Last Chance to See

have arrived at the wrong time of day, but because we have arrived in the wrong year. There will not be any more right years.
    Until 1987 Fiordland was the home of one of the strangest, most unearthly sounds in the world. For thousands of years, in the right season, the sound could be heard after nightfall throughout these wild peaks and valleys.
    It was like a heartbeat: a deep, powerful throb that echoed through the dark ravines. It was so deep that some people will tell you that they felt it stirring in their gut before they could discern the actual sound, a sort of
wump
, a heavy wobble of air. Most people have never heard it at all, or ever will again. It was the sound of the kakapo, the old night parrot of New Zealand, sitting high on a rocky promontory and calling for a mate.
    Of all the creatures we were searching for this year, it was probably the strangest and most intriguing, and also one of the rarest and most difficult to find. Once, before New Zealand was inhabited by humans, there were hundreds of thousands of kakapos. Then there were thousands, then hundreds. Then there were just forty … and counting. Here in Fiordland, which for many thousands of years was the bird’s main stronghold, there are now thought to be none left at all.
    Don Merton knows more about these birds than anyone else in the world, and he has come along with us partly as our guide, but also because this flight into Fiordland gives him the opportunity to check one last time: has the last kakapo definitely gone?
    Our helicopter is perched at such a dizzying angle on the high ridge of rock, it looks as if the merest puff of wind willtoss it lightly away into the valley far below us. Mark and I walk slowly away from it with a stiff, uneasy gait as if we are aching all over. Any move we make we make first with our heads before daring to move the rest of our bodies. Bill Black grins at us wickedly for being earthbound city boys.
    “No worries,” he says cheerfully. “Wherever we can land, we put down. This is where Don wanted to come, so this is where I put him. Wouldn’t want to be here if there was a high wind blowing, but there isn’t.” He sits on a small rock and lights a cigarette. “Not right now, anyhow,” he adds and peers off into the distance, happily contemplating the enormous fun we would all have if a gale suddenly whipped up along the valley.
    Gaynor feels disinclined, for the moment, to move too far away from the chopper, and decides that this might be a good moment to interview Bill. She pulls the tangled coloured cables of the cassette recorder out of her shoulder bag and jams the tiny headphones over her hair, without ever looking down to the left or the right. She thrusts the microphone at him and uses her other hand to steady herself nervously against the ground.
    “I’ve been flying in Fiordland for fifteen years,” says Bill, when she’s ready, “mostly telecommunications work, and some construction work. Don’t do tourists usually. Can’t be bothered with that. Otherwise I do a lot of work for the kakapo transfer program, flying the wardens around to the most inaccessible parts of New Zealand. A helicopter’s very useful for that, because it can put down in the most unlikely places. You see that rocky peak over there?”
    “No!” says Gaynor, still staring fixedly at the ground. “I don’t want to look yet. Just … tell me a story. Tell me … tell me something funny that’s happened to you. Please?”
    “Something funny, eh?” says Bill and takes a long, thoughtful drag on his cigarette as he surveys the valley. “Well, I once set my hands on fire in the helicopter, becauseI lit a match without realising my gloves were soaked in petrol. That the sort of thing you had in mind?”
    Don Merton, in the meantime, has calmly walked off a few yards, and is peering anxiously at a patch of the scrubby ground. He squats down and very carefully brushes aside pieces of loose earth and grass from a shallow depression in the earth. He finds something and picks it up. It is small, roughly oval in shape, and pale in colour. He examines it carefully for a while and his shoulders sag dejectedly. He beckons us over to join him. We follow nervously and look at the thing he is holding up between his fingers and regarding with extraordinary sadness. It is a single, slightly elderly, sweet potato. I hardly know what to say.
    With a sigh he replaces the sweet potato on the ground.
    “We call this place