The Falcon and the Lark

Beginnings

Whether Hollywood had impressionable New Zealand kids in mind when it turned out all those Western movies in the ‘fifties I’ll never know. But I do know how they affected me: they transformed the rock-and-tussock landscape of the Strath Taieri into Badlands whenever I travelled inland to my grandparents’ home at Middlemarch during summer holidays.

Middlemarch — a county town which no doubt boasted a county sheriff.

You could eat dust there, and the fluffy seeds of thistledown bounded past in the nor’west gales like miniature tumbleweeds. Injuns, their speargrass feathers giving them away, crouched behind rock outcrops that spread sun-baked in every direction beyond the green valley floor. Vultures disguised as harrier hawks wheeled menacingly in the heat haze, and the skylarks’ lofty song, hard to pinpoint, was an oddly joyous feature of the landscape which somehow I managed to pass off as theme music.

Come high noon, I’d be looking homewards. What’s for dinner, Grandma? Beans?

Indoors, of course, I left the Badlands behind. We’d play dominoes, and Granny’s hands, shiny from rubbing Ovoline on eggs to preserve them, would help me move the little black blocks around whenever my counting failed me. What able hands they were — nurtured seven children, my mother Jean the youngest of them.

Coal-range culture reigned then and its symbols included a singing kettle, warm plates from the warming rack, and warm pyjamas. I never saw anyone light the stove. It was always going, an enduring comfort. Home, home on the range! You appreciated it first thing in the morning. A touch of frost in summer in this strath, this broad mountain valley, was not unknown. You climbed out of bed — a small boy literally did, for the beds had tall iron legs — and climbed into porridge that came off the coal range steaming.

Behind the house, down a narrow pebbly path, was a fascinating object — the dunny. It leaned a bit. A wooden picket door allowed a serrated slice of sunshine to penetrate overhead when you were inside. On a summer’s day the seat, smooth with use, was agreeably warm, and a small boy’s legs dangled. Handkerchief-sized squares of newspaper were strung up behind the door. Sometimes there’d be a rustling sound nearby — not Red Indians sneaking up but red hens scratching in the leaf litter under a row of poplars.

They are gone now, the house, the dunny, the hens. The section is empty. The Ayson family, my mother’s, have all gone, too. No aunts or uncles remain in the district, nor any on the Peat side. There were a century of Peats here, starting with great-grandfather Alexander in 1870, first farmer in the Clarks Junction/Deep Stream area.

He and his sons farmed next the rock and tussock around Shannon, then Sutton, creeping ever nearer to the flat river valley in which Middlemarch lies. Uncle George Peat, a grandson of Alexander’s, was the last Peat to live here — not county sheriff but county grader driver. He also drove an old brown Austin car.

Uncle George would sometimes drive me home to Mosgiel. The journey, over a hilly, river-cut landscape, took three hours. In still, hot weather the radiator would boil. The dust was appalling. But it would obscure the blue smoke pouring into the cab from the protesting engine.

Thirty years on, I still go back. State Highway 87 is tarsealed now and straighter. In a fast car you can do the same journey in an hour. Loops of the old road show up here and there, reminding me of the days when this route used to be an expedition into make-believe country.

These are Badlands no longer. But the enchantment endures because, in place of the childhood fantasies, real-life mysteries emerge, springing out of the rocks, plants, wildlife, and patterns of human settlement. Here are stories that require no big-screen enhancement — fascinating, intriguing stories. On these upland roads I try to ‘ride easy’. At times this has the effect of willing the strangest stories out of the landscape.

The Peat and Ayson families clocked up a century and a half of relating to this one valley on the eastern edge of Central Otago. The least I can do is spend a few weeks at a time in it. So I go back — not only to tease out family history but also to immerse myself in a landscape which is personally special, an ancestral home. It is a surrendering of a sort, a chance to leave behind my city self and approach the land and the sky with a new humility.

WINTER

ONE

ABOVE THE CRATER, where few clouds have gathered, the sky begins to glow — light ochre at first, an earthy colour, hardening in minutes to orange. Shades of pink flank the orange core. Suddenly the sky is aflame, bursting red.

From my vantage point on the lower slopes of the Rock and Pillar Range, I can just make out the dark, pouting lips of the crater on the Taieri Ridge skyline east of Middlemarch — the opposite side of the valley. Despite appearances, the fireworks in the sky do not signal another eruption, a re-run of the events of ten million years ago. This landscape is largely made of schist, a kind of non-volcanic sedimentary rock. The lighting is simply explained: the sun is coming up over Taieri Ridge.

Yet this is no ordinary sunrise. It is the one that ends the Longest Night and prefaces the Shortest Day — the Winter Solstice sunrise.

The pause is not perceptible but you know, because it has always been so, that somewhere in the railway yards of our solar system the points are switched, noiselessly, automatically. It happens twice a year, winter and summer, and the planet, leaning as it spins, sets out on its orbit to favour the opposite hemisphere with sunshine, encouraging an all-over tan.

Golden brown is the prevailing colour the year round in the Strath Taieri. This morning it is white-dusted with frost, the product of a still, clear winter’s night. As the sun lifts out of the distant crater its rays seek out the valley floor where Middlemarch, population 189, lies in a cold cuddle of fog. I am well above the fog and predict it will disappear as the day warms. It barely covers the big pine trees round the village showgrounds and is already breaking up at the edges, a fleeced effect.

This fog is nothing like the winter fogs of old that used to lie for days on end, conspiring with hoar frost to keep the village deep-frozen around the clock. The story goes that it got cold enough then to freeze the steam engine’s whistle. Cold enough, too, to freeze a candle flame solid — to put out the light you snipped the flame with a pair of scissors.

I am aware that the first hour before sunrise is usually the coldest, which is why I have come well-insulated to this lookout point above my base at Gladbrook Station — woollen hat and gloves, woollen seaman’s jumper under a padded cold-weather jacket, woollen socks and thermal socks inside lace-up gumboots, and, yes, long-johns. To farewell the Longest Night I take no chances.

Ten minutes before I feel the first twinkle of solstice sun it is painting the Rock and Pillar tops, a thousand metres above me, a brilliant amber that falls as a curtain across the entire face. The range seems to hum its approval and, on impulse, I haul out my harmonica, its metal casing bitingly cold, and contribute a couple of verses of Amazing Grace to the show.

A fortnight ago these mountains sported a dapper waistcoat of snow, but a thaw since has reduced it to tatters. Irregular white squiggles are all that remains — high-country hieroglyphs.

Across the top of the range, outcrops of schist rise in jagged formation above the alpine meadows like the teeth of a much-abused saw. They give the range its name — Rock and Pillar. In fact, they are much older than the range itself, which was uplifted along a fault line just five million years ago. Its schist actually started out as a rock called greywacke, which was formed from sediments laid down on the ocean floor 400 million years ago. Heat and pressure from upwellings of the earth’s molten core slowly transformed the greywacke into schist and in the process infused into it quartz lodes bearing gold, scheelite and other ores — a treasure chest.

But rock of hybrid origin does not necessarily develop hybrid strength. The name, schist, is derived from a Greek word meaning to split, and this the rock does spectacularly well in the Strath Taieri.

It splits, crumbles and weathers along lines of weakness. Curiously, many outcrops are sliced clean through across the grain; in others the layers are folded into corrugated patterns, hooks and chevrons. You may stumble on perfectly round holes filled with red algae which geologists, exercising not a little imagination, describe as ‘Druids’ sacrificial vessels’. Altogether, then, the schist leads a rotten life, shattered by frost, baked by summer sun, and thrashed by wind storms. Ancient gales were responsible for the loess soils surrounding the outcrops — wind-blown silt and dust from western inland regions and possibly even from the continental shelf out east, long since submerged.

The biggest and toughest of the schist outcrops still standing above the loess are called tors. In a few places these tors form ridges and from my sunrise lookout I can see some of the best examples away to my right, on the Sutton Hills, which deflect the Taieri River east towards its gorge and mark the southern boundary of the valley.

From this height and distance and in the frosty primeval dawn light the ridges show up as the spiny backs of dinosaurs poking out of parallel graves.

8.27am, 21 June. The sun hits the dinosaur I have chosen to sit on. It bursts through a gap between crater and clouds, shockingly bright but devoid of warmth just yet. I whisper a prayer for its ascent into summer. How dull to live on the equator when you can enjoy the extremes of climate at this latitude, those extremes determined by the coming and going of the sun, the seasons, the cycles of life.

Now I check out what is lighting up around me, right to left, eyes swinging, panning, mind snapping the pictures still … Click! Sutton’s dinosaur ridges and a dinosaur watering hole nearby called Salt Lake, a uniquely saline pond without an outlet, a silver disc at dawn … Click! Bulbous Mount Stoker, where the earliest people to see the dawn in these parts left bowls of polished kowhai, dried weka skins and other artefacts … Click! Bald Hill, tor-less, guarding an amphitheatre containing the most exquisite leaf fossils, a buried still-life forest … Click! Click! The Sisters, twin knobs, strikingly smooth, at the southern end of Taieri Ridge, and below them a tree-topped sibling called Smooth Cone … Click! (terribly exposed) The crater, blitzed by the rising sun, a sunken ruin of black boulders described on maps simply as The Crater, the one and only … Click! Kakanui Range, a distant glint of snow, with sharp peaks forming a wall at the far end of the valley, another geological story …

Such panoramas take the breath away — especially in freezing air. The big view is mesmerising. I am reminded of how our eyes dominate all senses to a point where simple and delicate things escape our notice — the whispers in the silence, aromas in the breeze, things as subtle as the texture of lichens on weathered stone.

Lichens are plants of ancient ancestry and as a matter of fact I am seated on a grey-green species. Every plant in the vicinity can salute this lichen for its work at the frontline of life, and not only the plants but all the grazing animals, the sheep, cattle, and rabbits.

Now I have some warmth on my face. The air is not as rasping on the cheeks. Finches, ever energetic, have begun their daily rummaging — goldfinches, chaffinches, greenfinches. Starlings have also left their overnight communal roosts and swirl in the air. Two vocal magpies are telling a harrier to get out of their air space. The harrier takes the hint, wheeling away with lazy wingbeat. Had the attack continued it would have rolled over in mid-air, talons bared, at each pass of the magpies.

The world is well awake. The sun will continue its passage without any coaxing from me. I wonder if anyone else has seen what I have just seen — the Winter Solstice sun rise up out of a crater.

TWO

THE FIRST RAYS OF MID-winter sun stabbing over the top of Taieri Ridge catch the falcon slumbering on her overnight perch high up on the Rock and Pillar Range — a prime site for viewing the valley and the hills right out to the Otago coast.

It is a favourite fair-weather perch of hers, a twisted, rigid branch of an old fire-scarred matagouri tree. Unlike some of her rocky landing spots and lookouts, which she uses in gales, this roost allows her to sit up straight with her long tail tucked in behind the branch and talons firmly gripping it. She is relaxed. Her small head is erect, her feathers tight and smooth against her body — a picture of sleek nobility illuminated. Her eyelids, lightly closed over her dark brown eyes, flicker fractionally. She could be dreaming falcon dreams.

A predator like her, occupying top place in the food chain, can afford to lounge through sunrise. Natural enemies are few. Also, falcons do not mind a sunbathe first thing in the morning. There is no rush to start the day. In winter they