A-Hunting We Will Go

March 18, 2008 09:23

Lunatic hokum inflated by the souvenirs and gifts trade, or legitimate interrogation of a scientific community in denial? Would anybody know of the sleepy town of Loch Ness were it not for the mysterious beast many say lurk ‘neath its calm surface? Had people not been looking for it, would we have lost the New Zealand native takahe out of denial of its continued existence? Another blurry photograph, a fuzzy footprint, and sceptics and believers line up predictably for more of the same. New Zealand has its own history of ‘hidden animals’ and explorers on their tails. Aaron Hawkins polishes off the magnifying glass, throws away the concept of extinction and goes in for a closer look.

One Man And His Pigeon

One of the great setbacks for cryptozoologists in New Zealand is the seeming lack of any real national body or support network for the various field projects being planned or executed at any given time. After all, who would want to split the remuneration of that Sunday News exclusive? These are lone wolves. Shunned by science and, often, society, they set out on their own to prove the impossible. Their lack of collectivism leaves them not only without committees and weak cups of tea, it also denies them the opportunity to cherish and worship the shining beacon of budding cryptozoologists the length and breadth of the country: Dr Geoffrey Orbell.

In the entirety of the 19th Century, only four sightings had been made of the takahe, the more reclusive and chubby cousin of the graceful pukeko. By some scientific formula of the time, zoologists had agreed by 1930 (without really doing too much in the way of looking for them) that the takahe was extinct. Orbell had different ideas, and persisted with searches in the Murchison Mountains. Lo and behold, on Novermber 20, 1948, a nation still beaming with smug post-war pride was greeted with news that Orbell had found his takahe; 250 of them still existed, and conservation of the species began in earnest. Had Orbell not believed the takahe were simply in hiding, they could well be extinct by now. If you can find one extinct bird, who’s to say there aren’t dozens more?

The Great Aussie Battler

Some might call Rex Gilroy the cryptozoological answer to Steve Irwin. He has an all-consuming passion for the task at hand, reminds you a bit of your jittery uncle, and is equally as likely to get killed in the field. Irwin swam with deadly creatures; Gilroy goes hunting in the Ureweras. The Australian explorer has been uncovering Australia’s mysterious archaeological past since the 1959, during which time he has documented over 3000 reports relating to the yowie (a particular ‘hairy humanoid’ mapped back to – and dismissed as – Aboriginal folklore), along with Australian pyramid networks, Tasmanian Tigers and Moas.

In early January of this year, Gilroy said he was within photo-op distance of the little scrub moa, one of the many extinct garden vegetable varieties of moa who once roamed freely on the mighty contours of Aotearoa. He and his wife, Heather, claim to have found hard evidence (tracks) in the Urewera ranges in November last year. Evidence, he says, that points to the existence of the Anomalopteryx didiformis, better known as the little scrub moa. Aside from tracks, the latest find includes a recently-used nest in a dead kauri tree. In a recent interview with the Hawkes Bay Times, Gilroy refused to reveal the exact location, but has confirmed that “the location is in pretty remote country. [We] need to have more time to investigate, and if I can get something on film, that would be tremendous.”

Due to the vast similarities of moa and their luckier Australian neighbours the emu, this seems to be the most convenient sceptic bandwagon to jump on, but despite the torrent of negative reaction from scientists and the news media, there’s no stopping Gilroy. “You’ve got to be a bit eccentric in this business,” he says. “If people think you’re a little bit crazy, they leave you alone so you can do your work.” So the mad old bastard ploy is actually just a ruse. Might be time to start paying attention to that crazy old taxi driver.

Moa may have been hunted to extinction within a century of human arrival to New Zealand. By the time you read this, the Gilroys would have been back in the country, not making such a media fuss this time, quietly going about rewriting their vague history. One prominent archaeologist, speaking to Critic anonymously for fear of aggravating the staid hierarchy of the scientific community and upsetting his firm hold from within the academy, is on Gilroy’s side.

“It’s quite boring and predictable, actually, the reaction within the academic community to people like Rex Gilroy: that he’s only a pseudoscientist, the prints are from an emu, the photo’s far too blurry, all that stuff. The media play along, and cast him as the crazy old uncle. But he took me up to the spot in the Ureweras. And I was blown away, to be honest. This could be it.” Why does the scientific community appear to be so resistant to these new discoveries? “A range of reasons, from purely selfish ones, certain researchers may have put out books on extinct birds or something like that, but as far as I can see, it’s mostly snobbery. They call people like Gilroy a joke, but that’s what they said about Orbell, and let’s not forget that Galileo and Newton were also considered pseudoscientists for the most part.”

But it ain’t just birds. Not by a long shot.

The hunt for the hidden animals can be roughly lumped into three groups: looking for animals that have been documented as having existed (takahe, moa, kokaho), creatures that are more deeply rooted in folklore (the maero, or New Zealand Wildman) and those that are just strangely anomalous to the environments in which they are found (Fiordland moose, Canterbury panther – no relation, of course, to the more violent variety that once prowled the suburbs of Auckland). Anyone who made the trek into the depths of Deep Cove will be aware of the resonance of the moose legend, if not with some cobbled together ghost story or crappy ball point pen emblazoned with an artists impression of one of the moose purported to be roaming Fiordland.

For the better part of the past three decades, the hunt has been on for the survivors of a moose population liberated in Fiordland in the early 1900s. Ken Tustin, a spritely 62-year-old adventurer, has spent around 600 nights in the bush trying to prove his point. Generally, cryptozoologists are aware of their wafer-thin chances, and just accumulate and analyse sightings from passers-by. Not Ken. His life’s work thus far amounts to some stray hairs he found, which he sent off for DNA testing. The tests revealed that he was almost certainly right in assuming they were from a wild moose. “I read articles saying I’m obsessed but … I think it tells kids, hey, in 2008 there are some great adventures still to be had. There are unsolved things and wonderful mysteries out there.”

Misplacing a small moa or a takahe in some long grass is one thing, but how in 600 nights can you not find more than a few shreds of evidence of something as conspicuous as a moose? Wellington-based online journalist Mr Misanthrope suggests darker forces at play.

“As soon as you start throwing around words like ‘conspiracy’ people automatically switch off and drawing a tin foil hat on your head and things like that. But I seriously believe that there has been a concerted effort on behalf of the science and media communities to try and diffuse any situation.” Down the phone line you can almost hear his eyes darting around the room. You get the feeling he’s getting used to this, and immediately moves to correct you.

“What I’m saying is there are extremes at both ends, but society, and in particular the way these debates are framed by our news media, look more favourably on one extreme than on the other. Look at it this way. You have crazed conspirators at both ends of the spectrum. Is a hermit who thinks he’s being traced by the government any crazier than those within intelligence circles that actually do want to trace him? The neo-fascists have outlets like the Sunday Star-Times and the Herald. If someone thinks they’ve found the last moa or the maero, nobody is going to go out of their way to publish that story, and if they do, it’ll get tacked on after the weather as the light relief human interest story. At best.”

The man, the myth, the legend

Alan Bird, or ‘Dicky’ as he introduces himself, is a shabby and unkempt man, who lives in a little cottage tucked out of view up on City Rise. On advice from a patron at the Clarendon Hotel, I decided to head up and see him. “Don’t phone him,” the gap-toothed man at the bar told me, “he thinks we’re all trying to get him locked up.” I asked the patron if Dicky would he be interested in talking. My new friend opened wide and wheezed the biggest laugh his pack-a-day lungs could muster. “Shit, you’d be lucky if you could get him to shut up.” The door is open at Dicky’s, but I knock loudly and he shuffles to the door. He is unshaven, unkempt and, save a robe that could probably do with being a little bigger for his frame, undressed. After a fairly tense introduction he brings me inside. Tip-toeing over piles of newspapers and empty beer crates he leads me into his dimly lit room, which smelled a little like a blend of forgotten cat and laundry in the washer some three days after the cycle is done. “What you comin’ round here harassing old buggers like me for?” he asks, jamming together a few scraps of tobacco to roll a cigarette with.

Acording to The Cryptid Zoo website, the maero “are described by the Maori as looking much like themselves, except that they were bigger, with shaggy hair growing all over their bodies. The maero were exceptionally strong, even for their size. They did not wear clothes and had few of the trappings of even primitive civilisations, although it is thought that they had fashioned crude weapons out of stone clubs.” They could kill and maim mere mortals with long, hard, razor-sharp fingernails. Legend has it, when Maori settlers came to New Zealand, the maero (known also as the mohoao) took to the bushes and hid. Don’t be fooled by their arboreal habitat, though. They had none of the taboos that surround cannibalism in contemporary society, and made no effort disposing of their hapless victims. Eventually, though, after almost constant war with this land’s new inhabitants, the brute strength of the maero was outfoxed by the Maori, and they retreated further into the mists of the native bush, never seen again, and presumed extinct.

Dicky pulls out a yellowing scrapbook and sets it gingerly on a lop-sided coffee table in front of me. Like a deranged holiday monologue, he guides me through this illustrated history of quite bizarre interaction. In contrast to the chaos of the house, the cataloguing is immaculate. There are pencil sketches, those from memory separated from those from photograph, various expedition notes, inventories, right through to elaborate Goldberg-like mousetraps designed to bag him a maero and bring it in for questioning, so to speak.

“This is the first book. This one goes back to the very beginning. I was working over on the West Arm, and when I popped out one evening for a cigarette I saw this figure coming down out of the bush and the fog. I was a bit pissed by this stage, so I started calling out to him ‘present yourself’ I said, but he just kept lurching towards me, oblivious. Then I saw him. He was the biggest, hairiest, savage beast I had ever seen, and what stood out most were these claws on his hands. They glowed in the moonlight.” Dicky pauses, and in the brief silence, I can hear him swallowing hard. “Then he gave out a scream that would wake the dead. I could feel my blood boiling … I screamed, he took off and I ran back inside. That was the beginning of the end.”

Dicky didn’t know much about the Fiordland moose, when I asked him, but he says it is entirely possible that the bellowing maero could be the source of all the moose controversy. “People are still going to be more comfortable talking about a moose than a monster. People will deny anything to make themselves more comfortable.”

Making myself more comfortable had become something of a priority of mine, and I had inadvertently begun shuffling a little in my chair. As I stood up to make my polite excuses and leave, I found that Dicky the Wildman Hunter wasn’t quite done with me yet.

“Sit down. I’ve got one more thing.”

What followed was one of the most deeply troubling things I have seen. I don’t consider myself to be particularly sensitive, and I am something of a skeptic underneath it all. The moa could be any bird from afar, the maero any slovenly prop forward finding too many wild mushrooms. This, though, I had no answer for.

On tape, dubbed from raw 8mm film stock, was a shaky beach side scene that could have been any Great Kiwi Holiday in the late 1970s. The camera is a little shaky, and wind noise makes the natural soundtrack practically inaudible. This goes on for some time, occasionally with a small child running into shot, then being escorted away hurriedly by anxious parents. No birdlife is to be seen or heard.

Then it breaches. Standing at least ten feet tall, fully erect, was an amphibious creature, you would assume, except it was bipedal. Human legs, broad flippers for arms, and covered top to bottom in scales. The face looked much like a fish, with its protruding mouth, but as it came out of the water, its scaly skin started dropping off, not in flakes, but in indiscriminate chunks, as if it was rotting at super speed and plopping off into the water around it. As it approaches the sure, a gang of at least a dozen men burst in and start hacking at it with knives, and the scream is extra-terrestrial; shrill gurgling, getting louder and louder, drowning out the audible thwack of the knives driving into its flesh, and the grunts of the angry mob, until it collapses onto the ground. Labcoats arrive, and just as they’re about to continue, one turns and stares down the barrel of the camera. They take off in the camera’s direction, it falls to ground, and the picture cuts to static.

“I call him the homoaguasaur. They’d been tracking him for weeks, but that’s all the footage I got. I had a reel of dummy film ready, so I could leave them something. That way I could get away more easily.”

The conversation, as far as I am concerned, is over. Wordlessly, breathlessly, I gather my notes and head out the door.

“Don’t bother about looking it up, either. You don’t want them tracking you down. They’re merciless.”

I don’t know who ‘they’ are, and from here on out I don’t care. I don’t know if it can be considered brave so much as stupid, but there are things out there that I really don’t think I want to know about. But, next time you’re spending the night out in Fiordland, listen carefully in the night. If you hear a lost animal mourning, you might just find yourself praying it’s a moose.