394 TUTIRA 



draining, scrub - cutting, and stumping. In themselves they do not 

 produce wool or fat stock. We did, however, rely on an immediate 

 increase of stock through the firing of certain paddocks, especially of 

 the Kocky Staircase, whose progress I have elsewhere described as 

 typical of the whole trough of the run. We reckoned without our 

 host. We found ourselves blocked by weather conditions. That 

 summer was a remarkable one, not only in drizzle and windlessness, 

 but in absence of sun. During each of the months of November and 

 December there were ten days, and during the month of January eleven 

 days, upon which the sun never shone that is, during a third of the 

 three hottest months of the year the sun registered no mark whatsoever 

 on the sensitised papers of my sun-recorder. There was no weight of 

 rainfall, but day after day the countryside was wrapped in a warm white 

 dazzling drizzle. The growth of fern and scrub was prodigious ; on 

 permanently grassed lands the rush of feed was equally great. Where 

 in ordinary seasons there grew a short sweet bite, now it lengthened into 

 a fozy hay, which fell and lay in swathes on the saturated ground, and 

 through which new green stuff forced itself. Growth of this sort sheep 

 will not eat ; they prefer to remain short of feed. During this abomin- 

 able season, on the good country of Tutira as on the bad, the flock was 

 pressed into the smallest compass, jammed into an area hardly quarter 

 the size of the country over which they should have been feeding ; they 

 were concentrated on the foulest pasturage of the run the tops, the 

 camps, and the rich low -lying flats around the lake. There was a 

 big shortage of lambs at weaning-time always a bad beginning. In 

 March a " buster " blew up from the south, a foot and a half of rain 

 falling in three days. 1 The lambs, already in wretched order and 

 full of disease, died as I had never before seen them die at Tutira. 

 Even amongst the ewes, where 3 per cent is the normal rate of mortality, 

 there was a considerable loss. The death-rate over the whole flock 

 wintered was a fraction above 25 per cent. Nor is a set-back of this 



1 Reiteration of exceptional events may easily become misleading, the more so as it is the 

 unusual that sticks most firmly in the mind. Thus references throughout this volume to heavy 

 storms may give quite a wrong impression of normal Hawke's Bay weather. Certainly deluges 

 do occur, certainly also there is a considerable annual precipitation, but because of its very 

 vehemence whilst falling, the hours of actual rainfall are few ; a splash of a couple of inches 

 falls in an eighth of the time it would require elsewhere. It is an emotional climate brief 

 bursts of passionate tears, long spans of smiles and happy laughter, sad for an hour, serene for 

 weeks. 



