next came the interview which showed one very guilty boy hanging his head and not speaking. Then the boy’s father said what everyone knew was true: it was the boy who had buried the bits of pottery.
They then went live to the Wiltshire Property Development building where Tim Bourke said that Bill Wiltshire was relieved that the matter had been sorted out and that he would be able to get on with Pacific Keys. There was then an interchange between the studio presenter and Tim Bourke about why the boy would have done such a thing. The conclusion was that he did it for selfish reasons—he wanted the bay to stay the way it was. And where did he get the bits of pottery? ‘Well,’ said Tim. ‘I’ve asked around and it seems that these things are quite common and can be bought online, so that’s probably where he got them.’ And what would happen to the boy? ‘I have spoken to the police,’ replied Tim, ‘and they say that it is unlikely they will lay any charges.’
We sat at the table in silence until the news was finished. Then the TV was turned off and we sat in silence for a while longer. Finally, Dad said, ‘Ben, you have brought terrible shame on this family.’ His voice was controlled, almost as if he was reading the words. ‘And you have caused embarrassment for other people. Perhaps I should have said yes to the sale earlier and stopped all the wondering. Well, now I’m going to say yes. Tomorrow I will ring Bill Wiltshire and tell him we are selling.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And, then, that must be the end of it. There must be no more interference. You are not to get involved in anything to do with stopping or changing the development. Nothing. Do you understand me?’
I nodded.
‘No, that’s not enough. I want to hear you say it.’
I took a deep breath and said it. ‘I will not get involved in anything to do with the development.’
‘And you make sure you keep that promise. Now go to your room.’
I don’t want to talk about the days that followed. The media interest seemed even more intense than the first time—everyone wanted a chunk of the boy who had perpetrated the hoax. But, just when it seemed that it would never end, it did and I was left in peace. I sat in Treetops and read—the world of fantasy was proving a much better place than the real world.
Slowly I recovered and began to take an interest in life again. When finally I checked my emails, I found I had lots from Sarah-Lee telling me about school. When I had not responded, she became increasingly concerned about me, pleading for a reply.
I was unsure what to do about Sarah-Lee. There was no doubting that she had planted the bits of pottery. I thought she was extremely lucky that the media had not discovered the connection to her parents. It only needed a comment from someone and links would have been made back to the Petersens. That would have been disastrous for them.
Eventually I did write to her. It was a long email, reporting everything. I did not accuse her, but it was impossible to keep the anger and sadness out of my words.
Her reply came almost immediately.
Dear Ben,
I am so terribly sorry. I regretted it as soon as I left. At first I was angry with you, but that was stupid. I was angry that we keep destroying beautiful places like Mansfield Bay. I wanted to stop it from happening and so I buried the pottery pieces.
I did not expect you to find them. I don’t really know what I expected. I did it without thinking it through.
I’m crying as I write this. I am so ashamed of myself and of what I have done to you.
I will understand if you never write to me again, but that is not what I want. I want us to stay being friends. It means so very much to me.
Sarah-Lee
Part III
Chapter 17
Spring arrived, bringing better things, as if nature was trying to make up for all the bad things that had happened over winter. The first was the return of Bigmouth.
I suppose I should have been angry with her. I had cared for her like a mother cares for a child. Yet she was the one who’d led me to Vanuatu and all the awful things that had come from that. The consequence of taking her out of a nest was to be shamed in front of the whole country. Still, I bore no grudges; in fact, quite the opposite—I was thrilled to see her.
She arrived one dull, windy afternoon and sat on a branch outside Treetops, crying softly. When I let her inside, I found that she was breathing with her beak open as if she was exhausted. Her feathers were a mess and I wondered if somewhere between Lopevi and here she had been in a storm.
I wanted to feed her and searched my mind for some place where I could find food. There seemed to be nothing. Then I remembered a dead hedgehog I’d seen on the beach. I grabbed a plastic bag and sprinted along the beach. ‘Yes!’ I hissed as I turned over the carcass. ‘This is perfect.’ The thing was crawling with maggots. I rolled it into the bag and returned to Treetops.
Bigmouth was still where I had left her. It was half an hour before she ate anything, and even then she took only two.
Three days later she was back to normal. She spent the time in between entirely in the tree hut. I don’t
know what would have happened to her if she’d had to look after herself. Though, perhaps she’s one of those animals that can survive no matter what. The last time I’d seen her, she was living amongst the poisonous gases and falling ash of a volcano.
The next piece of good news was totally unexpected. At the beginning of October, Tiny-M came back. At first I didn’t recognise her, she looked so different. She was wearing her breeding dress—and what a dress it was. Her boring white and grey was now charcoal and red, with yellow-tipped feathers. She looked magnificent.
I was so happy to have her back. Yet, when I thought about it, I also felt a little sad. She might have looked beautiful, but she was one messed-up bird. Red-necked phalaropes breed in the northern hemisphere, and here she was in the south all dressed up to breed, but with no one to breed with. Now, she seemed doomed to fly back and forth over the equator, always out of phase with the rest of her species: looking good when the others were drab, and drab when they looked good.
At about that time, Bigmouth mated for the first time. The cuckoos had been calling in the trees for several days. From what I could tell, it sounded like three males were interested in her. (Maybe it was the fancy leg band that attracted them.) She led them on for several days before selecting Mr Right. While Bigmouth knew that a human lived in the tree, the male had no idea, and so I became one of the few people in the world to see shining cuckoos mate. I found it embarrassing. At the start I lifted my camera to film it, and then felt that that wasn’t right, so I left them alone.
Over the next few days I followed her for hours, hoping to see her lay in a warbler’s nest. That, too, has been seen only a few times. It was not to be. I now know that they usually lay at dawn when the warbler leaves for the first feed of the day. I was simply not getting up early enough. I looked for the nest containing her egg, again without success. Probably just as well or I would have been tempted to save the warbler chick and start the whole business over again.
Peg spent most of these days with me down at Treetops. It was obvious that her life was coming to a close. She was now fifteen and that’s old for a dog. Lots of people say they love dogs or cats or some other animal. That sort of love doesn’t seem to cover what I felt for Peg. Throughout all the things that had happened in that year, she’d never once complained, never criticised, and never blamed. She’d always greet me with a happy smile and a waggling tail. Sometimes when we were walking I would think that she had gone missing and I’d call her. She would nudge my leg, showing that she was right next to me all the time. Then she’d give me a look that said, ‘I’m right here, you silly chump. Do you think I would ever leave you?’
I changed things to help her cope better. We walked more slowly than we had before. I now took my lunch down to Treetops, to cut down on the number of trips to and fro. If she was asleep when I was ready to leave, I would read some more until she was awake. They were only little things compared to what she did for me.
My birthday came around again and I became a teenager. I didn’t notice any difference except there was no flashy gift that year. I got some clothes from Mum and a schoolbag from Dad, which I knew he hadn’t bought. Not that things between Dad and me were bad; they were not. He was on some new medication and there could be two or three days on end when he seemed OK. But sooner or later something would annoy him, and you soon knew that the sickness was still there. The good times were better, and the bad times were worse. Sometimes they were so bad that he even became physically ill with breathing problems, hot and cold spells, and the like.
The gift of a schoolbag reminded me that in a few months I would be off to boarding school. I didn’t want to go. There had been a lot on the news about bullying in schools, and how it was often the clever students who got picked on. I thought that I was probably in that group, so a schoolbag was not high on my list of hoped-for presents.
When the mail arrived I found that Cole had sent me The Lord of the Rings trilogy—which was high on my list—and that made me feel much better. It was the first contact from Cole since the hoax, and I was relieved to find that he hadn’t abandoned me completely.
Then Sarah-Lee sent me an email. We communicated about once a week, just telling each other what was happening. They were no big deal, but I found myself looking forward to receiving hers and sending mine. Her birthday email was much the same as the others, except for the end:
Mom and Dad are coming to New Zealand for a conference in a couple of months and I’m hoping they’ll let me skip school and come with them. That’ll be sometime before Christmas. I do want to see you again. I’ll keep you posted on what’s happening.
Lots of love,
Sarah-Lee
I know many people sign off with ‘lots of love’ without meaning too much. But Sarah-Lee had not done it before. That, and the possibility of seeing her again, gave me a funny feeling inside.
My previous birthday—when I’d turned twelve—had got worse as the day progressed, with the arrival of the bikers and Dad’s reaction to Bigmouth. My thirteenth was exactly the opposite. In the morning, after the gift from Dad, I rated it a one out of ten. Cole’s gift and Sarah-Lee’s email lifted it to five. But by the end of the day it was up to ten—the highest ever.
So, what happened in the afternoon to cause such a big change? Oh, only that a small bird flew into our bay. It was a male red-necked phalarope, and, like Tiny-M, he too was all dressed up to breed.
It was that nosey Bigmouth who pointed him out to me. She put on her come-and-look-at-this dance to lead me down to the edge of the estuary near Treetops. At first I thought it was Tiny-M and that somehow she had lost some of her feathers, because she looked a lot plainer. That’s when Tiny-M herself flew in and began to show interest. It was the first hint that something special was happening.
I rushed back to Treetops to get the camera. I set it onto movie so that if anything happened I could record it all. When I got back to the birds, something was definitely happening. I don’t know if they’d ever met before, but they sure got friendly very quickly. I recorded it all.
Later, when I was sitting in Treetops, I began to realise the importance of what was happening. These birds had never before bred in the southern hemisphere. They were northern birds. If they successfully bred down here, then I felt sure they would continue to do so. That would isolate them from the northern ones, and isolation can create new species.
This was a big event. It was like finding a new comet, or the cure for a disease, or really finding that Lapita people had been to New Zealand. I understood then that this could be my miracle. This could save the birds and Mansfield Bay. Yet, I also knew that it would not be easy. First Tiny-M had to lay the eggs, and then the male had to hatch them. Plus I had to find some way of using this information without breaking my promise to Dad.
I would record everything and tell no one. I would worry about what to do with it later. There would be no Professor Waghorn, or anyone else, messing with my life this time.
Chapter 18
Tiny-M made a nest and laid four eggs. Then T-Boy (that’s the phalarope male) started sitting on them. However, Tiny-M had made a bad choice of site for her nest. It was on the other side of the estuary: a hollow in the ground that she had lined with leaves and grass stalks. It was well camouflaged, so it was unlikely that the harriers or gulls would find it. But the mammals would. They hunt by smell and T-Boy would have just the right scent for them. I don’t set traps on that side of the estuary, and so there were plenty of mammals that could make a meal of those eggs: rats, stoats, hedgehogs, weasels, and even possums. It was the worst possible place to nest.
I could see the nest from Treetops using my binoculars. Each morning I arrived expecting to see it abandoned. Surprisingly, it lasted almost two weeks. The four eggs must have been just about ready to hatch. I don’t know what animal got them in the end. When I took a closer look, there were mammal tracks all over the place. It looked like lots of them had gathered for the feast. I also found enou
gh feathers to think that they might have got T-Boy. He would have tried to defend the nest against the invaders, but he would’ve been no match for their teeth.
I photographed it all, not knowing whether the whole thing was over or not. However, later in the day, when the tide was out, I saw the pair of them feeding on the sandbank. T-Boy looked very much alive, even though he had lost all of his tail feathers.
Phalaropes have a strange relationship. While the male had been sitting on the nest, Tiny-M had ignored him. Now that the eggs had gone, they were the best of mates again. I felt that they must communicate in a lot of ways other than the occasional peep, peep that I could hear. That was yet another thing to be investigated by the Mansfield Research Institute.
Tiny-M’s second nest was in a more sensible place. It was on the estuary side of the sand spit, in amongst the spinifex. My only concern was that it had flooded there during the cyclone earlier in the year. However, we don’t get cyclones before Christmas so she was probably all right. She laid her four eggs and left the male to get on with it. Again, I recorded it all.
I looked after that nest more than any nest ever. I surrounded it with boxes of Fenn traps baited with delicious smells: rotten eggs, canned cat food, dead possum meat. I dug ditches to trap the hedgehogs and put possum bait stations in the trees. I was going to protect those eggs, even if it killed me.
Just when I thought everything was turning out right, the emails began again. The threats were much the same, except more violent. And now there was a new bit:
ur dogs wont worry us dis time bird boy