When Jonathan Pasley was six years old, his grandfather placed him in the middle of a circle of stones. The circle was set up like a clock face, with one stone at each hour of the clock. His grandfather handed Jonathan an old fly rod with a lead weight at the end of the line.
"Here," his grandfather said. "When you can touch the weight to each of those points in succession without missing, you'll be good enough to go fishing with me."
It took Jonathan two years to master his grandfather's test. These days, there's no point on a trout stream, no matter how shrouded in brambles or blasted by winds, that Jonathan can't reach with a flick of his rod. He'd tell you it's that skill — plus a great deal of patience and persistence — that earned him the position of resident fishing guide and all-around expert on the outdoors at Christchurch's Clearwater Resort. I'd add that he's a natural entertainer, one with a gift for telling stories and crafting metaphors that most of the people in my writing program would envy.
"Just let the tip of your rod go back and forth, like you were raving a banner for your Boston Red Sox," he tells me, as the long white line snaps back and forth above my head like a whip. He believes he can make a fisherman out of anyone, whether he's taking the head of New Zealand's PGA Tour on a helicopter fishing expedition to some uncharted part of the South Island or helping an uncoordinated writer learn to cast in a little pond beside the resort golf course.
Back at the clubhouse, drinking coffee in front of the fire, he tells me his version of the one that got away. "A buddy of mine had been fishing this area of the lake all morning, hadn't caught a thing," he says. "I tell him I want to try this one little area.
'It's fished out,' he says. But I tell him I'm going to try it anyway, and sure enough as soon as my line's in the water I've got one on there. He's mad as hell and tells me he's going to land it — it's not time yet, but he's out there in the water with the net between his legs..."
And here Jonathan demonstrates how the fish swam through his friend's legs, and the friend somersaulted in the water, losing net, line, fish and quite a lot of dignity. I'm laughing so hard I almost miss one of the women at the reception desk asking me how my evening went.
"It was fantastic," I manage, and then I'm telling Jonathan about how I'd spent the evening getting a backstage tour at the Willowbank Animal Reserve.
My guide, Bruce, had studied falconry in his native Zimbabwe before moving his family to New Zealand about six years ago. Since hunting with falcons is illegal here, he signed on as a bird wrangler and animal expert at Willowbank. He took me through one of the aviaries where a flock of keas — alpine parrots — settled around us, perching on our shoulders and poking at our hands for food.
Keas have a way of looking at you that's more like a monkey than any bird I've ever seen. They're so intelligent that many Maori tribes refused to eat them, believing that the spirits of relatives who had done something wrong in this life might inhabit a bird in the next. They're known for stripping the rubber off the windshield wipers of tourists who park in the highlands.
"That's right," Jonathan laughs, as I tell him about the keas. "There's nothing in New Zealand that'll hurt you, so sometimes when I've been up in the high country, I've gone up into a tussock to have a sleep, and the keas will pull the laces right out of my hiking boots."
Bruce introduced me to the blue duck and the tuatara, the only living member of an ancient order of reptiles ("and one that gives a nasty bite," he said, rubbing his hand). Then it was time for the main event.
We walked through a huge indoor chamber lined with brush and lit by little colored floodlights. Along either side of the path, things that looked like chubby, fluffy pincushions with soda-straw beaks ran about, poking in the leaves for a moment and scuffling away.
"That one's always been special to me," Bruce says, pointing out one of the kiwis. "I came up on her mother thinking she was about to lay, and I caught the egg just as it came out of her. I was there when it hatched," he says, and I can hear the pride in his voice.
We leave the compound, and he takes me to another part of the preserve. He's spent the afternoon cutting down pussy willow trees — he calls them "weeds" — and is about to re-introduce the birds he had to relocate during the work. Two of them are kiwis. He lifts one of them out of the box. I ask if I can pet it, and he nods.
Its feathers don't feel like feathers, or like the hair of a mammal, but something in between. I stroke it with one hand while it sniffs at the other, and then Bruce puts it down and it scampers away.
"Petting a kiwi," Jonathan says, as I finish my story. "I wish I'd have been there. I've never done that before."
We shake hands warmly and go our separate ways, each of us convinced he is the man with the greatest job in the world.
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