At first he’d sort of disappeared for a few years – he’d ‘gone bush’, been in a shearing gang and been ‘down south’. But by late 1942 the hunt for Les was in full swing. Police memos noted his distinctive height and appearance (he was well over 6ft), and letters went back and forth between the police and the army. Les was finally arrested in January 1945 in Blenheim and was imprisoned for two months for using a false name and another two for failing to report.

I also tracked down Les’ granddaughter, Sue Pulman, who told me he’d been an adept bushman and self-sufficient at living off hunting and fishing. 

“Les would ride his bicycle up to the bushline, hide it in the scrub and then hike, usually one or two days, to one of his huts,” she said. “There were two or three huts, all a good couple of days’ hike from each other.” 

Merv’s file was stamped with a large, scarlet brand: ‘Conscientious Objector. Refuses to take oath’. An irate local had penned several complaints: ‘Do you think it’s fair that other mothers and fathers have to part with their sons, as I did, with three of mine, to fight for the likes of this Mr Bergersen who’s had his freedom for a year and [is] still having it? If it’s good enough for other boys and wives’ husbands, it’s good enough for him.’ 

There’s a famous photo of conscientious objectors during WWII, snapped at Hautu Detention Camp near Tūrangi. Nine men smile at the camera, which is separated from its subjects by close rows of barbed wire. The men look like a rag-tag bunch. Some are shirtless in the heat; one has a long beard. Behind them are small huts, road-worker style, with shared facilities and presumably no insulation. It would have been freezing in winter. 

Merv’s son Jeff told me he once showed his father the photo. Merv had looked at it for a while then pointed to each man in turn and named every one. 

“How do you know all that?” Jeff asked.

“Because I was there,” Merv said.

In 2006 Merv was suffering ill health and Jeff resigned from his job to spend more time with him. They’d sit in the sun and chat. In 2007 Jeff got a computer and introduced Merv to the internet. “I pulled up the subject of the conscientious objectors’ movement in New Zealand,” Jeff told me. “My father didn’t openly profess to be a conscientious objector – it was just circumstance – and because of his manner, he didn’t make any protest or any attempt to front up to conscription.”

I couldn’t fathom how something like compulsory service would fly in a modern environment, and said as much to Jeff. 

“Trying to understand what happened with those generations, what they went through and how it affected families, it’s hard for newer generations now to appreciate how things went down. There are others who won’t talk about it because of the stigma. It took a bit of chiselling to get info out of him.”

Needle in a haystack

I found a description of Les’s main hut while rifling through material at Ohakune Library one day. Tramper Ashley Cunningham had collated a book of historical information, including photographs, and donated it to the library in the 1980s. He’d been to the hut just a few months after Les was captured. 

“We delighted in the workmanship of it,” he wrote. “It was built of kaikawaka, broadaxed so perfectly that the timbers and woodwork seemed almost to be sawn.” 

By 1949 Les’s broadaxe had disappeared and the hut had begun to degrade. In 1987, Cunningham’s last trip to the hut, he found it challenging to locate because of the changing environment. “The hut had been reduced to scraps of decaying wood, and some old corrugated iron.”

I wanted to find the hut and hassled my old mate Papa Smurf to join me, luring him in with occasional tales of the Bergersens until he finally relented and drove over from Hawke’s Bay for a mission. The Smurf had long been involved in LandSAR, and now that he was retired he was regularly chasing kiwi in the Kaweka as part of a tracking programme. Not only was he admirably fit for an old bugger, he was also adept at moving swiftly and stealthily through the bush. 

We walked up Mangawhero River, Papa Smurf finding animal tracks on the sides and moving far faster than me, and we got onto a sort of terrace between two tributaries. I noticed he made almost no noise as he slipped through the trees, like fingers of fog swirling across the landscape. I turned back and looked at my other mate Pete, who’d also come along. “It’s like he can smell it, eh?” I said. “Years of experience.”

Pete nodded. “I can see why you wanted him to come.” In contrast to Papa Smurf, Pete is a larger-format human and often had to do combat with fallen branches rather than duck under them, but he didn’t complain. I recalled a scene in Barry Crump’s book Wild Pork and Watercress in which young Ricky Baker realises he’s learning how to weave his way through ferns, vines and branches. His Uncle Hec had chastised him: “If you try to break off every twig and fern that gets in your way, you’ll be worn away long before you’ve made any impression on the Urewera.” I reckoned Papa Smurf was Uncle Hec in real life, only without the child welfare issues and police involvement. 

We split up and conducted grid searches, staying within calling distance, but without result. Papa Smurf asked a question he should have asked some time ago. “What exactly are we looking for? Is the hut still standing?” I realised I’d failed to include some critical information: that the ‘hut’ was mere scraps on the ground, if that. 

Papa Smurf didn’t care that I’d conned him into a wild goose chase; any mission was a good mission. We concluded that everything had probably got covered up during the four decades since anyone was last known to have been in there. 

We had two needles, good, strong needles, but a very large and unwieldy haystack. 

I tracked down Kaye Rabarts and David Wilton, two researchers and volunteers who had been to two Bergersen hut sites in 2008, and they offered more concrete intel. “Bear in mind it’s just a scatter of overgrown rubble lying on the ground,” Wilton warned. 

Rubble was enough for me. Pete and I went back for another go in spring. It took us 40 minutes to wind our way up the overgrown river. We pushed up to a terrace, 10m above the stream, and there it was. There it was! 

Corrugated iron rose out of the ground, interspersed with plainly broadaxed planks, so cleanly hewn that they could have been cut yesterday. An old beer flagon stuck out of the dirt. I spotted a door hinge and a pile of stones almost entirely covered in moss. 

We were about to leave when I looked down at my feet. Unthinkably, there on the ground was the head of an axe. I picked it up, its heft weighing on my hands. Les’s axe – or one of them, anyway. Probably used to split firewood rather than craft the hut, but still, a sign of the strong, talented craftsman who built the structure. 

Diary of a bushman

Les and Merv were both habitual diary keepers, documents the families still hold. 

In early 2025 I managed to meet up with Les’s granddaughter, Sue Pulman, during a holiday road trip. I wanted to return the axe head to the family, and she showed me her grandfather’s diaries, written in a neat, quick hand. 

They’re a gripping read. Les records several close calls where he nearly got caught and had to hide in long grass until darkness fell. He was supported by a couple of close friends whom he trusted and relied on for help. ‘What a beautiful world this would be if the masses were to see, believe and act as my friends do,’ he wrote. ‘Help one another. All men equal, no race or class distinction and no war.’

Les wrote of telling his son he had to leave again; he told him that either he had to head off to go shearing or go to war and kill some other little boy’s daddy. His son cried. 

“If he only listens like he did tonight and takes heed of what I tell him in regard to war he will never don the khaki and cause sorrow and grief to millions.”

Sue told me Les had actually tried to get his memoirs published but was declined and told nobody would be interested in reading about his life. 

I like to think that Les is looking down now, gratified that he’s finally in print – not just in a magazine but also in a book, where his chapter takes pride of place as one of the most fascinating hidden stories on Ruapehu. 

This is an edited chapter from Hazel’s book Fire & Ice, published by Massey University Press. Subscribers can purchase the book at a 10% discount.