Last Chance to See

and then an hour, and as the sun gradually crept higher in the sky, Arab was once more a floating wraith far distant from us in the trees ahead, and then we lost him altogether. The spring had certainly dropped from our step. For a while we stumbled on, guided by the very faint sounds of Boss’s bell, which was still borne to us on the light breeze sifting through the trees, but then that too stopped and we were lost. Ron was a little way ahead of us, still bounding with rumbustious Scottish gusto, but he too was now floundering for the right direction.
    We were clambering over a bank that was thickly covered with ferns and rotten tree trunks, which led down into a wide, shallow gully in the middle of which Ron was standing, looking perplexedly around him. Gaynor lost her footing as she negotiated the muddy slope into the gully, and slithered down it elegantly on her bottom. I got my camera strap caught in the only branch that didn’t break off the moment you touched it. Mark stopped to help me disentangle myself. Ron had gone into bounding mode again and was hopping up the far side of the gully calling out for Arab.
    “Can you see them?” Mark called out.
    A thought struck me. We were lost because Boss’s bell hadstopped ringing. The same thought obviously hit Mark simultaneously and we both suddenly called out, “Have they got a kakapo?”
    A call came back.
    Gaynor turned to us and shouted, “They’ve got a kakapo!”
    Suddenly we were all in rumbustious bounding mode. With much shouting and hallooing, we clambered and slithered our way hectically across the floor of the gully, hauled ourselves up the other side and down into the next gully, on the far side of which, sitting on a mossy bank in front of a steep slope, was a most peculiar tableau.
    It took me a moment or two to work out what it was that the scene so closely resembled, and when I realised, I stopped for a moment and then approached more circumspectly.
    It was like a Madonna and Child.
    Arab was sitting cross-legged on the mossy bank, his long, wet, grizzled beard flowing into his lap. And cradled in his arms, nuzzling gently into his beard, was a large, fat, bedraggled green parrot. Standing by them in quiet attendance, looking at them intently with his head cocked to one side, was Boss, still tightly muzzled.
    Duly hushed, we went up to them. Mark was making quiet groaning noises in the back of his throat.
    The bird was very quiet and quite still. It didn’t appear to be alarmed, but then neither did it appear to be particularly aware of what was happening. The gaze of its large, black, expressionless eye was fixed somewhere in the middle distance. It was holding, lightly but firmly in its bill, the forefinger of Arab’s right hand, down which a trickle of blood was flowing, and this seemed to have a calming effect on the bird. Gently, Arab tried to remove it, but the kakapo liked it, and eventually Arab let it stay there. A little more blood flowed down Arab’s hand, mingling with the rainwater with which everything was sodden.
    To my right, Mark was murmuring about what an honourit would be to be bitten by a kakapo, which was a point of view I could scarcely understand, but I let it pass.
    We asked Arab where he’d found it.
    “The dog found it,” he said. “Probably about ten yards up this hill, I’d say, under that leaning tree. And when the dog got close, it broke and ran down to just here where I caught it. It’s in good condition, though. You can tell that it’s close to booming this year because of its spongy chest. That’s good news. It means it’s establishing itself well after being resettled.”
    The kakapo shifted itself very slightly in Arab’s lap and pushed its face closer into his beard. Arab stroked its damped ruffled feathers very gently.
    “It’s a bit nervous,” he said. “Especially of noise probably more than anything. He looks very bedraggled because of being wet. When Boss first caught up with him, he would have been in a dry roost up there, and probably at the noise of the bell or the dog going too close, the bird broke out and ran down the hill, and was still going when I caught it. It’s just gripping me a bit and that’s all. If he wanted to put the pressure on …” He shrugged. The kakapo clearly had a very powerful bill. It looked like a great horn-plated tin opener welded to its face.
    “It’s definitely not as relaxed as a lot of birds,” muttered Arab. “A lot of birds are really