1874 - Kennaway, L. J. Crusts: A Settler's Fare due South. [Capper reprint, 1970] - [Pages 31-60]

       
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  1874 - Kennaway, L. J. Crusts: A Settler's Fare due South. [Capper reprint, 1970] - [Pages 31-60]
 
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[Pages 31-60]

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own Washerwoman. However little he may know about soda, or clothes-lines, or crimping, or Italian irons, or blue, he must himself plunge, mentally and practically, into a sea of uncertainty and soapsuds; and in many cases which I have seen, he has done this so utterly wrongly, and so hopelessly badly, that to look at him is really perfectly weepable. "The things,"-- instead of coming in folded-smoothed, and aired, --being first scrubbed and worried in half cold and entirely hard water, screwed up and wrung out with a most unmitigated wrench, and then stuck about upon thorns and bushes, wrinkled up and withered, looking like ghosts of departed garments, suffering under eternal rheumatism.

It is therefore an era, when time having brought civilisation, civilisation (bearing as her arms and shield a wash-tub festooned with clothes'-lines) brings the great institution I have named. It is in short, an era indeed, when the settler ceases to be his own Washerwoman.

This era came to us twice; once during our third year on the river where we first pitched our Robinson Crusoe camp; and once during our sojourn on the forks of the Harketere; but for years after both these eras, it never came at all, and we continued weekly to dabble our nearer garments in a running stream, and to spread them, to bleach like sheepskins, on the railings of our stock-yard.

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About the first Washerwoman period, servants began to crop up and come into existence to some extent. They were an immense advantage and assistance; but occasional specimens were eccentric in the extreme.

Among many others, I remember one whom it is impossible to forget--an Irishwoman, good-hearted and willing, but knowing little more of civilised necessities than a Maori woman. Her husband worked on the farm: he wore the regulation battered black hat, and the real traditional patched and ragged coat, really and strictly with only one tail. Moreover, he smoked a short dodeen pipe, and kept a thoroughbred private shillelah in his clothes-box.

He was respectful, however, and good-natured in the extreme. One day we sent him to town--three miles--to get a pair of horses shod, and to bring back a couple of bottles of yeast. During the whole of his journey back, the mare he was leading would not lead; but dragged back, with her head in the air every minute: the horse he was riding boring steadily forward, regardless of Pat, the mare, and the bottles. He hadn't the ghost of a pocket about him into which to put the bottles, but held on, with the reins and a bottle in one hand, and the leading-halter and another bottle in the other. Every now and then the led mare would come to a dead stop, and Pat, carried back on his horse, would be nearly pulled apart by the dead drag upon his arms.

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The yeast, too, excited by the jolting, kept popping out the corks and oozing out all over him. It was a very hot day, and he got back in the last stage of botheration. Instead of being impudent and sulky, as many colonial servants would have been, and telling us we might get the next yeast ourselves, he respectfully placed the bottles on the ground, and wiping his head with his one coat-tail, merely said, "Arrah, yer honor, but I've had a power o' pother with them pottles."

His wife had two disadvantageous peculiarities. She nearly killed us with the unspeakable messes she prepared to represent food, and (for reasons which she never clearly explained) she would wear her night-cap all day long.

The long and short of the thing was, that we had to give them both notice to leave the very day they came into the house, and they took it as good naturedly as if we had given them five shillings and a new hat.


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Curfew without a Bell.

JULY (MID-WINTER), 1853.

AFTER some weeks of incessant storm and almost continuous floods of rain, we sat one night in our hut, one on each side of a wavering and rather feeble fire. Through the hut the wind hurried with a perpetual whistle which at times became almost a scream; while over the thin roof, close to our heads, the gale roared and raged as if it would sweep our intruding shanty from the plains. Our chimney, or rather smoke-hole, (for it was only ten feet high) was built of heavy earthen sods, and being broad and thick, was some two or three tons in weight. It had been drenched through and through during a wet, black winter, the Sou'-West storms beating full upon it. As we sat, greatly weary, after a hard and drenching day, and tired out with the incessant howling of the wind, the back of the fire-place suddenly bulged in against us, and the whole mass of the chimney itself fell, the next second, with a thundering boom, upon our flickering fire, and rolled in great earthy blocks out upon our hut-floor and ourselves. --The instant it

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was down, the wind tore into the hut through the open space with a sudden roar, --revengeful that it had been kept out so long; the rain lashed in with it almost horizontally, and as we had had no candle lighted, the burying of our lire left us in outer darkness; the first thing that became at length visible through the gap, being great grey volumes of clouds flying over the tops of the hills behind us, torn to pieces by the wind as they came.

Our curfew had been administered with a vengeance, and without a bell.


Hoarfrost Coverlet.

AT length, --when the spot upon which we had first pitched our camp upon the coast had been reduced from an utter wilderness to comparatively habitable order, --we started upon an expedition to get back into the interior, with a view of discovering, if possible, available sheep-country.

The expedition consisted of one old Colonial hand and myself, tolerably well mounted, and having with

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us provisions which, at a pinch, could be made to spread over a fortnight or three weeks. We struck away from the coast down the plains of the island, steering almost due south for two days: at the end of that time, we left all traces of civilisation behind us, and crossed a large, rapid river, which had hitherto almost entirely bounded the operations of the settlers.

This river, the Rakaia, was then--and has been nearly up to the present time--a great obstacle to the advance of the colonists into the interior: it cuts for itself, for nearly fifty miles, a straight course across the plains, from the base of the mountains to the sea, occupying, in some places, a bed a mile and a half in width, Fed from the glaciers of the Southern Alps, it pours down its bed a rapid and heavy body of water at all times, and is with difficulty fordable on horseback; but at uncertain times in the spring and summer, when the deep snow on the lower ranges is melted by heavy rains, it is flooded with great billows of rolling grey water, and becomes impassable, even by an elephant. The working of a boat is made exceedingly difficult and dangerous from the fact that its bed of loose shingle and boulder-stones is constantly shifting, and bars of sand and stone are thrown up weekly in new directions, cutting the channel up into a dozen different streams, more or less separated by banks of loose boulders.

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After crossing this river--not without risk of our lives, whatever they were worth--we took, as it were, the first turning to the right, and struck up towards the base of the mountains, inland, reaching on the fourth night a district which seemed likely to promise well for the object of our expedition. After fording our horses through another rapid river, the Harketere--not so large as the first, but similar to it--we rode up late in the evening into a wild tract of country altogether beyond the farthest back station, and as far as we could judge, from a rough knowledge of an unsurveyed country, uncovered by the claims of any previous explorer.

The sun had some time set, and the daylight was fast leaving us, as we rode up from the riverbed: so we pulled up our dripping horses at the very first spot which would give us a decent camping ground for the night, and prepared for a halt till the sun thought proper to come back from behind the mountain-tops again.

We had halted upon the exact spot shown on the cover of this book, and I make a note of this night, because--though we did not know it then--we were camped for the first time on a tract of country, of about thirty thousand acres, which we afterwards held for nearly eight years. We were within twelve miles of the base of an Alpine range of mountains, snow-topped: the plains about us had that tangled, ragged look which utterly unoccupied country

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has, and the climate, from elevation, was more severe than that which we had hitherto experienced, being, in fact, a second step in the gradations of the climate of the country.

It was a clear moonlight night, with a sharp, ringing white-frost setting in. We tethered our horses to large, deep-rooted tussocks of coarse grass, unstrapped each a pair of red blankets from our packs, and, rolled therein, --with our saddles for pillows, --lay down on the ground to sleep away the night.

There was nothing whatever in the shape of wood, within reach of our camp, which would enable us to make more than a few minutes' flash of fire, to boil a tin pot of tea; so that any idea of the traditional camp-fire was altogether out of the question.

I do not think any one knows what it is to be thoroughly and really cold to the bones, till he has slept out for a moonlight night on the ground, with one red blanket over him, and a sharp, keen frost gradually changing the red of the blanket to a crisp, glittering white. The old colonial hand who was with me shivered audibly, and notwithstanding the many nights of cold camping which followed, I still distinguish this one as pre-eminently below zero. Though we were dead tired, we could sleep but little; we lay awake and listened to the swamp-hens near us, calling monotonously hour after hour, --we could see the mountains, close above,

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glimmering with their white tops through the night, --we could hear the chilly rattle of the river we had crossed, as it rolled all night among the boulder-stones, --and we watched the cold, white moon, as the hours went, sinking slowly to the horizon. After a long time she sank very silently down to the edge of the plains, lingered for a moment, as if to take a last look at our camp, and then dropped altogether out of sight, leaving the night quite dark, and bitter cold. I need not tell you how we longed for morning, --how we tried to think we were warm, -- how we dozed and dreamt we were in the water on a winter's day, --and how slowly the morning came; and as grey streaks at last drew lines through- the darkness, how stiff and white everything began to show itself; the grass-blades (green and smooth last night), stiff and rough with rime, --a pool of water near us fastened over with starred ice, --the rough coats of our horses' backs white with hoarfrost, --and we ourselves like two white mounds upon a frosty, winter field. We did not need calling; before the earliest ground-lark on the plains gave a solitary morning chirp, we had thrown off our stiffened blankets, and were knocking the rime off what little sticks and twigs we could find to coax a fire into existence. The night, meanwhile, gradually paled away into grey morning, and at last above the plain the red edge of the sun rose slowly up, and day came back to us again, and we shivered

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as each new sensation of warmth ran through our bodies benumbed with cold; --in fact, for the first hour, we spoke very much as if we were walking organs on two legs, and somebody had pulled out the tremolo stop.

So passed my first night of eight years, in the forks of the Harketere.

After a pocket-knife meal of bread and mutton, which we had carried rolled up in our blankets, we saddled and mounted, and rode for three hours up through the forks of the river, examining closely the geography of the country, the character of the growth of grass, and the supply of timber, water, and shelter. By this time the sun was well up, and the frost having melted from the stiffened blades, we stopped on some good grass-country, and gave our horses two hours' feeding time: after this, we struck in zig-zag lines--for better examination of the country--up towards the mountains, the country being all level, but rough and tangled, with a strong growth of coarse tussocks, pampas-grass, snow-grass (similar to the pampas, but having a deep red tinge in the blade) and Spaniard or spear-grass, the latter growing in strong plants from one to four feet high, and being a perfect chevaux-de-frise of bristling green thorns, like porcupine quills. Notwithstanding the care with which our horses avoided them, their legs were bleeding freely all day, stuck in every direc-

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tion; and our own--for we frequently had to push through the worst places on foot--were so thickly stabbed that they ached for weeks afterwards.

By sundown, after a hard day, we reached the base of the mountains, and found the fork of the river crossed by a large dark forest of black birch, extending for thirty thousand acres, on the plain and up the hill-side, nearly to the snow level. Here we had for the night a most luxurious camp; we halted in a semi-circular bay of the forest, the dark line of the tree trunks edging the plain as regularly and symmetrically as in a park. We chose our lair for the night under a thickly branched birch tree, in the shadow of which it was already half night, --we collected a pile of dead fern for mattresses and coverlet, --lit a huge fire within safe distance of our camp, --sat down before it on a fallen tree, --boiled our tin pannikins of tea, --again attacked the bread and mutton with the miraculous appetite which exploring gives, --heaped more dead logs upon the fire, --finally, wedged ourselves in among our fern bedding, --and slept a sound, hard sleep, without dreams, till broad daylight, with the sun full up, awoke us to another morning.

It had been a keen frost again, though we had not felt it; but our horses, tethered to tufts of snow-grass, had had another hard night of it, and stood motionless, dreamily warming themselves into life in the rays of the morning sun. The forage on the

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spot was poor, and for their sakes we started, almost as soon as we had risen from our camp, halting at the first good grass for three hours' feeding.

This day, and the two or three following, we spent in farther examination of the country, and in satisfying ourselves of its extent, and capabilities for carrying stock and sheep; starting back at length for the coast, as rapidly as possible, in order to secure it by a formal application to the Land Commissioners.

With our return journey I shall not detain the reader: the first six hours were made through a dense fog which shut out all land-marks, and compelled us to steer by pocket-compass. We successfully re-crossed the large river I have named, and passed into the settled districts as quietly as possible, to avoid giving any clue to the direction whence we had come; lest some one who had not been at the risk and trouble of getting upon the country, should step in before us with a paper claim, and spoil our intended application.

On the morning following our return, we presented ourselves at the Office of the Crown Commissioner, and handed in an application, a copy of which I give here, as it shows the mode in which newly discovered country was then secured. It was worded as follows: --

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"We, the undersigned, hereby apply for forty thousand acres of country in the Province of Canterbury; bounded on the north, by the northernmost branch of the River Harketere--on the south, by a second branch of the same river--westward, by a black-birch forest and the base of the snowy ranges-- and eastward, to the extent required."

A License to occupy--conditional upon the necessary country eventually proving to exist on survey-- was granted us, but it was not till two years later that we were securely placed in possession.

On the boundaries and neighbourhood of our application becoming known, we were warned, on all sides, that the country was useless, that the climate was dangerously severe, and that, if we ever took stock into it, we should never get them out; but notwithstanding these ominous warnings, we stocked it with success, and held it for some years. It proved to be a most valuable run, and amply rewarded us for the time and exertion we had used in gaining and holding it.


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On the Road.

A FORTNIGHT later, a larger expedition, consisting of three hands and myself, left the coast to take delivery of a flock of a thousand sheep, not far from the Nelson, or northernmost boundary of the Province. Passing up the island through wild and hardly occupied country--alternately level and broken with rolling downs, and cut into, at intervals, by the usual treacherous and unbridged river--on the third evening we reached the station for which we were bound, and found, of course, --as is almost invariably the case in the colonies, --nothing whatever ready or arranged for the delivery of the sheep. One delay and another kept us for eight days, our party sleeping in a row at night on the floor of the common room, on sheep-skins. When at last we started, we had about three weeks' drive before us, it not being possible to take sheep through new country at a greater average rate than ten miles a day, without knocking up and losing a large number.

A word or two here about sheep in the colonial meaning of the word. Colonial sheep are not English sheep. They are--though tolerably well-bred--half-wild, unmanageable animals, accustomed to roam over great tracts of open country, allowing no one to approach them within half a mile, but

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stretching away at full gallop, and trying the mettle of good dogs to head them. Having been yarded during the necessary drafting and branding for three days and nights without food, our flock, --by this time half-starved and twice wild, ---strung away at starting, at a rapid pace, seeking ravenously for feed.

It was about three o'clock on a dark-looking afternoon when we got away on our journey, and by twilight we had crossed a stretch of level country, and reached the mouth of a deep valley which led up into a pass over ranges immediately in front of us: and here, though we had but little shelter or advantage for camping, we were compelled to stop, as the daylight was fast leaving us.

Before actually camping, I will, with permission, give the reader a short idea of the order of travelling with sheep in the interior. As a rule, to drive a mob of sheep for any distance, takes not less than four hands, --with three horses saddled, and one packed with provisions and baggage, --but it must be remembered that, in a young country, everything being difficult to obtain, the appointments of first explorers are often necessarily poor and rude: and the difficulties of the route, over a broken and unknown district, imperatively oblige the reduction of their baggage to the smallest possible weight and compass; so that when one says "baggage and provisions," these are to be taken in a limited and

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qualified sense. A pair of blankets, and a tin quart-pot per man; a frying-pan, tether ropes, butcher's knife, a bag of flour, and canvas bags of sugar and tea; a nob of salt, and a few boxes of matches-- with a reserve of flint and tinder for a pinch--in most cases make up the list; and in the drive I am describing we had little more. During the day, the sheep have to be got somehow over the steep sides of hills, and through long stretches of plains, as well as the tangled growth of a wild country, the rugged nature of the ground, and the greater or less heat of the day will allow. It needs incessant care to prevent stragglers breaking away from the head and sides of the mob, and the rear of the flock, made up of the weaker sheep, requires an equally constant look-out. The horses are led or ridden, as the ground allows; and in country which the explorers know, the best camping-spots are steered for, and the night-halts, if possible, made there; but in driving through unknown country, the halts are made very much where the explorers find themselves at sundown.

For nearly a week before our first night's camping, heavy rain had been falling, and it was drizzling thickly when we prepared to camp. The sheep were so wild and restless that it was necessary to keep a double watch: two of us took charge at seven o'clock, the other two camping; --it being arranged that each pair should call the other after



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ON THE ROAD.

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four hours' watch. This watching consists of continual walking, backwards and forwards, round the flock, from one point to another, to check the constant efforts of the sheep to break away. As soon as the watcher has stumbled over the rough ground to one end of the flock, an unquiet and suspicious bleat or two, and a rattle of tramping feet will summon him to the other, where a throng of grey nodding heads will be indistinctly seen, stringing out from the main circle, and trying to break away through the darkness. This attempt having been frustrated, a similar one calls him-- like a human pendulum--to the other end, and then back again, and back again, and so on through the night; till the time at last comes for calling out the other human pendulum, who meanwhile has been enjoying his night's rest somewhat in the following way. --He has cut (if he could get them) five sticks, upon which to form a framework; over these (if he has one to spare) he has thrown a red blanket, lashing it at the corners to pegs, or placing heavy stones along the edge; at one gable end of this mansion he has hung up his oil-skin coat as a break-wind to his head, --again applying the great stone-principle to keep it down, --and bracing the whole against the wind by flax-lines, lashed to the ground fore and aft. In fact he has produced a structure not a whit less rude than that shown in the sketch attached, which very faithfully

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recalls one of our evening camps "on the road" of this very journey.

On the ground under this lordly roof, --when he can raise it, --the sheep-watching colonist has laid his saddle-cloth and pea-jacket, and on these his remaining pair of blankets, --having placed at his head, for a pillow, his saddle, supported on each side by his boots: these last, be it observed, being the only articles of clothing of which at his evening toilet the explorer divests himself. Having arranged his lair as described, he crawls, like a weary caterpillar, into it, draws his spare red blanket over him, and though (as was the case with us on our first night's camp) the ground below him be soft and black with rain, he sleeps heavily, from sheer weariness; till-- perhaps dreaming that years have passed, and that he is again in his old home in old England--he is aroused by his more weary fellow-watcher and fellow-pendulum, to come out into the night, and pendulate through his share of the wet, dark watch round the flock.

On the particular night I am alluding to, we had great trouble with the sheep; wild and half-starving, they tried to break away at every point, and were restless and unmanageable. Meanwhile the rain fell heavily; thick clouds made the night black and dark; the ground round the camp, trampled by the sheeps' feet and our own, was churned into mud; and the rain found its way into our shoulders and boots,

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and dripped through our blanket-tents. At two o'clock it poured in torrents, and continued to fall heavily till daylight. The moment we could see the light--something like dirty gruel--coming through the clouds, we broke up our camp without attempting fire or breakfast of any kind, saddled our horses, and let the sheep pour away, in long lines, up the sides of the pass we had to traverse. As they were in a state of almost chronic starvation, we allowed them to spread out, in loose order, over a space of something like a hundred acres. Deep cross-gullies, and spurs of the range kept on jutting out and checking our advance; and every now and then creeks, --or running streams with swampy hollow banks undermined by the current, --would oblige us to head the flock, and choosing the most available place, (sheep having almost as much dread of water as a human being of fire) to force the leaders of the mob across and keep the main body crossing at the same points, having invariably to drag many, streaming and half-drowned, from under the overhanging banks, where otherwise they would feebly paddle till time and water drowned them. This operation, assisted by the rain which fell all the morning, left us in the evening very wet, and in poor plight for watching, and sleeping on the soaked ground; and though the night was dry, we passed a very cold and sorry camp, and started the next morning still wet and stiff.


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No Bridge.

AFTER the last note, I find in my diary that two days later--the first fortunately fine, enabling us to dry our blankets by hanging them over our saddles, and the second wet again--we found ourselves clear of the ranges, on level country, and about six in the evening slowly rounding down into the broad shingle bed of a river, --now called the Ashley, --which was running down in three heavy streams, yellow and swollen with the rains. We pushed our sheep hard against the edge of the bank, and surrounded them on the land side by pitching two blanket-tents, and tethering two sheepdogs to big stones, at points about thirty or forty feet apart, lighting a camp-fire at another point-- thus forming a kind of cordon round them, so that one hand was sufficient to keep the watch, while the other three slept. Having done this, and collected enough of drift-wood in the river-bed to keep the fire up during the night, we killed a sheep which had broken its leg in a crush, in the course of the day, and broiled great slabs of his body in the fire, carving at them with our pocket-knives, with a

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degree of hunger which in new-world expeditions-- what with uncertainty and exposure--generally keeps well up to the starvation level.

It cannot be too distinctly remembered that in a new country there is, speaking roundly, absolutely nothing. No matter what difficulties you get into, there have been there no hard-working ancestors who, for a thousand years before, have been providing you with the means to get out of them. If you make the shore in a coasting craft, no one has thrown out a breakwater, or put up a pier to enable you to land; if you are wandering on a wide plain, no one has put up a finger-post to direct you; if you toil across a barren plain up to the base of a range of hills, and are full weary on reaching them, no nameless but excellent ancient Briton (or modern one either) has laboriously cut zig-zag lines of road for you to mount the ranges, or bored tunnels for you to pass through them. On a dark evening in winter, with big flakes of snow beginning to fall through the grey air, there is no "hotel de voyageur" in the bottom of a wild ravine; if a long summer's sun has parched up your throat, you must find for yourself the green spot where water wells up, or burn with thirst till you do; if you are hungry, you must feed yourself as best you may; --and over a broad swollen river, no old-world unknown benefactor has built a strong stone bridge, that you may go over safe and dry-shod.

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There you are alone--you and nature; and you must make the best terms with her you can.

We were not the only explorers who had waked, after a long night, to find a flooded, bridgeless river before us, knowing, as we did full well, that we had left another in our rear, and that they shut us in, till it was their own good pleasure to release us.

I never remember recognising so distinctly as on that morning (of our Ashley camp) the full advantages of Huns and Celts, and Picts and Scots, and Ancient Britons, and old-world fellows generally. It became at once clear that their mission (even though they ground themselves away in the operation) was to rub down the rough edges of the world, in order that we, whose time has fallen in later days, might walk through the earth safely, and at our own sweet will. It is one thing to fly over a deep but civilised stream in an express train, to hear a little extra rattle, to look out of the window and say "Oh!--Bridge," and before you have settled yourself into your corner again, to be half-a-mile on the other side; but it is quite another to come up, on a streaming evening, to a wild, uncurbed river, and look hopelessly across two hundred yards of thick, rapid water, and wonder how on earth you are to get yourself, your horses, your baggage, and a thousand sheep to the other side. It will not do for me to keep the reader on the banks of this river as long as we were kept there,

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as even if he had time to send out and provision himself, he might begin to think the thing a bore. We were kept there four days; shepherding our sheep on the adjoining plains, cooking food, collecting fire-wood, and taking in turns heavy pulls of sleep, by day; and watching, as before, by night.

On the fourth morning we succeeded, at some risk, in fording the river, the water just boiling over the saddle-bows, and making our horses rock to and fro as the weight of rapid water surged against them.

With very few exceptions, all the New Zealand South Island rivers are similar in conformation to this one, and crossing them is often attended with considerable risk, because their beds are so constantly shifting, and because the so-called fords by which they are crossed almost invariably converge immediately below into rapids, in which it is scarcely possible for a horse or man to swim, and into which, if a horse is washed off his legs in fording, he is almost of necessity rolled before he can regain either bank. The current, too, is too powerful to allow a horse to push straight across from bank to bank; he is compelled to give way before the stream (running from six to ten miles an hour) and to cross in a diagonal line.

It is usual, therefore, to enter at the extreme upper end of any supposed ford, in order to allow as much space as possible below, for the necessary

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giving way of the horse down the stream; and as the actual force of the current is not known till tested by getting well out into the body of the stream, it takes a cool head and a nice judge of the depth and strength of the remaining water, to calculate, --with the thick turbid flood foaming over the saddle-bow, and the horse already rocking unsteadily under him, --whether or no it is possible to press over the current still before him, without being forced down into the rapid below. Of course if he decide to turn back, it is even then quite probable that he may be too far in to clear the head of the rapid, and regain even the bank he has left: in which case he has before him only a choice of equal evils, and a good chance of serious accident.

I very much regret to say that good men have been lost in these rivers, and I myself can count six men whom I knew well (and two of whom held adjoining stations to our own) who were lost in crossing them, during the time we were working together in the interior.

I have been a little long in describing the fording of these rivers, because in up-country work their passage is incessantly necessary, and because I shall allude to them once or twice again.

After fording the Ashley in the manner I have described, we succeeded in finding, lower down the river, a point at which it was possible to attempt crossing the sheep. Deep water is invariably chosen

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for crossing sheep over large rivers, as the fords are too rapid to allow of their swimming: they are forced into the deep current at a point where it sets to the opposite bank, and left to their own devices to get out, They give immense trouble, for though a few score may be thrust by main force into the water, they obstinately turn round again and again, and re-swim to the bank they have left, exhausting themselves, by hours of resistance, before the struggle really comes in crossing the main stream itself. More than that, they make desperate efforts to break away from the river-bed altogether, and are only held together by frantic efforts of shouting men, and perpetual galloping of sheepdogs. When at last the head of the mob are induced to strike out over the waste of water they see before them, and the main body follow, they rarely gain the other bank till the current has carried them perhaps a furlong down the river, and some of their number are swept into rough water below, and washed helplessly down till their white heads sink out of sight below the whirl.

Two days are constantly taken in crossing large mobs; and in one case a friend of mine was three days trying to cross only three hundred sheep over a rapid river, (the Rangitata) and was then compelled to give it up in despair; and he and his shepherd carried them over bodily in pairs, on horseback, --fording the river time after time, till their horses were cramped and

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stiff with cold. He told me that his exasperation passed all possible human calculation. Three days' delay and wet hard work, and three extra nights' camping and watching, without succeeding in forcing these three hundred obstreperous wild animals to take the water, nearly reduced him to a state of raving idiotcy, and he assured me it took him weeks to recover his normal senses: --and from experience I can fully understand and sympathise with the desperation of his feelings.

A quarter of an hour after beginning the attempt to cross our sheep over the Ashley, we were wet to the waist; and wet we continued all day, till sundown found us, horses, flock, and all, (with a loss only of a few of the weaker sheep) across at last on the other bank. Here we got a fine night, and camped and watched again as on the other side; but in the morning, when we let the sheep break away, they left more than one of their number dead and stiff on the ground, from yesterday's crushing, and from camping, streaming wet and starving, on the shingle.

The drive, after this, continued with varying fortune for three weeks. We crossed, --with much difficulty but unusually little loss, --two other main rivers, on one of which we were checked for eight days by an impassable flood, and both of which were dangerous and treacherous enough in all conscience. We drove steadily by day, steering down

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the plains due South, and camping at night as best we could; and, --except in the river-beds, where we chanced on a little drift-wood, --getting scarcely a stick of fire-wood on the route.

At last, after much wet weather, and twenty-five nights of watching, and camping on the ground, -- about noon on a welcome fine day, our sheep, horses, and selves slowly trailed up out of the very riverbed close to which the old colonial hand and myself had, eight weeks before, camped through the night I have before described as being so pre-eminently below zero.

Here we got at length a night's unbroken sleep; for being on our own country we could let the sheep go for the night. We pitched our rather dilapidated blankets in the shelter of a small "scrub" or copse, and slept on the ground a long night's deep sleep, -- for we were all by this time a good deal tired out.

We spent the next week at this camp, keeping an eye on the sheep at twilight and daybreak, and allowing our horses and selves a spell of rest and recovery. From this point we shifted to a scrub about four miles off, and built ourselves a hut of wattle and clay, roofing it with pampas-grass, cut at the roots with a cooper's adze.


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Goodbye to the Old Hut.

IN this wattle hut we continued during the summer and autumn, intending to make it our winter quarters. We spent what spare time we had, at the forest I have named as crossing the head of the run, --about ten miles distant, --employed in felling trees, and splitting rough timber for a more permanent house, wool-shed and yards. Two of us used to pack a horse with flour and meat, and--leaving the others at the hut with the sheep--go up to the forest, remaining there till we were compelled to return to the hut for provisions. At this forest, or "bush," as it is invariably called in the colonies, we got the only change of diet which nature (here very stingy in her larder supplies) yielded us. In the bush were numbers of wood-pigeon, large and in good condition, and sufficiently curious about our operations, and innocent of our intentions, to sit on the branches above our heads and wink at us, first with one eye and then with the other, until we took up a gun, which we always kept by us while at work, and brought one or two of them down. We carefully abstained, however, from shooting a bird more than we actually required for our larder.

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Our cooking utensils were divided between the party at the bush, and the party at the hut.

The hut-party had a frying-pan and an iron baking-pot, while the bush-party (of which I was one) were set up in house-keeping with a saucepan: and in the saucepan we boiled and stewed everything we ate; but as this everything was limited to salted mutton and pigeon, the cuisine was not after all very elaborate. We used to stew as many pigeons as the saucepan would bold at a time, (which I remember was about five, or four-and-a-half, according to size) and, the saucepan serving for a dish, to eat at them for two or three meals till all was gone.

We baked dampers in the hot ashes of a wood fire, mixing our flour by placing it in a hole punched with our fists in the yielding outside of a flour-bag, and pouring in water among the flour, till, with immediate stirring, and subsequent punching, it was reduced to a simple and remarkably tough dough. Damper, salt mutton, and pigeon, --salt mutton, pigeon, and damper, --we lived on for six months, three times a day, not thinking that harder times were still in front of us. So passed the summer and autumn, a time of bright exhilarating weather, and of constant employment and activity. I do not think we saw, during that time, more than four or five fresh faces, one (by the by) being a son of the late Sir T. D. Acland, who had taken up country

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behind us on the ranges, and who was then generally looked upon as a harmless maniac for having done so. I need scarcely say that his run has since proved of considerable value. We shared our very poor shelter on the Harketere with him for the night, and bid him good speed in the morning, giving him our best wishes, and, --what was much more important, --a box of lucifer matches, of which he had run short.

As our first autumn in these new districts drew to a close, an unfortunate accident occurred, of which, as it happens to many early squatters, I will put the reader in possession. We were living, it will be remembered, in the interior of the country, in a low wattle hut with a thatch roof, in which were all our goods and chattels, simple and few, -- but each one precious as gold, where we could get no more. One morning, one of the hands and I started out on the run in one direction, and the other two of the party in another, to find, and bring in, if possible, a wild mob of strong sheep which had broken away and been some days missing. Before starting we arranged a signal, often used up the country, agreeing that if either party found the sheep, they should make a smoke to telegraph the fact to the other; this is done by collecting dead and green grass, heaping it over pampas-grass (or scrub if obtainable), setting fire to the whole, and making the smoke as dense as possible. On the plains, this


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