The native name of one of these ranges, Heru-o-Tureia, the comb of Tureia,

Tureia was sixth in descent from Tamatea, who reached New Zealand in the Takitimu, one of the fastest of the canoes of the great heke or migration from Hawaiki.

These are the features of the comb system broadly outlined to let the reader visualise its strange cleavage pattern. A modification must now, however, be noted; it is this, that although the fissures start at right angles to the main range, their sides do not remain parallel. These gaps, their shape at base more or less that of an inverted horse-shoe, widen as their distances from the back of the comb increase. Another minor modification of the parallel hill chain system is the presence here and there of narrow linking spurs that jut forth east and west as if wedding the ranges to one another. Running at right angles to the general north and south trend of the ranges, though infrequent, they are well-marked features in the landscape.

The breadth of the run can be traversed and its surface viewed if, in imagination, the reader will take up his position on the western-most rim of the trough to which the whole station has been compared, and proceed thence eastwards towards the ocean. The Heru-o-Tureia range marks the limit of limestone and divides the sandstones, conglomerates, and marls of the coastward belt from the more ancient slates and ryolites of the interior. Moving from it eastwards we shall pass over successive lines of hills till we arrive at the Newton range—the easternmost edge of the trough. It too illustrates the prevailing feature, the continuity of top and upright rock rampart facing west, the “back” of the “comb,” its cloven spurs sloping towards the east, the “teeth.”

Everywhere, therefore, on Tutira we discover one pattern, one principle, one type of formation dominant; we find furthermore throughout the run narrow “tooth” valleys enclosed by perpendicular walls—valleys which may deepen but which never can expand, and out of which over the bulk of the run no water whatsoever visibly flows. The precipices containing them form what may be called, for convenience' sake, the dry cliff system of the run.

Strongly contrasting with it exists another which may be equally well termed the wet cliff system. Unlike the former, its sculpturing offers no difficulty to the imagination. It has been cut out by processes which are still at work. Its streams still chiselling out their beds flow far beneath the surface. Its cliffs, saturated with moisture percolating through the pervious soils above, are from top to bottom feathered with ferns and delicate greenery. There are in fact two conspicuously distinct series of cliff—the rock walls of the one dry, bare, and prominent; the rock walls of the other damp, densely overgrown, and, until closely approached, invisible.

Besides the boundary rivers named, there are within the compass of the station several streams of lesser volume, also flowing between narrow perpendicular walls; the only stream, indeed, not imprisoned by precipices during its whole length is the Papakiri, which ends its career in Tutira lake. Every upland lake is a sea to the rivers that feed it; to the Papakiri the lake is the ocean of its extinction. For the same reason also that the Waikoau curbs the speed of its current and deposits its silt upon approach to the Pacific, the Papakiri drops its burden of soil as it nears Tutira lake. Save for a mile or so in the course of this little river, and the equally brief run of a few brooks on the uplands of Opouahi, the drainage system of the station has to be searched for. It lies beneath the level. Barring the two or three miles that march with Arapawanui, the boundaries of the run are wet cliff; except on the Newton range, the paddocks are enclosed by wet cliffs. Within each paddock are wet cliffs; within many of them are miles of wet cliff. There are in addition miles of dry cliff in almost every one of these natural enclosures. The reader will not grasp the coming story of Tutira if he fails to understand that there are, wet and dry, several hundred miles of precipice on the run, varying in height from 20 to 150 feet.

Other prominent natural features of the station are its water surfaces. Of these the largest is Tutira lake, next in size is Waikopiro—the two, conjoined in wet weather, covering some 500 acres. Within a couple of chains distance from the last-named, and at a lower level, is situated Orakai, five or six acres in extent. There is a lakelet, Opouahi, of about similar size, on the uplands of the west; a deep clear lakelet, Te Maru, on Putorino, and a couple of tarns on Heru-o-Tureia. Tutira lake, about two miles long, resting at the foot of the Newton range, is drained by a meandering serpentine creek of the same name, which, after crossing the old Maori foot-trail, breaks into a series of over-falls, and finally leaps at Te Rere-a-Tahumata into a magnificent chasm of 157 feet in depth.

As in the shaping of the run water has played so prominent a part, it will be well in this initial chapter to devote a few lines to the rainfall. The heaviest deluges are blown up from the north-east, east, south-east, south, and south-west. During some three or four days' duration, not infrequently one foot and over, and on one occasion nearly two feet, have been registered. Except in the form of showers, rain seldom reaches Tutira in appreciable quantity from the north and west. Thunderstorms, which cling to the coast and the ranges, the station almost entirely escapes. Snow falls but rarely—only thrice in my time has it lain for more than a few hours; during one of these blizzards, however, it certainly fell in the same whole-hearted manner as have done the greatest of the rain-storms. Everywhere on the low lands two feet deep, it lay still thicker on the Newton range, completely blotting out the sheep for a couple of days.

The rainfall of eastern Tutira is different in character from that of

Height above Mean Sea-level, 500 feet. Hour of Observation, 9 a.m.Date.Jan.Feb.Mar.April.May.June.JulyAug.Sept.Oct.Nov.Dec.1·83·28·07·54·2022·70·32·15·0533·94·57·10·01·35·024·091·65·26·525·03·033·406·08·11·367·05·05·24·448·18·081·91·08·16·1592·23·551·67·0410·02·27·031·70

The storm of 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th of June registered just over 20 inches. What weight of water may have fallen in addition we cannot tell, for on the 11th and 12th the rain-gauge was found to be filled and overflowing.

·01·01·08·35·0411·04·988·40·022·92·1412·12·09·022·958·40·022·4413·30·076·801·61·0214·39·16·471·63·3615·14·1316·86·16·1417·08·01181·68·11·10·27·8519·61·22·6020·73·571·1421·101·801·8822·66·03·11·10·93·1723·55·24·01·12·1624·01·29·0125·25·01·4626·27·15·02·0127·12·11·01·27·06·33281·30·09·0429·08·02·33·0830·0231·06·01Total.10·846·901·952·5712·2222·092·0210·166·641·925·482·23Number of days.10121310881514128136Jan.Feb.Mar.April.May.June.JulyAug.Sept.Oct.Nov.Dec.Total for Year, 85.02 inches.

The materials of which the station is formed are marl or “papa,” sandstone, sandy marl, limestone, and conglomerate. Except the last, they are obviously of marine origin. Marl is the foundation on which the others lie,—it is the bed-rock of Tutira. Whatever may have been its origin, the remains of an ancient southern continent or not, its constituents seem to have been carried by ocean currents or tidal action. Deposition has been, at any rate, intermittent, not constant. Undulatory lines of sand-grit can be traced on cliffs where flaking is constant and where consequently exposures are clean.

Such lines are particularly noticeable on the beach cliffs between Waikari and Mohaka.

The marls of Tutira vary in fertility and mode of weathering, the least fertile being the most homogeneous and compact, the most fertile those that disintegrate in cubes or exfoliate in peelings.

Through the kindness of Dr Lauder, of the Edinburgh and East of Scotland College of Agriculture, a station sample of marl has been analysed. It “contained 34 per cent of calcium carbonate (chalk), fairly large quantities of the oxides of iron and aluminium; smaller quantities of calcium and magnesium oxides. Phosphates were present, but no potash.”

We can now consider rock formations superposed on this base of marl. To do so it will be convenient that in imagination the reader should as before take his stand on the Maungaharuru range and again traverse the run from west to east.

The great dry bastion on the west is built up of alternate layers of sandstone and limestone, the result, doubtless, of floodings of sand over shell-strewn ocean beds. Each band is of a different thickness. Each slightly differs also in material, the sandstone sometimes less and sometimes more dry, the limestone bands varying in the nature of their shell fragments. Where, as occasionally happens, the topmost sea-floor has been stripped by gales of its earthy coverings, cleavage is revealed in the form of almost exact squares, in a mosaic of grey blocks of limestone set in packed red sand.

A very perfect example of such a pattern may be seen on the great wind-blow of the Maungaharuru range.

Continuing to traverse the run, moving eastwards, we reach central Tutira. Hereabouts limestone disappears, sandstone and conglomerate resting on the marl, the sand of the former seemingly ground out of gravel, the pebbles of the latter rolled, worn, and of a generally ovoid form. In these conglomerates and sandstones, fossils are rare. In the first I have found but a single specimen, a short length apparently of some knotless tree stem; in the second, one or two kinds of bivalves. Usually the weathering of the alternate bands of a cliff face proceeds evenly. Sometimes, however, it happens that in a loose type of sandstone erosion by frost and wind is rather more pronounced than on the conglomerates above. When that occurs the cliff assumes a protuberant air, a curious rotund or pot-bellied appearance. Normally the conglomerates of the central run cap the sandstones. Lacking their protection, the softer rock has melted into cones, domes, razorbacks, and peaks.

Proceeding once more from the west to the east we reach low lines of hills, eminences hardly more than hummocks. What is visible of their rock material differs but little from the earlier mentioned conglomerates; their colour is rusty-red instead of grey, they do not appear to be so thoroughly set, they can be worked with a pick, almost with a shovel. There is perhaps rather less variation in the size of their pebbles.

Again advancing on our traverse of the run, crossing the lakes we reach the eastern range of Tutira—the eastern edge of the trough. Once again the rock formations change: the typical western facing cliff is built up here of limestones, sandstones, and marls, irregularly superposed one upon another in bands of different depths. Compared with the sandstones and limestones of the west, the sandstones and limestones of the east show fresher and fuller signs of marine life. Their sand is more truly sea sand. Their limestones contain a larger number of shell-species closely connected, or actually identical with those now existing in the pertingent seas. Above several of the limestone bands are shallow deposits of a highly friable ferruginous matter. On the cliffs of the east, too, there supervenes a new and most important factor. In this region the marl bands interpolated at irregular intervals, rapidly crumbling, sap and undermine the more durable strata; the cliffs are somewhat less sheer, the strata exposed having weathered less evenly. From the sea-floors thus sapped great quadrilaterals—rock cleavage

To recapitulate: The base of the whole station is blue marl rock or “papa.” Superposed on it rest the ranges of the west formed of sandstone and limestone, the ranges of the centre formed of compressed sandless pebble-rock and slaty sands, the ranges of the east built up of layers of marl, sandstone, and limestone.

Of these masses of material, the sandstones and conglomerates extend over nine-tenths of the station and are of little value. Such elements of fertility as exist are contained in limestone outcrops, in masses of travertine, but especially in elevated streaks of marl.

Examination of the general physical features of the run has shown a series of parallel hill chains running north and south. Traversing the run from its inland boundary, the reader has crossed them one by one and seen the comb formation, though becoming less and less marked in height, persist through the west and throughout the trough of the run. A continuity of these features might have been looked for, especially as after a brief interruption they reappear in eastern Tutira. Instead we come upon a sheet of water still, after the depositions of centuries of alluvium, ninety feet in depth, two miles in length, and half a mile in width. In lieu of the normal narrow gorge there occur a series of immense hollows, one of which, the “Big swamp,” is already filled with alluvium; whilst others still exist as lakes Tutira, Waikopiro, and Orakai.

It is at the base of the Newton range, where the conglomerates of the central run cease and the limestones of eastern Tutira begin, that this change in the plan of the run, this interpolation of a new pattern, occurs. Its presence is an anomaly; it is an extraneous feature to the great general scheme of the station; it can, I think, be accounted for only by processes unlike any yet considered.

Hollows where waters lie may be attributed to erosion, to lodgment of waters in craters, to the accumulation of material forming barriers or dams, by subsidence of the crust of the earth.

Except the last, that of erosion is the only theory which might at first seem to fit the facts. The great trough passing through the centre of Tutira,—a trough extending scores of miles north and south of the station,—marked throughout by extensive beds of conglomerate and sandstone, has been described. These deposits, sharply separated from one another, have presumably been lodged by water action of some sort. In the site of this trough or long hollow a great river might have been imagined to have run at some period, a river which might have left the “Big swamp”—once a sheet of water—and the present lakes Tutira, Waikopiro, Orakai, Opouahi, and Temaru, further to the north Waikaremoana and Waikareiti, further to the south Waipukurau, Te Roto-a-Tara and Wairarapa, as evidences of its former course. It might have been imagined, in fact, that this chain of lakes had been scooped out by some vast old-world river.

There are, however, difficulties in the acceptance of this theory. The sands and conglomerates are not mixed, they are sharply distinct; certainly the latter do not contain that proportion of sand which might be expected in a river-bed. The shape, moreover, of the pebbles suggests neither the grinding of a shelving beach nor the erosion of a running river. In each conglomerate band lie horizontal seams varying in size of stone. Inspection of these seams suggests that their pebbles have been sown in a vast top-dressing, rocked into settlement rather than rushed into position by chance of currents. Perhaps these stones, originally cubes frost-fractured, have been ground by a more remarkable trituration; perhaps their smooth, ovoid form has been acquired by volcanic boilings or tossings. At any rate they are perfectly different from stones of the same material gathered from the top of the Newton range—stones evidently shaped by some little stream that ages ago must have flowed there.

Alternate layers of sand and conglomerate seem in fact to have been laid down very much as on eastern Tutira sands, limestones, and marls have been superposed one on another. Perhaps, indeed, a more profound likeness may be traced—the depths of strata conforming or corresponding to one another on east and west.

There is another difficulty also in regard to the fashioning of the Tutira lake basins by river action: the existence of the coupling spurs already mentioned, spurs here and there linking one range to another. Two of them traverse the breadth of the lakes, one of them at either end of Tutira lake proper, a third barring the way at a slightly higher elevation south of Waikopiro. These coupling spurs, as elsewhere on the run, cannot be reckoned as enormous afterthoughts, as avalanches of rock and soil solidified. They are marl—basic, homogeneous parts of the original scheme of things. Their presence at right angles to the length of the lakes precludes the possibility of river action. Scour sufficiently violent to have scooped out the lake basins must have worn to an equal depth these barriers of solid marl. Their surfaces, now submerged, must moreover have been subject, during a comparatively recent geological period, to superterranean influences such as now obtain elsewhere on the run. They bear evidence, too, that the drainage system ran then as it continues to run. They are mere relics, in fact, of former shelves and terraces, whose material has been worn away when levels were other than they are now. Previous to subsidence they had been sculptured by processes similar to those which have created spurs of kindred shape on the ranges of the west, centre, and east. What, moreover, is true locally of these comparatively small water areas is true of the whole terrain included in the great dip which runs throughout and beyond the length of the Hawke's Bay province. If, indeed, there has been a river flowing at any time north or south along the trough of the run, no signs now remain. It is safe to affirm that since Tutira assumed approximately its modern form the drainage system has been west and east, never north and south.

If, then, the creation of the lake basins is due neither to scour nor to blockage by earthfall of waters once freely escaping, a single possibility remains. Their presence, I believe, is due to subsidence of the crust of the earth—a movement sympathetic with that of the great outside subsidence of what is at present the bay of the province.

Although too much stress need not be placed on local phenomena, it is nevertheless certain that many small facts countenance the belief that Tutira is situated on a line of seismic partiality. During the 'eighties, when the famous Pink and White Terraces were destroyed by the eruption of Tarawera, the waters of Orakai became a dull brownish - green colour, and for many weeks continuously gave forth a strong smell of sulphuretted hydrogen; it has done so on several occasions for shorter periods since that date. The reek of sulphur is distinct, too, in many parts of the gorge of the Waikari. In the Waterfall paddock there is a spring of sulphur water; there is a tepid runnel in the bed of one of the Waikoau tributaries. Earth tremors are frequent, though perhaps not more so than elsewhere in the district. The eastward fall, moreover, of the Newton range seems to be rather less pronounced than elsewhere, as if its base, in close proximity to the lake, had somewhat sunk in local sympathy—that, in fact, the cant of the range had been in some degree readjusted by the subsidence which created the lake basins.

Local weakness in the earth's crust, break in continuity of geological plan, proof in the exposed ocean-floors of many changes of elevation, difference possibly in degree of eastward cant of the range contiguous to the lakes, makes subsidence at any rate a tenable theory in regard to the lakes of Tutira.

Their original depths may be approximately calculated from the present appearance of the ranges on either side and from examination of the cachment area of the Papakiri. The valleys gouged out, the sand and grit borne down, minus that percentage drained off in the form of muddy water, rest at the bottom of one or other of the lake basins. The area covered by Tutira lake has been in past times considerably greater than at present, for the stream that drains away its surplus water has eaten through a bank of sandy marl to the depth of some twenty feet. There remain, nevertheless, no signs whatever of this period—a fact explicable only on the assumption that erosion of the channel of escape must have been at first exceedingly rapid; that it must have been worn through not in years, but weeks, perhaps days.

Had flood - water, containing in suspension mud carried down in landslips from the fertile marls of the Newton range, been deposited on the receptive pumiceous lands which must have been then under water, a distinct vegetation would have arisen. The effect of such submersion would have been apparent still, for after heavy floods the waters of the lake remain wan for months with comminuted clay.

After the deluge of 1917, when more than 20 inches fell in four sequent days—the rainguage twice overflowing—the lake had not regained its usual blue twenty-four months later.

The conjoined waters of Tutira and Waikopiro at present escape from the north - west corner of the former. Whether they have always done so remains an open question; a 30-foot rise from the present height of the lake would allow its waters to lap over in three directions. These three lines of escape would be—firstly, its present exit; secondly, westwards along the base of the Natural Paddock hill; thirdly, in a southerly direction towards the Race Course flat. A

The future of the lakes on present lines of geology is as certain

Everywhere on Tutira there has been spread at one period a carpet of dark matted humus. Immediately beneath it has lain a streak of clean grey pumice grit three or four inches in depth; beneath that again, dense, slightly greasy beds of packed red sand. On the eastern run there are traces of pale, valueless clay. Such were the primeval soils and subsoils of ancient Tutira.

The relative poverty of the huge district west and north of Napier is usually but wrongly attributed to the presence of the pumiceous band. Really this shallow layer of grit is of trifling import. The bane of the region, of which Tutira forms a part, are its sheets of packed red sand.

The surface soil of humus, dust, and pumice grit is described in the Edinburgh analysis as “poor, light, sandy material, containing only 7.2 per cent of organic matter. It contains no phosphate.” The subsoil of red sand “consisted mainly of silica, the colouring being due to oxide of iron. No phosphates or potash were present.”

Strata, undisturbed by time and change, are now discoverable only on the tops of tablelands, the backs of the aforementioned combs. No soils from greater heights has ever lodged on them. Owing to poverty and subsequent impossibility of enrichment, also by reason of elevation and exposure, it is likely that scrub and fern only, not forest and bush, have always flourished on their barren wind-swept heights. The original stratification of their soils has remained, therefore, comparatively undisturbed, undislocated, by root growth of any considerable size. The belief that only low growth has always clothed these arid, wretched tops is confirmed by the absence of a certain scrub—manuka (Leptospermum scoparium)—which at a later date, as we shall see, took possession of the run. These table tops, then, almost alone on the station, remained free of the pest. Presumably it had grown on them alternately with bracken for so long that the particular chemical constituents needed for the plants' growth had become exhausted. Corroboration of this theory is to be found in the fact that upon the small proportion of other land on Tutira where manuka had flourished prior to the 'seventies and 'eighties subsequent crops were also scant and poor.

These elevated scraps of plateau or “comb” backs—a few acres altogether—still remain samples of what all Tutira was. To this day on them there can be discovered more clearly than elsewhere the original soils in their original order of deposition—the dark musty humus, the grey grit, the bed of packed red sand. On their heights not only has

It will be most convenient to consider the lowermost first, and thus take them in the order of red sand, pumice, grit, and humus. The red sand deposits are of a firm, impervious, slightly greasy texture. The whole run has been plastered with the worthless stuff. It is common to west, central, and eastern Tutira. It shows up red on the naked “wind-blows.” The quadrilateral mosaics of the topmost limestone sea-floors are set in it. It rests in sheets on the conglomerates.

There can be little doubt that these red sand deposits are of volcanic origin. Their substance may prove to be waterlogged pumicestone fine ground, its greasiness resulting perhaps from some admixture with the scanty pale clays found on the eastern run. Perhaps, too, the coloration of the deposit may be derived from sources similar to those which gave the conglomerate beds their rusty ferruginous hue.

Proceeding still from below towards the top, we come upon the band of pumice grit that lies on the red sand. It is about four inches in depth, the grit perfectly loose and dry, its grain very even, in size resembling the granules of a rough brown sugar. It is remarkably unclogged and free from intermixture of foreign matter. Like other bad things, it has reached Tutira from one or other of the inland volcanoes of the North Island. It is, I think, æolian, wind-carried, and has probably descended on a countryside supporting a vegetation thick enough, stiff enough, and high enough to afford immediate shelter and cover. Its light dry substance, falling like rain from above, would thus either percolate direct through this growth or be at once watered on to the ground by wet weather. It would lie evenly on the ground—as in fact we find it in the undisturbed plateau fragments—and during succeeding centuries became covered with root matter and leaf-mould. The vegetation which thus sheltered and harboured this pumice shower must have been then growing on red sand, for it cannot be doubted that the top spit of humus is merely the accumulated results of decayed vegetation. The pumice deposit appears to have been the result of a single volcanic outbreak. Nowhere, at any rate, do I find the slightest trace of alternate layers of grit and humus. The two substances are clearly distinct. Other showers of pumice may have fallen at other periods on naked surfaces and been blown off, but the result of the one particular eruption incorporated in the soil of the station fell, I believe, on a surface protected from wind. Unless we are to suppose different meteorological conditions, no layer of grit could have endured one hour's nor'-west gale on bare baked sand. Even by the less violent action of rain it would have quickly been washed away.

The alternative to the theory of wind-blown pumice is to suppose the grit to have fallen on water and eventually to have sunk. There are many difficulties, however, to be faced. Falling on open sea the light material would have been soon dispersed; even granted that it may have fallen on landlocked waters, the floating masses would have been heaped together by action of wind and wave, the grit would not have been evenly distributed on the bottoms. Moreover, even supposing that the grit had become submerged in a level band, upon the rise of the plateau its surface would have dried and the light top-dressing of pumice would have been dispersed by gales. Lastly, there is nothing in the appearance of freshly-exposed red sand beds to suggest that weighted water-clogged grit has rested upon them. Its grains have not become incorporated in any considerable degree with the lower-lying material. It seems to me that whilst there are insuperable objections in the one case, there is nothing hard of belief in the other.

The volcanic mountains Tongariro, Ngaruhoe, Ruapehu, are all within a hundred miles of Tutira. During the Tarawera eruption of '86 the run would have been thickly dusted with fine grit had the wind happened to have blown towards it. On east Tutira flake pumice is rare; there are banks of it on Maungaharuru varying in size from a crown-piece to a man's palm. The Mohaka river, rising in the chief region of volcanic activity in New Zealand, bears in flood-time from its fountain-head quantities of sponge-shaped blocks; in fact, the size and shape of pumice fragments differ according to distance from source of supply.

The dark, dusty, matted humus of the surface requires little description. There can be no doubt that it is the most modern soil of the run, the outcome of rotted fern fronds, forest debris and fine dust, blown from burnt forests and bracken lands.

From the foregoing description of the soils and subsoils of the run, it is apparent how poor the original surface on every part of the run has been. It is apparent, too, that any surface improvement can only have taken place by the superposition of limestone, travertine, marl, and sand, by an admixture of soils due to overblown forests, and by the deepening of vegetable mould. From a sheep-farmer's point of view, the original state of Tutira must have been worthless: indeed for him New Zealand even now has been discovered and Tutira “taken up” many hundreds of thousands of years too soon.

In another chapter the reader has been, I hope, helped to grasp the general configuration of the station by the metaphor of the “comb.” With equal ease he will understand its soils, if another salient fact of another sort be grasped. It is this, that the fertility of the run is in direct proportion to its angle of inclination, that the steepest country is the best, the flattest country—alluvial flats excepted—the worst. From the former the jacket of pumice and red sand has to some extent been overlaid by washings or stripped by slips. The latter remains as it was centuries ago, even its leaf-mould stolen away by subcutaneous erosion.

Kahikanui swamp, lying beneath the highest marl outcrop on the station, and containing washings almost wholly composed of that substance, is the only first-class piece of soil on the run; in miniature it resembles the far-famed flats of Poverty Bay.

Each of these plains—the one of a few dozen acres, the other of many thousands—has been created by alluvium carried down in flood-water from hills of marl. In each case the rougher, larger particles have been precipitated at the apex of the plain, while the finest, most highly comminuted silt matter has remained in solution until dammed back—in the one case by Tutira lake, in the other by the waters of the Pacific. The result is that although rich throughout, the physical conditions of the soil at apex and base are widely dissimilar, the apex easily worked and friable, the case heavy and hard set. What Herbert Spencer has termed “the multiplication of effects” can further be traced in different weeds, different grasses, a different permanent pasture.

The flats—alluvial is too sumptuous a term—of the pumiceous trough of the run do not exceed some two or three score acres, the largest single patch perhaps not more than five or six acres in extent. As station assets they are of no great value, it is the means by which they have come into being that deserves notice here. That method is not direct deposition from above, but injection from below of water charged with microscopic quantities of rotted vegetation, the soakage from higher slopes. These pumice alluviums in outward semblance differ but little from neighbouring lands. For long, indeed, they were regarded as equally worthless. It was a belief countenanced by the arid grit of the surface and by the appearance of the vegetation supported thereon—groves of pole manuka, their bark tattered and thin, their harsh leaves brown-green and prickly, a foliage yielding neither shelter from winter storms nor shade from summer heats. On the other hand, covering contiguous slopes, flourished luxuriantly green tutu (Coriaria ruscifolia) and koromiko (Veronica salicifolia). It was believed that their foliage was creating leaf-mould on the slopes where it fell; really its manurial value soaked through the humus and sandy grit by a process of filtration to be explained later, then, unable on the flat to escape further, rose from below in the form of an alluvium of dirty water no stronger than weak tea.

Riding through some such bit of country with a stock and station agent, he remarked of the deep green tutu-covered slopes, wishing presumably to say something pleasant: “That does not look so very bad, but this—!” Without consideration I replied: “You might not think so, but this is really better.” I yet recollect his sour, sick face as he turned in his saddle and looked at me. As I say, he was a stock and station agent inured from childhood to chicanery, yet he was fairly nauseated, not of course at the lie as he necessarily accounted it, but at its ineptitude, inadequacy, futility, the waste and uselessness of such a foolish falsehood.

Sufficient now has been said of the soils of the run and their ancient order of deposition. If the reader has grasped the fact that all steep land is good and that all flat land is bad, he knows everything that need be known.

The original appearance of Tutira has been described. We have yet to trace the agencies by which its contours have been modified. It will be remembered that the station was pictured in the beginning as a series of plateaux afterwards tilted towards the east, these tilted terraces or canted plateaux smooth and unbroken by fissures. The evolution of the comb system, the development of these fissures, has yet to be described. It has, I think, been brought to light by a very remarkable process of subcutaneous erosion, a process akin to the dissolution of a dead beast when first the flesh decays, then the skin shrinks and shrivels, whilst only at the last do the bones protrude. In this transformation water has been the chief agent, but before proceeding to state what water has done it will simplify our task to state what water has not done.

Water has not created the dry cliff system. Water has not scoured out the solid rock of these strange valleys walled in by precipice. Both sense and sight forbid the supposition. There is no lateral soakage whatever into them. In hundreds of instances, except the drops that actually fall on to their surfaces from the sky, no extraneous water has ever reached them. Rock erosion by scour has not occurred, because water has been able to pass away from the contiguous lands on either side through beds of grit and sand. The junction of their double walls of cliff is not lanceolate but horse-shoe shaped. It bears no resemblance to the typical commencement of a water-worn ravine. The difference between the width of the valleys as measured from cliff to cliff at two, twenty, and two hundred yards from their beginnings is out of all proportion to the necessities of scour, supposing such a process had ever been at work. Finally, at the mouths of these valleys there exist no indications of the rock material which must have been deposited had water erosion been responsible for their formation. As regards these chasms, this is, I think, a fair statement of what water has not done.

The task of water has been to remove by infinitesimal quantities the material deposited between the rock walls; to flush, if indeed such a verb can be applied to an enormously tardy process, and scour out material already deposited in the valleys; to render visible what a mightier force had already accomplished. Erosion, in fact, has brought to light, not created, the rock-bound valleys of Tutira. When the plateaux which I have supposed to have been the original shape of the run canted to the east, making the station a series of tilted terraces, these deep interstices had been already moulded.

About the nature of the force that has severed the sea-floors upon which Tutira sheep now run, yet incompletely severed them,—that has severed them, yet not severed them in parallel lines,—any suggestions I can offer are little likely to be of value. There seems, however, to have been a twofold motion—the one cracking them in lines running north and south, the other incompletely parting these strips or oblongs of country into numerous short unparallel asymmetrical gaps east and west. The fissurings extending north and south are attributable probably to the effects of subsidence as segment after segment canted towards the east. The gaps east and west, with their broad horse-shoe beginnings, are less easy to account for. They may be due to shrinkage by evaporation whilst their rocky material was still plastic; their shape forbids the idea of cracking or fissuring.

Although no satisfactory solution can be offered as to their origin, much can be said as to the manner in which they have been brought to view. Each range shows its own slight modification of the general geological plan. In order, therefore, not to confuse the reader and darken counsel with a multiplicity of detail, I propose to work stage by stage from past to present conditions. The reader is invited to contemplate an ideal section of a hill range in the conglomerates of central Tutira before erosion had begun its work.

In the beginning, then, when the main rivers of Tutira ran hundreds of feet above their present levels, the surface of our imaginary section seemed whole, unwrinkled, ungapped, and inclining gently towards the east. It was coated with a matted humus overlying æolian pumice grit, overlying disintegrated red sand. Filtering through the loose surface mould on to the layer of grit and sand, rain-water did not so much penetrate downwards as follow subcutaneously the trend of the slopes. It passed away in an unseen filtration; I imagine it lipping from grain to grain of grit, moving as evenly, as diffusedly, and with as little current, as water spilled on an inclined sheet of blotting - paper. Finally, at the base of our imaginary slope the accumulated soakage would gather against the cliff of the next “comb,”—against, that is, the next western-facing precipice—the next segment of canted plateau. There, unable to press further east-ward, it would be temporarily held. Eventually, at the base of our

The deluges that from time to time pass over Tutira have been mentioned. Readers will have, therefore, no difficulty in picturing their effects on steep marl slopes. Although on the station itself there is only a small proportion of land of this type, yet speaking broadly of the “papa” country of the east coast of the North Island, it is being flattened towards the sea by a mighty melting process, most marked and most discernible in the soft marls of Poverty Bay. As, however, it is the history of Tutira I am writing—limited as is the acreage affected—I shall cull my facts from local sources.

During heavy rainfalls on eastern Tutira the numerous oozes, leakages, and “damps,” consequent on alternate bands of marl and limestone, become surcharged with water. The supersaturated subsoils burst with their weight of wet, chasms of many feet in depth are created, the hillsides spew forth mud; under-runners become gulches, or, choked with debris, spill on the hillsides their streams of silt, torn turf, and curious rough-rolled balls of clay.

Eastern Tutira, indeed, after a violent “buster,” appears to have been weeping mud. From the edges of all ancient slips the water-sudden fringes drip with clay; new red-raw wounds smear the green slopes, scalp-shaped patches detach themselves, slipping downward in slash and turf. Sometimes a whole hillside will wrinkle and slide like snow melting off a roof, its huge corrugations smothering and smashing the wretched sheep, half or wholly burying them in every posture. Sometimes a slip rushing down a steep incline will temporarily block the creek below, piling itself up until again washed away, and leaving on the opposite slope, yards above the stream, a curious plaster mark of dirt. Gluey streams, hardly moving faster than glaciers, from whose tenacious mud bogged sheep have to be extricated hoof by hoof, make the hillsides a terror to shepherds.

Returning directly after the Armistice, I was amused to find that recollections of the flood of the previous year had been adapted to the needs of the nursery. My three nieces had invented the new game of “bogged sheep.” There is no necessity to give the exact rules as framed by the little shepherdesses. Suffice it to say that the game can be played as most convenient on carpet or grass, that some of the players are “sheep,” others “shepherds,” the object of the latter of course being to rescue the entombed animal by dragging it leg by leg out of the mud. Should it bleat piteously during the operation, again fall back into the mire or, best of all, should its cold cramped legs refuse their office without pastoral support, by as much more is the game quickened.

Besides earth avalanches there remain after every great storm, here and there, fissures on the hillside nine inches or a foot in depth. Sometimes they are mere longitudinal cracks, but more often of an irregularly ovoid shape. They mark areas, often of great extent, where the surface has slid a few inches. They can be detected further by trees slightly out of the natural angle of growth, by the bulging and bellying of fence

Although Tutira when first taken up as a sheep-run was a wilderness of bracken (Pteris aquilina, var. esculenta), it had nevertheless been within a very recent period wholly under forest. In the oozy bog runnels of the central run, where the current scarcely stirs the floating weeds or shivers the tall green reeds, timber is plentiful. The swamps, undrained and drained, are full of it. Through the shrunken surfaces of the latter protrude in the drier parts dark peat-preserved boles. In the great drains scoured out by flood-water are to be found the crowns and octopus-like roots of trees. Timber lies in the basin of every lake, lakelet, and tarn on the run. It shows beneath the turf of grassed lands whiter in the morning frosts, browner in summer droughts. Surface timber also, chiefly totara (Podocarpus Totara), is, or rather was—for thousands of posts and strainers have been split from it—plentiful. It was most abundant on the most arid parts of the trough of the run. Thereabouts there had been a lesser growth of fern, a lesser accumulation of inflammable material. The fires, which from time to time used to sweep the countryside, had been from lack of combustible matter less fierce and less frequent in these localities. Great lanceolate-shaped spars curiously gouged and chiselled by fire were common, whilst here and there entire boles remained almost intact. Some of these prone trunks were of great girth; one lying in the open gave a diameter of twelve feet.

There will be found in the following chapters some account of the bygone inhabitants of Tutira—their fortunes, their folk - lore, and their feuds. These relics of the past have been gathered from the mouths of three friends well stricken in years, Anaru Kune, now “gone west,” Aparahama—for short 'Para or 'Pera,—and last but not least, Te Hata-Kani, that wonderful old man—tauwhena—a word meaning sometimes dwarfish, of small stature, but also used to denote a person who never grows old, but retains his youthful vigour to the end. To these three men and to the indefatigable Rev. P. A. Bennet I owe the history of the Ngai-Tatara. To be in sympathy with this hapu or sub-tribe and its old-world ways, readers would be well advised to shed the Decalogue, to accept for the nonce the ethics of the Stone Age, to imagine themselves bare-limbed, bare-headed, brown, the pake of everyday wear thrown over their shoulders, on high days and holidays clad in soft mats of woven flax, plumes in their hair and taiahas in their hands.

The generally accepted theory as to the colonisation of New Zealand by the Maoris, too definite to contain the whole truth, is that some five centuries ago a great migration from Hawaiki reached the Dominion. Mr Sidney H. Ray, to whom I applied for information on this matter, and who has kindly allowed me to use his reply, writes thus:— “I think that whenever the introduction of an element from the West into Polynesia took place, it must have been a great deal earlier than the fourteenth century. There is internal evidence that the known Maori language is formed by the imposition of an Indonesian linguistic element

By Indonesian is meant the original speech of the islanders of the Indian Archipelago.

Maori footpaths in olden times followed the lines of scantiest vegetation such as open river reaches, unfertile hill-tops, ridges bare of cover, lines of ingress and egress, in fact, least liable to ambuscade. There were two main trails connecting Tutira with the coast, the one from Arapawanui on the east, the other from Tangoio on the south. These, as also the tracks round the lake and the outward track to the ranges, I shall use as threads on which to string our narrative; from them I shall invite the reader to listen to the legends, folk-lore, and history of the localities traversed.

Starting from Arapawanui on the coast, the track inland followed the general line of the river Waikoau as far as the eastern corner of Tutira. The going was fairly open and level; the river, flowing only a few score feet above sea-level, had deposited along its banks sand, grit, and limestone rubble washed from its upper reaches. At its great bend, near to the several boundaries of Arapawanui, Tangoio, and Tutira, precipitous marl cliffs compelled a deviation. Almost exactly opposite the spot where the Mangahinahina stream joins the main river, our trail crossed on to Tutira soil. Immediately after passage of the Umungoiro ford a faintly defined subsidiary track followed for a quarter of a mile the general direction of the river-bed to a little clearing in a patch of bush. Doubtless it had been the home of some outlier, a residence only habitable under the conditions of the second phase of native life on the run; like every settlement of that later period, it was marked by the presence of peach-trees. Reverting to the main track from the Waikoau, it followed the line of the Mangahinahina brook until that streamlet, as streamlets do on Tutira, narrowed into a gorge. It continued along a narrow ridge, first in a northerly line, then along the ridge of another

In Maori occupation the water area of Tutira was more productive of food than its solid surface. “Te wai-u o koutou tipuna”—“the milk of your ancestors”—runs the local proverb, signifying the constant supply of food ready to hand from lakes and rivers. It is natural, therefore, that a larger number of place-names, legends, and traditions should have been remembered about the vicinity of the lake, about its shores, small fertile marshes, and promontories, than about the remainder of the run. Most of the traffic was by water; even in the 'eighties there were several old canoes afloat; others still intact rest to this day submerged and safe in Waikopiro. There were narrow trails of a more or less temporary character connecting pa with pa, kainga with kainga, cultivation-ground with cultivation-ground, but probably in many places no permanent route existed. The line of sparsest vegetation would be the only general description of the eastern lake path, a line that must have altered in some degree with every fire run through the flax and fern, with every flood and consequent crop of landslips.

Starting from Piraunui and following the eastern margin of the lake, the trail, such as it was, passed on the right the celebrated spring of water Te Korokoro-a-Hine-rakai, on the left the log Te Waka-o-whakairo, ere reaching the small marsh known in modern days as “Pera's Swamp.” Here on a dry patch of good land stood, in the 'eighties, the remains of an old hut, its little garden plot marked with a patch or two of thyme (Thymus vulgaris). About the dry warm apex of the same valley flourished a considerable peach-grove. On another dry rise, rich in leaf-mould and travertine oozings, grew a single peach-tree. On the farther side of Waikopiro swamp a sharp spur runs down from the main range terminating in the peninsula Te Rewa-a-Hinetu. Upon the

Whatever may be the value of the central portion of Tutira in the future, and personally I believe it will be very great, it was to the natives immediately prior to European civilisation almost worthless.

There existed upon its surface neither forests for birds nor suitable streams for eels. Place-names are in consequence fewer in number and records of the past scantier.

From the ford Maheawha the trail proceeded in a northerly direction. On the left of the track lay several hundred acres of flattish lands and low rolling downs by the name of Parae-ia-kai-ora. About the centre of this region rose the little hill Tamaiahua, opposite which a fairly well-defined subsidiary track branched off in the direction of Otupare, “Conical Hill.” Proceeding on its way the main track rose gradually until it reached Orawaki. This height, better known as the “Image Hill,” got its name from the image or tekoteko which at one time stood on its summit. I understand that the original, a fine piece of carving, adorned with greenstone earrings and clad in finely woven mats, was highly thought of. It was burned in one of the numerous fern fires which used to sweep the countryside; only a rude replica of the original remained in the 'eighties. The rough block of totara from which it was carved had split, but showed, nevertheless, the moko or tattoo pattern on the face, and the conventional three fingers crossed over the belly.

In early days the missionary bell topper was in demand as adornment for the tekoteko. The Rev. Mr Spencer, working during the 'forties at Tarawera, was made by the Maoris to promise—a promise he was never allowed to forget—that his discarded headgear should be reserved for this special purpose. Our “image” on Orawaki hill, naked and alarmingly masculine, clad in the ecclesiastical bravery of a top-hat, could only then have been further christianised by a bishop's apron.

The two halves of New Zealand are separated by a narrow strait. At the date of their discovery, one—the South Island—was an open land fit for immediate settlement, carrying nutritious grasses; the other—the North Island—was a vast tangle of fern, of scrub, and of forest. In it there was no open country ready to the settler's hand; the pioneers of the North had to create their pasturage.

On Tutira grew a few acres of tussock-grass (Poa cœspitosa), a few score acres of flax (Phormium tenax) and of raupo (Typha angustifolia). A few hundred acres also of forest and woodland lay hidden in gorges and ravines. Otherwise, over the whole station stretched an illimitable sea of bracken (Pteris aquilina, var. esculenta). This plant, against which the station has been battling for more than forty years, delights in loose humus, sandy soil, and pumice grit. Into such soils—never dry, yet never water-logged—its rhizomes penetrate many feet. It is perhaps the only fern which thrives on manure. Year after year it will invade garden-plots; it will persist season after season in sheepyards. On ploughed grounds fed with artificials its fronds spring taller, thicker in stem, and of a deeper green.

In fallen forest country, burnt and elsewhere grassed, every hollow stump eight or ten feet across, into which stock cannot reach, becomes a huge fern - vase. The fenced - in railway lines carry on either side, through cleared bushland, long ribbons of bracken. Intermingled with light open bush, I have measured fronds fourteen feet long. So situated, they develop something of the habits of a creeper—the stalks becoming finer and more pliable, the lower pinnæ aborting, the whole frond growing languorous and etiolated. In open lands on Tutira growth was most luxuriant on eastern and southern slopes. On such aspects, in competition with tutu (Coraria ruscifolia) and koromiko (Veronica salicifolia), fern averaged five or six feet in height. On hot dry northern and western slopes it grew a foot or two less. No dry soil, however, was too bad to nourish bracken. Stunted to a few stiff inches, it covered alike the driest hill-tops and the most arid flats.

The growth of the plant is as follows: early in November myriads of minute brown-green circinate fronds begin to appear, each uplifting its own little cap of earth, as trap-door spiders raise the lids of their dry homes. Later these fronds grow into notes of interrogation, then, rising well above the old growth, each opens into the likeness of a man's hand bent back from the wrist, with fingers still curled up.

Later again the fronds develop into antlered spikes mossed with ferruginous dust. At last, fully unfolded, they assume the sombre green hue characteristic of fern country in New Zealand. On poorest soils bracken most quickly matures; on good ground weeks pass before the fronds attain completion. After its spring growth, unless scorched by fire or eaten by stock, the plant rests until the following spring. Unlike its British relative, which rots away in a single winter, six or seven different seasons' crop can be discriminated in the tangled masses of the New Zealand plant. The lowest are in various stages of fragmentary decay, others brittle and brown though sound; another is mottled with grey, but still in patches preserving its green; another bowed and weatherworn, only its tips sere; another dull green and almost perfect; the latest crop of all still erect and topping the growths of former years. Such was the appearance of Tutira in former times.

There was but little room for other plants. In fact, as mountains prove the last resort of peoples driven from their homes by conquest, so in the cliff system of Tutira plants survived which must have otherwise perished in the tyranny of fern. The reader knows the physiography of the station—an alternation of slope and cliff; a drainage system far beneath the level. Over every slope fern lay in swathes: it reached to the base of every cliff, it hung like a fringe over every precipice.

Forest and woodland covered less than two out of sixty thousand acres—forest growing in the ranges of the interior, well worthy of its name from the immense size of many of its individual

The ferns of Tutira deserve special attention—a chapter, albeit a brief one, to themselves. Out of the 135 species enumerated by Cheeseman in his ‘Manual of the New Zealand Flora,’ or 134 if the very doubtful Davallia Forsteri be disallowed, more than one-half grow on Tutira. It is a remarkable record for one station—a record which, I am confident, can never be exceeded. Variations of altitude, large rainfall, range of climatic conditions, dissimilarity of geological formations, and careful search have each in its degree contributed to this result. The main cause, however, has been the wild and rugged nature of the country, its enormous quantity of gorges and ravines, its hundreds of miles of precipice and crag. Species ousted elsewhere maintain themselves in such spots—they afford a last foothold to fugitives; thus, clinging to the base of a low conglomerate cliff, survives a patch of Gleichenia circinata. Twice have fires almost blasted the plant to death; twice has it reappeared. A dripping precipice, otherwise usurped by Polypodium Billardieri, shelters Lindsaya viridis, crannies in a single mass of broken limestone rock high on Heru-o-Tureia afford foothold to Cystopteris fragilis; the concave base of a series of high, dry conglomerate rock-faces safeguards Doodia media; though nibbled and brushed by stock, and though endangered during every flood by land-slips, it survives. The low rims of a tumbled mass of conglomerate boulders offer a last foothold to Adiantum diaphanum. It has climbed by an athletic feat from its own natural habitat—the forest floor. Asplenium Trichomanes survives on a single limestone rock broken from one of the ancient sea-floors of eastern Tutira and deeply set in the turf of the green hillside. Each of the above species has been found but on one small spot on Tutira. Another fern only to be found on rock is the slender, beautiful annual, Gymnogramme leptophylla. Thrice since 1882 it has been exceedingly plentiful on the conglomerates of central Tutira. On each occasion the plant has shown itself after periods of remarkable drought and heat, germination of its spores seeming only to happen at a temperature above normal. Except under such conditions not a single specimen has been found. It is absent or abundant, very plentiful or undiscoverable, appearing or reappearing at intervals of years. Asplenium flabbelifolium also chiefly abides on the rocks. I have got specimens of many others—burnt up, starved, depauperated—on cliffs. Their names need not, however, be given, as they grow also on sites where they thrive and which they adorn by happy growth. One other fern—Gleichenia Cunninghamii, a forest species normally—has once only been found on Tutira.

I can say of the ferns as of the grasses and orchids of the station, that they have been sought for with special care. Appended are the names of species:— Hymenophyllum rarum.Hymenophyllum polyanthos, var. sanguinolentum.Hymenophyllum pulcherrimum.Hymenophyllum dilatatum.Hymenophyllum demissum.Hymenophyllum scabrum.Hymenophyllum flabellatum.Hymenophyllum Tunbridgense.Trichomanes reniformeTrichomanes humile.Trichomanes venosum.Cyathea dealbata.Cyathea medullaris.Hemitelia Smithii.Alsophila Colensoi.Dicksonia squarrosa.Dicksonia fibrosa.Cystopteris fragilis.Lindsaya viridis.Adiantum affine.Adiantum diaphanum.Adiantum Æthiopicum.Hypolepis tenuifolia.Cheilanthes Sieberi.Cheilanthes tenuifolia.Pellæa rotundifolia.Pteris aquilina, var. esculenta.Pteris scaberula.Pteris tremula.Pteris macilenta.Pteris incisa.Lomaria Patersoni, var. elongata.Lomaria discolor.Lomaria vulcanica.Lomaria lanceolata.Lomaria alpina.Lomaria capensis.Lomaria filiformis.Lomaria fluviatilis.Lomaria membranacea.Doodia media.Asplenium flabbelifolium.Asplenium Trichomanes.Asplenium falcatum.Asplenium lucidum.Asplenium lucidum var. anomodum.Asplenium Hookerianum.Asplenium bulbiferum.Asplenium flaccidum.Aspidium aculeatum.Aspidium Richardi.Aspidium capense.Nephrodium decompositum.Nephrodium glabellum.Nephrodium velutinum.Nephrodium hispidum.Polypodium punctatum.Polypodium pennigerum.Polypodium australe.Polypodium grammitidis.Polypodium serpens.Polypodium Cunninghamii.Polypodium pustulatum.Polypodium Billardieri.Gymnogramme leptophylla.Gleichenia circinata.Gleichenia Cunninghamii.Todea hymenophylloides.Ophioglossum lusitanicum.Botrychium ternatum.

In regard to the immediate past there is no reason to believe that in actual number of breeding species there has been any decrease. On a run so full of crags, impenetrable gorges, and deep river-beds, possibilities of concealment and escape are almost unlimited. The difference between now and then lies not in reduction of species but in reduction of individual birds. Undoubtedly there has been a very great diminution in the aggregate numbers. There are probably not ten birds now for every thousand there used to be immediately prior to settlement.

There had, however, existed—say within a century or two—other species. The older resident natives knew of them by tradition; they knew their Maori names. From hearsay they could, with a fair degree of accuracy, describe their habits. They recognised with expressions of delight their coloured representations as depicted in Buller's illustrated volumes. Thus I learnt that the Blue Wattled Crow (Glaucopis Wilsoni), a breed, until the forest was felled, extremely plentiful on the coastal forest between Wairoa and Gisborne, was at one time common also on Tutira. They recognised, too, the Saddle Back (Creadion carunculatus), a species which in my time has always been exceedingly rare on the east coast.

I have seen locally, indeed, but one pair in my life, immature birds in dense scrub on the slopes of the Maungahamia range in the back country of Poverty Bay.

We shall note in another chapter how indigenous species of birds have been affected in different ways by the development of the run—by its change from bracken and bush into grass: how some must inevitably perish, some linger in lessened numbers, and some, I am glad to say, survive and even increase.

Appended is a list of species seen on Tutira during my time:— Falconidœ (Hawks).Hieracidea Novæ Zealandiæ.Hieracidea ferox.Circus Gouldi.Strigidœ (Owls).Athene Novæ Zealandiæ.Alcedinidœ (Kingfishers).Halcyon vagans.Meliphagidœ (Honey-eaters).Prosthemadera Novæ Zealandiæ.Anthornis Melanura.Zosterops lateralis.Certhiadœ (Creepers).Acanthisitta chloris.Luscinidœ (Warblers).Sphenœacus punctatus.Gerygone flaviventris.Petrœca toitoi.Anthus Novæ Zealandiæ.Muscicapidœ (Fly-catchers).Rhipidura flabellifera.Psittacidœ (Parrots).Platycercus Novæ Zealandiæ.Nestor meridionalis.Cuculidœ (Cuckoos).Chrysococcyx lucidus.Eudynamis taitensis.Columbidœ (Pigeons).Carpophaga Novæ Zealandiæ.Apteryginœ.Apteryx Mantelli.Charadriadœ (Plovers).Charadrius bicinctus.Ardeidœ (Herons).Ardea poeciloptila.Ardea alba.Scolopacidœ.Himantopus leucocephalus.Limosa baueri.Rallidœ (Rails).Ocydromus earli.Rallus philippensis.

About 1860 an immense territory was purchased by Government from the native owners of southern Hawke's Bay, the lands thus acquired being parcelled out in great runs as freehold. It was open fern country for the most part, extending from the foothills of the Ruahine and Kaweka ranges to the ocean. The homesteads of the stations thus created were connected with the port of Napier either by sea or by rough bullock-tracks following the lines of old river-beds deserted by

It has been stated that in March of '78 George Merritt sold to C. H. Stuart one half-share in Tutira. There is an underlined diary entry dated 1st April '78: “C. H. Stuart takes over the share of T. J. Stuart.” There is another: “Ayson received from C. Stuart £40 to pay native track-makers.” Doubtless there was some private arrangement between the brothers, for though a minor at the time, the half-share in the station actually belonged to T. J. Stuart from the beginning.

During the same year Merritt's remaining share was also taken over, no money as far as I can discover passing in the transaction. The probabilities are that there had been advances made from a bank or mortgage company. There would also be on Merritt's part responsibility for the working expenses of the place. Not long afterwards a new name appears, that of T. C. Kiernan, who entered into partnership with C. H. Stuart, the latter again, doubtless, acting for his brother.

In the hands of Messrs Stuart & Kiernan, Tutira was to undergo a vast transformation. They had bought the place to put into it their own personal work, to make a home of it for themselves. They were young, hopeful, and energetic. The earliest written record extant, that of '78, is fragmentary, but in Kiernan's diaries each day's work on Tutira is fully registered between January of '79 and July of '81. Kiernan's diaries are, in fact, items in the early history of Hawke's Bay; though written of Tutira, they illustrate incidentally the vicissitudes of every sheep-station in the province, the rise and fall of prices, the smiles and frowns of fortune.

These were the times, as in King Arthur's court, when each hour brought forth some noble deed, when each day saw some wrong to the station righted. The Stuart Brothers and Kiernan loved their run— they were enthusiasts. They worked as young men work when hope is high. The wool-shed to be erected was a vision to dream of; it was a joy to view with the mind's eye vast stretches of green grass; their hearts leapt up when they beheld the flocks and herds of the future, the larger lambs, the fatter wethers, the heavier-fleeced ewes. In that golden age money was valued as useful only for some new improvement to the station. She was the beloved mistress for whom nothing was too good. She was to be decked with the straightest of fence lines, the woolliest of sheep, the shadiest of willow-groves; beautified with tall crops, smoothed in green grass, lawned like Arcadia. A settler gives his best love not to his parents, not to his wife, not to his little ones, but to his land.

In a former chapter I have asked the reader to shed the Decalogue and to strip himself to a Maori mat. In this I could wish that he should brace himself to the agony of perusing three months' entries from T. C. Kiernan's diary. Unlimited diary is a proverbially stodgy diet, and that of '79 is no exception to the rule, yet deliberately I intend to reproduce January, February, and March exactly as they were written, day by day, word for word, with all their repetitions, trivialities, jottings of wages, stores, mutton, tobacco, and pain-killer sold. I have thought it better to show the plain unvarnished tale as a whole than attempt to select sample days. The reader must prepare himself, therefore, for the digestion of a three months' lump of diary. Alas! that I cannot present to him the grimy original documents; then, indeed, he might forbear, or, at any rate, condone the offence. Truth to tell, they hardly bear transcription to clean paper and clear type; I feel a kind of shame in dragging to the light of day jottings pencilled in smoky huts lit by candles guttering in the draughts, the writer, with hard hands and broken nails, rising from time to time to turn the frizzling chops, to prong the simmering joint, or to pile fresh embers on the lid of the camp oven.

The play opened then in '78 with a dramatis personœ of owners and ex-owners: Thomas and Charles Stuart, George and Ben Merritt, a mysterious Mr Doull “from Otago,”—alone of those mentioned in the fragmentary diary of '78 honoured with the courtesy prefix,—shepherds, bushmen, contractors, and natives.

The station once acquired, improvements were not long withheld; from the beginning, indeed, they were lavished on the land with both hands: draining, track-making, and fencing were started within a few weeks of purchase. Specialisation of work had not begun—each man put his hand to the task most pressing. The kind of life led by these pioneers, the kind of work done in the early days of station life, cannot, in fact, be made more comprehensible to readers than by full citation of actual bare facts. Doubtless the work was rough and crude, but it is upon the dust and grime and sweat of these prehistoric days that the present Tutira is founded.

Well, the reader has to imagine a company of young men, living on bread, mutton, wild pork, and potatoes, in a reed-hut, garbed in little else than boots, shirt, and moleskins, the last-named garment supported by a waist-belt containing the butcher-knife, sometimes its leathern sheath, from use and wont, so warped to the wearer's shape as almost to resemble a tucked-in tail; the station itself a wilderness, unfenced and pathless, covered with bracken, bush, and flax.

The diary of '78, by whomsoever written, is broken and fragmentary, in that of '79 each day's work is entered. Making no further apologies, I shall allow this diary to speak for itself. Whether of interest or not, its pages, at any rate, portray the early days of a sheep-run. The initials C. H. S. are those of Charles H. Stuart, T. S. those of Thomas Stuart, T. C. K. those of T. C. Kiernan, otherwise the journal tells its own tale.

Here we can conveniently close our chapter—sufficient matter has been given to show the normal daily life of a station in the making. I know it has been prosaic; I know it has been heavy. I cannot but be aware that its stolidity must have even veiled and obscured the glories, the delights, the ecstasies of improvements, for there is no fascination in life like that of the amelioration of the surface of the earth. For a young man what an ideal existence!—to make a fortune by the delightful labour of your hands—to drain your swamps, to cut tracks over your hills, to fence, to split, to build, to sow seed, to watch your flock increase—to note a countryside change under your hands from a wilderness, to read its history in your merinos' eyes. How pastoral! How Arcadian! I declare that in those times to think of an improvement to the station was to be in love. A thousand anticipations of happiness rushed upon the mind—the emerald sward that was to paint the alluvial flats, the graded tracks up which the pack team was to climb easily, the spurs over which the fencing was to run, its shining wire, its mighty strainers; the homestead of the future, the spacious wool-shed, the glory of the grass that was to be.

It was a joy to wake, to spring out of your bunk half dressed already,—there wasn't a nightshirt north of Napier then,—to glance through the whare's open door at the clear, innumerable hosts of stars, in the huge fireplace to open up the warm cone of soft grey ash piled carefully overnight, to push into its heart of glowing red the dry kindling, to see the brief smoke ascend, to hear the crackle of the rapid flames. Oh, those were happy days, with no cares, no fears for the future, no burden of personal possession, when every thought was for the run, when every penny that could be scraped together was to be spent on the adornment of that heavenly mistress.

In the chapter just closed the reader has enjoyed without alloy the delights of land improvement; without thought of the morrow and without anxiety as to finance, he has contemplated the beginning of a sheep station; but, alas! pleasure and profit do not always march hand in hand. Local knowledge, experience, judgment, acquaintance with stock, each plays an important rôle, each is necessary to final success. There were other reasons, too, militating against our young men about which nothing yet has been said.

It is never pleasant to speak plainly on certain subjects, especially in a book of this sort open to the general reader, yet surely, after the attainment of a certain age and of a certain amount of experience, warning becomes a plain duty. Reading, then, between the lines of certain entries in these diaries, it cannot be concealed that our pioneers had got into very dangerous company. It is not my place to preach—readers will resent anything in the way of a sermon; I suppose, too, that young men will be young men to the end of time—yet, to be frank, there were persons to be met with in the streets of Napier—and pretty openly too—whom it would have been better our pioneers should never have known. There were parlours, too easy of access altogether, where nothing but harm could happen. If the presence of a certain class, if the trade they ply, cannot be eliminated, its conditions, at any rate, should be regulated. In the 'eighties nothing of that sort had been attempted; bankers and managers of mortgage companies might charge what rates they chose. Legislation in respect to this matter came later, when the New Zealand Government began itself to borrow and relend cheap money to struggling settlers. In the 'eighties it was otherwise. In those days young fellows like the Stuart Brothers and Kiernan were, in spite of themselves, so to speak, forced into bad company.

Well then, harking back to the last days of March, it will be remembered that Kiernan bought sixty rams, for which he had presumably given a station cheque of £150. On 1st April I find recorded these words: “Was surprised cheque for rams had been returned by Bank of New Zealand; had to give my private cheque for £150 to meet it.” 8th April: “C. H. Stuart returned from town with news of hard times and the likelihood of having to sell the run. Everybody down on account of bad news.” 9th April: “At Kihekanui, very miserable on account of bad news—no heart to do anything.” 10th April: “Went to town to arrange matters connected with run.” 11th April: “Returned from town owing to not being able to do business till Thursday next.” 12th April: “Trying to kill time.” 17th April: “In town waiting to see Miller.”

Thrice fortunate those who have not passed through the dreary stages of having “no heart to do anything,” of “trying to kill time, of “waiting to see Miller.”

Trusting that these entries from Kiernan's diary will prepare the reader for the sad sequel, we can go back many months—to the date, in fact, of the partnership of Stuart and Kiernan. The reader has, in fact, seen but one side of the operation of breaking in a run. If, however, he has been in any degree deceived, it has only been as Messrs Stuart and Kiernan were themselves deceived. He has intentionally been allowed to look at things as they themselves viewed their own affairs. The truth is, that from the beginning these pioneers were doomed—they were predestined—to failure. Conditions in the interior were in those days quite unknown; knowledge of local conditions—the most important knowledge of all—had to be purchased. Settlers in the fertile districts of southern Hawke's Bay may have been but little wiser or more careful, they always had this in their favour—that their soils were sufficiently rich to redeem the owner's faults, even making full allowance for the fact that in those days fern was fern, that none could tell in the 'seventies that a plant, easily destroyed in a dry climate and on warm rich soils, would prove almost ineradicable on porous land in a wet district.

The master and main difficulty was lack of sheep-feed. Eliminating the leaves of tutu (Coriaria ruscifolia), edible only to salted stock, and the growth of fern fronds, which ceased altogether for six months of the year, there were not 100 acres of sheep-feed on Tutira, there were not 100 acres of grass on Tutira when Newton stocked the run with 4000 sheep. In early times, not only on that station but on every property in Hawke's Bay, the sheep had to create his own pasture, himself to grow his own keep. Now, to understock is the secret of all successful sheep-farming, but action on the lines of this axiom was denied to the run. Irreconcilable contrarieties in nature had to be reconciled. The pioneers of Tutira had at one and the same time to “make” their country and to consider the welfare of their stock; it was to solder impossibilities and make them kiss.

In an earlier chapter a general description of the indigenous vegetation of the run—bracken, forest, woodland, and marsh—has been given. With the influx of Europeans into New Zealand and the importation of stock and of alien plants suitable for stock, the natural spread of grasses had begun in a small way on Tutira. It grew on pig-rootings, on deserted native clearings and cultivation-grounds, on landslips and along the bases of the marl and limestone outcrops. These patches and spatters of grass were scattered over the 20,000 acres of the station. They were sometimes hundreds of yards, sometimes miles apart, linked with one another by narrow tracks or rather bores through high fern and tutu. In addition to these self-sown alien and native grasses, sheep-feed was obtainable, as has been already mentioned, during certain months of the year by the burning of bracken. Of this plant the circinate fronds are on good land fairly nutritious; sheep can, during summer, be maintained on them in fair store order. These scattered patches of grass, this fern growth, together with the leaves of the tutu, were the original sum-total of sheep-feed on Tutira. The Children of Israel had to make bricks without straw, the pioneers of Tutira had to produce wool without grass.

The first care of the settler was to increase his area of grass by the operation known through Hawke's Bay as “fern-crushing” or “fern-grinding,”—words ominous of the part played by the unfortunate sheep, and which will be described later. It is sufficient now to state that after fire had cleared the tangled bracken growth, the ground was surfacesown and kept clear by browsing sheep. As the greatest growth of fern took place during late spring, it was then impossible to have too many sheep. Every squatter in Hawke's Bay was in the 'eighties “fern-grinding,” so that in those times sheep could not be bought at that season of the year. The result was that every sheep likely to survive the winter was kept, however old and however fleeced. It was at least a pair of jaws, a beast that could bite bracken.

Fern-grinding, however unavoidable in the progress towards creation of the large flock—that distant goal upon which the eyes of the run were fixed—was nevertheless a process utterly incompatible with the ownership of properly-fed stock. The early years of the run were, in fact, a compromise between murdering the sheep and “making” the country. The run was in the position of having to wrong its stock because no other course of action was feasible. It had to transgress the first and greatest of pastoral commandments: Thou shalt not overstock; there was no remedy for the evil.

It was upon the 4th of September 1882 that the new owners of Tutira took delivery of their sheep-station. They were wild with anticipations of sport, of riding, of the mastery of animals, of life in the wilds. At least, by one of them, every hour of that golden day can still be vividly recalled. He remembers wakening at dawn and rushing out to forecast the day. It was a perfect Hawke's Bay spring morning, and be it said, no weather in the world can beat a fine September in Napier. The sky was cloudless, the faintest crisp suspicion of frost mingled with the salt tang of the beach. Behind the town rose the magnificent snowclad ranges Ruahine and Kaweka, in front heaved the Pacific's vast expanse.

What magic there is in possession! What a pleasure the sight of the hacks! They were not quite like any other horses in the world; they were our own, they belonged to us, an earnest of that glorious sheep-station which was to provide after a few seasons easy enlargement of our minds and fortunes, endless rivers, moors, and forests in Scotland.

We rode through the picturesque town—our horses' hoofs sounding loud on the quiet streets—where half the inhabitants were still asleep. We passed through Port Ahuriri, crossing the newly-built wooden bridge which linked the northern and southern portions of the province. We followed the beach road along the western spit, peopled then only by a few fisher-folk, some of them living in homes built of biscuit and kerosene tins in lieu of iron sheeting. We passed the Petane Hotel, then run by the refoubtable William Villers. We forded the Esk river, and, riding through the kainga of Petane, scanned with deep interest the reed-thatched whares of the owners of Tutira. O Ananias, Azarias, and Misael! that morning our happiness overflowed the world. We even loved our landlords—after all, they had been heathens until recently; they had never read Henry George; they knew no better. We rode along the shallow sandy turf of the Whiranaki Flats and over the Beach Hill to the County Boundary Peak. We were then in the county of Wairoa, one of whose divisions was the Mohaka riding, within which lay Tutira; it was another step towards our new possession. Farther on we reached the Tangoio Bluff, and turning inland at right angles passed the homestead and wool-shed of the Tangoio run. Tangoio and Tutira marched with one another.

We followed several miles inland, but parallel to the sea, the switch-back track, the old coastal pack-trail, so lost to common-sense as to think its deplorable grades good going. We struck the First Fence, and saw for the first time the Tutira station mail-box. To ordinary eyes it might have seemed, as indeed it was, a kerosene case nailed to the top of a strainer-post. To us it was much more; that box, simple and unpretentious to the outward eye, had been the receptacle of communications about Tutira wool, about Tutira stock, about Tutira interests of a dozen sorts. We viewed it with a kind of reverence.

We turned sharp inland and followed up and down over the hilltops, the trail faintly marked by the station pack-team. Three miles farther on we struck Dolbel's Boundary Gate, and saw in the distance the Delectable Mountains of our pilgrimage—the ranges of Tutira. Shortly afterwards we looked down upon the Waikoau tumbling along amongst its boulders. We led our horses over the “shoot,” the almost perpendicular drop, down which the pack-team used in muddy weather to slide with stiff legs and unlifted hoofs. We zigzagged down the steep trail of Dolbel's Face, disturbing mobs of wild cattle, each of them raising pleasant anticipations of future huntings. With the delight of Scott crossing his Tweed at Abbotsford, we splashed across the unsung ford of the Waikoau. We trod Tutira soil. We viewed for the first time our own sheep. They were merino ewes,—skin and bone, scrags, their

To attempt the portrayal of the successive processes by which, over the whole run, its lighter lands have been trodden and trampled into some sort of utility, would be to work on too large a canvas. A multiplicity of details, unavoidable even in the annals of a single paddock, related of many would confuse and mystify. One will suffice: the enclosure called the “Rocky Staircase” is in soil typical of every block on central

Perhaps the chapter may possess another interest. During its perusal no great stretch of fancy will be required to note in our little world of plants a process not altogether unlike that now taking place amongst classes and individual members of the species homo sapiens. Armageddon, in truth, has been raging as fiercely in the Rocky Staircase as in the Old World. The ancient régime in both has been overthrown. The good things of life have been opened to all capable of taking them; the selfish sway of capitalism and land-lordism—call them brackenism and tutuism—has been broken. There has occurred a revolution which, however personally distasteful to Pteris aquilina and Coriaria ruscifolia, has proved quite delightful, I should imagine, to humbler members of the community who had hitherto been half-starved in breathless slums and barren crofts—bog brims, arid tops, and precipices—and who now for the first time could breathe fresh air and state their appetites. The reader will see in Chapter XIX. the Rocky Staircase “made safe for democracy.”

Allusions have been made from time to time to fern-crushing, to the ebb and flow of sheep-feed, to the contraction and expansion of feeding areas; they will now be fully explained. Pteris aquilina, var. esculenta, is a form or sub-species of the British bracken. Its roots were in ancient times of a certain value to the Maoris for food; at a later date its circinate fronds were moderately palatable to stock. The normal growth of the plant is that of its English relative, a single even crop of fronds in spring-time. Unlike the bracken of England, however, which rapidly withers and disappears, the fronds of the New Zealand pteris endure for years.

Briefly described, the science of fern-crushing on rich stiff land is as follows. A section rough enough to carry a fire is selected proportionate to the number of sheep forthcoming to crush it, the tangle of fern is burnt off in autumn, whilst immediately afterwards the land is surface-sown with grass and clover seed. A week or fortnight after destruction of the old stalks and stems young fronds begin to appear. Sheep are then poured into the paddock, the number required per acre varying with the fertility of the land, and, equally important, with the weather conditions. Drought means cessation of growth; sharp frost, temporary destruction; heavy warm rain, stimulation of the rhizomes. The stock used has also to be carefully shepherded. Sheep “hanging” in corners, or against fence lines barring them from the paddocks where they have been bred, have to be driven elsewhere or skimmed off. Feed, and sheep to eat that feed, should be exactly balanced. Without a big enough mob, the bracken fronds uncurl and become uneatable; on ground too heavily stocked, sheep fall away in condition. At the end of the second season, if all has gone well, if the sown grasses have sprung up dense enough to cover every bit of open ground where otherwise there might have been germination of undesirable weeds, if the land has been rich enough to support a heavy head of stock which will have trampled down unwanted plants, or devoured them unnoticed in mouthfuls of grass, then the work has been permanently done,—grass has taken the place of fern. On first-rate land these results are obtainable without injury to stock; on first-rate land the work is permanent.

The soils of Tutira, except for a few hundred acres, were, however, not first-class; they were not, except perhaps for a couple of thousand acres, even second-class. The great trough of the run—the vast bulk of the station—was third-class.

Fern-crushing on Tutira was accomplished on its few acres of first-class land as described—that is, with a minimum of trouble to man and beast; on the few hundred acres of second-class land, with rather less good results and a considerably greater output of labour to shepherds and injury to stock. On eighteen out of its twenty thousand acres, it is no exaggeration to say that the surface had to be stamped, jammed, hauled, murdered into grass. It was only the low price of sheep that made such procedure possible, for the stars in their courses fought against the station. The rainfall, double that of southern Hawke's Bay, stimulated this terrible growth of fern against which we warred. Weather conditions militated against the station in another way too—they immensely prolonged our shearings. Not infrequently a break in the weather would occur immediately after the gathering in of sheep from a block in process of crushing. These sheep, having once been mustered, could not be put back; in the first place, because the weather might have cleared at any time, and the fleeces become dry and fit for shearing; in the second place, because sheep dogged overmuch grow callous and sulky; they will not run well and give a second clean muster. I have known stock in this way kept for a fortnight or three weeks away from a paddock, where every day the fern-stems were lengthening, where every day the fronds were uncurling.

The soil of the trough of the run has been described. It was spongy, porous, and relatively unfertile, as well fitted to the requirements of bracken as unsuitable for grass. The alien fodder plants sown, nowhere amalgamated into anything that could be termed a sward. Between the isolated plants of the miserable “take” of seed there was ample space left for the germination of undesirables. We shall see, in fact, that as the station began to get the better of bracken, its place was taken by another and a worse plant. The grassing of nine-tenths of Tutira has not been—it could not be—a fine art run on scientific lines of husbandry. It has been accomplished by brute force at the expense of owners and stock.

Between '82 and 1917 the story of this paddock will divide itself naturally into seven distinct periods, each prefaced by a fire, each showing a maximum and minimum of carrying capacity, each demonstrating the ebb and flow of sheep-feed, the contraction and expansion of land over which stock was able to graze.

In the spring of '82, when I first saw the paddock, it lay a blackened waste, strewn with a tangle of tough stems—the ropy, parboiled stalks of the latest, greenest, and therefore least combustible of the many layers of fern that had covered the ground. On the damper aspects—the southern and eastern slopes—stood extensive groves of tutu, black, stiff and stark. Mustering this block a few weeks after arrival, I remember my astonishment at these miles of desolation unrelieved by a single green blade. I had seen nothing like it before. Of manuka, excepting a compact fire-swept patch of ten yards square on the main top, there was none. The rood or so of sheep camp on the main range had been ploughed and reploughed by pig in search of grubs and roots. Immediately beneath the great conglomerate cliff from which the paddock takes its name, also beneath lesser lines of cliff, lay narrow ribbons of open land, also uprooted and grubbed and regrubbed by pig. These strips of overturned sods contained survivors of such plants, native and alien, as Microlæna stipoides, Danthonia semiannularis, ryegrass (Lolium perenne), white clover (Trifolium repens), suckling (Trifolium dubium), Cape-weed (Hypochœris radicata), Geranium sessiliflorum, Pelargonium australe, &c. On the very edge and rim of the cliffs hung scant tufts of Poa anceps, and of Deyeuxia quadriseta, a species which even to this day on Tutira seems terrified to venture into the open. Here and there, too, on the rocks grew plants of blue grass (Agropyrum scabrum). Except for these pig-ploughed shreds and these rock surfaces the Rocky Staircase was in October of '82 a blanket of blackness. Save in the immediate vicinity of these strips of uprooted turf there had been no germination of any seed whatsoever. The paddock had nevertheless then attained its zenith of food supply, its maximum of expansion. Certainly there was no grass in it, but the tutu groves sprouting again from their burnt stools were open. Sheep running in the paddock could at least wander over every acre of it. With the advance of the year the initial stage of contraction began; by November millions of brown circinate fronds had appeared; they grew tall and strong, their pinnæ expanding until the ground was once again overspread with fresh crops of bracken, which season after season lay thicker on the ground. On this abomination of desolation some 300 merino wethers managed to survive, their fleeces black with dust from bracken and tutu thickets, their wool stripped from belly and side through constant contact with scrub and fern.

In the autumn of ‘89 began the second period. By that date the bracken, which had been until then carefully conserved from fire in accordance with the general plan of fern-crushing, was again fit to burn. The paddock became for the second time in our story a wilderness of charred stalks and stems. Now, however, on its surface for the first time began to appear cotyledons of certain aliens. They were sprung from plants which had by this time obtained a firm hold on the grassed lands of eastern Tutira and had begun to move inland. Some like the Prickly thistle (Cnicus lanceolatus) and the Cape-weed (Hypochœris radicata) had taken advantage of the wind to extend their range and to increase their numbers; others like Mouse-ear chickweed (Cerastium glomeratum), Silene (Silene gallica), and the native Houtawai (Acœna australis), had by different contrivances fastened their seeds to the legs and fleeces of sheep. Seedlings were still, however, rare compared with later germinations, the more so that winds blowing from the south and east, from the sea, over the grassed lands damped the feathery pappus of winged seeds. Their appearance was in any case of relatively trifling import, for the hand of man was about to interfere on a great scale with natural conditions. It had been, in fact, determined that the block should be crushed, sown, and stocked. Instead, therefore, of a few score of sheep running, as formerly, haphazard, many thousands were decanted into the paddock. Many hundred bags of grass seed were also sown. The first result of this stocking was the annihilation of every tutu thicket throughout the block. The bracken also was severely checked both by hoof and tooth, especially on the tops and along the upper portions of the slopes, positions dear to all sheep and especially to the timorous merino.

As might have been anticipated from what the reader has already been told,—a knowledge, however, then unattained by the writer and his partner,—this attempt to grass the Rocky Staircase was a comparative failure. On the worst portion of the paddock the seed failed to germinate; on rather better soils it held out feebly for one or two seasons, but everywhere its grip weakened with lapse of time. It was discovered, too, that on large areas of the paddock, sheep would starve rather than eat the fern fronds. On other portions, only with difficulty could they be forced to crop the shoots.

The result was that the worst parts of the paddock immediately relapsed into bracken; that another immense proportion became overgrown with hardly less rapidity; that only the steepest—that is, the best—portions of the block remained open to the sun and air for any length of time. A fresh process of fern expansion in fact recommenced in spite of us, its progress synchronising with the gradual failure of the sown grasses and clovers. At the termination of this second phase in the history of the Rocky Staircase, the paddock appeared to have reverted almost to its original vegetation, except indeed for the establishment of certain sheep camps, oases of deepest, most luxuriant green.

The continued enrichment of these camps month after month, year after year, decade after decade, where night by night thousands of sheep concentrate on small areas, has been for forty seasons very distressing to Harry Young and myself, constantly scheming as overseer and owner how to provide more grass for our sheep. The waste of ammonia on soil already enriched beyond all reason has been the more vexatious in view of the glaring needs of the arid areas around. Picturing the surrounding land as it might have been but for the conservative habits of stock, almost involuntarily have the words rushed to my lips, “I say, Harry, wouldn't it be grand if sheep only wouldn't always pee on the same place?” and often have I heard his responsive sympathetic sigh, “Ah, sir, Tutira would be like heaven then.”