356 TUTIRA 



tame following ancestral habit and drawing on to the tops. The wild 

 rams confined themselves to their own harems, or if, as very rarely 

 happened, a more amative male emerged, he was detected and run down 

 with dogs. Fom time to time these little companies or portions of them 

 were raked in as chance favoured. Beyond leading the tame sheep astray 

 at musters they did no harm ; they were, indeed, rather an interest, the 

 possibility of their capture giving a zest to the musters of early times. 

 There were also larger mobs of wild sheep on several of the Waikoau 

 cliff boundaries cliffs not, as nowadays, densely overgrown with manuka, 

 but then thick with anise and native grasses. 



One of these little septs or clans deserves special mention, as doubt- 

 less its environment was the essential factor in a change of colour of 

 fleece very rare or perhaps unique in wild nature. The flock in question 

 ran on the wooded cliffs of a portion of the Opouahi block, a locality cut 

 into irregularly sized sections by narrow waterless ravines beginning 

 above as deep sink-holes and terminating below in the impassable gorge 

 of the upper Waikoau. The Opouahi block, about three thousand acres 

 in extent when first known to me in the 'eighties, formed a portion of 

 Hindmarsh's Kakamoana station ; as an outlying corner cut off from 

 that run by intervening gorges and impenetrable belts of bush it was 

 probably considered valueless to its real owner. At any rate he made 

 no use of it ; it was stocked by the then owner of Putorino, who wintered 

 on it some three thousand hard-fed merino wethers. Now it always 

 happens that in considerable mobs of dry sheep a proportion of ewes- 

 two or three in a thousand, perhaps are included by accident of ear- 

 mark or by oversight in the drafting-yards. Thus there may have been 

 ten or a dozen lambs born each season in Opouahi. In those days, how- 

 ever, the country was open and easy to muster clean. The likelihood is 

 that any lambs born were swept up at the annual shearing muster, or if 

 not, then at the secondary muster for stragglers. 



In short, there were no more "wild " sheep in Opouahi than else- 

 where. What makes me positive of this is that during the 'eighties one 

 of my duties was to attend the Waikari draftings in order to pick out 

 any " strangers " that might have boxed with those of that station. We 

 were all shepherds in those days, and, as was natural, talk turned on 

 events of camp and muster, the work of dogs, the good " turns " of 

 particular collies, pig seen, feed, condition of stock above all else, on the 

 numbers of sheep brought in, for Putorino was at this date enduring 



