138 TUTIRA 



lands in such entanglements of scrub. Holding stock on to new 

 ground in those days broke the hearts of the men and wore the frames of 

 the merinos to greyhound lankness. With stock unharrassed and feed- 

 ing leisurely numbers must have been trapped and lost, but with sheep 

 "stringing" or hurried, companies of tens and twenties were swallowed 

 at a gulp. The animals themselves did not know where to go or what 

 to expect. The country was as strange to them as to their owners. 

 What happens in every paddock " worked " by sheep for any length 

 of time had not then occurred, the first action of a mob in a strange 

 enclosure being to map it out, to explore it, that is, by lines radiating 

 from established camps. In time tracks turn aside and thus cease 

 to reach crossings discovered to be impracticable because of bogs ; soft 

 spots, localities mined with under-runners, blind oozy creeks, cliffs and 

 so forth are avoided. Neither man nor beast had purchased experience 

 then, however ; it had yet to be bought by lives of sheep and money of 

 pioneers to paraphrase Kipling, by the bones of the sheep of Tutira, 

 Tutira has been made. These early losses were inevitable ; they were 

 as unavoidable as the mistakes of travellers exploring lauds of unknown 

 races of men, of unknown diseases, of unknown climates. 



Conditions were not ameliorated by the nature of the breed of sheep 

 then run in Hawke's Bay. They were merino, and there is something 

 maddening to the merino in the sight of its fellows escaping to fancied 

 freedom. There were in early times many of them since hardened by 

 processes to be described later numerous stretches of narrow marsh, 

 firm enough to bear the weight of the foremost dozen or score of sheep, 

 yet insufficiently sound to withstand the puddling and poaching of 

 hundreds of hoofs. The leaders of the mob would safely traverse such 

 a barrier. It would then become a quaking slough, the original narrow 

 line of traffic marked by bogged animals. 



The wallo wings of the wretched sheep in their mud baths would 

 deflect the line of travel by a few feet until another parallel track would 

 undergo the same process and in its turn also become a bog. Where 

 hundreds had crossed, dozens remained their carcases sinking into the 

 morass or remaining half submerged ; if discovered at all, advertised by 

 the presence of the harrier hawk (Circus Gouldi), which from the date of 

 the stocking of Tutira began greatly to increase in numbers. Another 

 type of trap taking from this conjectural mob its two or three or four, day 

 after day and week after week, was the crevice typical of marl forma- 



