A First Year In Canterbury Settlement Part 7

Besides the yards above described, you will want one or two smaller ones for getting the sheep into the wool-shed at shearing-time, and you will also want a small yard for branding. The wool-shed is a roomy covered building, with a large central s.p.a.ce, and an aisle-like part.i.tion on each side. These last will be for holding the sheep during the night.

The shearers will want to begin with daylight, and the dew will not yet be off the wool if the sheep are exposed. If wool is packed damp it will heat and spoil; therefore a sufficient number of sheep must be left under cover through the night to last the shearers till the dew is off.

In a wool-shed the aisles would be called skilions (whence the name is derived I know not, nor whether it has two l's in it or one). All the sheep go into the skilions. The shearers shear in the centre, which is large enough to leave room for the wool to be stowed away at one end.

The shearers pull the sheep out of the skilions as they want them. Each picks the worst sheep, i.e. that with the least wool upon it, that happens to be at hand at the time, trying to put the best-woolled sheep, which are consequently the hardest to shear, upon someone else; and so the heaviest-woolled and largest sheep get shorn the last.

A good man will shear 100 sheep in a day, some even more; but 100 is reckoned good work. I have known 195 sheep to be shorn by one man in a day; but I fancy these must have been from an old and bare mob, and that this number of well-woolled sheep would be quite beyond one man's power.

Sheep are not shorn so neatly as at home. But supposing a man has a mob of 20,000, he must get the wool off their backs as best he can without carping at an occasional snip from a sheep's carca.s.s. If the wool is taken close off, and only now and then a sheep snipped, there will be no cause to complain.

Then follows the draying of the wool to port, and the bullocks come in for their full share of work. It is a pleasant sight to see the first load of wool start down, but a far pleasanter to see the dray returning from its last trip.

Shearing well over will be a weight off your mind. This is your most especially busy and anxious time of year, and when the wool is safely down you will be glad indeed.

It may have been a matter of question with you, Shall I wash my sheep before shearing or not? If you wash them at all, you should do it thoroughly, and take considerable pains to have them clean; otherwise you had better shear in the grease, i.e. not wash. Wool in the grease weighs about one-third heavier, and consequently fetches a lower price in the market. When wool falls, moreover, the fall tells first upon greasy wool. Still many shear in the grease, and some consider it pays them better to do so. It is a mooted point, but the general opinion is in favour of washing.

As soon as you have put up one yard, you may set to work upon a hut for yourself and men. This you will make of split wooden slabs set upright in the ground, and nailed on to a wall-plate. You will first plant large posts at each of the corners, and one at either side every door, and four for the chimney. At the top of these you will set your wall- plates; to the wall-plates you will nail your slabs; on the inside of the slabs you will nail light rods of wood, and plaster them over with mud, having first, however, put up the roof and thatched it. Three or four men will have split the stuff and put up the hut in a fortnight.

We will suppose it to be about 18 feet by 12.

By and by, as you grow richer, you may burn bricks at your leisure, and eventually build a brick house. At first, however, you must rough it.

You will set about a garden at once. You will bring up fowls at once.

Pigs may wait till you have time to put up a regular stye, and to have grown potatoes enough to feed them. Two fat and well-tended pigs are worth half a dozen half-starved wretches. Such neglected brutes make a place look very untidy, and their existence will be a burden to themselves, and an eyesore to you.

In a year or two you will find yourself very comfortable. You will get a little fruit from your garden in summer, and will have a prospect of much more. You will have cows, and plenty of b.u.t.ter and milk and eggs; you will have pigs, and, if you choose it, bees, plenty of vegetables, and, in fact, may live upon the fat of the land, with very little trouble, and almost as little expense. If you grudge this, your fare will be rather unvaried, and will consist solely of tea, mutton, bread, and possibly potatoes. For the first year, these are all you must expect; the second will improve matters; and the third should see you surrounded with luxuries.

If you are your own shepherd, which at first is more than probable, you will find that shepherding is one of the most prosaic professions you could have adopted. Sheep will be the one idea in your mind; and as for poetry, nothing will be farther from your thoughts. Your eye will ever be straining after a distant sheep--your ears listening for a bleat--in fact, your whole attention will be directed, the whole day long, to nothing but your flock. Were you to shepherd too long your wits would certainly go wool-gathering, even if you were not tempted to bleat. It is, however, a gloriously healthy employment.

And now, gentle reader, I wish you luck with your run. If you have tolerably good fortune, in a very short time you will be a rich man.

Hoping that this may be the case, there remains nothing for me but to wish you heartily farewell.

Crossing the Rangitata

Suppose you were to ask your way from Mr. Phillips's station to mine, I should direct you thus: "Work your way towards yonder mountain; pa.s.s underneath it between it and the lake, having the mountain on your right hand and the lake on your left; if you come upon any swamps, go round them or, if you think you can, go through them; if you get stuck up by any creeks--a creek is the colonial term for a stream--you'll very likely see cattle marks, by following the creek up and down; but there is nothing there that ought to stick you up if you keep out of the big swamp at the bottom of the valley; after pa.s.sing that mountain follow the lake till it ends, keeping well on the hill-side above it, and make the end of the valley, where you will come upon a high terrace above a large gully, with a very strong creek at the bottom of it; get down the terrace, where you'll see a patch of burnt ground, and follow the river- bed till it opens on to a flat; turn to your left and keep down the mountain sides that run along the Rangitata; keep well near them and so avoid the swamps; cross the Rangitata opposite where you see a large river-bed coming into it from the other side, and follow this river-bed till you see my hut some eight miles up it." Perhaps I have thus been better able to describe the nature of the travelling than by any other.

If one can get anything that can be manufactured into a feature and be dignified with a name once in five or six miles, one is very lucky.

Well, we had followed these directions for some way, as far in fact as the terrace, when, the river coming into full view, I saw that the Rangitata was very high. Worse than that, I saw Mr. Phillips and a party of men who were taking a dray over to a run just on the other side of the river, and who had been prevented from crossing for ten days by the state of the water. Among them, to my horror, I recognised my cadet, whom I had left behind me with beef which he was to have taken over to my place a week and more back; whereon my mind misgave me that a poor Irishman who had been left alone at my place might be in a sore plight, having been left with no meat and no human being within reach for a period of ten days. I don't think I should have attempted crossing the river but for this. Under the circ.u.mstances, however, I determined at once on making a push for it, and accordingly taking my two cadets with me and the unfortunate beef that was already putrescent- -it had lain on the ground in a sack all the time--we started along under the hills and got opposite the place where I intended crossing by about three o'clock. I had climbed the mountain side and surveyed the river from thence before approaching the river itself. At last we were by the water's edge. Of course, I led the way, being as it were patronus of the expedition, and having been out some four months longer than either of my companions; still, having never crossed any of the rivers on horseback in a fresh, having never seen the Rangitata in a fresh, and being utterly unable to guess how deep any stream would take me, it may be imagined that I felt a certain amount of caution to be necessary, and accordingly, folding my watch in my pocket-handkerchief and tying it round my neck in case of having to swim for it unexpectedly, I strictly forbade the other two to stir from the bank until they saw me safely on the other side. Not that I intended to let my horse swim, in fact I had made up my mind to let my old Irishman wait a little longer rather than deliberately swim for it. My two companions were worse mounted than I was, and the rushing water might only too probably affect their heads. Mine had already become quite indifferent to it, though it had not been so at first. These two men, however, had been only a week in the settlement, and I should have deemed myself highly culpable had I allowed them to swim a river on horseback, though I am sure both would have been ready enough to do so if occasion required.

As I said before, at last we were on the water's edge; a rushing stream some sixty yards wide was the first instalment of our pa.s.sage. It was about the colour and consistency of cream and soot, and how deep? I had not the remotest idea; the only thing for it was to go in and see. So choosing a spot just above a spit and a rapid--at such spots there is sure to be a ford, if there is a ford anywhere--I walked my mare quickly into it, having perfect confidence in her, and, I believe, she having more confidence in me than some who have known me in England might suppose. In we went; in the middle of the stream the water was only a little over her belly (she is sixteen hands high); a little farther, by sitting back on my saddle and lifting my feet up I might have avoided getting them wet, had I cared to do so, but I was more intent on having the mare well in hand, and on studying the appearance of the remainder of the stream than on thinking of my own feet just then; after that the water grew shallower rapidly, and I soon had the felicity of landing my mare on the shelving shingle of the opposite bank. So far so good; I beckoned to my companions, who speedily followed, and we all then proceeded down the spit in search of a good crossing place over the next stream. We were soon beside it, and very ugly it looked. It must have been at least a hundred yards broad--I think more, but water is so deceptive that I dare not affix any certain width. I was soon in it, advancing very slowly above a slightly darker line in the water, which a.s.sured me of its being shallow for some little way; this failing, I soon found myself descending into deeper water, first over my boots for some yards, then over the top of my gaiters for some yards more. This continued so long that I was in hopes of being able to get entirely over, when suddenly the knee against which the stream came was entirely wet, and the water was rushing so furiously past me that my poor mare was leaning over tremendously. Already she had begun to snort, as horses do when they are swimming, and I knew well that my companions would have to swim for it even though I myself might have got through.

So I very gently turned her head round down stream and quietly made back again for the bank which I had left. She had got nearly to the sh.o.r.e, and I could again detect a darker line in the water, which was now not over her knees, when all of a sudden down she went up to her belly in a quicksand, in which she began floundering about in fine style. I was off her back and into the water that she had left in less time than it takes to write this. I should not have thought of leaving her back unless sure of my ground, for it is a canon in river crossing to stick to your horse. I pulled her gently out, and followed up the dark line to the sh.o.r.e where my two friends were only too glad to receive me. By the way, all this time I had had a companion in the shape of a cat in a bag, which I was taking over to my place as an antidote to the rats, which were most unpleasantly abundant there. I nursed her on the pommel of my saddle all through this last stream, and save in the episode of the quicksand she had not been in the least wet. Then, however, she did drop in for a sousing, and mewed in a manner that went to my heart. I am very fond of cats, and this one is a particularly favourable specimen. It was with great pleasure that I heard her purring through the bag, as soon as I was again mounted and had her in front of me as before.

So I failed to cross this stream there, but, determined if possible to get across the river and see whether the Irishman was alive or dead, we turned higher up the stream and by and by found a place where it divided. By carefully selecting a spot I was able to cross the first stream without the waters getting higher than my saddle-flaps, and the second scarcely over the horse's belly. After that there were two streams somewhat similar to the first, and then the dangers of the pa.s.sage of the river might be considered as accomplished--the dangers, but not the difficulties. These consisted in the sluggish creeks and swampy ground thickly overgrown with Irishman, snow-gra.s.s, and spaniard, which extend on either side the river for half a mile and more. But to cut a long story short we got over these too, and then we were on the shingly river-bed which leads up to the spot on which my hut is made and my house making. This river was now a brawling torrent, hardly less dangerous to cross than the Rangitata itself, though containing not a t.i.the of the water, the boulders are so large and the water so powerful.

In its ordinary condition it is little more than a large brook; now, though not absolutely fresh, it was as unpleasant a place to put a horse into as one need wish. There was nothing for it, however, and we crossed and recrossed it four times without misadventure, and finally with great pleasure I perceived a twinkling light on the terrace where the hut was, which a.s.sured me at once that the old Irishman was still in the land of the living. Two or three vigorous "coo-eys" brought him down to the side of the creek which bounds my run upon one side.

Footnotes:

{1} Project Gutenberg note: the edition of the book from which this eText was transcribed contained a number of other, unrelated, pieces.

These have been transcribed and are available as separate eTexts. The pieces on Darwin are in the eText "Pieces on Darwin" and the minor pieces written whilst Butler was at Cambridge University, England, are in the eText "Cambridge Pieces".--DP.

{2} See Preface.

{3} August, 1862.--Since writing the above, matters have somewhat changed. Firstly, Ewes are fully worth 30s. a head, and are not to be had under. Secondly, The diggings in Otago have caused the value of wethers to rise, and as they are now selling at 33s. on the runs of the Otago station (I quote the Lyttelton Times, which may be depended upon), and those runs are only very partially stocked, the supply there must in all probability fall short of the demand. The price of sheep in this settlement is therefore raised also, and likely to continue high. All depends upon what this next spring may bring forth upon the Otago gold- fields. If they keep up the reputation which they sustained until the winter caused the diggers to retreat, the price will be high for some few years longer; if they turn out a failure, it MUST fall before very long. Still, there is a large and increasing population in Canterbury, and as its sheep-feeding area is as nothing compared with that of Australia, we do not expect sheep here ever to fall as low as they did there before the diggings. Indeed, they hardly can do so; for our sheep are larger than the Australian, and clip a much heavier fleece, so that their fleece, and skins, and tallow must be of greater value. Should means be found of converting the meat into portable soup, the carcase of the sheep ought, even at its lowest value, to be considerably higher than 10s. Nothing is heard about this yet, for the country is not nearly stocked, so that the thing is not needed; but one would, a priori, be under the impression that there should ultimately be no insuperable difficulty in rescuing the meat from waste. It is a matter which might well attract the attention of scientific men in England. We should all be exceedingly obliged to them if they would kindly cause sheep to be as high as 15s. or 17s. seven years hence, and I can see no reason why, if the meat could be made use of, they should fall lower.

In other respects, what I have written about sheep on terms is true to the present day.

{4} The above is true to the present day (August, 1862), save that a higher price must be given for the goodwill of a run, and that sheep are fully 30s. a head. Say 8000 pounds instead of 6000 pounds, and the rest will stand. 8000 pounds should do the thing handsomely.