174 TUTIRA 



innumerable tiny brown seeds. On the dry surface, in company with 

 charred morsels of stick and stem, mingled with dust hardly more 

 minute than itself, manuka seed was whirled downwards in nor'- west gales 

 and eddying whirlwinds. In wet weather it was everywhere transported 

 in sheeps' hoofs. In deluges and tropic showers it was poured down- 

 wards along the hard stamped tracks. On every wet pebble that rolled 

 from the conglomerate slopes the little seeds clung fast. Plants did 

 not appear one here and another there as in former periods ; they 

 germinated, sometimes in tens, sometimes in hundreds, sometimes in 

 thousands, on every acre of burnt ground. Over certain portions of 

 the paddock they sprung up like hay-seed round the edges of a stack. 

 The bracken, crippled and weak, now endured the sufferings it had 

 formerly inflicted on other plants ; in the company of this virile new- 

 comer it was squeezed to death, throttled, denied the right to air and 

 light. So completely, during the last years of the fifth period in the 

 history of the Rocky Staircase, had manuka dominated bracken that in 

 spring-time great sections of the paddock, areas of hundreds of acres, 

 appeared at a distance of miles as if sprinkled, appeared even as if laden 

 with snow, the snow of manuka petals. It looked as triumphant in 

 1912 as tutu and bracken had looked in '82. The paddock had changed 

 between these dates from fern to manuka Pteris aquilina had fallen 

 before Leptospermum scoparium. Throughout this fifth period in the 

 history of our paddock no attempt was made to crush fern. From a 

 foe it had, in fact, become a friend and ally. Without intermixture 

 of its fronds further fires would have been unobtainable. Our paddock 

 would have become a vast manuka thicket with a permanent carrying 

 capacity of nothing at all. 



There was again during this fifth period but little change in the 

 maximum and minimum of sheep carried. On parts where native 

 grasses had formerly thrown a certain amount of feed, green growing 

 manuka now held sway. This loss of feed was, however, more than 

 made up by the wonderful spread of suckling clover; stock carried 

 during the fifth period subsisted, in fact, wholly on this invaluable 

 annual. 



During the sixth period of the paddock an extraneous factor for 

 the first time came into operation. It was this, that after a quarter 

 of a century the writer had been granted a sound title to his holding. 



