362 TUTIRA 



selection and mating. Pickers of stock for the frozen meat trade, too, 

 are suspicious of blacks. I believe that subconsciously they are regarded 

 as wild animals less likely to be really fat. 1 



To recapitulate : We have in Opouahi an area of some seven or 

 eight hundred acres cut into six or seven ragged sections, each of them 

 separated from the others by rents terminating at bottom in a river- 

 bed impassable for sheep, and on top expanding into open feeding- 

 grounds. There, on these narrow strips of precipitous land, sheep have 

 possibly been in small numbers running wild since the date of the 

 stocking of Heru-o-Tureia by Mr F. Bee half a century ago. Certainly 

 in the 'eighties, when I first personally knew anything of Opouahi, no 

 more wild sheep were in hiding there than elsewhere on Tutira. 



By the middle 'nineties the lease of Opouahi was nearing its 

 termination, the surface of the ground was fast deteriorating in carry- 

 ing capacity because of scrub, the process continuing until at length 

 it became impossible to work dogs. At last only a few hundred ear- 

 marked sheep were wintered each year for a few weeks. In late spring, 

 summer, and autumn the block lay vacant ; feed consequently became 

 rank ; the wild sheep, hitherto subsisting on bark, shoots of trees and 

 fallen leaves, now for the first time drew on to the open tops, each sept 

 or clan ascending at dawn and at dusk again retiring to its particular 

 strip in the scrub. Thus protected by favourable environment from 

 shepherds, with extended areas of feeding-ground, kept in excellent 

 condition because of unlimited feed, the wild flock or flocks of Opouahi 

 increased and multiplied. Each season augmented the percentage of 

 blacks until at last one small sept had become entirely black, whilst 

 throughout the whole flock there were about as many blacks as whites. 

 Then, alas ! a fresh lease was obtained, the surface of the ground was 

 bit by bit cleared of scrub and bush, the wild flock destroyed, and the 

 natural evolution of a pure black race of merino terminated. To me 

 the rapidity of the alteration in colour is not less remarkable than the 

 change itself. Whatever intensification of black blood may have 

 occurred in a single sept, to outward seeming the change over the whole 

 little flock happened in ten, or at the utmost twelve seasons. 



1 I remember shortly after arrival in New Zealand watching the well-known dealer, 

 Andrew Grant, picking "fats." When asked by me for his hesitancy and discrimination in 

 regard to several apparently prime blacks, his answer was that they "killed" badly. So many 

 statements, nevertheless, continue to be accepted because it is nobody's interest to disprove 

 them, that this dealer's belief is given for what it was worth. On the other hand, what Sandy 

 Grant did not know of sheep was not worth knowing. 



