Flights of fancy

Peter Walker cleverly weaves Arabian tales, early Chinese and Persian voyages, eccentric amateur fossil hunters and a colonialist hardman” into one intriguing story.

- CHRIS MOORE

There once was a time when no thinking person with any claim to being a true intellectual would be without a personal collection of objects biological, zoological or palaeontological, each labelled, catalogued and housed in cabinets of curiosities.

Peter Walker has resurrected this notion in his own literary cabinet. The time has come, he suggests in this intriguing new book, to talk of many things. But instead of cabbages, kings and sealing wax, the returned expat author (The Fox Boy, The Courier's Tale) and journalist focuses his attention on a single fabled creature, one that casts a long shadow throughout the book's myriad twists and turns. The extinct Haast's eagle, Harpagornis moorei, Te Hōkioi, the largest eagle known to have existed, hovers over these pages as it once did from its eyrie in the South Island mountains. With a wing span of 2-3 metres and a body weight of up to 15kg, the formidable hunter preyed on the much larger but flightless moa placidly browsing below. Te Hökioi, also known as Te Pouakai, is thought to have evolved from smaller species of eagles 1.8 million to 700,000 years ago. By the early 15th century, it was extinct, alongside the moa, but it had survived long enough to encounter (and probably alarm) the first Polynesian settlers of Aotearoa, stamping itself into their psyches. European arrivals later dismissed these stories as a folk myth -until the discovery of a small piece of Te Hōkioi that changed everything.