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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 10 (February 1, 1934)

The Wild Horse

The Wild Horse.

There are wild horse hunts now and again in the wide fenceless areas in the West Taupo sector of the King Country. That rough territory, one of the few wild corners of the country remaining in the North Island, waiting for the transforming touch of the pakeha settler, is roved over by many mobs of ownerless horses. These are the descendants of horses which strayed from the settled parts of the King Country and the Waikato borderland.

There have been wild horses in the Rohepotae ever since the early settlers, just as there were on the great Kaingaroa Plain until the State fencing and tree-planting operations narrowed down the free prairie country. There used to be exciting sport and profit combined when the Maoris of Galatea and elsewhere in the Rangitaiki Valley rode in chase of the wild horses and captured the pick of them by driving them up into some blind gully where cliffs barred their escape and roping them quite in the Wild West manner.

In the mid'-eighties, riding about the fern and flax and manuka-covered plains south of Puniu River, we used to see many mobs of wild horses, watching us and scattering away over those then silent lands of the King Country, unpeopled except for a small Maori settlement here and there. The Manukarere plain, now a well-settled region of good farms and homes, was a great free, roaming place for countless horses. They could be described as mostly weeds and scrubbers, but now and again a spirited-looking stallion was seen that the Maoris and some of the border settlers chased and sometimes ran down. It was risky work riding over that fern country, as some of us discovered; the deserted cultivations of the Maori were full of old potato-pits, overgrown, and unseen until one was right on them, and occasionally a horse stumbled into one—but never the wild horses, they knew them too well.