206 TUTIRA 



land, an acre here, an acre there, not snapped up, not ploughed, 

 not grassed. Each homestead will support a colony of cats and dogs, 

 each will be a nucleus for a settlement of rats. Wild covert will have 

 altogether gone from the hills, the kowhai and fuchsia and hiuahina 

 which, either as single trees or in open clumps, have hitherto withstood 

 fires, will have died out from lapse of time. Because of nibbling sheep 

 and increase of danthonia a grass easily fired no seedling successors 

 will have replaced the originals. 



If, in fact, the squatter has chastised the ancient vegetation with 

 rods, the yeoman will chastise it with scorpions. In the last, fullest, 

 most energetic development of land for agriculture and stock-farming, 

 shreds and patches of ancient Tutira will remain only in the deep 

 gorges, the sinuous bogs, the cliffs of the run. There will nevertheless, 

 as I have said, subsist on the station, though in sadly lessened numbers, 

 nearly every native species that has bred on its 20,000 acres in my day. 

 They will disappear indeed from the surface, they will sink, with the 

 streams that are to prove their salvation, deep into the bowels of the 

 earth, they will survive in the gorges. 



Previous chapters have shown the effects of trampling of animals, 

 drainage of swamps, destruction of water herbage, in general the dis- 

 appearance of covert, the substitution for jungle and scrub of land open 

 to the sun. The country under my regime has been shorn of its fleece ; 

 in the time to come it will be flayed of its very skin ; yet in spite of 

 himself, perhaps against his wishes, the settler of the future must on 

 land of this type help perforce in the preservation of wild life. To 

 a sheep-farmer producing sheep, wool, mutton, and beef on a great 

 scale, the loss of one or two thousand sheep a year is accepted with 

 comparative equanimity. It is unavoidable on land held as leasehold 

 without compensation for improvements. The yeoman, however, will 

 be a freeholder. He will have purchased his land like Mary her 

 ointment of spikenard at a great cost. Loss above the normal 2 or 2| 

 per cent will, on a small flock, be considered a serious matter an evil to 

 be remedied. The only sure and certain cure of that evil is fencing. 

 If the smallholder is to prosper and to thrive, cliff and bog alike must 

 be secured from trespass of stock. There will be conserved, therefore, 

 on either side of each gorge and boggy creek on Tutira, a strip of covert. 

 Above the rims of the cliffs will flourish manuka, bracken, certain heaths 

 and dry-country plants ; along the sides of the boggy creeks will grow 



