V
Bush Felling

When in the evergreen shade is heard the axe of the bushman,
Down come the trees with a crash, fast the cleared acres increase.
In chattering terror wing off the Kaka, the Tui, the Morepork.
In silence the pigeon departs, and gone from his wallow's the boar.

Having written in the last chapter something as to the "breaking in54" of fern land to grass, I now come to the question of the bush country.

The first thing you have to do, if you propose to clear an area of bush, is to get it surveyed into sections of, say, fifty or a hundred acres. If you wish to have every tree destroyed, the survey is a simple matter enough. But should you happen to be of those folk (regarded by the purely utilitarian as silly fools) who have some regard for beauty, you have a much more worrying job, the arranging as to the pieces of bush you do not want felled.

In doing this you have to keep in mind the following points:

You must, in the first place, leave nothing that will interfere in any way with the easy working of stock.

Then you must see that your reserves are in bush that is really worth keeping, and that they are so situated that no body of wind-driven flame from the great fire can possibly sweep through and destroy them.

Finally, because a licensed surveyor is not necessarily a man of taste and discretion in such matters, you will find that if this job is to be done well, you must explore, peg out, survey and map these bits of bush yourself. And this means a lot of hard scrambling and slasher work and careful manipulation of prismatic compass and chain measure.

This all done and mapped, and the acreage deducted from the area to be cleared, you let the felling, privately or by public tender, either to little partnerships of axemen, or to contractors who employ daymen, as the case may be, who all then soon begin to arrive on the scene of their winter labour.

But as new bush land is generally beyond the reach of roads, and as it would be quite impracticable for each small contractor to bring on the ground all the things he will from time to time require, it is imperative page 38that the owner shall not only start a rough butchery, but also keep a general store, the stock of the latter mainly consisting, besides flour and sugar, of tea, tinned stuff, trousers, tools and tents, and Mr. Perry Davies' Vegetable Painkiller, this last fiery liquid being, one understood, very grateful to the throat, the day after the week in town before. At one stocktaking we had on our hands some very cheap and nasty blankets, apparently compounded of coarse shoddy and coconut matting. My storeman, who was a bit of a wag, had entered them on the stock list as so many "gaol rejects." But when I told my cook Lloyd, he said: "Why, bless you, sir, I knows that sort. We used to have 'em at sea. Them's dogswollenokms. Dogs' wool and oakum, sir"

When the various parties have arrived at the station, purchased whatever they were short of, and fixed up their camps, work begins. They first have to go through the section started on with slash hooks, cutting the smaller growths and especially all vines and creepers. When this work has been inspected and passed, axe work begins. The ground being always aslope, and often very steeply so, your bushman (Plate VI) will start at the lowest point, and selecting a certain group of trees he will "belly-scarf" page break

Plate VI
Felling Tawa

page 39 and "back-scarf" the lot, that is to say, he will cut about one-third through on both the lower and high sides. That done, he will set to work on a tree he has had his eye on as being suitably placed, and bigger than the others, and perhaps tied to them with vines. He will cut this tree carefully so that it will fall on some, at least, of the others. If this "drive," as it is termed, has been well managed, all the whole lot will come down together, the half-cut trunks loudly cracking as they give, and the great mass of branches all breaking up with immense fracas, the long-drawn crash being audible for miles.

Skilled labour, and by no means uninteresting, but a man must be in his prime and keep pretty fit to "stick it" for long, and he must be well fed. A good contractor will stoke up his men, every two hours or so, with as much bread and potatoes, fresh mutton and beef as they will hold, with jam, butter and tea ad lib.

There turned up one night a new arrival in the country asking for a job. He seemed willing, if rather simple, and when he was asked: "Can you fell bush?" he replied, "Oh yes, Ah can chop all right, but they do tell me here there's a bit of a knack in it." He was quite rightly so informed. The beginner will half kill himself taking sledge-page 40hammer strokes from the shoulder, whereas when all the arm and wrist muscles are rightly used, a much more effective sliding cut is obtained with considerably less expenditure of force.

A new hand, too, will chop all round a tree so that it can tumble over any way it likes, instead of cutting back and front only, leaving the uncut line across the direction in which he wants the tree to fall. I remember an old hand's scornful remark on a bit of bush I had myself felled. "They've had some bally new chum at work here; pencil pointing the trees like that."

A beginner would usually be puzzled to extract a broken axe helve from the head without tools. This is done by driving the edge of the blade well into the end of a small green log, to keep it cool and preserve its temper, while you burn out the handle in the fire.

There is one risk that all axemen must run, however experienced they may be, the risk of dead branches falling either from the tree they are at work on or from another as that goes over, there being often vines or creepers stretched from one to the other. But the danger, though ever present, is not very great.

The best gang of bushmen I ever had to do page 41with were New Zealand born young fellows from a Danish settlement. They would work mightily all the week, and instead of resting the seventh day, they would be off cattle hunting miles away among the precipitous ranges, and after a whole day's rough and most arduous bush clambering, would come gaily up the long track to camp, "humping" on their backs the most surprising loads of good beef.

Theirs was an astonishing camp to come upon on a very wet day. The little tents were scattered about in the bush, well apart, and in each would be one of the "Scandies" practising, quite independent of everybody, his particular instrument of the Danish settlement brass band. Sometimes on a Sunday, when hunting was "off," the band would go upon a high ridge and play, in unison this time, and for the benefit of all camps within earshot; which was better. They were fine men these Danes. On their own land in the next province several of them had, one winter, felled adjoining small sections, and when the hot season was well advanced, it was high time to burn off. But there were some wooden cottages of other settlers to the probable leeward, and no one liked to take on himself the sole risk of burning one of these, or even of incompletely burning his page 42neighbour's felled bush, should the fire not be a good one. As the stuff certainly had to be burned somehow, everyone was much worried till a bright idea occurred to one of them. He got some dry rotten wood and, quite unknown to anyone, spent some hours experimenting with a cheap reading lens. Satisfied as to the practicability of his idea, he that night fixed things up carefully and departed early next morning on business to the nearest town. When he returned the bush was all well burnt and no damage done.

These and other young New Zealanders, out to make a little money to put into their own small section of land, were the cream of the men.

On a neighbouring station one winter, there were three young men who overdid it. They used every hour of daylight and even turned out again to work whenever the moon was up. They made a good cheque, but two of them were dead within the year. "Bush whacking," as I said just now, is no child's play.

There were other men who would deny themselves every little camp luxury and work like devils for months and months, and then off they would go to town and spend the hard-earned proceeds in a week's boozing.

Sometimes they would hand over all their cash to a publican and settle themselves to drink and stand treat until he should tell them that it was all gone; then back to the bush again for another spell of hard slogging. But these short goes of hard drinking do not seem to do anything like the damage to a man's constitution that results from continuous soaking, as in the long working intervals, on nothing but tea, there is plenty of time for recovery.

I have never dissected one of these bushmen. I should expect, did I do so, to find their insides most thoroughly and efficiently tanned, for they like their drink strong. On Sunday a billy of water is boiled (a billy being a lidless paint-pot with a wire handle) and into it is put a handful or so of tea. All through the week it is replenished with tea and with water as required, till about Friday you will find, if the iridescent film with which it is covered does not put you off tasting it, that you get in its flavour really "something for your money,"

In inspecting this clearing work the main thing is to be sure that all vines and undergrowth are properly cut, and, secondly, that all trees are felled "clear of stumps" so that they shall not deep green. At what height the axe is used does not matter at all, page 44the timber being of no value; waist—or even breast-high is usual—but sometimes when a big tree has outstanding buttresses, the axeman will, in a very few moments, cut two small deep holes in it about shoulder high. He will then fix horizontally into these holes a couple of short poles, trimmed to fit, and lay a cross-pole or so between them. On this very doubtful-looking platform he will stand quite securely and cut the tree high up where the bole is of a more reasonable size. Trees, however, above a certain girth, which varies in different contracts according to the circumstances, are often left uncut, to rot standing after being killed by the fire.