170 TUTIRA 



canadensis) also temporarily overran the Rocky Staircase in vast 

 profusion. 



It is not again necessary to describe the processes of stocking and 

 crushing. Suffice it to say that once more the old operations were re- 

 enacted, once more a certain number of bags of ryegrass and cock's-foot 

 were sown, once more the worst parts of the block relapsed into bracken, 

 until at last stocking of the paddock was altogether discontinued. The 

 sheep were wanted elsewhere, for as one block began to fail, station policy 

 arranged that another should come into use. After the third or fourth 

 season it was in fact an advantage to allow a paddock to become again 

 overrun with fern-growth, to become again fit for firing. The maximum 

 number wintered during the maximum expansion of the third period 

 was about eighteen hundred. Except over an insignificant area of camp- 

 ing ground, English grasses and white clover had disappeared. Sheep 

 were chiefly, if not altogether, wintered on suckling clover, an invaluable 

 plant which from this date became our mainstay on the pumiceous area 

 of the station. The minimum number carried dropped back as usual to 

 about a couple or three hundred. 



The fourth period in the history of the Rocky Staircase was particu- 

 larly marked by the failure of fern to maintain its ancient sovereignty. 

 The plant was weakening under the long warfare waged against it ; 

 although it covered the ground still, the covering was less dense and 

 matted. The " burn " of 1902, consequently, was not what is technically 

 known as a " clean " fire. Unlike previous conflagrations that had swept 

 the Staircase from stem to stern, this fire left unburnt the ridge-caps, 

 the tops, sometimes even the upper slopes. There had been a lack 

 of herbage to carry the flames ; they had died down for want of material. 

 On these localities manuka had already made a lodgment. On all of 

 them it remained now in the fourth period, green, flourishing, unburnt, 

 five or seven feet high, its infinitesimally minute seed shaken abroad in 

 every breeze, spread by the hoofs of stock, in wet weather sticking to 

 every dislodged pebble, washed downhill in every sheep-path runnel. 

 Otherwise, as before, save on unburnt portions and on the bright green 

 sheep-camps, the paddock was a blackened tangle of fern stems inter- 

 mixed with scorched manuka growing singly or in twos or threes. 



During this fourth period, however, it remained a blackened tangle 

 only for a few weeks. Seedlings which had appeared, so to speak, 

 singly after the first fire, in hundreds after the second fire, in hundreds 



