One Helicopter at a Time
At eighty-five hundred feet at five-thirty in the morning, the air was clear, the temperature in the forties. Horseflies for once did not buzz my ears. Here, dawn did not simply happen: a rolling wash of silent clouds heralded its arrival. The first ribbons of light warmed an 'ama'u fern, fanned out in yellow rays. The heavy night sky lightened to gray and then to magenta. From somewhere in the crater, nene geese honked at the transformation. This place was truly the House of the Sun.
I looked south at Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island. Their summits rose above the clouds, twin islands in birth. In my hand, I held an ancient ulumaika, the Hawai˙ian bowling stone. The sun felt good on my face. I put the stone in my backpack, checked for my breakfast apple and then picked up my rifle.
Already, the fire team was in position. We were concealed in the rocks above, anticipating the command to commence fire. I switched my rifle safety on and then off as the goats fed into the valley. The hundred or so goats in the theater remained unaware of the rifles surrounding them. Our National Park Service team worked the east rim of HaleakalŞ; eight members pushed the herds towards prearranged spots where the seven "guns" waited. Starting at seven thousand feet elevation, the "drivers" had hiked from the sub-alpine tree line to the barren rim. Behind me, the inside rim dropped off; nearly sheer for a hundred feet. Not humanly traversable, it did offer freedom for the goats.
I looked over a rock formation that formed a natural funnel thirty yards wide by eighty yards long. Where it narrowed, at the end where I'd planted my butt, the funnel measured about fifteen yards wide. It was my job to secure this escape route. My extra ammunition, loaded into stripper clips of five rounds each, gleamed from several rocks nearby. I removed my jacket; the temperature had risen into the lower fifties. Still cold, but I needed my arms free.
The air, stained red from the volcanic fog from Mauna Kea warmed; clouds receded to a lower altitude and what little mist remained clung to the pukiawe shrubs, then began to lift and dissolve. Without the fog, the goats would soon discover the trap. Not only with their eyes, but with their noses – scents earlier disguised in the moisture would announce us in the erratic wind.
I could hear the drone of helicopters far away. The goats, also noticing the intrusion, moved closer together. I stared at the radio, swiped my hand across my jeans. Nineteen animals were within a hundred-fifty yards. And although no goat had sounded an alarm, three nannies with keiki, stood erect, their noses sniffing the air.
Gunfire erupted from less than a mile away. The goats ran from my right to my left side, away from what sounded like thunder. As they ran, they herded. I raised my rifle and shot the two animals nearest me, only forty yards out. They fell immediately.
The pack was not yet tightly grouped. They ran towards me. A nanny ran for the edge, knowing I could not follow if she cleared the pali. As she led the herd, my crosshairs searched out her shoulder. I fired; she died. An adolescent billy, to the right and slightly in front of her, also fell. He stumbled back to his feet and tried to keep pace with the others that raced by. I did not waste another bullet on the billy. There were many other animals; the billy, his hip fractured, couldn't run.
Without the alpha female to lead them, several animals in the pack panicked, turned around and ran away from the safety of the pali. They bolted past the dead nanny and the wounded male. Others stopped and looked about, their eyes wide. Bleating filled the air.
I slid my rear end a fraction to the left, repositioning my body and rifle towards the eight goats that still ran for the edge. Twelve seconds later, the two nearest me writhed in the dust. My rifle ran out of bullets. I marked the positions of the six goats sprinting towards me as I thumbed the five rounds off the stripper clip into my rifle's magazine.
A kid weighing at most thirty pounds led the herd. Although the reload had taken just four seconds, I had only enough time for one shot. At such close range, the keiki appeared as a blur of motion. I tracked the crosshairs in front of the blur and pulled the trigger; the small animal flew with the impact. Five goats made it past me, over the edge to freedom. Fired cases gathered at my feet.
Seven goats remained in the opposite end of the funnel. The billy crippled in the initial dash continued to cry. Broken, it pulled itself forward with its front legs, then tumbled into a small crevice. Changing target, I shot the dark brown nanny climbing up the north wall of the funnel with her kid. Her body tumbled down but the kid escaped my line of sight. All the other goats had fled.
I reloaded the rifle again, leaned it against my daypack. The rifle's barrel burned my palm. From halfway across the funnel, the billy cried. Surprised he had dragged himself that far, I stood, fanned my fingers several times and picked up the rifle. Marching towards the sound, I forced the scorched air into my lungs. It tasted like copper.
As he sensed my approach, the animal stopped crying. I slowed, tracked the blood to the tan and white billy. I stood ten yards to its left; we regarded one another. The billy tried to stand but its broken hip did not cooperate. He collapsed, cried one long bleat: Baah!
I raised my rifle and the animal stopped crying. I smelled the urine the billy had sprayed itself with. My shot resonated. Pau, I wiped my hands on my jeans, turned around and walked back to my breakfast.
Feral Ungulate Invasion
Haleakala Crater sits atop the island of Maui like a demi-god. In it live plants and animals found nowhere else in the world: Hawaiian tussock grass, one of the few tropical subalpine grasslands on earth, the once close-to-extinct Hawaiian nÂn goose and the crater's signature plant, the silversword, emblem of Haleakala. Introduced feral goats also live in the crater, twenty-five years ago numbering in the tens of thousands. Goats breed prolifically, often bearing twins. Lacking natural predators, they are controlled only by human intervention. In the years prior to 1980, these "non-indigenous lifeforms" threatened to devour endangered flora, particularly the silversword, favoring its succulent silver rosettes.
The ambitious National Park Service plan to minimize this threat consisted of two actions: 1) encircle the entire crater rim with a four foot high fence and 2) eradicate those animals that remained in the enclosure. The first part could be done with a small core of paid specialists, many volunteers and about one million dollars. The second, the eradication, required more money, a lot of ammunition, twenty or so repeat "game control deputies" and strong coordination organizing the "drives." Deny entry, destroy all resident animals and there should be no problem; or so the twofold attack worked in theory.
Hawai'i shares with other isolated land masses a fragile ecosystem. The islands' history is one of invasion and extinction, both in flora and fauna. In Hawaii: The Islands of Life, author Gavan Daws reports that, although Hawai'i contributes only 0.2 percent to the United States' land mass, nearly three-quarters of the extinct plants and birds have gone extinct there. Also, 27.9 percent of the plants and birds considered endangered live, but do not thrive, on those islands.
Certain valleys do not contain any indigenous plants at all, having been deforested by more aggressive species. So dependent on isolation as its defense, and because Hawai'i lacked large mammals, the tart akala raspberry bears no thorns. Kikuyu grass, introduced from Africa, carpets much of Maui's upcountry. Shimmering in the wind like wheat, the emerald grass is beautiful, but deadly. It robs native plants of moisture, preventing them from germinating.
The invasion struck other islands too. On Hawai'i, the Big Island, mouflon, introduced from Asia, and their feral sheep progeny, threatened to destroy the habitat of the palila, Hawai˙i's honeycreeper. Living only in the summit cinderlands of Maui and Hawai˙i, the bird requires the mamane tree to endure. Mamane do not fare well where mouflon thrive. In order to protect these plants, thereby protecting the palila, the Sierra Club sued the state. In response, the state first extended the hunting season and then, initiated a feral sheep eradication program on Mauna Kea.
The feral sheep program on the Big Island offered two bonuses over Maui and their goat problem: the sheep hunting area could be accessed by vehicle and the prey was considered a prize, the meat delicious. Unfortunately for Maui, goat was lowest on the local game meat food chain and, more critically, a hunter had available only the options of riding his horse into the crater's backcountry or walking. Either way, the trip required at least two days and the resolve to trek over "non-maintained" trails. If he were afoot, the high altitude and fifteen-hundred feet in two miles might present a problem, especially considering that the hunter had probably carried in, at a minimum, three gallons of water.
Initially, most people deputized to hunt in the crater did so to acquire goat meat. So, in addition to the twenty-four pounds of water he had carried in, a hunter could then look forward to packing out the twenty or so pounds of goat meat another twelve miles over loose golf ball to softball sized rocks that bruised insteps and twisted ankles.
Without adequate game management resources, as in developing trails to allow better access, hunting for private consumption exerted little pressure on the goat population. By 1980, the goats, and the tropical rainforest's bane, the pua'a, Hawaiian for "pig," had multiplied incessantly, eating everything. From a helicopter, the goat herds we flew over looked like black armies, their numbers in the hundreds. Several plant species would become extinct.
At this time in my life, I had been unofficially involved with the firearms training program for the State's Division of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR). Several of my closest friends worked for that division's Department of Conservation and Resource Enforcement (DOCARE). Candy, the full-time conservation officer on Lana'i, would soon switch government agencies to the National Park. I had hunted with him previously and had accompanied him on several DOCARE patrols. When Candy began work for the National Park they asked him to recruit "guns" for the systematic eradication of all "non-indigenous lifeforms" in Haleakala. My career killing goats and pigs began a week after Candy contacted me.
The National Park Strikes Back
I have slept on the mountain, flown in a helicopter over some of the most diverse, rugged moonscapes in Hawai˙i, and been deposited on a summit where I couldn't otherwise go. I have also awakened to clump grass glistening in the mist, heard the wind keen through the mŞmane, and trekked into a rainforest thick with the smell of ginger, the humidity earthy on my skin. But the destruction caused by the pua'a slapped me each time I found it. Entire hapu'u tree fern groves would lay destroyed at my feet, the pigs' diggings resembling an overexcited backhoe. Erosion quickly followed. Water, even out of running streams, could not be drunk unless the drinker desired E. coli, a bacterial infection that most often required hospitalization.
Goats did not defoliate an area as strikingly as the pua'a but the goats themselves were much more obvious. On the rim where many of the drives were conducted, they had had little interaction with man, so had little fear of us and were visible nearly everywhere you looked. Or waited. I heard goats a dozen times more frequently than human conversation. Goat shit kept me company when I ate my poi and pipikaula.
Horseflies also joined me during the hunts. Fat, green-eyed, and aggressive, they landed on the sandwich in my hand, buzzed my ass when nature called, and flew into the bullet entry hole ten minutes after the host was shot. Shot, but not necessarily killed. The flies sometimes backed out of the wound drunk and bloody, attacking whoever stood near.
Still, I couldn't blame the flies. Goat carcasses bloated like overripe fruit in the sun wherever we, my fellow hunters and I, traveled. The goats we killed became less than meat, litter no one picked up. Because of logistical problems, whatever we shot was left to rot. At eighty-three hundred to nine thousand foot elevation and with cloud cover infrequent, the early processing took only a few days. Bloated stomachs exploded within a week, slime banquets for the horseflies.
The stink became a health hazard. We could hunt an area for three days, then needed to move on. Drives usually lasted a week, after which we avoided the goat killing fields for about a month. Exposure quickly broke the bodies down and, if the remains lay near enough to the forests, the pigs gorged themselves on goat. Many skeletons, scattered hooves, bore gnaw marks.
Redevelopment Costs
In the night, when the owl is less than exquisitely swift and perfect, the scream of the rabbit is terrible. But the scream of the owl, which is not of pain and hopelessness, and the fear of being plucked out of the world, but of the sheer rollicking glory of the death-bringer, is more terrible still. – Mary Oliver, Owls
Once, thirteen years ago, I hiked through Haleakala Crater. Early that Friday afternoon, the day I was to meet three friends that evening at the Waikamoi Preserve in the Koolau Gap for an overnight camp, I walked into a small herd of goats just off the non-maintained trail. Although not on a "drive," I killed maybe three of them. Because it was a short trip, I carried a meat sack; I would carry out the meat the next day. I approached the most easily reached carcass, lay my rifle and backpack on the ground, and drew out my knife. When I touched the nanny, I realized she bore keiki. The National Park considered it a bonus to kill a hapai –a pregnant – nanny. Regardless what it looked like, I had not killed this nanny because she was pregnant.
Trying to avoid looking at her belly as I removed the backstraps from her spine, I did not pay attention to the blade in my hand. The steel encountered an unexpected texture, slipped through her fur and slashed the first joint of the index finger on my left hand. Before the blade finished its stroke, I felt it touch bone. I watched, fascinated, as the finger flashed white, as if the finger itself had fainted, for that instant before the fatty tissue opened, blushed with blood.
That Friday, I considered the pain fortunate. It woke me, brought me temporarily back into the crater. But I lost something there. Perhaps those animals fleeing on three legs stole it. Or perhaps I lost sight of it among the eyes that searched the lava frozen in the moonlight. Sometimes desire strokes me and I dig out that knife. When kids shoot other kids because they cannot otherwise voice their rage. And we ask why. Then the killings return like a dream.
And maybe it isn't possible to stand close to murder piled on murder and not be touched by it. – Stephen King, Weiskopf from Apt Student
When I shot feral ungulates in the crater, I had the noblest of intentions. The Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club and the National Park knew the killings needed to be done. Even the local hunters agreed, although grudgingly. Yet, to a man, everyone involved in the slaughter could see the changes it effected: unusually quiet moments, staring at our spare ammunition, crying. Unable to articulate it, we simply piled up the body count, laughing at the numbers. In three minutes, I myself had killed seventeen goats off the sheer face – the pali – of the inside west rim of Kaupo Gap. Or the one afternoon I left sixty-eight carcasses rotting just east of the summit of Hanakauhi.
It isn't that I regret what I did or feel guilty about the killings. Someone had to do it. I could not make an educated guess how many animals we eradicated. Nor do I believe I want to know. Somewhere between what my mind could rationalize and what my emotional being could accept, a gap existed. Even today the two halves within me cannot find resolution; maybe none exists. I consider myself one of the better adjusted.
At four in the afternoon on the day after I put the billy out of its pain, I walked back to the camp I shared with D.V., another hunter who had been recruited by the National Park. A recent transplant from the mainland, he had mostly hunted animals before to sustain his meat freezer. On Halloween morning, I woke up to find D.V. painting his face black and orange in a random pattern. As he left the tent armed with his rifle, he sang, "Gonna have me a good time, gonna have me a real good time."
On the way back to the camp, I shot the four goats I found on the inside face of the west rim. Like my morning kills, I recorded these in my National Park Service log. Half a mile from camp, I found a goat's severed head set on a rock. Horseflies exited its mouth. Someone had wedged a stone into the mouth.
When I tried to free the puck-sized rock, flies buzzed off the goat's neck bone, clung to my arm. I finally broke the stone free and threw it into the crater. Horseflies immediately reentered the mouth, landed on the goat's tongue. I looked fifty yards in all directions but I couldn't locate the animal's body. The goat's head had been carried a long way. For some reason I cannot remember, I sat next to the head and preoccupied myself with the flies buzzing my face. Although I expected him to, D.V. did not jump out, laughing, from the grove of ama'u ferns nearby.
I arrived in camp forty-five minutes later. I heard a nanny bawling from somewhere in the valley to my left. Fifteen minutes later, a shorter bleat followed by a shot confirmed the kid had found its mother one last time. We'd been taught that, if a wounded nanny cried, its kid often would return. This time, however, no second shot came. Another fifteen minutes and the wounded animal still complained.
A "driver," D.V. approached me. A cigarette hung out the right side of his mouth. "You see my goat's head?" he smirked.
"Yup," I replied, "can't miss it."
"Figured these stupid things might catch the hint." He took a drag on the cigarette, watched his fingers tap the ashes onto the cinder. "Stay the fuck out of here."
"D.V., what's happening down there? The nanny's been crying for over an hour."
"I baited the keiki back. Finally got him."
"Yeah, I heard the shot. But why didn't someone kill the mother?" I knew that D.V. alone had been in the valley.
He placed his hand on my shoulder. "That's the sound of the forest regenerating itself."
I tried to look at D.V.'s face but the sun had already sunk below the crater rim. He withdrew his hand from my shoulder, the glow of his cigarette growing brighter. The nanny lasted until a little before eleven. After she quieted, only D.V.'s snoring disturbed the tent.