“Well, I do want something,” she ventured. “But not to change it. To have a place change me.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said with an inflection that indicated he really meant it, and again, he looked over at her to catch her eye and she internally winced again. “It’s true, what you say. There are two types of people in this world. The kind who want to create and add something, and the kind who want to take.”
Then his blinker was on and he was pulling into a park of sorts with astonishingly enormous trees towering into the sky like wild skyscrapers. She could not help but gasp. He said, “Right? Thrilling, those buggers. And those are only about seven hundred years old! Which makes them teenagers! These are not only some of the largest trees on earth, they’re also the longest-living.”
“Astonishing, really. And thank you sincerely for the ride,” she stammered, stepping out. “I enjoyed it. I’ll enjoy this too.”
Before she turned, he leaned toward her and spoke through the open window. “My pleasure. But first, I never asked your name, and second, I want to confess something. I often fly my drone to find and map the big kauri trees. They’re not all in this reserve—there’s some hidden up high on Nan’s land. I’m mapping the forest to document ecological values for any legal fight we have ahead of us. I saw you walking up some little-used trails.”
Her heart fluttered. “You saw me with a drone?”
He shrugged. “I followed you—”
“With your drone?”
“Sure. To see if you had any surveying equipment or some such thing.”
“I didn’t see any drone!”
He shrugged. “These are not kid drones. They’re high up. You probably heard it.”
“Ah!” she yelped, turning back to the car to fully face him. “Do they sound like a big hummingbird?”
He tilted his head, considering. “I suppose so.”
“You were following me!” Her voice was higher and harsher than she intended.
Now he furrowed his brow. “Not in a creepy way, I’ll have you know! But if you were out with surveying equipment or flags or maps or anything, then, hell yeah, I’d want to know. I thought you were here to…ruin the place.”
She was a bit sick to her stomach. Apparently, she wasn’t as invisible as she thought. “I keep hearing a bird that sounds like a bee. Or a huge hummingbird. There I was, being all dreamy-nature-girl, imagining some strange bird. A drone.” Then she started to laugh. “It’s pretty funny, actually.”
He smiled, clearly relieved. “I also spent some time looking for my cat. Goes missing from time to time.”
“Mink brown? Cutest cat alive?”
His eyes lit up, the crinkles deepened. “Sable. That’s her name and her color.”
She tried to silence her body’s reaction, but she was mesmerized. Such kind eyes. Such an open face. A well-trimmed beard with a smile. Such a quiet sincerity about him.
“I confess the cat has often been with me,” she stammered. “Helping me with the jewelry. And by the way, I’m glad she has a bell.”
“Ay, well, yes, all outdoor cats should have bells. Especially in a bird heaven such as this. So a shy jeweler, huh? That’s what Aroha said.” When she only shrugged, he added, “I kept the drone at a distance. Just to be clear, there was nothing untoward. No spying. I just did enough surveillance to make sure you were who you said you were. Then I went away and left you alone. These developers are nasty. Nothing is beneath them. They want that property, and I figured you could have been…well, pretending to be an artist. That would be crazy, I know. But not impossible, right? But I’ve seen your tools out on the picnic table, seen your work. I wanted to come clean with you. Seemed like the right thing to do.”
His look was now so open and sincere that she felt her cheeks flush and, terribly, tears come to her eyes. She was so lonely. But no, it wasn’t that—it was that he was so attractive in the way that someone can be so attractive. As a human being. And also, wasn’t it better to dive right into danger, rather than to try to avoid it? Safer in the end. It had worked so far. So she put her hand out to touch the top of the window. “I don’t know where you’re heading today, but I don’t suppose you want to join me, do you?”
—
The kauri looked exactly like huge broccoli florets skyrocketing above all the other tumble of bizarre greenery. The tree in front of them looked monstrously healthy to her, though she knew that wasn’t the case—the Kauri Dieback signs and gates had warned her otherwise.
“I can’t believe they’re dying of a fungus.” They were stopped at a yellow gate, required to scrub and spray their shoes before entering the natural area.
“A fungus spread by a mere pinhead-size amount of dirt,” he said, brushing his hiking shoes with the bristle brush that had been provided. “This scrub station always feels like…I don’t know…like a gong, a mindfulness reminder. Right? Some small bit of action to prevent future catastrophe. A reminder that small things can kill.”
“And inattention. That can kill too,” she mused.
They walked onto a wooden plankway designed to keep humans’ feet off the ground and followed this path as it meandered through the forest. A few tourists wandered by—there were more people than she’d seen since arriving and she’d forgotten what even a small crowd felt like. She and Richard ducked away from most of the visitors and stopped to consider the bark of a large kauri tree, blue-gray and smooth. She didn’t know quite how to articulate it, but seeing the bark hurt her heart. Haunted her heart. To know she was witnessing something that at some point would literally not be on Planet Earth anymore.
She spread her arms so as to feel small—the trunk of this tree was wider than she was tall. By a lot. They stopped to read more from the signage: The kauri were a species of conifer that was widespread during the Jurassic period but was now found only here.
“Colorado has signage like this, but it’s about a beetle,” she said. “They call the dead forests beetle kill. Both words imply action, an ongoing situation, you know? Verb-like! Beetle kill, dieback…It makes me sad.” As she said that, he simply and strangely touched her shoulder and pulled her toward him, so that they were side by side, staring at the tree.
She breathed out and did not move, either into him or away from him. She tried not to tense up. Oh, god, what was she doing? What was happening here? Was this a New Zealand thing?
Luckily, a young ranger in a khaki uniform and with red curls tucked into a ball cap approached. “You okay, loves?”
Ammalie blushed and wiped away a tear that had suddenly streaked down her face. “Oh, yes. We’re just feeling sad. About the trees.”
The woman nodded, unembarrassed and unflustered by the show of grief. “Yeah, no joke. Now they die. And they were so strong. Their life span being one or two thousand years. That’s huge. You realize how huge that is?”
“It’s like looking at the stars. Or sea,” Richard said, pulling Ammalie slightly closer.
“Yes,” she agreed, trying to relax into his shoulder. “We’re so small.”
The ranger looked up at the tree with them. “The Māori built waka taua—war canoes—and a single trunk could hold a hundred eighty warriors. The wood is very water-resistant. So. They were used to build ships—first for the Māori, then for the English, who cut down most of them.”
Richard cleared his throat. “A fungus! It takes very little things to change the world.”
The ranger nodded. “It’s easy to catch predators like the stoats, possums, rats, and feral cats, which kill birds around here, even to extinction,” the ranger said. “But a fungus, that’s tough.”
