154 TUTIRA 



paid for. As a matter of fact, we did shear something over 7000 sheep. 

 The shortage in our flock, therefore, was nearer 3000 than 1000, nearer 

 25 per cent than 10 per cent. 



Perhaps the reader may marvel how Stuart and Kiernan could have 

 in so brief a period brought to book at shearing-time 9000 sheep. They 

 were thus carried : 3000 wethers ran on the " back country," living 

 until late autumn on the fern fronds that spring up after fires lighted 

 purposely, and during winter feeding on tutu leaves, vast groves of which 

 shrub, commingled with bracken, covered the whole of the central and 

 west. In these regions there was literally no grass whatsoever, not 

 one single acre, for the sheep camps were each season ploughed and 

 reploughed by innumerable wild pig ; a further 500 sheep would be 

 stragglers raked in at various draftings from the neighbouring stations 

 of Arapawanui, Tangoio, and Kaiwaka. The remaining 5500 were able 

 to survive during the brief North Island winter, because the merino is a 

 small sheep and can subsist on little, and because the surface of such 

 country as was then in grass was virgin land, and grew feed with an 

 exuberance altogether unknown after a few years, but principally 

 because these 5500 ewes and hoggets were very badly done, because 

 the country was very grossly overstocked. According to modern lights 

 perhaps 3000 instead of 5500 could have been properly carried on the 

 newly-grassed area. 



The first brood of martyrs to the cause had emulated Bret Harte's 

 hero, Briggs of Tuolumne, " who busted himself in white pine." If any 

 particular factor in addition to loss of stcck may be said to have given 

 the mace blow to the three Stuarts, Kiernan, and M'Kenzie, it was their 

 expenditure on heart of totara and work in connection therewith. 



H. G.-S. and A. M. C. chose a new road to ruin. They knew that 

 9000 sheep, such as they were, had been shorn on Tutira, and reasoned, 

 perhaps not unnaturally, that what had been might be again. They 

 were mistaken. 



For explanation of this dictum we shall have to revert to the work 

 done by Stuart and Kiernan, as recorded in the station diaries. They 

 had burnt out the countryside ; they had scattered broadcast large 

 quantities of grass seed until the high water-mark of grass expansion 

 had been reached. Conditions were then at their best : the sheep, 

 running over a great area of open ground, obtained a larger 

 pasturage ; the surface of the ground newly burnt was clean of para- 



