The accent intrigued him too. Was it South African? “We came up the Waiwawa yesterday,” he replied. “Last night we camped on the flat just below here. You must have seen the smoke from our fire.”
The other looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t understand.”
“I thought I saw one of your party looking at us from behind that rock below the hut just before the sun went down.”
“I need to know your route.”
A hearing problem? Bill quickly changed the subject. “Those 308s look just the job. Many deer round here?”
The voice was showing increasing impatience. “Your route, please?” the goatee asked a third time.
Short on the fellowship of the hills, thought Bill. But the route was not his department. He looked towards his companion.
“We thought we’d have a crack at the Waitoa,” said Stan, using the typical Kiwi understatement but not without an element of pride.
There was a short pause. “The Waitoa,” said the leader, emphasising every vowel carefully in his clipped accent, “is closed.”
“Closed!” Stan threw down his pack and thrust his face almost right into the goatee. “What do you mean closed? No one’s ever even been there!”
“These are official instructions from the Director-General of the Forestry Service.”
“The Director can go and get lost! It’s a public Forest Park. He can’t just close valleys like that!” He disliked intensely those small shifty eyes, the flat voice, the ridiculous little goatee.
“There must be some reason,” Bill said quietly.
“Two days ago on December 29th there was a discovery in the Waitoa.”
“What kind of discovery?”
“A formerly extinct bird,” replied the tourist party leader.
“Which one?”
“The huia.”
This new shock was too much for Stan. He reeled away muttering “Huia! Huia!”
“Congratulations!” said Bill, and offered his hand to the man with the ginger goatee. “Who were the lucky ones to spot it?”
“We have two wildlife consultants with our party,” the leader replied. “One is a member of the Ornithological Society. They came back here immediately, and Kevin Carr – he’s the member of the Ornithological Society – went in the helicopter to Rotorua to put a call through to the Director-General. Then he flew down to Wellington to show him the photos and the sighting reports.”
“Kevin Carr!” Stan seemed to have difficulty with the name.
“I expect they got into the Waitoa with the helicopter,” Bill continued coolly. “How many have you got?”
“We have only one helicopter.”
“What kind?”
“A Squirrel.”
“Just the job.”
Stan couldn’t offer his hand. It was his valley they were shutting him out of. They had violated it with a helicopter and travelled there in obnoxious comfort in under an hour. He would have taken three days down that terrible gorge. And they had discovered a huia, the Maori royal bird, a bird extinct for over sixty years. He would never in his wildest dreams have thought that a huia could be found there. But the cruellest thing of all was the man who had discovered it – Kevin Carr – a person he knew in the Ornithological Society and intensely disliked.
To hell with him!
The party leader was handing him the hut book and a ballpoint pen, but he pushed it away. “If I can’t go to the Waitoa, I don’t want to go anywhere.”
“Let’s have a look at the map,” said Bill.
Stan, a little surprised, produced the map from his pack. Bill studied it carefully. “What about up Mt Waiwawa, along the ridge to Devil’s Peak, then down the Raukawa and out to Mangaorongo Station.”
“Oh, all right,” he said. “One, two, three, four, five, six days, plus two for safety. That should get us out before January 7th – unless the river floods.” He began to write in the book, then paused to read the names of the silent party, but the man with the goatee motioned him on. He finished his entry, including names, proposed route and estimated time of arrival at Mangaorongo Station.
They were ready to go. The leader stood waiting and there was no conversation. They heaved up their sixty-pound packs.
“Good shooting!” said Bill, as they lumbered off slowly up the hill.
The man with the ginger goatee didn’t reply but continued to watch them as if he wanted to make sure they chose the route that they had indicated.
The route rose steeply up the open tussocky ridge of Mt. Waiwawa. Stan, still seething, was beginning to feel the heat of the climbing sun. They stopped for a rest and a handful of scroggin a thousand feet above the hut. Not a word had been spoken since they had left it.
“You know, it strikes me as curious,” said Bill, speaking in his slow way, “that the leader of the tourist party didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t really listening.”
“That flash in the sun I saw. What is metal and moves?”
“Kevin Carr – that creep!” he continued to seethe.
“Think, Stan.”
“Oh – ice axe, binoculars, rifle?”
“Most likely to be a rifle as they were doing some shooting,” said Bill. “Did you notice anything unusual about the party in the hut?”
“Bloody arrogant dollar-toting tourists – but what can you expect in that ‘hotel’?”
“Would you say they were unusually quiet for adventure tourists?”
“That officious, slimy character behaving like he owned the whole shebang,” he seethed again.
“He didn’t smile at lot, did he?”
“Tried to make us feel like petty crims.”
“But all the same he was extremely efficient.”
Stan eyed Bill in surprise. His casual, easygoing companion could on rare occasions, usually on sighting a deer, move fast and in a totally unexpected direction.
“Too efficient not to keep a watch out last night,” Bill continued. “And that rock was the nearest point to the hut where you can get a view down the valley. We went past it on the way up and I saw signs that possibly two people had been kneeling behind it. Yet for some reason that leader bloke didn’t want to admit that they’d been watching us. And it couldn’t have been anyone else because I also checked the valley for other campers as we came up. Another thing I noticed this morning was someone with binoculars standing at the lounge window, watching us approach.”
“I thought you were watching out for deer as we came up to the hut.”
“I don’t mind watching, but I don’t like being watched. I also checked the helipad. Two helicopters had been using the pad in the last forty-eight hours. One was small, the Squirrel that he mentioned. The other had larger skid marks and was probably bigger and heavier. But the leader said they had only the Squirrel, which would have taken Kevin to Rotorua.”
He had a healthy respect for Bill’s opinions, partly because they were so seldom voiced. But the way Bill had acted in choosing the route was totally out of character. “That route. How did you work it out? You never even look at the maps.”
“Stan,” said Bill very deliberately. “I wasn’t thinking of going on that route.”
“Wha-at?”
“Would you like to keep to your original route?”
He looked at Bill incredulously. “To the Waitoa, you mean? But why? It’s a huia sanctuary.”
“I’ve just got a hunch.”
“About that party?”
“That bloke was hiding something from us. I don’t believe his party were adventure tourists.”
“Who were they then?”
“I don’t know, but he looked as if he had been in the military.”