Exceptions to Reality

The Last Akialoa

A number of years ago a friend and I had the opportunity to spend a week on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which is known as the Garden Isle. The top of the island is a volcanic caldera. Over the millennia, the caldera has filled up with decaying organic matter, like a giant planter. Within can be found some of the most unique biota in the world—a swamp in the sky.

Determined to hike across at least part of this wondrous landscape, we drove up past Waimea Canyon one cloudy summer morning, parked our rented car in the last lot, and set out on our hike. It quickly became clear that when it came to describing the actual conditions and terrain, all the guidebooks woefully understated the actual conditions. Most Hawaiian hikes do not involve repeatedly sinking, sometimes up to one’s waist, in a thick, gooey sludge of organic mulch. Nevertheless we made it to our destination, a lookout on the pali (a steep cliffside) high above the little town of Hana.

Meanwhile the cloud cover had thickened dramatically. Wind and rain had been intensifying for hours. I decided to hunker down for the night with our emergency tarp and let the weather blow through. My younger companion, however, declared tersely that “I’m not going to freeze to death up here!” and started back. As he was my responsibility, I felt I had no choice but to accompany him. By the time we reached our car, barely before darkness settled in, it was the only one left in the parking lot. Being well-prepared for the hike, it had never occurred to us to check the weather forecast.

As it happened, Kauai was in the process of catching the trailing southern edge of a passing tropical storm.

Back in our hotel, I spent two hours in the shower. Ten minutes to wash the gunk off myself, and the remaining time attempting to get it out of my sneakers. The latter task proved impossible, so ingrained had the organic matter become. Regretfully I had no choice but to throw away the unsalvageable shoes. Had I planted them, I have no doubt they would have sprouted a fantastic variety of flora.

Some small literary controversy attended the publication of “The Last Akialoa” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. There are those who think it does not qualify as either a fantasy or science fiction.

A nice leisurely afternoon stroll in the Alakai would, I think, change that perception…

The first thing Loftgren noticed was the rain, coalescing out of the air as mist, then sifting gently to the already sodden earth. He smiled to himself. They could hardly have expected otherwise considering they were about to enter the wettest place on Earth.

He didn’t mind bringing up the rear. Fanole, their guide, was out in front, probing the feeble excuse for a trail, occasionally calling back to his two companions warnings and advice in equal measure. Behind him and just ahead of Loftgren was young Sanchez, the graduate student who had worked so long and hard to be included in the expedition. At the moment he resembled a runaway candy bar, enshrouded as he was in the transparent plastic sheets that shielded both him and his gear from the all-pervading damp.

Back down the road they had just left and four thousand feet below them lay the Kauai coast, with its warm tropical sunshine and chattering tourists and full-service hotels. Ahead lay thirty square miles of the most improbable and impenetrable terrain in the United States, if not the world. Equally remarkable, much of it was still unexplored.

The Alakai Swamp occupied the bowl of a gigantic caldera that formed the top of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Trade winds slamming into the flanks of its highest peak, Mount Waialeale, were shoved upward into colder air where they were forced to drop their load of moisture day after day, month after month, year after year, with a benumbing, saturating regularity. Four hundred and eighty inches of rain a year. Six hundred and twenty-four inches in the record year of 1948. Cherrapunji in India occasionally had more during the monsoon, but Cherrapunji also enjoyed a dry season.

In the depths of the Alakai, the swamp in the sky, the dry season was measured in hours.

By late morning they were making their way down one of the knife-edged ridges that slice up the Alakai like razor blades planted in a pie. The Forest Service had hacked notches out of the solid rock, and while the going was slippery, by choosing his handholds with care Loftgren was able to keep all but the soles of his Gore-Tex-lined boots out of the stream that tumbled down the crack in the mountain. The temperature hovered in the sixties, and he was still dry and comfortable.

Fanole had warned him that no matter what he wore he wouldn’t be able to stay dry for more than a day or two. They’d laid a small wager on the matter. Thanks to the university’s beneficent largesse, Loftgren had been able to outfit Sanchez and himself in the latest in tropical gear, modified to take into account the fact that at this time of year temperatures in the Alakai often dropped into the forties at night.

Their guide wore comparatively little: shorts and a light cotton sweatshirt, cheap ankle-high sneakers and socks. His pack weighed more than those of his companions because he carried the tent, but that was only proper. He was being paid well for his exertions.

Loftgren hadn’t really wanted to engage Fanole, but the number of men who knew anything about the deepest parts of the Alakai could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and when they found out where the ornithologist wanted to go, every one of them had turned him down. When asked why, an old half-Hawaiian, half-haole had quietly responded, “Because I want to live to enjoy my grandchildren.” Fanole was the guide of choice because among the knowledgeable only Fanole had agreed to take on the expedition.

Such caution—fear, even—surprised Loftgren. Having carried out important fieldwork in both Papua New Guinea and the western Amazon, he was hardly about to be intimidated by the prospect of working on Kauai, with a profusion of Sheratons and Hyatts sprawling not two hours’ drive from where they’d parked the rented van. He’d been planning this trip for more than a year and had prepared himself by reading everything extant in the limited literature about the Alakai.

He’d also encountered the stories—true, apparently. About the honeymooning couple whose car had been found at the nearby Kalalau Lookout a few years ago and who had never been seen again, alive or dead. About the US Geological Survey engineer who died of a heart attack three hundred yards from the summit of Mount Waialeale in 1948 and because of the difficulty of the terrain had to be left tied to a tree until his companions could return with adequate help to bring him out. It took sixteen men three days to get his body off the mountain. About the attempt to push a road through the swamp back in the 1950s. The construction crew had smashed their way into the forest and quit for the day, only to return the next morning to find their bulldozer missing. A brief search revealed that it had simply sunk out of sight.

Then there were his unsuccessful predecessors. Kinkaid of the University of Hawaii first, and two years ago Masaki of UC Riverside. Brazen to the end, Kinkaid had gone in alone, while Masaki had wandered away from his companions one day, never to be seen again. Kinkaid had been too brash for his own good, and Masaki—well, it was felt that Masaki had been the victim of either bad judgment or bad luck, neither a fault to which Loftgren was heir.

It was raining harder now and he found himself having to concentrate more closely on the trail. They were off the ridge and advancing through dense forest. Uluhe and ekaha ferns grew thickly in the underbrush, and the occasional flash of brilliant red ohi‘a lehua or waxy yellow-white lobelia flower flared like strobe lights among the green walls through which they were moving. Occasionally he picked out the bright orange berries of the Astelia lily gleaming among the sodden verdure.

“Starting to get a little sloppy. Watch your step,” Fanole called back to them.

An instant later Sanchez slipped off the rotting log along which he had been tiptoeing and plunged waist-deep into thick, soupy, organic muck. Fanole edged carefully around the inadequate pathway, clinging for balance to the overhanging branches of dripping trees, and reached down to give the embarrassed student a hand up.

Beneath the transparent rain slicker the young man’s waterlogged jeans were now stained brown from the waist down. Shreds of bark and leaves and other unidentifiable macrobiotic matter in various stages of decomposition clung to his legs and shoes.

An unsympathetic Fanole offered one of his typically terse observations. “Warned you. In here if you don’t get soaked from the top down, sooner or later you get soaked from the bottom up.” With that he turned and started back up a trail that had already diminished to little more than a narrow tunnel between the trees. “Might as well get used to it!” he yelled back.

The now saturated graduate student looked unhappy. “Sorry. I thought I could keep dry for one day, at least.”

Loftgren tugged the brim of his slicker down over his forehead. His face was wet, but the rest of him still held back the best efforts of the swamp to drench him. On the other hand, he was already soaked with sweat.

The Alakai was where dryness went to die.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Julio. Both Fanole and I have a lot more experience in this kind of country than you do.”

Twenty minutes later Loftgren stepped over a log and onto a seemingly solid patch of ground that turned out to consist of cloying thigh-deep sludge. Fanole and Sanchez stood off to one side, looking on as he slowly pulled himself out and worked his way through the trough. No one said a word.

By nightfall they’d reached the junction of the Pihea and Alakai trails. Here the Forest Service had helicoptered in thick beams and wood planks. Securely strapped together, these formed a level, solid, platform at the trail juncture.

Fanole set up the tent, somehow managing to keep the interior halfway clear of rain. Beneath the extended, oversized storm flap they stripped nude and deposited their equipment outside on the redwood six-by-sixes.

“Any other wood’d rot out inside a month,” their guide pointed out unnecessarily. “Except cypress and mahogany. But we can’t get cypress here, and mahogany’s too expensive. So we have to import the redwood.”

Using clean towels they dried themselves, then crawled into the tent to settle down around the camp stove Fanole ignited. By the time dinner was ready it was darker outside than the inside of a cave. A drenching, dripping, soaking dark. Steady rain pattered like dancing mice on the top of the tent, falling harder at night than it had during the day. Except for the monotonous thrumming of the continuous downpour—the heartbeat of the Alakai—it was dead silent outside the shelter.

Fanole poked leisurely at his reconstituted freeze-dried supper, looking on as Sanchez ravenously devoured his and Loftgren made a more considered go of his own. The guide was nearly fifty, with a receding forehead of thinning brown hair and dark eyes the color of aged bourbon that seemed to pierce whatever crossed their path, be it human or rock or tree. His sun-seared appearance left his ancestry open to some question, but he was certainly at least part Hawaiian. He had a slight bulge around his middle: spare tire for a bicycle rather than a sedan. Otherwise he was surprisingly muscular.

“You don’t mind my saying so, I think you’re both crazy.”

Loftgren grinned. It wasn’t the first time that opinion had been expressed in regard to the expedition. “You’re entitled to your opinion. If you feel that way, why did you agree to guide us?”

Fanole finished the last of his dinner and set the plate carefully to one side. “Because no one else would. I know you academic types. If you couldn’t get any help, you’d eventually have tried it on your own.” He glanced up at the roof, listening to the rain tap-dancing relentlessly outside. “You’d never have gotten out of this place alive.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Loftgren told him. “I’ve been in rougher places than the Alakai. There are no snakes here, no hostile natives. Not even any dangerous bugs, and the mosquitoes quit climbing at the thirty-five-hundred-foot level.”

Fanole nodded. “That’s right. Nothing dangerous here but the place itself. Don’t need any snakes or tigers. The swamp’ll kill you all by its lonesome.” He looked toward the entrance and nodded knowingly. “No landmarks, either. No sky overhead; only clouds. No ground underfoot; only a bottomless pit of composting plant matter. Even compasses act funny in here.”

Sanchez felt compelled to speak up. “Begging your pardon, sir, but we got through the first of the bogs okay.” He smiled apologetically. “Didn’t stay very dry, but we got through.” Reaching over, he tapped his pack. “Hard to get lost with a GPS.”

Fanole shook his head once. He didn’t smile. “‘The first of the bogs’? We haven’t even reached the bogs yet, kid. That was just muddy trail. I’ve personally sounded bogs here that were twenty feet deep. There are deeper still, but they ain’t been plumbed yet.”

“How come?”

“Nobody’s ever brought in a long enough measuring probe. Remember: we’re walking across the throat of an old volcano. Might be bogs a hundred feet deep. Maybe a thousand. Nobody knows. In the whole swamp there’s only two barely-there east–west trails and nothing at all running north to south. Your plan is to head off-trail and follow the line of the Wainiha Pali. Nobody’s ever gone in there and done that.” He snorted softly. “With or without a GPS.”

“Kinkaid went in,” Loftgren corrected him, “and Masaki.”

“Nobody knows that for certain.” Fanole’s eyes burned into those of the ornithologist. “Masaki got to the Kilohana Lookout. Nobody’s sure about Kinkaid. If you try to go north from there, you’ve got sheer cliffs on one side and unplumbed bogs on the other. I give you haoles about a day before you give up on it. If we make it that far.”

“I once spent a month in the highlands of New Guinea, Fanole. Don’t try to scare me.”

“I’m not.” The guide leaned back on his light sleeping bag. “You hired me for advice. I’m giving it. Just think it’s a lot to go through for a glimpse of a bird that’s probably been extinct since the ’seventies.”

“There have been reports of song-sightings since then,” Sanchez pointed out. “The survivors of Masaki’s party all confirm it.”

Fanole rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one big, weathered palm. “You stay out here long enough, it’s easy to start hearing things as well as seeing them.”

“Masaki vanished while tracking a singing akialoa,” Loftgren insisted stubbornly.

“Maybe.”

“Those with him heard it, too. The weather and the terrain got so bad, they all gave up and fell back, except Masaki. But they heard it.”

“Maybe.” The guide was incorrigible. “Next you’ll be telling me you expect to find an o‘o‘a‘a, too.”

“No.” Loftgren’s voice dropped. “No, I’m afraid the o‘o‘a‘a is gone. But not the akialoa. I won’t accept it. It’s too beautiful to not exist any longer.”

From his file pouch he drew forth a folded eight-by-ten. Like every other picture he carried, like every map, it was laminated to protect it from the all-pervasive, all-destroying moisture. Unfolded, it revealed a painting of a small bird with a distinctive brown patterning and a lighter buff underbelly. Attractive but hardly spectacular.

Except for the downward-curving sickle-beak, which was fully one-third the length of the creature’s body. It was this remarkable protuberance that set the akialoa apart from its immediate relatives and for that matter, from all but a few other birds in the world. It had last been seen in the Alakai in 1973, and the possibility of its continued existence was the reason for Loftgren’s university-sponsored expedition.

To find the akialoa, he mused as he gazed at the painting, the details of which he knew as intimately as those of his own body. Finding it would guarantee publication in Science, Natural History, the Smithsonian, National Geographic—they would be fighting one another for the right to be first to publish his words and pictures. A coup for the department and for the entire university. Perhaps a chair dedicated in his name. Promotion to professor emeritus of ornithology. The world would be his—or at least that small portion of it that concerned itself with birding.

Kinkaid had plunged into the Alakai seeking the elusive scimitar-billed bird and had vanished. So had the esteemed Masaki. Now it was his turn, and he fully intended to succeed where they had failed. If the akialoa still lived, it would be left to professional ornithologists such as himself to devise a scheme for ensuring its survival. Only they had the knowledge and ability to do so.

But first he had to find one.

The rain was lighter when they awoke. Carefully, they packed their equipment and set out again. Halfway up a steep, slippery, moss-bedecked slope he was delighted to find an outcropping of ohi’a trees. Fully mature at eight inches high, they were all more than a hundred years old. Later he spotted a thriving specimen of gunnera, the world’s largest herb, with its unique eight-foot leaves. Miniature trees and giant herbs. Reversed proportions, he reflected, were the norm in the Alakai.

Later that day the sun came out and they saw their first birds. Sanchez picked up a pair of bright red apapane, but it was Fanole who pointed out the endemic anianiau and the rarer i’iwi. Loftgren felt left out until he saw a tiny elepaio sheltering from the sun beneath a palapali fern.

Of the akialoa, however, there was no sign.

It was raining seriously when they entered the first bogs, edging around them where possible and wading through—sometimes up to their waists—when it was not. Fluttering fragments of fluorescent tape tied to tree branches were all that marked the trail, and these were hard to see in the fog that had settled over the swamp. Several times Loftgren had to admit he would have been lost without Fanole to lead the way.

On the third morning they turned off the intermittent trail and plunged into abject wilderness.

No one bothered to comment on the damp anymore because they were all soaked from head to foot. It was a distinctive, all-pervasive dampness that made you feel as if your skin were slowly sloughing off your body. White ridges appeared on palms and fingers; it felt as if at any minute your flesh would burst into flagrant, pustulant bloom. Forward progress was now measured in yards instead of miles.

By the end of the week the formerly resolute Sanchez had had enough.

“I want out, Martin.” Despite the protection offered by the battered but still-intact slicker, water trickled down the graduate student’s sensitive face into his eyes and mouth and ears.

Loftgren regarded him sternly. “There’s no ‘out,’ here, Julio. This isn’t a library research project. We stay until we’ve found what we came for or until we run out of supplies.”

Fanole materialized silently at the frustrated student’s shoulder. “The kid’s right. We’re in too deep as it is. If we keep going this way and don’t manage to hook up with the Mohihi Trail, we won’t get out of here.”

“You’ll find the Mohihi.”

“Maybe. I’ve never gone this way before. No one ever has. We could step right off the damn Pali or stumble into Waialeale. You know damn well nobody’s gonna spot us from the air because the cloud cover only breaks fully maybe once, twice a year. No emergency helicopter pickups in here, mister. I say it’s time to leave. You got what you paid for.”

“I paid for an akialoa. We have plenty of food left.”

“We’ve been slogging and bogging for four days and we haven’t seen a hint of one. Nobody knows exactly where we are, and in an emergency it wouldn’t matter if you could raise someone on that satellite phone tucked in your pack anyway. It’s time to go.”

“If we don’t save the akialoa, no one will. Even in the academic community people are losing interest.”

“You can’t save what doesn’t exist,” Fanole replied evenly. “People have been reducing the native birds’ range and food supply for hundreds of years. You know that. Even if there are a couple left, we don’t know if there’s enough of whatever they specialize in feeding on to support them. Long-petaled flowers, bugs, whatever. There’s so little information about the akialoa that we don’t even know for sure what the hell they eat. But that hook of a bill evolved to feed on something specific. We don’t know anything about it from the old Hawaiians because they almost never came up here. Country’s too rough, too many dangerous spirits. Too many feather-hunters who never made it back. Birds like that don’t just switch specialized feeding habits to lobelia or ohi’a in a few decades. The o‘o‘a‘a had a better chance in that respect and it didn’t make it. Be reasonable, man.”

Loftgren regarded his companions. Fanole was unyielding. Sanchez’s expression was a mixture of pleading and anger. Bits of dark, decomposing plant material clung to his forehead and hair, giving him the aspect of a drowned Hispanic dryad.

“All right. But first we finish out the day and then camp. We can start back tomorrow.”

Fanole grunted, willing to concede an afternoon. An exhausted and relieved Sanchez merely slumped to the ground where he stood. Beneath him, the spongy earth immediately began to give way, oozing up around his hips and shoulders. Hastily he rose to search for more solid ground. With the intensifying rain shrouding them in wet shadow, they made camp.

The song woke him. It was sharp, piercing, utterly distinctive. At first Loftgren thought it might be an akepa, but decided the concluding notes were too high.

Hauling himself to the front of the tent, he unzipped the flap and crawled outside. Fog swirled around the temporary shelter, coiling smoke-like through the trees, reducing visibility to a few yards. An errant shaft of sunlight shining momentarily through the clouds briefly pearlized the drifting fog.

It sat in a tree not ten feet away, singing energetically, that remarkable bill parting slightly to emit each series of notes. He stared breathlessly, hardly daring to move. Then it turned to regard him momentarily out of tiny blinking eyes before flying off into the enveloping mist. Alighting somewhere unseen, it resumed its cheerful song.

Loftgren flung himself back into the tent and pawed at his camera bag until he’d extracted the digital unit. Fanole sat up and blinked at him as the ornithologist struggled feverishly with a fresh storage card. Sanchez stirred sleepily nearby.

“Nude Menehune nymphs cavorting in the bogs?” the guide inquired.

“I saw it.” Trying to steady shaking fingers, Loftgren slid the camera into its protective housing, checked the telephoto, then began to tighten the knobs on the aluminum strip that would make the plastic airtight and waterproof. “I heard it first and crawled outside, and I saw it.”

Fanole sat up sharply. “What do you mean, you saw it?”

“On a branch, right outside the tent. It was still singing when I came in for the camera.” He rose, checked to make sure the card was more than half empty, and started for the tent flap.

“Hey!” Naked, Fanole scrambled out of his bag. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

Loftgren paused in the entrance. “Can’t wait. Might never see it again.”

“You idiot, hold up!” Fanole lurched to the opening and outside, where it was beginning to rain afresh. On hands and knees, Sanchez blinked out from behind him, trying to wake up.

“What’s happening? Where’s Professor Loftgren going?”

Fanole stared into the intensifying shower. “He said he heard his damn bird. Says he saw one.”

“Saw one?” Sanchez emerged, arms wrapped across his naked chest, shivering slightly in the early-morning chill. “An akialoa?”

“I guess.” The guide turned and reentered the tent. Sanchez gazed into the fog and drizzle for a moment longer, then retreated.

“Aren’t we going after him?”

The guide’s eyes were unblinking, hard. “Without our equipment? Without planning? Not me, kid. Not me. If he has an ounce of intelligence left in him, he’ll be back within an hour.”

Sanchez hesitated in the doorway, wavering. “And if he’s not?”

Fanole said nothing. He was heating coffee.

Loftgren ran on, pushing through the trees and brush, ignoring the brilliant red flowers that occasionally cropped up in his path. Once, an apapane trilled close on his left. He ignored it, concentrating only on the song that stayed just ahead of him but never disappeared entirely. The bird was moving, perhaps in search of the particular long flowers it needed to feed on that were nearly extinct elsewhere in the swamp, perhaps toward a nest. A nest! What a discovery that would be!

All he needed was a picture; one lousy picture. A single decent clear shot. Then he’d pick his way back to the tent. They could search farther for the bird or return to civilization if Fanole and that simpering Sanchez still insisted on going back. He’d expected better of his most committed graduate student. It was apparent he had the brains but not the dedication. Great discoveries were not made by the cautious or the reluctant.

A second time, the bird lighted in a tree in front of him. He aimed the camera, but the creature flew off as he thumbed the release and he couldn’t be sure he’d gotten the shot. A check of the LCD screen showed that he had not. Damn! It was almost as if the bird was leading him on, deeper into the swamp. Absurd notion. Rare as it was, it would be nothing if not highly skittish. He plunged furiously onward, once wading through a bog that reached up his waist to his chest, then his neck, then to his very chin. You couldn’t swim through a bog, he knew. It was too thick, too dense with organic components. But it wasn’t quicksand, either, fighting to drag you down.

Out of breath, muscles aching, he flailed at a protruding root, got a grip, and pulled himself out. Just ahead the akialoa sang on, its song bright and strong.

Broken branches and thorns tore at his rain gear, at the sweatshirt beneath, and finally at his exposed skin. He ignored it all just as he ignored the profound dampness, just as he ignored the waning light. Dimly he realized that it would be impossible for him to find his way back to the camp by nightfall. Concentrating as he was on listening for the bird, he had no time for mere personal concerns. But he was strong and experienced. He would find his way back tomorrow.

In the brief, bright, burning fury of discovery, he had forgotten about the cold.

There was just a light breeze, but once the sun went down it was enough to drive the chill through his flesh and into his very bones. At times, he found himself remembering from his reading, the temperature in the Alakai could drop to levels that approached freezing. Ordinarily that would not have mattered, despite his light attire—except for the fact that he was soaked to the skin. Curled by the side of a bog, he started shivering as soon as the sun disappeared completely. By the time it was dark he was trembling violently.

He had nothing to light a fire with, even if any of the sodden pulp that passed for wood around him could have been persuaded to nourish a spark. For a while he tried shouting, gave it up when he realized no one would dare come looking for him in the dark.

Eventually the shivering began to subside. He lay on his side, his breathing slow and shallow, realizing what was happening to him. All because he wanted to help a single, rare bird to survive. His greatest fear was not of death, but that no one else would come after him. The public would forget about the akialoa without dramatic rediscovery and intercession by trained ornithologists. Without the support of dedicated scientists like himself, there was no way the species could survive.

An eternity later he became feebly aware that the light around him was strengthening. Had the night passed so quickly? Or was his perception of time failing faster than his other senses? The omnipresent fog and drizzle prevented the sun from reaching the surface, from warming him. Closer to Heaven he might be, but here it was wet and gray.

Searching for more solid ground, he dragged himself with infinite patience away from the bog until his hand wrapped around something hard and almost dry. A solid piece of wood at last. But when he struggled to pull himself higher it came apart in his fingers. Blinking, he examined it weakly in the saturated light. It was not brown, but white. With a great effort he managed to raise his head.

Not one, but two deteriorating skeletons lay just above him, entangled in the trees where they had collapsed. Scraps of rotting, disintegrating clothing clung to the bone-white shoulders and hips. Like desiccated string, a few vestiges of tendons hung slack from the limbs. Exotic mosses and small ferns flourished in the vacant body cavities, having fed well on the now decomposed flesh.

Kinkaid, he thought. Masaki. Or maybe just a pair of disoriented, unlucky hikers. Without a detailed forensic analysis, there was no way to know. Had they been drawn here, too, by the song of the akialoa? Drawn to what? A nesting place, perhaps. Or maybe a courtship ground, where hopeful males displayed their most colorful feathers and warbled their most enchanting songs.

From somewhere very close by, an akialoa greeted the morning with the rarest song in the world.

Kinkaid, Masaki, and now him. Everything risked for fame and modest fortune. All to try to help a wonderful, unique bird, and all for naught. How ironic it was that a man should die of hypothermia in the midst of a swamp. He pushed on, staggering and falling, struggling to his feet, always following the song.

He did not know how much time had passed when the sun finally came out. The warmth was as unexpected as it was welcome. With dryness came a rush of renewed strength and determination. Knowing he ought to turn back, he pushed on. Not the wisest of decisions, perhaps, but having come this far and endured so much, he felt he had no choice.

Then he saw them.

They were perched in a cluster of trees green with epiphytes and bromeliads, bejeweling the branches with the brilliance of their plumage. His jaw dropped in wonderment. A pair of black momo sat preening themselves, their own shorter sickle-bills digging parasites from beneath their wings. Nearby, a flock of greater amahiki chattered away like so many lime-green mockingbirds. With its thick, heavy beak, a greater koa finch was plucking caterpillars from the trunk of an isolated tree, while overhead a trio of o‘o‘ flashed their extraordinary tail feathers and brilliant gold wing tufts. Crow-sized kioea yelled at diminutive red-and-gray ula-ai-hawane. It seemed as if all the extinct, beautiful birds of Hawaii had gathered in this one place, just waiting for the sun to come out in the Alakai. Waiting for him.

Then he heard the song again, and there they were. Not one, not two, but three pairs cavorting in the tree directly ahead of him, singing their approval of the rare appearance of the sun. The males were seven to seven and a half inches long, bright olive-yellow above and yellow below, the gray-green females slightly smaller. And those amazing, astonishing bills, unequaled anywhere in the kingdom of birds. There was a nest, too. Hearing the peeping of chicks, he hardly dared to breathe. Ever so slowly, he reached for his camera.

It wasn’t there. He must have dropped it while running and slogging through the swamp, he realized. No matter. With such a sight as no ornithologist of his generation could dare to dream of spread out before him, it was enough simply to sink to his knees and stare, and stare. Spreading his arms out to his sides, he drank in the sight and the sun. And smiled.

Sanchez wasn’t with the search party that stumbled across Loftgren’s body early the following year, but Fanole was. The guide recognized the remnants of the ornithologist’s boots as he rechecked his group’s position on the new GPS he carried. He had to check it three times. Each time, his amazement grew. Without food or proper clothing, the haole researcher had somehow made it halfway up the side of Mount Waialeale itself.

Two of the Forest Service rangers on expedition with the guide peered over his shoulder. “Know him?”

Fanole nodded, resting an arm across one thigh. “Bird prof. Went running off into the depths by himself last year. His graduate student and I spent a day searching for him before we turned and got out. Barely made it.” He thought back. “That was two days before Tropical Storm Omolu hit the island.”

“Poor son-of-a-bitch.” The taller ranger wiped moisture from his face beneath the rain hood. “What a way to die.”

“I dunno.” His companion cocked his head slightly to one side. “He looks kind of peaceful to me.”

Fanole grunted, straightened. “We’ll have to mark the location. Another crew can haul out the body.”

“That’s for sure.” The first ranger started to turn away, hesitated, looked back and frowned. “What’s that he’s holding in his right hand?”

The other ranger squinted. Fanole had already started back toward their bivouac. “Plant stuff. Fern leaf, I think. I don’t guess that he’s holding anything. Fingers contracted while dying.” He sighed and shook his head sadly. “Rigor mortis.”

Still, the taller man hesitated. Then he shrugged and started after his companion. “Funny. For just a second there I thought they were feathers.”