RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33424, 4 January 1974, Page 12

RANDOM REMINDER

THE CURSE OF THE COAST

West Coast pubs are not the only things active late at night over there. They have whistling frogs in the bogs, mosquitoes to keep you active while the sandflies asleep, moreporks, opossums and many other things that go bump in the night. And they can migrate. A Christchurch couple, terribly home and garden, visited the Coast for the week-end and were impressed by the vast amount of native bush clothing the ranges. How nice, they thought, to transplant a tiny section — it would, they reckoned, never be missed — in their garden at home. So they took a spade they had thoughtfully packed from the boot of their car. dug up a selection of seedlings, covered the roots in moss and packed them away. Their eye was caught, too, by the pungas. How stately, how splendid, how easily transplanted. And in no time two pungas, destined

for a shady corner of a Fendalton garden, were stacked into the boot too. By this time the boot was showing signs of botanical overcrowding, but they squeezed in their small suitcase and sleeping bags and set off home.- their green fingers itching. They got the trees and pungas planted and watered and stuffed the sleeping bags into a capacious wardrobe in their bedroom. But the Coast was about to exact a fearful revenge. From the sleeping bag it had exchanged for a less comfortable home in a punga crept a creature nearly three inches long, with even longer feelers and a formidable array of wellsprung hairy legs. It crept from the wardrobe, across the carpet, up the bedclothes and on to the exhausted form of the lady of the house. She muttered and brushed idly at it as it investigated her hair and face; but when it sought

warmer fields beneath her nightgown she woke. Rapidly.

Her husband says her scream lifted him three feet — horizontally. As •eyes opened he observed a discarded nightgown flying across the room and what appeared to be a whirling dervish clambering on to the dressing table. The light and a hunt went on and after a frantic search, directed by a naked but unembarrassed wife, he managed to swat the creature with a slipper and persuaded her to return to bed. But wetas are made of sterner stuff. In the morning, it had gone, perhaps only to crawl away to die, but perhaps to return. The uncertainty has them worried. They have vacuumed the room, searched every nook and cranny and considered calling in the fumigation boys. And while the Curse of the Coast hangs over them, they are sleeping in the sunroom.