Last Chance to See

exciting rare birds to me almost immediately and I told him to take a running jump. A great start to a day of virtually unremitting ornithology. Gaynor asked me to describe the scene as we walked into the forest, and I said that if she poked that microphone in front of me once more, I’d probably be sick over it. I quickly found that I was walking by myself.
    After a while I had to admit that the forest wasn’t that bad. Cold, wet, and slippery, and continually trying to wrench my legs off at the knees with some bloody tangled root or other, but it also had a kind of fresh glistening quality that wouldn’t go away however much I glowered at it. Ron Tindall had joined us this time, and was busy striding his way through the undergrowth in an appallingly robust and Scottish manner, but even this ceased to make my head ache after a while as all the glistening began slowly to work a kind of soothing magic on me. Way ahead of us, half-glimpsed through the misty trees, the blue-plaid parka moved silently like a wraith, following the busy clinking of Boss’s bell.
    After a longish while of trudging, we caught up with Arab, who had stopped again on a narrow path, and was squatting in the sodden grass.
    “There’s a fairly recent dropping here,” he said, holding up a soft, dark mottled bead for our inspection. “It’s got that white on it, which is uric acid, and it hasn’t been washed off by the rain or dried out by the sun. That’ll disappear in about a day, so this is definitely last night’s. This is just where we were, in fact, so I expect we just missed him.”
    Great, I thought. We could have stayed out a little longer last night, and stayed in bed a lot longer this morning. But the early sun was beginning to glimmer through the trees and there was a lot of fragile beauty business going on where it glistened on the tiny beaded dewdrops on the leaves, so I supposed that it wasn’t altogether bad. In fact, there was so much glimmering and glistening and glittering and glinting going on that I began to wonder why it was that so many words that describe what the sun does in the morning begin with the letters “gl,” and I mentioned this to Mark, who told me to take a running jump.
    Cheered by this little exchange, we set off again. We had hardly gone five yards when Arab, who had already gone fifteen, stopped again. He squatted once more and pointed to some slight signs of digging in the earth.
    “That’s a very fresh excavation,” he said. “Probably last night. Digging for this orchid tuber. You can actually see the beak marks through the bottom here.”
    I wondered if this was a good time to begin feeling a bit excited and optimistic about the outcome of the day’s expedition, but when I did, it started to give me a headache, so I stopped. The damn bird was just stringing us along, and it would be another gloomy evening of sitting in the hut cleaning our lenses and trying to look on the bright side. At least there wouldn’t be any whisky this time because we’d drunk it all, so we would be leaving Codfish the following day clearheaded enough to know that we had flown twelve thousand miles to see a bird that hadn’t turned up to see us, and all that remained was to fly twelve thousand miles back again and try to find something to write about it. I must have done sillier things in my life, but I couldn’t remember when.
    The next time Arab stopped, it was for a feather.
    “That’s a kakapo feather that has dropped,” he said, picking it lightly off the side of a bush. “Probably from around the breast by its being quite yellow.”
    “It’s quite downy, isn’t it?” said Mark, taking it and twirlingit between his fingers in the misty sunlight. “Do you think it was dropped recently?” he added hopefully.
    “Oh yes, it’s reasonably fresh,” said Arab.
    “So this is the closest we’ve got yet …?”
    Arab shrugged. “Yes, I suppose it is,” he said. “Doesn’t mean we’re going to find it, though. You can stand practically on top of one and not see it. The signs are that the kakapo was quite active in the early part of the night, just after we were here. And that’s bad news because there was rain during the night, so some of the scent has been washed away. There’s plenty of scent around, but it’s inconclusive. Still, you never know your luck.”
    We trudged on. Or perhaps we didn’t trudge. Perhaps there was a bit more of a spring in our step, but as half an hour passed,