Rat Island by William Stolzenburg Read Free Book Online Page B

action, that he had settled all his debts to the last shilling, and that his body would be unidentified, Henry crept shakily away like a wounded animal to die in a quiet corner apart. He stumbled across a bridge, somewhere, and scattered his last few shillings about, uselessly. Then he took out a six-chambered revolver and shot himself.
    Next morning at first daylight, a man admitted himself into the Auckland Hospital. Richard Henry, the ultimate handyman and hunter, had somehow botched the job of killing himself. The first shot had left Henry standing there blinking, the bullet lodged benignly in his skull. He reconnoitered, put the gun to his head, and tried again. The gun misfired. Henry this time took the hint: “The remnants of superstition made me think I had better put it off to see what would turn up.”
    A week later Henry received a telegraph from Melland, bringing news that he and his mates of the Otago lobby had finally pressured the government into putting a curator on Resolution Island. Two weeks after that, with ship fare wired by Melland and a resuscitated purpose in his heart, Henry was sailing south with hopes of a second life, as curator of Resolution Island, would-be savior of the kakapo.
    T O THE R ESCUE
    In the New Zealand winter of 1894, the steamship Hinemoa delivered Richard Henry to Dusky Sound. But for a transient community or two of gold miners and sawmillers, plus one eccentric old prospector, he was the sole human inhabitant of a water-bound wilderness spanning 150 square miles. He set up shop on a little island to the west of Resolution Island, called Pigeon Island.
    Amid the rocky shores of Pigeon Island, Henry found a sandy cove tucked between two sheltering harbors, which would be his port in the stormy seas of Dusky Sound. There he built a house, raised high upon pilings to thwart the periodic stormings of rats. He built a boat slip and a shed and planted a garden in soils mixed with the ancient ashes of the moa-hunting M ā ori. The forests of Pigeon Island chimed with the birdsong of tuis, kakas, and bellbirds. A cave just beyond the tide line harbored a rookery of crested penguins, where Henry would collect eggs for breakfast.
    With his favorite terrier, Foxy, and a young assistant, Andrew Burt, and once again comfortably at the helm of his sixteen-foot dinghy, Henry set out into Dusky Sound, beneath towering snowcapped mountains, through waters breaching with dolphins and whales, headed for the mainland in search of kiwis and kakapos.
    He found the wild folds of Fiordland still alive with them. He found the signs of the kakapos’ feeding, in the telltale husks and chewings of tussock. In the season of breeding, he felt the hillsides pulsating to the rhythm of their tympanic booming. On their first collecting trip, in May 1895, Henry’s little team sailed seventeen miles to the foot of Mount Forster. They returned ten days later (nine of which rained on them) with twenty-six kakapos and a kiwi, and stocked Resolution Island with the first hopes for their future. The rescue was under way.
    The rescuers settled into a strenuous routine. They would load Putangi to the gunwales with supplies for two-week stints of camping and kakapo catching, and out into the wild sound they would sail.
    Henry was careful to study his barometer, to wait out the threatening storm. But once underway, the winds funneling down the fjords of Dusky Sound came quickly and vehemently, forever sending Putangi fleeing for shelter in the closest cove. “The steep mountains along the sounds lead the wind, and their many peaks tangle it up so that … it is very awkward for a sailing vessel,” remarked the understated Henry. “A north-west gale will come down Breaksea Sound, meet the real nor’wester coming in from the sea …, and then both go whirling and snorting down together taking a strong current with them.”
    â€œWet and tempestuous” became the standard report in