Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salmon Rushdie
We visit the glow worm caves in Te Anou. We take a boat over the water and then are herded into the information room, where the underground cave boats that take you through the caves start from. We have read that there is 'nothing like the feeling of floating through the darkness in silence, gazing up at the twinkling silver glow worms in the black'. There are about forty of us in the group, and maybe a third are children.
"Silence," I whisper to M, "seems unlikely."
It seems more so as we proceed. An informational video is shown and we learn about the glow worm responsible for this starlit haven. The little boy next to us talks loudly about, for some reason, crabs, all the way through. He's rather a sweet little boy though, and frankly it is harder to tune out the parental shhhhing than his chatter. I don't think its fair to try to get young children to be quiet for long periods. It's not in their nature. It's like trying to get a British adult to conduct an entire conversation without mentioning the weather.
The guide shows us a slow motion video of a glowworm trapping and eating a sand fly. He has to pause in his speech to allow for the spontaneous cheering which ensues. Oh yes. We have all encountered the New Zealand sand fly. Some of us still itch from several weeks ago. Our affection for the glow worm collectively increases.
Then he tells us that they eat only the inside of their prey, dropping the husk to the floor.
"Be careful," he says, "to keep your mouth closed, even as you might want to gape in wonder."
The attraction of the glow worm slightly decreases.
By the time they start to syphon off small groups of six for the individual groups to fill the small row boats, we are all a little giddy.
We climb through the dark cave, and into a boat. There are two children with us. They are absolutely beautiful. Full of freckles and wide eyes and they are perfectly silent. We drift through the cave gazing up and the starlit clusters in the velvety blackness, the only sound being the gentle lap of the water under the boat. Oh, and some adults.
Yes. In the end none of the children utter a whisper, it is a group of twenty sonethings who drift through talking audibly about something entirely unrelated. They are clearly audible even to those who do not have them in the boat. There is an angry cacophony of shhhhing noises. And then a rather shame faced silence.
"...(the pollution in the sea of stories has become very bad, says Mali)...Certain popular romances have become just long lists of shopping expeditions. Children’s stories also. For instance, there is an outbreak of talking helicopter anecdotes.”
Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salmon Rushdie
The following day we are booked on a cruise on the famous Milford Sound, which we are very much looking forward to. We are picked up by a very friendly man driving a bus, and he proceeds to chat to us all the way to Milford Sound. He is full of interesting stories and anecdotes, from the accidents on the road to the Sound, to the old days when people hunted deer by jumping out of a helicopter onto their backs, to the two school teachers who scaled the mountainous terrain in order to pick a place to build the road. What really sticks with me though, is something I have been noticing in New Zealand since we arrived (and in fact continue to notice for the rest of our trip.
Certain animals are mythologised as being evil.
The lucky creatures picked out for this treatment are possums, stoats and weasels.
Before you assume that people have simply been reading too much 'Wind in the Willows', I will try to explain the logic, though, like many such brandings, the logic is flawed, and like Haroun's polluted sea of stories, has become a little twisted.
Creatures like these, and possums in particular, tend to attack the, now close to endangered, kiwi birds, or their young, or eat their eggs. It is, for a possum, stoat or weasal, simply natural behaviour. The birds are their natural prey, and they in turn are the prey of larger creatures, notably humans. Clearly, the kiwi being the national bird, and regarded with much affection, this leads to a resentment of the creatures which prey on it, particularly as it is, in this case, the classic under dog, being more or less unable to defend itself against them.
The twist in this logic, other than the argument that predator and prey behaviour are natural, is that when colonising humans first set foot on these shores, the Maori were living perfectly well on the land as it was, and the entire country contained no indigenous four legged creatures. The fauna was all bird life. As a result, birds like the kiwi, (and for that matter my favourite Weka birds), had not developed any protection mechanisms, such as the ability to fly, or a habit of laying eggs somewhere other than the ground. But the colonists wanted something to trade, something to eat, and a little piece of home. Deer were brought in for food, and later, cows and sheep for milk, wool and meat. Unfortunately, on the ships, as stoways, came rats, which proceeded to swiftly reproduce, colonising the island their own way. They preyed on kiwi eggs but were small enough to be eaten by some of the larger birds of prey, and potentially the kiwi could defend itself with its feet. But rats are a pest in other ways too, so the early settlers brought in stoats, weasels, wild cats and possums, to eat the rats. Then, if our driver is to be believed, they brought in dogs to eat the possums, because they bred a little more rapidly than the settlers were prepared for.
'There was an old woman you swallowed a fly,
I don't know why she swallowed a fly,
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old woman who swallowed a spider
Which wriggled and jiggled and squiggled inside her
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed a fly...'
Etc.
(If you don't know that twisted little rhyme from your childhood you probably think I'm crazy)
But you have to admit, its about as sensible as the old woman, who eventually swallows a tiger I think. To catch a cow.
So ancestral recklessness caused the possums to be here in the first place. And clearly to save the kiwi, the rapidly spreading population of possums has to be curbed.
What I am surprised by is the sort of folk belief that , possums in particular, are actually evil.
"What's that?" says our guide on the kiwi walk, shining his light on a black, furry creature, sniffing around the roots of a tree, "eurgh. Just a possum. Anybody got a gun?"
"There are two types of possum," says our driver on the way to Milford Sound, "round ones and flat ones. You see the flat ones mostly on the side of the road. They're a much better variety, in New Zealand you get points for turning round ones into flat ones as often as possible."
He is joking, well kind of, but there are many shops selling jumpers and scarves made out of possum fur, and a sign I see often outside them saying 'save the kiwi! Wear possum.'
It's not a joke. I've seen a lot of advertising which equates wearing the skin of one animal with saving New Zealands precious ecology. The possum population needs controlling, but there's something slightly twisted about this reasoning.
We walk through a park at one point, and there is a children's maze, which we walk through, just for fun. In the maze are little wooden 'story boards' designed to teach children about their environment. There is a kiwi character, and a weka character, but what really strikes me is the possum character, drawn with a hideous evil grin, walking upright with little hands outstretched like a cross between zombie and warewolf.
'Oh no!' cries the mother kiwi, 'he ate my babies!'
It's really quite disturbing. And, whilst not all New Zealanders are necessarily swallowing this rather blinkered view of their wildlife (part of our walking party when we do the Tongariro crossing later in the trip arrives having accidentally run over a possum, and feeling bad about it), it does seem to be a rather strange way of viewing the world, absolving humans of any responsibility.
"This animal is evil. By killing it we are heroes. Yes, yes we brought them over in the first place. To an island full of birds...no they didn't want to actually, we had to catch them and bring them across in captivity. But still. No it isn't our fault at all. The problem is that the animal is inherently wicked..."
"He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real."
Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
On a rather lighter note, (apologies - my vegetarian sensibilities get a little agitated every now and then), we load ourselves onto a beautiful little boat with a small group of people and we sail out onto Milford Sound.
It is magical. There is something about the water, which is eerily still, despite the boat propelling itself across it, and a deep blue, and the sense of depth. There is something in the cliff faces too, hanging over the boat in defiance if gravity, split down the middle in places by previous earthquakes, and textured with small plants, clinging green trees and birds. It feels uninhabited, which, essentially, it is, but the sense of isolation makes it feel like a secret. Wildlife, when we do see it, has more of a sense of ownership than we do, seals lolling casually on one solitary rock, ignoring our delighted gazes, birds of prey wheeling overhead, shoals of fish ducking and diving, blink and you miss them, beneath the surface of the water. There are waterfalls spread so thin that they look, in the sunlight, like a shower of tiny crystals, and which, according to our guide, are rumoured to have the power to make a woman look twenty years younger. Obligingly we clamour to the front of the boat and turn our faces into the spray. I seem to look exactly the same only a bit colder and wetter, but maybe its a delayed effect.
I guess you can't believe every story you hear.
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