CATS AND RABBITS 
VII 
229 
forest -clad mountains towered above on the farther 
side, and the banks were lined with wild masses of 
beautiful scrub : at Canvas Town (which has no canvas), 
the half-way house, we stopped for lunch. There were 
two tourists who had come for trout-fishing and deer- 
stalking ; the license fee for the latter is twenty shillings 
and entitles the holder to kill (in this Nelson district) 
six bucks — in Wellington and Otago it is three pounds 
for four stags ; shooting begins the middle of February 
and closes the end of May. The rules, they say, will be 
more stringent as the time goes on ; no customs duties 
are charged on guns or sporting materials which are 
bona fide property of any one landing and in use by 
him. The deer have increased very much here, so have 
those wretched little pests the weasels and stoats, which 
were imported to kill rabbits, but not caring for the more 
open country where rabbits are found, they have left 
them alone for the thicker shelter of the hills, where they 
live on quail, pheasants, and other birds, and sometimes 
young lambs. We passed flocks of English starlings, 
and saw an exciting fight between a black cat and a 
rabbit. We watched puss stalk her game, and saw it 
eventually killed. The settlers give from sixpence to 
a shilling for every cat they can get, for, after all, they 
are the greatest enemies the rabbits have. There is an 
amusing story told of a man who took over a shipload of 
them, which were turned out. They were all domesticated 
ones, and the morning after he was awakened by the 
dismal mewings of hundreds of them round his house 
clamouring for food. History does not relate how he 
dispersed them again, which in a cat’s case is no easy 
matter. In Victoria there was a case of a cat and 
rabbit having lived together, and at the Zoological 
Gardens there you may see some photographs of rabbit- 
cats. We seemed to have come into a land of rabbits 
