Rat Island by William Stolzenburg Page B

night.”
    By November 1898, Henry had ferried 572 ground birds, most of them kakapos, to supposed safety. He had overcome the mountains of impenetrable brush, the “roaring fury” of the seas, the rats in his hair, the swarming sand flies, the fickle demands of his captive kakapos. Yet he had underestimated the tenacity of his enemy. In an interview with the Otago Daily Times , Henry had once bragged of the inviolate sanctuary of Resolution Island. “When the ferrets come along they will have miles to swim, and they will have, moreover, to battle with fish, gulls, and the tide, and the latter alone is sufficient to disturb the calculations of even good swimmers. On the islands the birds may survive for half a century, and by that time people in every corner of the world will realise their interest and value, and then there will be no fear of their becoming extinct.” Such was Henry’s confidence when in February 1900 it was summarily crushed with a single blow.
    It was then that the fifty-two-ton schooner the Cavalier , bearing fifteen tourists, sailed into Dusky Sound. The Cavalier met Henry’s cutter on the open water and hailed the now-famous naturalist of Resolution Island. Henry shelved his schedule, took a few of the passengers aboard the Putangi , and escorted the Cavalier on a tour of the sound. He pointed out the mooring place of Captain Cook on Astronomer’s Point, pointed them to hiking routes in the mountains.
    Before setting sail for home, several of the Cavalier ’s passengers shared with Henry what to them had seemed a trivial observation. On the morning after mooring at Resolution Island, they had witnessed an interesting little episode, of a weka running along the beach. And bounding fast on its tail was a weasel.
    Henry waited for the punch line to what he could only hope was a joke. But the story ended there. The Cavalier departed, leaving Henry alone with his living nightmare.
    Henry tried to rationalize. There were still many wekas to be found on Resolution Island, a fact that in his experience should preclude the presence of weasels. But there would be no rest until the demon of Resolution Island, specter or reality, was vanquished. The next day, Henry set about making traps. He baited them with fish; he baited them with wekas. The traps lay empty. He mined the bush with the bodies of wekas laced with strychnine. No weasel tracks came near.
    Henry held desperately to his hope that the tourists’ tale had been hatched as a cruel hoax. “It is a vexatious story & has given me a lot of work,” he complained to his supervisor J. P. Maitland. “Why it was started I can’t imagine. It spoiled my plans here and upset everything.” And after five months of chasing the phantom predator, he was about ready to consider the case closed.
    Following a long and dreary July, waiting out an interminable siege of wind and rain, Henry ventured out with the first window of sunshine to check again on Resolution Island. And there he saw, on August 4, in the entrance of Goose Cove lagoon, scrambling upon the rocky shore, the lithe and tubular figure of a little carnivore, hunting in the herky-jerky style of a mustelid. Henry closed to within ten yards of what was now obviously the animal he had most feared, before the weasel caught his scent and disappeared.
    For months afterward, Henry struggled with the desperation of a death row inmate. He set traps with dead bait and live, and found weasel tracks as close as ten yards away, but could never touch the creature of his nightmares. There was no escaping the inevitable. Where there was one weasel, there was bound to be more. The channel separating Resolution from mainland had been proven too narrow, the impenetrable fortress was no longer. The predators would keep coming.
    Henry started putting birds ashore on other islands; he ventured north through Acheron Passage, to Entry Island of Breaksea Sound, with more birds.