Rowi, Okarito Kiwi

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An excerpt from Janet Hunt's book;

A Bird in the Hand

No-one sees the killer moving through the bush at nightfall, her nose and whiskers twitching, her eyes bright. She is chestnut-brown, soft and lithe,  a stoat with five kittens waiting in her nest. Like them, she is beginning to starve.

Last year, there was a burst of rimu fruit. Rats bred in their thousands and life was good, but this year the rats have gone and she is desperate. She flows over and under fallen logs like a snake, until she comes to a recently cut track. She follows it along the bank of a small creek towards the hills.

The young Rowi is just waking. He is only five months old but has been on his own for weeks, hiding in burrows by day, feeding by night.

He steps into damp forest leaves and searches for worms and grubs, sniffing and snorting as he plunges his long beak into the soft soil.

Suddenly he stops. His keen ears have heard the softest of sounds, a faint snap, but he is not sure where the danger is.

Five metres away, the stoat is confused. She can smell the Rowi but there is something else - rat. She has come to a rectangular wooden box partly hidden by branches. Her nose twitches. She starts to salivate. There is a stoat size hole atone end of the box- a tunnel. Her eyes gleam. Stoats love tunnels. She goes in.

Inside the stench of decaying rat is overpowering. There's a stick lying sideways across the middle of the tunnel but she can see the rat shape on the other side. She lightly steps over the stick and comes down on the spring-plate of a Fenn trap. There's a muffled bang as the steel jaws slam shut, breaking her back and killing her instantly.

The little Rowi hears the bang and now he can smell the stoat. He hurries into his burrow and stays very still before coming out to feed again.

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