Emma Ravens
dancing on her mountain
My friends, the kea, survey their alpine kingdom, chasing the echoed calls of their kin from beech valley to tussocked ridge, in my one shallow breath. For a child with no wings, this hill is a big one. Our parents pull us up it with bribery and hands to hold. I do not yet know the meditation of walking. I tell stories in my head.
The kea, Nestor notabilis, is our endangered mountain parrot native to the glaciers and moraines of New Zealand’s South Island. They are too clever for their own good, and find mischief in their dealings with humans. When Pākehā arrived to tame the high-country foothills of the Southern Alps, a plague of kea descended from the skies exploring destructively with their hooked black beaks. When swathes of their habitat were cleared for farming they turned to the paddocks, attacking and killing whole flocks of sheep. Thirty thousand kea were killed by settlers in eight years. There are less than five thousand left.
We clamber up above the hut, racing to emerge from a low tunnel of knotted roots, and the sinewy branches of the few stunted trees that have survived up here. When we pop out onto the ridge, the ardour of heavy boots on small feet is eased by the familiar expanse: snowgrass, karst and a sea of cloud. A hill-top temple for the atua.
On flat slabs of warm marble we sit and eat, accompanied by mad cackling of the kaitiaki that wheel above us. I envy them their brilliant orange armpits. When they land and hop closer, head tilted teasingly, this is a secret concealed by plumage of hued greens – revealed again, from beneath, when in a sudden change of heart, they fly away laughing. As the keepers of Kahurangi sky, my friends spend their lives drawn by curious impulse, and heart-changes.
The afternoon casts long shadows on the eastern face of the ridgeline, and to the west illuminates the floor of the Ellis Basin, hollowed with tomo. Hidden somewhere in the rocky shadows, the kea compete to build the prettiest nest of op-shop-borrowed shiny things. A shambles museum of prize distractions; an aluminium fork, screws stolen from the hut-builders, the ripest snowberry, and boot-laces from the seventies, with curly tussock and velvety astelia leaves to insulate. In the winter months, while blizzards rage outside, their chicks open their eyes in the warmth of patched-together mountain punk.
Mount Arthur’s alpine herbfields were home to an isolated population of native speargrass weevil Lyperobius clarkei, who relied on the particular endemic speargrass species Aciphylla ferox, or ‘fierce’ speargrass, for habitat and protection (its cousin, Aciphylla horrida, was traditionally used by Ngāi Tahu to make valuable perfumed oil). A few summers ago we struggled through dense spaniards till blood ran down our shins, and found mating pairs on flowering plants. Every year since, the speargrass has been sparser; the weevils are gone, but for some years I will continue to inspect remaining plants for sign. In the nineties, my mother wrote her ecology thesis on the extinction of weevil populations on the south coast of Wellington, linked with the loss of habitat plants. This is my first experience of the world around me dying. I ponder my friends’ distant disappearance from the mountaintops of Te Waipounamu; a far-away grave for the teeming flora and fauna of Wharepapa that surrounds me.
Closer to the slated summit, red-legged crickets leap away, disturbed by the tracks our feet make through the rooms of their gravel home. I wonder who first dreamed up this resplendent orange; the secret fashion up here. All the old tin huts in the Aotearoa backcountry are painted with NZFS-regulated ‘mandarin’, a bright refuge for weary trampers. They reveal themselves loudly to the dear few who walk these parts.
For a year, I live in my orange tutu and gumboots. I feel beautiful in constant motion, twirling colourfully from the playcentre collage table – to the sandpit – to the dress-up box (full of ill-fitting domed dresses, garish plastic beads and wings with the shimmery polyester torn off). I want wings with orange underneath; to soar and seek, flaunting my own ever-changing mind. Constantly inconstant, the sea is pulled by the turning of the moon – maramataka.
At home, in the bedroom I share with my little brother, a map of underground Mount Arthur stretches the length of the wall. These caves lie beneath us now, tangling for miles, from the summit down to the Pearse resurgence. The Ellis basin and Nettlebed systems are the deepest in the country and were my earliest fairytales. The maps, drawn by my father, are labelled with fantastical names; the ‘Hinkle Horn Honking Holes’ close to the Pearse entrance, the cozy cave-mud camp called ‘the Chocolate Room’, and the squeeze named ‘Gates of Troy’ (whose heroic namesake comes for dinner every so often). Photos of formations in ‘The Phallic Room’ are our hilarity. One day, I’ll know these mythical halls for myself.
The ancient ‘marble heart’ of Wharepapa is carved by eons of underground rivers eroding and calcifying, and will remain; growing, almost alive, after everything on the surface is washed away.
Ko Te Ao Wharepapa te maunga e rū nei taku ngākau.
Emma Ravens is a Pākehā writer and cellist from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They are about to finish their studies in English, music and German at Victoria University, and look forward to a long summer of tramping in the South Island.