40 



TUTIRA 



tenacious mud bogged sheep have to be extricated hoof by hoof, make 

 the hillsides a terror to shepherds. 1 After a " southerly buster " or a 

 "black nor'-easter" of three or four days' uninterrupted torrential 

 rain, I have counted on a two-mile stretch of hillside over two hundred 

 slips great and small, new or newly scoured out. Seven or eight times 

 since '82 the grasses and sedges of the valleys around the lake have 

 been overlaid by mud varying in depth from six inches to a couple 

 or three feet. Huge masses of solid hill have slid on to the larger 

 flats. Fencing is buried, roads and bridges washed away, culverts 



'*.^ r r f. ,"- 



X$7^k:; / 



"Like snow sliding off a roof" 



destroyed, stock bogged or caught and buried in the displaced masses 

 of earth. 



Besides earth avalanches there remain after every great storm, here 

 and there, fissures on the hillside nine inches or a foot in depth. Some- 

 times 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 



1 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 so 

 much more is the game quickened. 



