A climber in New Zealand

by Malcolm Ross

On the following day the weather was again fine, so I started for the hut on the Tasman Glacier, distant some fourteen miles from the Hermitage. Next day Dr. Cox and I carried swags of provisions and Alpine appliances some eight miles farther up the glacier to our old bivouac at the foot of Mount de la Bêche. Cox returned to the hut the same day, and I waited at the Bivouac, intending on the morrow to gather some Alpine scrub for firewood from the sunny slopes of the Malte Brun Range across the valley. In crossing the glacier next day I found the ice very much crevassed, and, not taking a good route, had to resort to step-cutting in more than one place before gaining the other side. Firewood was very scarce, but I got a small bundle—enough to boil the billy two or three times—and returned to the Bivouac, thence making my way down the glacier to the Ball Hut. Here I found Dr. Cox enjoying a well-deserved rest after the unwonted exercise of swagging.

An abrupt change from the surgery or the office stool to the swag enables the victim to make quite a number of new discoveries in the science of anatomy. The amateur porter may begin gaily in the morning with a full stomach and a light heart. In the cool, bracing air that succeeds the chilly dawn his fifty or sixty-pounds burden may seem almost as light as his own heart. But a couple of hours’ experience of a New Zealand moraine, with a mile or so of hummocky ice thrown in, will convince him that neither his pack, nor the important part of his anatomy already mentioned, is quite the feather-weight of his early morning imagination. And, while he has become aware that he is the possessor of an organ that can pump at quite an alarming rate, he is prepared to take oath that his pack is rapidly increasing in weight at the rate of from three to five pounds per mile according to the instability or the steepness of the moraine over which it is his ill-fortune to be scrambling. But of these two steepness is the more wearing, because instability gives only a momentary shock, and there is (generally) recompense in the exhilaration of a quick, though not always graceful, recovery; whereas steepness—or, worse still, the combination of steepness and instability—looms before you like a long nightmare, and depresses, even after it is conquered. By noon the straps are cutting into one’s aching shoulders, and it seems only a matter of time until the friction caused by the juxtaposition of swag and vertebræ has done irreparable damage to certain garments that need not be mentioned, and all this time the amateur porter has been performing acrobatic feats on slippery ice, and the measure that he has been treading over the unstable, live moraine has been remarkable, not so much for the dignity of its movement as for the language that has accompanied it. Finally, when hungry, athirst, and a-weary, he crawls up to his cold and lonely bivouac at the close of a grilling, sweltering day, he will tell you, with much forcible detail, that his pack weighs over a hundred pounds, and that swagging is the most matured and well considered invention of the Devil and all his angels.

Next morning as he rises, cold and stiff in every joint and limb, from the road-metal mattress upon which he has been trying to keep warm and snatch some well-earned repose, his outlook may be philosophic, though it will certainly not be optimistic. But breakfast, and the bracing mountain air, which is like a vintage wine, and a glorious summer sun, and further exercise will gradually dispel the miasma of initial trouble, while a week of this kind of work, with a minor peak or pass thrown in, will send him forth as a giant refreshed, ready to oppose all the ills that flesh is heir to, and eager to conquer the long icy slopes and grim precipices that guard the way to the virgin summits of his native land. Before long even his unquenchable thirst will have vanished, and, with forty or fifty pounds’ weight on his back, he will be able to hop from a moving rock on the live moraine to more solid footing without barking his shins in the endeavour, or to bound like a kangaroo across the rounded hummocks of the great glacier. “Ach!” said a distressed German scientist to me, on one occasion when I was setting the pace down the Great Tasman Glacier in a bitter rain-storm, “you are like a glacier flea—you take such joomps!” He had, himself, fallen twice on the hard, slippery ice hummocks, and his hand was freely bleeding from a cut, but he spoke more in sorrow than in anger, and at the end of the march he produced a couple of bottles of ale—one for himself and one for me—and then the two rival nations fraternized beneath the Southern Cross; and, under the soothing influence of the beverage, discussed the question of compulsory arbitration in labour disputes, and other abstruse economic problems so dear to the German mind.

On arrival at the hut I found that Fyfe and Mrs. Ross had walked the fourteen miles from the Hermitage, and, in the evening, Hodgkins surprised us by strolling into the hut after dark, he having left the coach near the Hooker Cage and tramped up the track the same evening. We were now ready to try the ascent of one of the higher peaks, but the barometer had fallen, and there were indications of a storm, which duly came to hand, so we stayed in the hut, amusing ourselves with a variety of games, cooking on the fire-can outside, and studying the habits of Mr. Nestor Notabilis, famed throughout New Zealand, and the world, as the most cruel of all sheep-killers.

This bird—a mountain parrot of beautiful plumage, and quaint and curious ways—is probably the most interesting of all the feathered reivers left on the ramparts of civilization. His home is amongst the hills and valleys of the Southern Alps. In most districts he is an outlaw, with a price on his head. At Mount Cook he is protected, because here there are few sheep to kill, and a few tourists to be pleased. Originally he must have waxed fat—or grown lean—on a diet largely vegetarian—with perhaps an odd worm or a grub or two thrown in, by way of variety—and the question of how he came to acquire carnivorous habits has been much discussed. Before the advent of the white man there were no four-footed animals in New Zealand, except, perhaps, a native rat, and it is doubtful if the kea touched him. My own idea is that it was his inordinate inquisitiveness that led to the change, and that the change was brought about in quite an accidental manner, just as that glorious and more famous discovery of roast sucking-pig was made! Thus when the early settlers, in the mountains, killed a sheep, they spread the skin, woolly side down, on the stock-yard fence. The kea, ever curious, swooped down upon it, and began to tear it to pieces with his strong, sharp beak. “Hallo!” he said to himself, “this is a great sport,” and then, after a few pecks, he stopped and began to think, for there was a new taste in his mouth—and the taste was good! It was the taste of mutton fat. And, from that day to this, the kea has never forgotten it. Then, one cold, hard winter, when all the berries were done, and he was idly pecking at another skin upon the stock-yard fence, there was set up in his brain a train of reasoning, till it suddenly dawned upon him that the sheepskin must have something to do with the sheep. And, next day, being hard put to it for a dinner, he flew down into the valley, and, there being no sheepskins about, he went back to the mountain-side and settled upon a live sheep. There he got his dinner! And, that same evening, the other keas, seeing him satisfied and replete, while they were cold and hungry, asked him where he had got such a good dinner, and he being in a good mood after such a dinner—for keas are very much like men in this matter—told them, and next day, and for many days afterwards, they all dined well. But the poor sheep could not understand why these hitherto innocent and friendly birds had suddenly become possessed of devils, and the owner of the sheep could not understand why so many of his sheep were dead on the hillside. But one day the owner of the sheep, through his spy-glass, saw a kea alight on the back of a sheep, and begin to dig, with his cruel beak, into the loin, so that he might get some nice warm kidney-fat for his dinner. And the silly sheep, not knowing how to ward off the attack, simply ran and ran till it fell down exhausted, and then, while the kea finished his dinner, the poor sheep died in great agony. But the next day the owner of the sheep got his gun, and all the shepherds got their guns, and there was woe and lamentation in many a kea family before the shadows of evening came down. From that day onward a price was upon the head of the kea, till now more keas are killed by man than there are sheep killed by keas; for the kea cannot get the taste of mutton fat out of his mouth, any more than an aboriginal—or for the matter of that his civilized brother—can forget the taste of roast sucking-pig.

Yet in spite of all this—which is quite a true story—my sympathies are with the kea; for, after all, this was the kea’s country, and the man should not have brought his silly sheep into it. And, when I see the flashing scarlet of his under wings against the blue of an Alpine sky, or note the metallic green and blue of his overdress contrasted against some snowy slope or dome, a feeling of deep regret about his ultimate destruction comes over me.

My wife, who, during my absences from camp and bivouac on the higher climbs, has had frequent opportunities of studying his character, does him more justice than any other writer I know of. He reminds her of “one of those Highland chieftains whose greatest glory was their being ‘put to the horn.’ With what impudence the kea struts, dances, or flutters past your very feet! How he poses himself on a near rock, and lets you come up boldly and miss him, and how condescendingly he waits for another shot, encouraging you with a cheeky ‘Kea!’ ‘Kea!’ I have seen a man unversed in the ways of the kea, steal along, holding his missile carefully behind him; but there is no need for concealment. You can go boldly up and have your shot—nothing to pay either, and probably no result, for even if you stun him he recovers quickly, and is off to his heights unless you are very smart indeed.

“I have had a dozen round me while I have been baking, interchanging confidential and probably contemptuous remarks on my method and results. They hardly troubled to get out of my way as I passed from hut to fire. I am not a good shot, and I feel sure they knew it. Any tins or rags thrown out are carefully inspected by them, generally in committee, and I have even seen them burn themselves picking coals out of the fire.

Cooking Scones.