Rat Island by William Stolzenburg

Henry’s weather diary. In his first month of residence on Pigeon Island, twenty inches of rain fell; in his first year in Dusky Sound, it rained on two hundred days.
    Henry and Burt lived much of their lives in oilskin suits, and wishing they had better. “Our clothes are no use for this climate, and only a load of wet & misery,” Henry grumbled, “and the oilskin coat on top of the sweaty wool is a fit finish for a farce in clothing.” Seldom the complainer, Henry rued the lead weight of his soggy work boots, “pumping water after half a day in the wet moss & I am certain it would be healthier to go without but for the tender foot of civilization & stupidity.”
    When Henry wasn’t running from a drenching squall, he was shooing marauding rats from his head as he slept and forever swatting the ubiquitous biting sand fly of Fiordland. The maddening swarms of flies had him burning damp moss in his tent to smoke them out. There would come a time when the only salvation for his sanity was revenge. Henry had left his dog tied at camp and returned to find him under siege: “The poor fellow’s head was swelled with their bites.” He coated his stove’s chimney with grease and watched with sadistic glee as the flies glommed on by the tens of thousands. “I was all the evening peeping out through the slit in the door, and greatly enjoyed their difficulties,” he recalled. “The woodhens found that sandflies soaked in fat were just to their taste, and they kept up a tapping on the iron that sounded quite musical, because we were sitting in peace for the first time for days.”
    Back at Pigeon Island, the comforts of home were short-lived. Henry would shave and dry his clothes and begin preparing for the next trip, baking bread and biscuits, preserving penguin eggs, and stocking his food box with stores of bacon and corned beef and potatoes and greens from the garden. Then out into the stormy passes he and Burt would sail again in search of flightless birds.
    Upon landing ashore with promising habitat, he would muzzle Foxy, tie a bell to his neck, and, in a routine harking back to his halcyon days at Lake Te Anau, send him coursing and clanging through the bush. And somewhere along the trail, if all went well, at the end of a muzzled nose, would crouch the kakapo.
    Henry would lift the bird, as soft as a swaddled infant, and place it in a wooden cage, sending Foxy afield again. Sometimes the team would capture a bird an hour. Other times they would go a day or more empty-handed. But eventually the Putangi would sail home to Pigeon Island bearing cages full of kakapos.
    The kakapo, Henry quickly learned, was a solitary beast that fought when confined with others. Every bird demanded and thereafter got its own quarters, a fact somewhat comically illustrated by the little Putangi , valiantly battling the whitecaps, top-heavy with kakapo cages. Home on Pigeon Island, Henry would sometimes feed and fatten his charges in his open-air aviary, before sailing them one last time across the channel to their new home on Resolution Island.
    Feeding the temperamental kakapo presented new problems. Ever the individuals, no two kakapos agreed on cuisine. After one of his early captives died in his care, Henry the host pained himself to satisfy the slightest whims of his guests. He hunted and foraged as a kakapo, stooping to harvest the bird’s native foods. When the berry crop of the forest petered out, Henry offered bread and potatoes from the Pigeon Island pantry.
    Henry’s tally of transfers swelled. In July the team spent a week hunting new territory in Cascade Cove (where it rained every day) and came home with two dozen more birds. Three months into his work, seventy-five birds had been whisked out of reach of the predators. By October of that year, the count had surpassed two hundred.
    B OWERS AND BALLROOMS
    Henry through his hunting and chasing grew to know the kakapo as no