THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 16, 1995 TAG: 9501140039
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Earl Swift
LENGTH: Long : 338 lines
First light spills into the high mountain valley and glints off the water of a hissing, yard-wide stream. It seeps through the gnarled beeches overhead, their branches bearded in pale green lichen. It sharpens the amphitheater of brush-bare, snow-clad peaks that makes a tube of the sky above me.
Something rustles the hebe bushes a few feet away, just across the water. It sounds big. I check my camera for the dozenth time and hold my breath.
I'm two hemispheres and 11,000 miles from home, crouched beside the Harper River a few hundred yards from its source in New Zealand's Southern Alps. The nearest road is a four-mile hike away, across an alpine saddle and down a steep, rocky mountainside.
Much closer, perhaps just beyond that bush, may hide my quarry: a mammoth, flightless bird standing a full foot taller than I do, a bird that could weigh upwards of 500 pounds. A bird that shouldn't be easy to miss.
Two years ago, three friends walking along this stream, at exactly this spot, reported seeing such a bird and chasing it through the dense tangle of brush that fills the valley. I've come in to see the place for myself.
Because, you see, there's a problem with their story: The bird in question, New Zealand's great moa, the largest bird to ever inhabit the planet, has supposedly been extinct for 500 years.
A few weeks ago, when I told my flatmate that I might head into the Bush in search of moa, he reacted the way most of New Zealand did to reports of the sighting.
``That story's rubbish, mate,'' Glenn Inwood said. ``There are no moa. They made it up.''
We were nursing pints at a pub in Christchurch, the largest city on New Zealand's rugged, sparsely populated South Island. ``I mean, somebody would have seen one before now,'' Glenn con tinued. ``This was a bloody big bird.''
I knew that Glenn probably was making sense, despite our joint effort to boost the Pacific nation's already impressive per-capita beer consumption rate of 110 liters per year. No living or recently dead moa had ever been seen, for certain, since the Pakeha, or whites, arrived in New Zealand in the late 18th century.
In fact, by the time Capt. James Cook put the first British parties ashore, the birds were already so long gone that most of the native Maori had no memory of them. All 11 species of claw-footed, long-necked moa had been hunted into oblivion.
They'd been easy game. Lacking even stubby wings after cons without worry of predators, the birds were ill-equipped to escape the spear-armed Maori. Most weren't particularly agile or speedy. Many apparently tasted pretty good. And the biggest of them was easy to track, being double the size of an ostrich.
``A moa would bump his head in here,'' Glenn said, jerking his thumb toward the pub's 10-foot ceiling. ``They were huge. If one of them kicked you, you wouldn't just lose your family benefits, mate. You'd lose your life.''
Fair enough, I thought. It was unlikely that a colony of moa could sneak around unseen by Maori or Pakeha for half a millennium in an area the size of Colorado.
But was it impossible? Every summer, scads of New Zealand's 3.5 million souls go traipsing into the Bush to backpack, log trees, clear roads. Yet only a tiny few have laid eyes on a kiwi, another flightless bird and the country's national symbol.
In 1948, a handful of chubby, blunt-beaked creatures discovered living in the sticks turned out to be takahe, a wingless bird thought extinct for 50 years.
Large chunks of the South Island's fiord-dented southwest coast rarely see visitors. A few mountain valleys reputedly remain unexplored. Was it so far-fetched to think that a few moa might survive in the country's remote back blocks?
Paddy Freaney was just out for a ``nice, leisurely tramp'' when he and two mates hiked into the Black Mountains in the central South Island early one Wednesday morning in January 1993.
It was the height of the Southern Hemisphere's summer, a time of long daylight and warm breezes among the peaks that comprise the island's knotty spine, and the trio made good time. Before long they reached Lagoon Saddle, a shelf of soggy, tussock-covered ground that bridges the gap between two mountains.
Atop the saddle spreads a large tarn, and from this lonesome pool, icy rivulets burble downhill among the tussock before merging a few hundreds yards away into a fast-moving, narrow stream - the Harper River. Its water leaps a 15-foot falls, then gathers volume and speed as it races over a rocky, twisting bed into a deepening valley.
A few hundred yards downstream the river wriggles past a small A-frame shelter used by backcountry hikers. Freaney and company - Sam Waby, a Christchurch schoolteacher, and Rocheele Rafferty, Freaney's friend and employee - stopped in for a spot of tea. Freaney snapped a few pictures. Then the trio clambered down the Harper's bank.
``There's a bench track up above you, but of course, you won't see a bloody thing if you stay on the track,'' Freaney explained later. ``Years ago, before that track was there, I used to go down there and poach the odd deer. And the river was the best way to travel.''
Waby had the lead - and a Churchill .243 bolt-action rifle, in case they saw some game. Freaney was next, carrying a daypack and a 35mm camera. Rafferty brought up the rear. They reached a windblown tree that blocked their view of the river ahead.
``I had had a heart attack, and I was not all that fit and was already huffing,'' Waby said. ``I stopped to have a drink of water, and Paddy stepped past me. I'd put the rifle against a rock.''
Then Waby heard Freaney gasp.
About 40 yards away, they say, standing amid the hebe bushes in the valley floor, stood a man-sized bird sheathed in coarse, red-brown and gray feathers. A thick neck jutted from its wingless, tailless body. Its small head was dominated by large eyes and a downturned beak.
They stared. ``I didn't even raise the rifle, because we were that bloody dumbfounded,'' Waby recalled. ``It looked straight at us, and then it was off.''
The bird sprinted away, Freaney in hot pursuit and desperately trying to focus the camera. He fired off three pictures. The animal vanished into the Bush.
``Back up the river there was a big, flat rock on the riverbank,'' Freany said. ``We sat down, and not one of us said, `What was that?' ''
True, said Waby. ``When we got back together we said, `That was a bloody emu.' But then we said, `Hold on. That was no emu. That was a bloody moa.' ''
I'd probably have a hard time distinguishing an emu from a moa, were either to erupt from that bush across the stream, but three months in New Zealand has exposed me to enough bizarre birdlife that I wouldn't be too shocked to see both at once.
A month ago I set out with two companions on a four-day sea kayaking journey in the Marlborough Sounds, an archipelago of steep-sided, bush-clad islands and necks at the top of the South Island. Gale-force headwinds whipped up waterspouts within yards of our boats. Rain lashed us so forcefully it stung. Then we met the weka.
Whenever we nosed the kayaks ashore, no matter how briefly, these fast-moving, criminal woodhens appeared. They swooped on our campsites in nighttime wave attacks, hell-bent on stealing food, fearless in the face of our shouts. They tried to steal our wetsuits as they dried in the sun. And at one bivouac, I found myself crashing through the woods on the tail of one brazen weka after it burgled a stuffsack from our gear pile. Fifty junior high students, camped nearby, cheered the bird on.
The weka are woodland pleasures next to the kea, a beautiful, deep-green alpine parrot that combines avarice with a penchant for vandalism. Leave your car parked in their company, and you may not recognize it when you return: Kea can strip it of rubber - windshield wipers, bumper covers, window seals - in minutes.
The parrots have been known to work in teams to steal backpacks and ransack purses, and have even killed sheep: A group of kea will isolate a weak member of the flock and peck out its liver.
They are, as New Zealanders are fond of understating, ``very cheeky birds.''
No such behavior has been attributed to the moa - not, at least, by the people who reported seeing them before Freaney and friends hiked into the Harper valley. Dozens of such reports exist, some describing turkey-sized ``bush moa,'' others 10-foot behemoths.
During the 1860s South Island gold rush, Jimmy ``Walker'' Waka wound up jailed after trading blows with another prospector who questioned his story of a 9-foot bird in the Bush.
In 1880, 7-year-old Alice McKenzie reportedly encountered a 4-boot, blue-gray bird that allowed her to pet its back as it rested on a remote beach. Her father measured its footprints at 11 inches from heel to claw.
Sixteen years later and 200 miles to the north, a group of schoolboys stumbled on a monster bird on a riverbank, and in 1928, back down south, a Danish prospector spotted three ``giant fowls.'' Other sightings came in 1940, 1950 and 1963.
Each of these incidents excited the New Zealand public, but none foresaw the controversy that exploded when the Harper Valley three went public.
What set them apart was Freaney's camera. On its film, reproduced in newspapers throughout the country, was the profile of something amid the valley's brush - out of focus, most of its features obscured by shadow, but something.
From the start, the sighting was dismissed as a joke by a great many New Zealanders. Newscasters smirked as they delivered the story. Restaurants offered ``moa burgers.'' The owner of a ramshackle, small-town zoo a few miles west of Harper announced that she had a moa in captivity.
Moa hoaxes, after all, historically outnumbered sincere reports. Pranksters in claw-print boots had been stomping around Antipodean beaches for decades. By 1993, it was an old, old joke.
Besides, Freaney had a reputation as an Irishman who liked his drink, especially when it was chased with a good leg-pull. It didn't help that he owned the Bealey Hotel, a roadhouse just a mile or so across the mountains from the Lagoon Saddle. A moa in the neighborhood couldn't hurt business.
Nor did it bolster the trio's story that one of the photos looked fake. Two captured the mystery bird from a distance; the third depicted what appeared to be an all-too-perfect wet footprint on a riverbank rock.
But some elements of the story kept press and public from simply brushing it off. For one thing, the three witnesses had a lot of face to lose. Freaney may be a joker, but he's also a former British Army commando, a past outdoor skills instructor for the elite Special Air Services, and no slouch as a civilian. He's an ace climber who has reached New Zealand's 31 tallest peaks in a single season, achieved 27,000 feet in the Himilayas, and pulled off mountain rescues no one else in the Southern Alps would dare.
Waby had a teaching career that would be irreparably tarnished if the sighting were a hoax, and Rafferty hoped for a job with the Department of Conservation, work she'd never get if her story were bogus.
The three stuck to their claim, over objections that Harper is popular with hikers, that surely the moa would have been seen before or since. They weathered experts' guesses that the photos depicted everything from red deer to giant goose. They appeared before the Christchurch Skeptics Association, convincing those present that they were sincere.
And they invited the government to test the claim by mounting an expedition to look for the big bird. The Department of Conservation wasn't interested. It would not spend taxpayers' money looking for an animal that didn't exist. Full stop.
On a sunny Tuesday morning, I left Christchurch bound for the Harper. I crossed the wide, flat Canterbury Plain past wineries and flat-topped hedgerows, beery old stagecoach stops and sprawling sheep stations, then climbed the wriggling, narrow highway into the mountains.
Freaney was atop a chair, wash ing windows, when I pulled into the Bealey Hotel. At 50ish he's tall, fit-looking, his blond hair turning to gray. Touristy Kiwi kitsch abounded around us in the lodgelike main dining room, including two stuffed kea staring down from the rafters.
``If I'd known what was going to happen, I'd have never said a bloody thing,'' Freaney said as he readied the place for an incoming busload of Americans. ``Mind-boggling, man. This phone was clogged, day and night - reporters from England, Japan, Australia, Ireland. Bloody Irish reporters calling here at 3 in the morning. They never worked out the bloody time difference, stupid sods.
``People have said, `Oh, you must have been up there smoking the wacky `backy,''' he said. ``We were sober as bloody judges. We'd have been quite lucky if we'd had two bloody pints the night before.''
I mentioned that I planned to hike to the Harper. Freaney warned me against falling into a common backpacker's trap. ``Lots of people walk the track now. The majority of them are foreigners. They'll go in with these big bloody packs, great bloody boots - Germans, Swedes, Poms, Aussies.
``They get blisters, sore feet, and all they're bloody doing is keeping their eyes on the footprints in front of 'em,'' he said. ``They don't see a bloody thing. They never, ever, see a bloody deer. They never write that in the hut books: `Saw a lovely deer out here today.' ''
We stepped onto a terrace overlooking the braided, teal-colored Waimakiriri River, and Freaney pointed out the trailhead.
``Climb up to the saddle and come down the river, and when you've gone about a kilometer'' - he smiled and winked at me - ``you're in moa country.''
So here I am, hunkered down on the Harper.
The hebe rustles again, then shakes violently, and an animal springs out and bullets down the riverbank: A possum, dark brown and bushy-tailed.
Damn.
Shadows are beginning to sharpen in the valley. The temperature's rising. It's time to move.
I've been in the bush for about 12 hours. After leaving the hotel I crossed a large sheep station to the trailhead and wheezed up the north side of 5,214-foot Mount Bruce, passing along the way the Bealey Hut, one of hundreds of trailside shacks maintained by the DOC and Forest Service.
Three weeks after Freaney went public, someone noticed that this hut's log book, in which hikers write their intended routes and observations, contained a May 1992 entry from a German couple. It read: ``Were very surprised to see two moas in the harper valley as we had heard they were almost extinct in most parts of the country.''
The Christchurch Press tracked down the hikers whose entry followed the Germans'. Yes, they said, they remembered reading that.
The trail took me above the bushline, around the mountain's shoulder to a slope above the saddle, then plunged through the beeches to the A-frame where Freaney and friends stopped for tea 23 months ago.
Along the way, I made a horrifying discovery. While my pack sat in the sunshine outside the hotel, the giant economy-sized Cadbury's Energy chocolate bar I'd stashed in its top pocket had turned to liquid. Sludgy brown goo coated everything in it - knife, flashlight, notebook, pens, extra film for the camera.
Chocolate-smeared, tailed by bees, I hurried to the A-frame and washed my gear as well as I could. Waking before dawn, I ascended the river to the saddle, circled the tarn, then headed slowly back down the Harper.
A half-hour later the river has doubled in width and sloshes through a high-sided, boulder-strewn canyon. I splash along the bank as quietly as I can, keeping an eye on the trees and brush ahead. Nothing.
Farther down the track dives into the riverbed from high up the valley's side, crosses the water and climbs out on the far bank. I ford the Harper and stop for lunch. My tube of Vegemite, a sandwich spread of dark-brown yeast extract, smells vaguely of chocolate. Then again, everything seems to.
I explore the riverbed for another hour, seeing nothing, then elect to switch to the track. A few miles farther on, as I ford a thigh-deep, fast-moving creek, a rock rolls out from under my right foot and I perform an Olympic-caliber swan dive into the torrent.
The water is very, very cold. I'm swept over a couple small waterfalls and against a half-dozen sharp rocks before I snag a boulder and haul myself out. My ankle is obviously damaged. I watch it swell while sprawled trailside, and wonder whether I'll be able to push on. The forest around me is completely silent.
Into boot-sucking mud, over slime-coated creekbeds, through a green tunnel of dense beech, matagauri and fern I limp, ears and eyes alert. Not a creature stirs.
I move farther and farther into the Bush. Along a wide side creek I find deer track, but nothing big and three-toed.
I cook dinner in a nearby hut, then move outside. Eventually the sandflies stop biting and I drift off, only to be rudely shoved into consciousness at 2 a.m. It's no kick from a great bird, however - just a small earthquake.
Morning comes, and with it, an 1,800 foot climb onto the Cass saddle in the Craigieburn Range. I emerge from the beeches and into the sunshine and thrill to the visibility that comes with treeless heights.
If a moa were living up here, I'd have no trouble picking it out against the tussock from a mile off. Descending back into the dense, cluttered forest, I realize I'd now have trouble seeing it six feet away.
Three hours later, still reeking of Cadbury's, my ankle bulging, I stagger out to the highway.
Does a monster bird from prehistory survive in the New Zealand wilds?
I don't know. I surely haven't seen one.
But then, I haven't seen any deer on this trip, and they surely roam the Harper valley. I haven't seen any kea, but they frequent the huts where I've stayed.
Corduroy terrain and thick vegetation make for stunted visibility in the Bush. You can see precious little from a trail or riverbed save for the few yards of ground immediately around you.
And that's in the frequently visited stretches of backcountry. You see even less in the more remote valleys of the Blacks and Craigieburns, valleys that enjoy a handful of human visitors a year, that lack trails, that force you to noisily bushwhack from point to point.
Sure, it could be a hoax. I'll admit I'm suspicious - particularly after visiting the Bealey Hotel, where a huge moa statue now graces the parking lot and Freaney has to hustle to keep up with the bus tours.
But if it is a con, it's a good one. In two years Freaney, Waby and Rafferty have never once slipped up, and nobody's come forward to blow their cover. Much of the population seems to know someone who has a friend who's a close mate of Freaney's, and to whom Freaney has confided that the whole thing's a set-up. Try to get those folks to talk, however, and they'll say there's nothing to the rumor.
It may be that we'll never have an answer.
I know this: Even the most cynical New Zealander hopes, deep down, that it's not a hoax - that is some mist-shrouded pocket of these still-wild, beautiful islands thrives a colony of beasts unmolested by the science that insists they don't exist.
Include in that number the Department of Conversation, which still refuses to investigate the Harper Valley claim. Turns out DOC has an endangered species management plan for moa.
DOC says the plan is just a hypothetical model, that it could have chosen any animal for the role.
Maybe that's true.
Maybe it isn't. MEMO: Today, staff writer Earl Swift returns to the Virginian-Pilot and the
Ledger- Star. He filed this story from New Zealand, where he has been on
a Fulbright Fellowship for three months. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
Paddy Freaney claims to have encountered a moa during a "leisurely
tramp" in New Zealand's back country two years ago/
Freaney maintains that his blurry snapshot captured the moa as it
beat a hasty retreat into the Bush.
Color illustration
World Book Encyclopedia 1995 by permission
The flightless moa, long believed to be extinct, could stand six
feet tall and weigh upwards of 500 pounds.
by CNB