Kiwi Tracks (4 page)

The setting outside is too spectacular to squander the occasion by sleeping. I climb back to the foredeck and gape down the length of Milford Sound: fold after fold of craggy mountainside against an unruffled backdrop of clouds. Like a black-and-white photographic print pulled prematurely out of developing solution, the ethereal scene has lost all hint of definition, being just an infinite gradation of dull grey. Mountain peaks some two thousand metres above, lit by the leaking light of an obscured full moon, are barely discernible through the mist and cloud.

I feel a presence behind me and turn around to see Giselle. She touches me gently on the shoulder and wishes me good night. Even though she is with Gert, I guess she remembers what it is like to be alone. A small, empathetic gesture like that can mean so much. Although she leaves, it is as if she is still with me.

Exotic sounds burst from the shore, breaking the stillness of the night: moreporks (the native owls), kiwis, kakas, tuis, bellbirds and penguins. The cries echo across the sheltered bay, reverberating from the steep cliff sides. It is not hard to imagine Captain Cook on his sailing vessel, moored silently in this same cove, with the same hidden sounds haunting the ship’s crew; or for that matter the Maori on their quests for
pounamu
, greenstone, which they value so much. Little has changed since the forests re-colonised the carved-out glacial valleys after the ice age ten thousand years ago. The glassy fiord is mottled by the tiny silent pinpricks of countless raindrops. I am insignificant in this great moodiness.

I cannot sleep, too many thoughts are rattling around in my head. I climb out of my bunk bed and onto the deck. Giselle is already standing there alone, and I do not disturb her. It is hard to tell when dawn arrives; it is just a different tint of grey. A filmy mist pervades the scene and yet there is no dulling of the senses. It is a world full of magic and portent.

‘It is so beautiful, isn’t it?’ Giselle says, without turning around.

‘Yes.’

‘It reminds me of Norway.’

‘You’ve been there?’ I ask. She had never mentioned this before, although I had talked about living in Norway.

‘Yes,’ she replies, turning to look at me. ‘How long did you live there?’

‘Five years.’

‘Why did you leave?’

I gaze into the deepest recesses of the fiord, where the union of water and rock face is indistinguishable. ‘The long winters in Norway,’ I reply, thinking back. ‘Not because of the cold, but the darkness and the lack of sunlight …’ The memory makes me feel cold inside and the still-tender recollections of a concluded relationship do not help, either. ‘It’s a bit of a clich�, but I know of no better way of describing it: it was as if I was slowly dying, like a wilting plant deprived of sunlight.’ Even now it is a pathological fear. I can conjure it at will, the slow descent into darkness as the days become shorter, until they are so perfunctory there is only the barest hint of light even in the middle of the day. ‘I couldn’t take it any more. I need sunlight. Colour. Unless you experience months of sunlight deprivation, it’s hard to explain. With each succeeding winter, it got worse.’

I gaze away from the fiord and at her. ‘The summer is different. It’s as if nature must pack as much as it can into the two summer months. If winter in Norway was hell frozen over, the summers there were heaven.’ It doesn’t take much for those wonderful memories to resurface. ‘We spent most of the time in the mountains, with a tent and a stove and food. There’s no reference point with time; it becomes meaningless when the days are endless. Sometimes we walked until four in the morning and slept until midday. Sometimes we didn’t sleep at all.’ As much as the memory of the winters fills me with angst, the recollection of the short summers fills my heart with joy. I am quiet, remembering.

Giselle breaks the silence. ‘She wouldn’t leave?’ she guesses. She considerately looks away again, gazing into the hypnotic distances of the fiord.

‘Norwegians are attached to their country,’ I reply, as if that was all that was needed to explain the break. There were many other factors: more intuitively than rationally, I had decided the relationship was unworkable. The curt summary is inadequate to describe the anguish of two lovers, wondering whether to cut their losses, wondering whether they were giving up too easily. How does one ever balance that complex equation? I never experienced such depths of loneliness, or such intense moments of happiness, as I did in those years in Norway with Kirsten.

Giselle does not probe any more, allowing me to retreat from the memory.

Kayaks are dropped over the side of the motor-sailor and I paddle away, close to the steep wall of the fiord. I lean completely back, head resting on the rear deck of the kayak, to see the top of Cascade Peak towering twelve hundred metres above. Water somersaults from ledge to ledge of this perpendicular wall of glistening dark bedrock, the whole mountainside an intricate tumbling aquatic lacework. I sit up. A seal rolls over playfully in the water. Three mallards appear out of the mist, swooping in like silent Phantom jets. High-mounted dihedral wings silhouetted against the emptiness behind them, feet lowered like webbed landing gear, they skim to a halt on the burnished water, which is flat as the steel deck of an aircraft carrier. Fugitive layers of mist hover motionless in the impressionistic landscape. I want to absorb it all, keep it somehow within me. I do not take photographs; it would not do the experience justice.

Carried by the momentum of my paddling, I drift through the water. It is impossible not to feel one’s heart ache in the midst of this raw silent wilderness. I let my fingers caress the yielding softness of the water, but the gesture is as empty as trying to hold hands with someone who is no longer there.

Return to beginning of chapter

It is bucketing with rain again. On their way back to Te Anau, Gert and Giselle drop me off at the Divide, a speck on the map, nothing else besides a shelter. Having waited for hours while the potential avalanches overhanging the road leading up here were pre-emptively ‘bombed’, I procrastinate even longer to avoid tramping off into the downpour and the rain-soaked forest. I stretch, repack my clothes and watch as busloads of tourists pass on their way to Milford Sound. Most of the jet-lagged Asian tourists are fast asleep, with their heads snapped back, gaping mouths wide open, or foreheads pressed flat against the windows.

A DOC utility vehicle pulls up to the shelter, the driver with a crew cut, a long fringe and an ear riddled with at least a dozen earrings. I recognise him as the warden from Dumpling Hut on the Milford Track. He introduces me to a man with Rastafarian dreadlocks, the warden from Lake Howden Hut on the Routeburn Track.

‘What are you doing here?’ I ask the Dumpling Hut warden.

‘It’s my days off, so I thought I’d do some tramping and visit my friend.’

Are these DOC hut wardens for real? They work for a living in isolated huts and when they get time off they go for a walk in the bush. They make me look like a socialite.

The Rasta carries a hunting rifle with telescopic sights. The two men have wicked glints in their eyes, giving them a decidedly degenerate appearance. Their weird hairdos don’t help either. I’m not sure whether they are deliberately trying to look like inbred Appalachians, or whether it comes to them naturally.

‘You two look like you’re straight out of
Deliverance
,’ I comment, sealing my pack against the rain with the outer cover pulled tight over it. ‘What’s the rifle for?’

‘To hunt down punters like you who haven’t paid their DOC hut fees,’ the Rasta taunts. He flicks his dreadlocks out of his face, suddenly taking on a more sinister appearance.

‘Seriously,’ I reply.

‘Hunt introduced species.’

‘Like deer?’ I suggest.

‘Like tourists,’ the other answers.

‘Sure beats talking to them,’ the Rasta laughs, throwing the rifle over his shoulder. He fingers a box full of ammunition.

‘We’ll give you a couple of hours head start,’ continues the Dumpling Hut warden.

‘Very funny.’ I swing the backpack onto my back and slope off, with just the occasional apprehensive glance over my shoulder. They wouldn’t really do that, would they?

They yell after me: ‘Any introduced species not on a farm is noxious. You don’t need a licence to shoot them!’

I quicken my pace. These tracks are not on farmland, and as a tourist I am after all an exotic species, along with whitetail, red, fallow, wapiti and chamois deer, pigs, goats, possums, rats and stoats. Even the brown and rainbow trout are introduced. Once again under the reassuring influence of the forest, the mild terror inspired by the jokes abates. There is no mistaking the overwhelming sentiment of wellbeing, as if my physical body instinctively understands that without these trees, we could not live.

The Caples Track, not listed as one of the Great Walks, diverts off the Greenstone Track. The first ominous sign is a collapsed footbridge half submerged in a stream. The path is overgrown and doesn’t look as if anyone has used it. I trudge through mud and water calf-deep. My boots and socks are already soaking wet – and I am only just starting the walk. I have to climb over fallen tree trunks, or crawl under them, and wade semi-immersed through flooded streams. It is more like an SAS obstacle course, designed to break the spirit of the unfit and unqualified. And why not? This is a wilderness, after all. I have been spoilt by tramping the groomed Milford Track.

I struggle up a steeply ascending trail that is often not a path at all, it’s so riddled with twisted roots, loose stones and tangled branches. Water gushes down, rendering the ground as slippery as a waterslide. I am dripping with perspiration and cannot believe I am doing this for fun. A sapling bent back to its full extent thwacks me on the ear and I trip, skewering my hand on a thin
stump. I will self-destruct trying to complete this walk; the two hut wardens won’t even have to hunt me down. Years from now, when DOC decide to elevate the Caples track to a ‘Great Walk’, they will find a skeleton pinned under a heavy green rucksack. A handwritten note in my bony fingers will bequeath my wealth, most of which will have rotted on my back.

Despite this scenario, to my amazement I successfully reach the top of the pass. To my even greater surprise I find myself traipsing with ridiculous ease along a boardwalk covered with chicken wire, winding through patches of heavy snow. Even if I tried, I could not slip on the horizontal planks – I could walk on them blindfolded. A sign warns not to step off the path, which has been constructed to protect the delicate ecosystem.

In contrast to the ascent, the walk down the other side of the pass is pleasant, dominated by beautiful, naturally sculptured green rocks. Soon I have descended out of the snow. Water jostles gently down a series of rock-lined waterfalls into pools fringed by ferns. The trickling waters of the creek are clear, with a seemingly jade hue, the impression soft and ethereal, as if painted with the washed-out strokes of an ink brush. It all looks suspiciously like a contrived, ornate and rather extravagant Japanese garden.

At Upper Caples Hut, my footsteps thump heavily across the wooden porch. I take off my muddy boots and enter. Four young Kiwis, two girls and two boys, mind their own business, playing cards. I could make the effort to initiate a conversation, but I am too exhausted to be bothered.

Two young American trampers arrive. They break the ice and talk to the four card-playing Kiwis, who all prove to be dental students from Dunedin. I listen to the conversation about American talk shows. The future dentists brag about watching all of them: ‘If one is on when we have classes, we tape it and look at it later. It’s unbelievable what Americans do and say on television.’ Their tone is disparaging, as if religiously watching such rubbish was no reflection on them.

When I reach Lower Caples Hut the next day, it starts snowing and raining. Although it is only mid-afternoon, I am exhausted from yesterday’s effort. I light the coal-burning pot-bellied stove, retreat into my Norwegian sleeping-bag and catch up on back issues of
Reader’s Digest
. The most recent copy is twenty years old. It thunders and hails outside but I’m snug as a bug in a rug. Drowsy with oxygen deprivation from the burning fire, I fall asleep with a
Reader’s Digest
over my face. At dusk the hut warden wakes me to ask for my hut pass. I am the only tramper and he invites me to join him and his female companion, an off-duty hut warden from the Routeburn Track, for home-brewed beer. Several hours later, full of good cheer, freshly shot and stewed rabbit, and a growing respect for the generosity and hospitality of Kiwis, I stumble back into the trampers’ half of the hut.