THE CHARTOGRAPHERS OF THE STATION 191 



even thickets of thistles. Like the major impediments cited, they too 

 pass away and are forgotten. Attrition by frost and wind wears down 

 the little hillocks, rain fills the hollows with soil, the dead brushwood 

 rots, its mould is blown abroad, strips of projecting vegetation are 

 destroyed by stock, the surface timber is burnt, the soft ground 

 hardens, with autumn rains the thistle stems fail. Each of these 

 first causes, seemingly ephemeral as the reek from the dead pack- 

 horse or the smoke from the scrub and thistle fires, is nevertheless 

 still marked in the material world. 



Another type of track created by the pack- team is worthy of note. 

 Where horses follow one another horizontally in single file along a slope 

 of clay hillside, a ditch-and-bank or ridge-and-furrow process is pro- 

 duced. Each animal taking the same length of stride plants his foot 

 down where or whereabouts his leader has trodden : the consequence 

 is an alternation of narrow bog-holes the size of a horse's hoof, apart 



i, I ' 1*1 L " 



"^*^ W^w#o$u^4x 



Pack-track on clay hillside. 



from one another the width of a horse's stride, with ridges hard because 

 untouched, but slippery with drippings of the coffee - coloured liquid 

 spurted during traffic from the churned troughs. No track can give 

 a worse fall to a shod horse. If the shoes of a front and hind hoof 

 become locked in one of these greasy pockets, the animal is pitched 

 sideways downhill, and must roll over without chance of recovery. 



Besides the general opening up of the run by means of trails and 

 tracks, the stocking of Tutira has produced phenomena which, though of 

 minor importance, have been and after all this is his book of interest 

 to the writer. One of these has been the metamorphosis of many of the 

 hill-tops, a change which it is easy to imagine might in future confound 

 and confuse the natural philosopher. The soils of Tutira are familiar to 

 the reader, the uppermost layer, humus resting on a layer of pumice grit, 

 this grit resting in its turn on a deposit of packed red sand. The orig- 

 inal vegetation of the run has also been a dozen times described fern 

 rank and luxurious on the cold east and south aspects, less exuberant 



