II
Settling Down

When, as time went on, by burning off fern and letting some small bush felling contracts, we had grass for some hundreds of sheep, a woolshed became necessary for shearing and storage of wool; so we set to work to erect one. We used for the heavy frame straight tree stems up to about a foot in diameter (with 1½-inch round pegs instead of mortices), and for the lighter parts, poles of various sizes, the only sawn timber in it being the floor and the weather-boards.

The timber we had—kahikatoa ¹ or tree manuka—was so hard, that when some was sent to England, the consignee, finding holes, wrote for samples of the grub that had made them, hoping to get a hint as to tools suitable for working it; so it may be imagined that the work of boring holes for the big pegs was no joke.

A Scotch neighbour, whom I shall mention again later as a man of ability but no learning, happened to come by when the building was half up, and finding the whole thing wobble when he pushed it, did not hesitate

¹ Leptospermum scoparium.

page 12to tell us that we were doing it all wrong, and that it must shortly collapse. New chums though we were, we did, however, possess some elementary knowledge of the rigidity of triangles, and our braces once pegged on, the same good man, with an undisguised astonishment that pleased us very much, was kind enough to admit that all was now as firm as a rock. As a matter of fact, we sheared our sheep in it below, and stored tons of wool in it above for many years,

There was another business to be undertaken. Even when we had only a few dozen sheep we were legally bound to dip them once a year to destroy parasites. So we fetched along one of our big tin-lined packing cases, filled it with the proper solution, and started to give each his bath. By the time we had actually lifted, in and out, two sheep, we realised that we had set ourselves very much too heavy a job, so we crammed the rest of the animals into a pen and poured the mixture over them. Next year we dug a long hole in the clay and made them swim through it, but that again was only a makeshift and a very dirty one; so then we had to make a real "dip" (Plate IV)—a great timber trough, some five feet deep and forty feet long, and after caulking the joints, to sink it in the ground.

Plate III
The Spring Crop

To one end of this trough the sheep, from a continually-filled pen, should follow each other close, should slide down a smooth boarded slope, plunge in headlong, and swim along to the other end. Here are small yards, from which will drain back into the trough most of the mixture of arsenic or carbolic with which the sheep's fleeces are saturated. To see that no animal escapes with a dry head, it is one man's job to stand over the dip with a crutch, shoving every sheep well under as he swims by.

In theory, as I said above, the sheep should follow each other in. In practice this happens only with young and unsophisticated sheep, and that only when managed by capable yard-hands. But once bit, twice shy, and in their second year there is more trouble and you must have a man hanging over the low-boarded fence by the entering slope to decide the sheep's mind for him, at the moment of hesitation, by starting him down the slippery slope with an emphatic shove.

But in the third year a lot of hard shoving is necessary even to get the sheep into the pen, and then, with broken nails, and hands getting fuller and fuller of thistle spines, you sometimes have to grab each individual old ewe, as best you can, neck and rear and shove her in by main force. And you have to page 14see that there is not the slightest roughness or crack on the bottom or sides of this narrow boarded slide, as it is astonishing how little is required to give a hold to the hoof of a thoroughly recalcitrant old ewe.

This stubborn resistance to cleanliness on the part of the more experienced sheep worries and wearies each new sheep-farmer as he comes along, and many have been the deep-laid schemes to circumvent it.

One bright spirit constructed a sheep-wide alley with a floor of slats on canvas, something on the tube escalator principle, worked by a hand crank. You turned the handle and the sheep were carried happily along to their decreed dip in the delousing fluid. Some innocent young hoggets did actually go along all right. So, full of joyful anticipation, the inventor called his friends and his neighbours together to see the thing work, fetching in a large yard-full of grown sheep for the event.

It was a pretty bad fiasco. His mechanics were all right, but he had not made a study of ovine psychology.

Not only did the animals refuse with the utmost firmness to put a single hoof on the escalator floor, but when some were taken up and planted well ahead on it by main force, they could, and did, back out of it at a much quicker rate than that at which page 15the inventor's crank could grind forward his moving floor.

Another idea was better, but even that did not deceive the victims more than once. The sheep, on this plan, are pushed into a good-sized pen, and when they are all in, a bolt is pulled and the whole thing sinks beneath the chemic wave, sheep and all.

Such a dip was built by a large runholder in Hawkes Bay, who after one or two preliminary trials invited a small party of the local sheep magnates to lunch and to admire.

To see exactly how the thing was made they all followed the owner on to the patent platform. A younger son, who was looking on, suddenly grasping the full gorgeousness of the opportunity, pulled the trigger handle, had one glorious glimpse of the result, and bolted for his life. For a week after that it was only his mother knew of his hiding-place; she managed to get food to him somehow. He still lives!

There was not much sheep work in the winter, the ewes lambing on the hills being left pretty much to themselves. Docking and ear-marking the lambs came on well in the spring, and in November began the great business of shearing.

We always employed Maoris for this work, who would each shear from eighty to one page 16hundred sheep a day, and were generally very pleasant, jolly, fellows to do with. They don't mind hard work so long as it can be done in company and does not last too long, though I only knew one Maori who would tackle a season's axe-work.

My brother H. generally looked after the shearing, while my dogs and I fetched in and took back the sheep. Now and then the shed would get completely blocked with bales of wool owing to the shocking unreliability of the Irish drayman. H., not knowing where to turn for room, with Mulooly three days overdue, would be boiling over with rage and breathing forth threatenings and slaughter. At last the five-horse dray would come along, and H. would rush out to say to his face what he thought of the quite unperturbed and airily smiling driver. Time and again this happened, but never once did he succeed in getting home on him. With a couple of words Mulooly would turn his point and have him helpless with laughter. Unfortunately I do not remember exactly how, in any one case, it was done, as there only remains in the family one quotation from him, a fragment of one of his tales:

"An Oi hit him wan welt over d' head wid de greeps¹—and d' pig wint."

At a friend's woolshed two young fellows were turning the winch in the wool loft, hauling up the newly-pressed 3-cwt. bales. Work below being for a moment slack, a couple of the jolly Maori girls, who were employed to pick up the shorn fleeces, were induced to stand on the last pressed bale. When their heads appeared above the loft floor the sweating winders, feeling they were being unduly put upon, let go, incontinent. The bale and its burden came down with a run—without harm, but the noise and vibration of the crude old winch were tremendous— till, finally, the great iron handle flew off clean through the roof and far away out in the paddock, missing one of the winders by a hair's-breadth.

Ah me—these women!

It was from this same shed that there came a large grindstone, the discovery of which raised the indignant ire of the final wool purchaser in Bradford, who considered it a poor bargain at 1s. 6d. per 1b. It had been used to keep down the wool in a half-filled bale during lunch-time, forgotten, and covered up by other fleeces.

Some years went by, and my elder brother having gone elsewhere, we three remaining brothers were still working on the old run, somewhat enlarged, when, while on a visit page 18to England, the casual remark of an old friend put into my head the idea of forming a limited company, among my relatives and friends, to take up more land. So, after obtaining in the Colony all the evidence I could, and after working out the sheep business on paper, even to the third and fourth generation, so to speak, I went back Home again to see what could be done in that line. I did not much "cotton34" to the job. There is, for my taste, too strong a flavour of mendicancy in this business of "floating" one's self, and I have not the hide of a canvasser; though, as it turned out, I needed it with hardly any of the people with whom I had to do.

My gratitude is still great to those few who first trusted me; for, after all, in so far removed a business, it was, at any rate, at first, largely a matter of personal trust.

With such kind help the thing went through, the land was bought, and, later, twice as much again (13,000 acres in all), and after two or three years of bad luck it became, and has ever since remained, a considerable success.

The following chapters have to do, both with the earlier time and with the years when I was acting as the company's managing director in New Zealand.