“Isn’t this basically a Great Wall for the forest?”
Katherine looked at the fence.
“What about the ones already inside?”
AFTER THE EMPTY TRACK
A few hours earlier we had been at Grassroots Trust Velodrome. When we left, the track was still empty.
We drove out of Cambridge.
Houses thinned. Farms returned. Green slopes ran out on both sides of the road, cattle and sheep scattered behind ordinary farm fences. The sky widened. The mountain drew closer.
Near Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari, the road suddenly emptied.
No cars.
No people.
I looked at Katherine.
“You should stand in the middle. You don’t get many chances to do that.”
She went out happily, raised both hands in a wide V, and stood there with the road running away beneath her towards the mountain.
Not much farther on, we saw the fence.
It was nothing like the farm fences we had been passing.
The mesh was high and dense, following the edge of the forest in both directions until one end disappeared around the slope.
Large information boards stood near the entrance.
We stopped there before buying our tickets.
FORTY-SEVEN KILOMETRES
The first board was about the fence itself.
Up close, the details became almost obsessive.
The mesh ran down close to the ground, with protection against animals digging underneath. At the top, the fence did not simply stop; it curved outwards to stop climbers.
Anything that crossed the line — a gate, a road, a drain — had to be treated as a possible gap.
One number dominated the sign.
47 km.
Forty-seven kilometres.
I followed the fence with my eyes. From where we stood, we could see only a short section before it bent with the land and vanished behind trees.
But it went on like that around an entire mountain.
Inside were more than 3,000 hectares of forest.
“Why go this far?” I asked. “Isn’t nature already pretty well protected in New Zealand?”
Katherine was still looking at the board.
“They’re trying to get it as close as they can to what it used to be.”
“Used to be?”
She pointed at the animals shown there.
Rats. Possums. Mustelids. Cats. Deer. Goats. Pigs.
I had assumed the fence was mainly about the animals we easily call pests — predators that kill birds or take eggs.
But the list kept going.
Deer do not hunt birds. Goats do not steal eggs. They browse. They trample. A seedling can disappear before it has had much chance to become a tree.
I turned and looked back outside the fence.
The farms we had just driven through were still there, ordinary Waikato country.
Then I looked at the animals on the board again.
The aim, Katherine said, was to exclude introduced land mammals as far as possible and give the forest a chance to move towards an earlier ecological state.
My first reaction was not admiration.
It sounded naive.
The mountain had been changed for a long time. Could anyone really turn it backwards? Forty-seven kilometres of specialised fence. Animals already inside that still had to be removed. Monitoring. Maintenance. Then doing it all again next year.
For a moment, I wondered whether the effort could possibly be worth it.
But Katherine’s question was still there.
What about the ones already inside?
Closing the fence was only the beginning.
The animals already living beyond it did not vanish when the last section of mesh was joined. People still had to go in: clear, check, monitor.
Lines and marked points spread across the diagrams on the board, one after another, into the forest.
None of it looked grand.
We bought our tickets.
The first gate opened.
Katherine went through and I followed. It shut behind us, but we were not in the forest yet.
There was another gate ahead.
For a moment we stood between two walls of mesh.
A sign asked visitors to check footwear, bags and belongings. I looked down at my shoes. Mud, seeds, tiny hitchhikers — the sorts of things I would normally ignore — mattered here.
Only when the gate behind us had closed did we open the one in front.
A few steps later, the fence disappeared behind trees.
The light changed.
Outside had been open sky and sunlit pasture. Here the canopy closed overhead. Ferns reached in from the track. Trunks climbed straight up, some wrapped in vines and moss.
Underfoot, hard ground gave way to soil and leaves.
The air smelled of damp earth, bark and leaf litter.
We kept talking, but more quietly.
THE BIRD FROM THE WALL
A bird called somewhere above us.
Katherine stopped first.
“Look.”
She pointed into the canopy.
At first I saw nothing.
The bird called again. Leaves moved. A black shape appeared behind them.
Light caught blue-green in the feathers. The small white tuft at the throat stood out.
“Tūī,” Katherine said.
I laughed.
“Isn’t that the one from the wall at Paddock Café?”
It called twice, hopped to another branch, then disappeared into the leaves.
I kept looking up for a while.
The canopy closed over it.
The information boards inside the forest came one at a time. Walk for a while, find one. Walk again, another.
One was about rimu.
Beside it was a cross-section of timber. The tree grows slowly; the rings sat close together.
I leaned in.
“Is this a bit like Chinese rosewood?” I said to Katherine. “Rosewood furniture is incredibly expensive.”
She smiled.
“Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because there’s less and less of the wood left.”
I looked again at the tight rings.
They reminded me of the Kauri Museum at Matakohe, where enormous cross-sections of kauri trunks sit indoors now, their rings preserving the years of trees that once stood in great numbers across the north.
Sunlight slipped through the canopy in patches.
Sometimes there was birdsong.
Sometimes only our shoes in the leaves.
THE BIRD THAT WAS GONE
Not far ahead, another bird appeared between the trees.
A very large one.
Not alive.
Wood.
A long neck. A heavy body. Katherine stood beside it and looked small.
It was a moa.
Once, birds like this walked through New Zealand forests.
Now there was a carving.
I took a photograph of Katherine beside it, then lowered the phone.
A little farther on, a tower began to appear through the trees.
TO BE A TREE HERE
First I saw the stairs.
Then I looked higher.
More stairs.
Higher again, and they were still climbing into the canopy.
A sign beside the structure gave the height.
Sixteen metres.
I had assumed it was simply another visitor lookout.
The board told a different story. Specialists had put up the main structure; local people and volunteers had helped with much of what followed.
I read the names again.
At the entrance, I had thought the whole project a little naive.
I still did, in a way.
But there was something about taking an idea that improbable and continuing with it year after year that was harder to dismiss.
Katherine had already started climbing.
The stairs turned upwards through the trees. After a while her breathing became noticeably heavier.
Halfway up, I stopped and looked down. The track we had just walked had shrunk beneath us.
We kept going.
At ground level we had spent the whole walk looking up at trees. Now the trunks seemed to fall away below us, and the canopy rose to meet us.
The wind was stronger at the top.
The fence was gone from view.
So were the entrance boards and the gates.
There was only forest: one layer of canopy behind another, running out towards the distance.
Katherine held the rail and looked across it for a while.
Then she said:
“I think it would be so nice to be a tree here.”
I stood beside her.
Wind moved over the treetops.
Somewhere below, a bird called.