Add This to the List of Things That You Are Page 7

  That was the best cure, and everybody knew about it.

  You know there was a time when the acclimatization society had the possum on its protected list. Hard to believe. Big celebration when they was released. Schoolchildren got the day off school for it. On the protected list one year and then a mortal menace the next. Same thing with the red deer. That was the acclimatization society for ye. Fledgling version of your DOC. Both about as native as yer common hedgehog and with the same cockadoodle theories.

  Rennie, he was a good, keen man. Ay, he was a character. A man of vigour, reality, laughter, and with a total disdain for the stupidity and constipation of government departments. He died five years ago. Rest his soul.

  We were whitebaiting in the West Country beyond them mountains. On the Hokitika upstream of the old quay. I had my stretch of bank and he had his stretch downstream aways. I came downriver to see how he made out, and he was nowhere to be found. Just disappeared off the bank. Me life’s friend.

  We found him later facedown in a pool like he was having a rest. He died with his boots on, which is how he would have wanted it. Maybe his knees just give out after all those years of tramping. Who can tell? Speedboaters were out that day making waves on the bank. Bloody hoons.

  Is the smoke affecting ye?

  I won’t hover about if the smoke affects ye.

  You still like the smell, hey?

  Well, yer some kind gentlemen. Bless ye.

  You know we went through sixteen pairs of boots in a season? By God. That’s how rugged the country was and just murder on yer feet. The DOC provideth the boots. That’s one thing I’ll give them.

  Yes, I know you’ve heard of the helicopter culling, but don’t ask me about it. We went to the bush on foot. No free rides for the Scottish lads, we said. We went so far back in the wop-wops no other human animal had walked there but a fellow culler. And a generation before us did the same. Was the cullers who made those tracks ye been walking on these past days. And cullers built the huts. You could say we was the Kiwi version of your American frontiersman, yer Daniel Boones and the lot. But we was two centuries later, of course.

  In the winter when the stags was off the roar and the sand flies had gone to bed, the DOC sent us out to build huts and do our shooting on the side. A culler could stay longer in the bush in a hut and wouldn’t have to carry his tent and such accoutrements. Now, there is nothing says a good hunter will be a competent builder, but Rennie and me built many a fine hut.

  One hut we built in the Ruahines in ’59 everybody knows about. It wasn’t the prettiest hut, but it might be the most famous. We were instructed to build a hut up at Mokai Patea. Well, there wasn’t a stag in the vicinity, and we still had a quota to fill even though the hut was priority number one. I was cutting timbers while Rennie was out stalking. There I was, feeling like the first pioneer of the land, and do you know what I found nestling amongst the kidney ferns? You’ll never guess, it was a tube of red lipstick! Who knows how it got there. By God. Laid by a rare bird maybe, or dropped from the planet Venus.

  Rennie come back empty-handed and said it would be a miracle if anyone shot a deer on this godforsaken mountain. I showed him the lipstick, and he said, By God that explains it! Well, we had a long laugh. We got our quota in the end. And we built our hut. We christened the place Miracle Hut, and scrawled the name in red lipstick over the door when we finished her.

  The name stuck, and you can read about it in yer lore and literature on the subject.

  I was interviewed by the BBC once after I hung up my rifle. For their documentary on the deer cullers. They called it Good, Keen Men after the book with the same title. I told them about the Miracle Hut and about how one time I killed four hinds with a single bullet. This was a Remington .222, mind. Yer triple deuce. A small caliber for a deer rifle. Not like the .303s the old-timers used. But it was light and accurate, and you could carry more ammunition. It was the favored rifle of the deer cullers of me day. Of course, it’s practically obsolete today.

  Beware the man who owns only the one rifle, we used to say. He probably knows how to use it.

  Rennie and me had pushed a herd up the Travers Valley toward the saddle. Pretty soon one herd amassed into three or four. Let’s just say there was a mess of deer moving up that valley. You can see Mount Hopeless there, capped in snow, and Mount Travers is just beyond it. Well, we just kept pushing them up the valley, and the whole lot stuck together, stags, hinds, and fawns. Normally a clever stag would split off and lead some animals to circle back behind ye. But these animals just kept going up and up. Pretty soon they hit the snow line. It was hopeless to get any higher, but they didn’t have the brains to turn back. They just pawed at the snow and fell over one another. Rennie and me was behind them watching, just amazed. We found a comfortable spot in the rocks so we could do it sitting down. I fired the first shot into the herd and four hinds come tumbling down the mountain. I couldn’t believe me eyes.

  Rennie and me culled two hundred deer in an hour. We’d set our rifles in the snow to cool them after every few clips. We shot every last one of them. We counted them later, cutting tails. Most of the animals were still alive, but we had no more ammunition. We got kicked to bits cutting tails. It was a deadly afternoon and tough as guts. While we were shooting it was like we went mad, just brimming with it. Couldn’t reload fast enough. But then after, we didn’t feel so beautiful. We just prayed for snow or an avalanche to cover them carcasses.

  It’s a grisly story, and I hate to tell it to ye.

  The BBC got it all down, but they just saved the wee bit about the four hinds with the single bullet. I was a good, keen man, if I was to understand it right. Most of the real old-time cullers were gone by then. I told them to go and interview Rennie if they wanted the genuine article. They tried to ring him up too, but Rennie didn’t want to hear about the BBC.

  I miss Rennie. He was a Hunter First Grade and then a Head Man. I never made Head Man meself, but it wouldn’t have cost the DOC much flint to lend me the title. A couple of years I led the seasonal tally for the whole South Island. And I always made me quota. After that I gave them two decades of desk work. Trained scores of lads to do what I learned on my own. You’d think you could pry the DOC loose of a little credit for a life’s work. But you’d be wrong. It would be nice. A thank you, sir, and we see you’re not completely without talent or native intelligence. Instead you get pushed out the door for a newer model who shoots his deer from a helicopter over a cup of tea.

  Don’t ask me about it.

  Excuse me while I enjoy a cigarette. Smoke keeps the bloody sand flies away at the very least. They’ve been known to drive a body stark raving insane. I’ve seen a woman screeching blue murder right there in the car park. Her bloke had gone off fishing or shooting in the woods and left her with the kids. A fine thing. They were being absolutely bloody destroyed by the sand flies.

  The bush robin again. Hear him? And that wee beggar’s a fantail. Another friendly sort of chap.

  Yes, I’ve heard about it. To listen to the DOC we have more birds now than ever in the last century, with the 1080 poison and the trapping for possums and stoats. Don’t ask me about the 1080 poison. Kills everything, not just the wasps and the possums and the stoats. It kills the birds too, and the deer. They drop it from helicopters just like they did your latter-day cullers.

  For the DOC, the deer is just a possum on stilts. The 1080 does beautiful things to a deer. Too beautiful to talk about.

  Ask anyone who’s lived here for a while, they’re not too keen on the DOC. That’s a certainty. The conservationist and the recreationist are warring breeds, it’s a known fact. They say the deer eviscerate the bush, but the moa, he had an appetite for bush plants too. You know the moa. Hunted to extinction by the Maori. Yer kiwi is a creature relative to the moa. Of course he’d be extinct if it weren’t for the 1080 poison. So sayeth the DOC.

  There’s a certain logic in it, but I’ll take a sportsman over a righteous protector of
the earth any day. Yer sportsman, he sees the value in all the creatures.

  No, that’s not a hawk. That’s a falcon. Falco Novae-see-lan-diae, if you want to be scientific about it. Now, he’s a native. Enemy to your friendly native songbirds, but protected. They say the New Zealand Falcon brooks no rival in his own domain. Will chase the Harris hawk out of his sky, hunt the shepherd’s collies back to his master’s heels and attack even the master himself.

  The Harris hawk, now, is imported, though that don’t make it a less noble creature. You can shoot him out of the sky if you have a notion and a decent eye. Don’t ask me about it.

  Bloody rollie is a poor replacement for a pipe. By God. And extinction is a fine conversation topic for a holiday. Forgive me, gentlemen. I’m an endangered breed meself. Last culler stalked a deer in 1987. We’ll be an artifact before you know it. By God. Hung up for show like the triple deuce. Maybe the DOC will put us on their list. Read about it in the histories and the literature.

  But let’s change the subject, shall we? I see you’re itching to go. Or is that the bleeding sand flies got you on your toes.

  The shuttle will be along soon, lads. You’ll see a van will have Shuttle painted on the side. You can go up to the backpackers for a wee coffee. If the driver don’t find you here, he’ll know where to look for ye.

  Oh, I’d take your bags along with ye. Nice rucksack like that, some bloke might come along and decide he’d like to have it for his own. That’s a myth what they say about New Zealand is a safe and friendly place. Of course, it used to be so.

  I’ll just walk along to the backpackers with ye, show you where to find it. Not that you’ll need help to find it, but I’ve got no hurry. The wife’s at the flower show in Christchurch with me youngest lad. International event. It’s not my cup of tea, but she enjoys it. She’s always off someplace.

  I’ll just travel along with ye. Seems I was going that way anyway.

  Three Ps

  All American photogs have flown home and I am left alone. Stresa, pearl of Lago Maggiore, opens to me wide and crude. I want to see it through my little hole again. But my Leica is gone. The conference was another constriction. And now that is over. Time and space again seem to me unbounded.

  The Trattoria Inferno, where I left my camera last night, opens at 11 a.m. Until eleven, I window-shop. I look in the fine shops for fine things to buy for Liz and old Hugh. But what to buy among all that? Silks and porcelain? I’m afraid to go into the shops. I just look in the windows until I catch the paranoid eye of the store clerk, readying his inquisition.

  May I help you? These scarves are handmade. The finest Como silk. What price range were you considering? For whom are you buying? Sir, if I may. What’s her color?

  The scenario makes my blood pressure rise. How do I explain I have no sense of taste, a man like me? I don’t know colors, fabrics, materials, styles. The words themselves make me itch. There is a purple silk scarf with a pattern of yellow butterflies and elaborate marble columns. It is pretty, I think. But is it pretty? I cannot discern. Would Liz wear it? Would Hugh?

  What do I have to complain about, alone in Italy in the sun. I’ll go and buy some pasta. A gift of food. I can pick colorful pasta or plain pasta. I can buy a jar of red sauce or white sauce. The choices are finite. If I don’t want to choose, I can buy some of each color, a pasta mélange.

  I make my way toward the Trattoria Inferno. I walk slowly, so not to arrive early. The streets here are nice—cool and cobbled, freshly washed. The terraces spill geraniums and foliage down toward the street and all the shutters are open. Laundry hangs out like decoration, smelling fresh. All streets lead to the lake, where the fine old hotels repose over the clear water. I walk by them, up the cobbled streets, then down.

  If I find my camera, I will embark for Switzerland. I have never been to Switzerland—have only seen it from a distance. Surely I will find something in Switzerland to photograph. One travels, after all, to come home and flaunt it. One makes pictures to recover the daily loss of beauty, halt life’s minute-by-minute decay. All photographs are elegies.

  And so on, and so forth. Conference theoretics still linger. Am I an eye or a finger? I long for all things practical. To do, to see, not to say . . . But I need my Leica. Yesterday I had it with me, out in the countryside taking pictures: valley fog low in the grasses. The camera is gone for sure, and there goes Switzerland too. I won’t go unless I can shoot it.

  At eleven the doors of the trattoria open and I walk in. There isn’t much suspense. The young waiter recognizes me immediately. His eyes dilate and he practically dives behind the bar and comes up holding my camera. I am relieved to see the old thing, having begun to say good-bye to it in my mind. Now I feel somewhat guilty. Were I to find a camera at a bar without the owner I would keep the camera. Well, maybe not now. I accept the camera, and utter an embarrassed grazie. Then, Mille grazie, mille grazie. I bow and back away. Prego, he says, a caricature of himself for me.

  The young waiter is handsome. I hadn’t noticed last night, though I recognize him as the same waiter. It’s amazing the things that are lost on one sometimes, especially if you try to be one on whom nothing is lost. If that’s your job. I walk out holding my camera, embarrassed, still partially resigned to its being lost. I’m lucky to have it still. I look back and the waiter is standing in the opening of the doorway, framed by a canvas awning. I wave to him, and he waves back, smiling. I shoot a picture of him, just for the hell of it. He doesn’t stop smiling.

  Thoughtless! I should have given him a tip. But now it’s too late. I can’t walk back and take money out of my wallet and thrust it toward him. He would be too embarrassed to take the money, though he would want it. The waiters here are professionals. They don’t assault you with their sob stories of how they’re saving for law school in order to get more of a tip from you. I haven’t the expected sympathy for American waiters with their constant clawing-to-get-somewhere American-ness. You work in a profession for its own sake, not as a way to get somewhere else. No, my waiter wouldn’t expect to be compensated. He would like to be, though, surely. That wanting but not expecting made me want to do it for him. The camera is worth probably four hundred dollars, yet it would cost me several times that to replace it. Perhaps I could not replace it.

  I resolve then to go back for a late lunch, have a large lunch, and leave a very large tip. That will express my gratitude and reward my waiter appropriately.

  In the two hours before lunch I buy the pasta, a bottle of the honey grappa—gifts enough—then make my reservations for that evening’s ferry. Switzerland is salvageable after all. A five-hour round-trip, it will kill this last night. I can have dinner on board the ferry. I go to the lake and dip my feet. It is a hot day. The lake is still but for the waves from the ferry boats lapping at my feet, barely cool. Several large carp school near shore. They’ve come up from the depths, sucking the surface of the water for algae or air. I shoot the carp, where the water laps at their backs.

  Liz left two days ago, when the conference ended. I stayed on with no special plans but to use up my vacation and try to see some things. Liz was the whole reason I came to Italy to begin with. She’s art editor at Cabin Life, the magazine where we work. She wrote a grant to come to this conference, the American Photographers’ Association. She belongs. I told her I didn’t want to go, but she said it wasn’t a question of wanting. Liz had been speaking with the managing editor. It seems that my photographs hadn’t inspired much enthusiasm in the ten months I had been there, and my probation was nearly up. My work was stagnant. Liz wanted it frizzante, like the water, she said. This conference was a way to catch up with what was new in my profession. Liz was always trying to sniff the zeitgeist. I told her I had no interest in fashion.

  But in truth this was my third magazine in five years. I was running out of magazines. Also, a deductible trip to Europe. I could gain some cultural currency.

  The conference had been a wash, more or less. So many black suits an
d so much theoretical cant. The conference theme was aptly opaque. The Three Ps of Photography, whatever they were. The point seemed less to penetrate to the core of the medium than to make it seem impenetrable through convolution. I hadn’t learned anything. I hadn’t met but one interesting person, and sharing a hotel room with Liz for seven days had probably done more damage to my position at the magazine than my loggy photography. By the time she left I could hardly breathe.

  Either you travel alone and are lonely or you travel with someone and fight, those the words of Hugh Feller, the one genuine character in the whole morass. Liz liked Hugh as well. You wait your whole life to describe someone with the word lugubrious, and then you meet Hugh Feller, those the words of Liz. Hugh’s wife divorced him. He was traveling alone. I’m not sure if there was anything divorceable about Hugh. Probably there wasn’t anything particularly marriageable, either, but what divorceable? He was big and gentle with big soft hands and he carried a fine Italian leather purse when we met him, on the last afternoon of the conference, aboard the funicular to the Mottarone, high above Stresa. Hugh’s purse wasn’t a European unisex handbag; it was a woman’s purse.

  Hugh still wore his conference name tag, so we knew he was one of us. He was reserved at first. He evidently did his work and didn’t need to palaver, fine by me. Liz was good at meeting people and she asked him directly about the purse, a comment that made me blush.

  My pockets were full, and my hands, Hugh said, holding them up. I realized I couldn’t carry any more. I looked up and saw a window full of these.

  As the funicular went up you could see things. The two islands off Stresa, an entire unforeseen arm of the lake. I introduced myself to Hugh, then asked how one went about buying a purse.

  I just picked one out of the window and put it on the counter, he said.

  I asked, But how did you choose?