WHERE THE HILLS RUN AWAY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 446, 9 January 1948, Page 6

WHERE THE HILLS RUN AWAY

By

SUNDOWNER

RIFLES ON THE ROAD

say that I was surprised to meet several armed men on the lonelier and more mountainous sections of the road between Hanmer Springs and the Hope Saddle; ie would not be the truth to

but I might have been surprised if I had forgotten the price of deerskins.

Some of these hunters were youtns on motor-cycles who had not much knowledge of mountains or of deer and were

returning disappointed. Some were experienced men who had been making week-end expeditions ; for two or three years, and in most cases doing it profitably. One vf them told me that his rifle was paying his rent for him-that he always got one deer and sometimes two or three and averaged 30 shillings a skin. It was of course hard work requiring knowledge. and skill as well as a car and petrol. It called for a mate, maps, anda good deal of organisation. But old cars were cheap when skins first began to be valuable; he used no petrol for anything else; and he had never had to change his mate. They had, however, an understanding with one or two runholders who, as far as they could, kept other

hunters away. "It’s a case of knowing when’ and where to go?" "Yes, and what to do when you get there. Runholders don’t like deer, but they like them better than lunatics at large with a gun. They know that we have never had a dog or shot a sheep." * % *

IN A LUCERNE PADDOCK

j 8 SAW a man cutting lucerne with a tractor and left the road to talk to him. I thought at first that he was 50 or 60 and twisted with rheumatism and toil; but when I reached him I saw he was not more than 35, and that

what I had taken for a permanent hunch was the attitude he was com-

pelled to assume to do two jobs at once. He should’ have had an assistant, but didn’t. Now if he looked ahead ‘all the time the mower behind him would miss patches or clog. If he looked back too often the tractor would run off the line. It was exacting work, and nerve-rack-ing, and I was not sufprised to find him irritable in conversation and given to reckless generalisations which he neither believed nor could support, but somehow hoped would annoy me. It was especially interesting that his perversity led him into an attack on the campaign against erosioy, It was "damned rot," he told me, that New

Zealand was threatened by erosion. Every fertile flat in the country had been made by erosion. "What about the flats that are not fertile-the shingle wastes sat mere no soil at all?" "Their time will come." "Perhaps it has passed." "Rot. Even if it had it would come again. The earth is always changing. If

it’s wearing away in one place it’s building up in, another." "What about the millions of tons of soil that go out to sea?" "If they go away they come back again. But I don’t believe that nonsense. Why doesn’t Grassmere fill up if so much soil goes down in every creek?" "Perhaps it is filling up." "No, it isn’t." ’ "Then floods perhaps keep emptying it out into the sea." "It’s not open to the sea." "Well, I don’t know about Grassmere. I’ve never been closer to it than the main road. But anybody can see the hills near Blenheim running away." "They're running down on to the flats. They're making the flats as they made this valley." "Do you admit wind erosion?" . "L admit every kind of erosion. What I don’t admit is that it’s ruining us." "Do you accept it as a threat?" "I don’t lie awake thinking about it." "But you do think about it a Rttle?" "T think about it a lot. But those damned fools who write books about it don’t do much thinking. They’re just alarmists-ignorant. alarmists most of them who don’t have to live on the land. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Without erosion New Zealand would be uninhabitable," "Have you read Cumberland’s book?" "What name?" ' "Cumberland," "No, I’ve never heard of it. But you don’t have to read a book to see where the good soil comes from." "Or the dust storms." "We don’t have many dust storms here. But what if we had? The dust setties again somewhere. They told us at Lincoln that the Port Hills: are just covered rock-erupted stuff buried in the dust from the plains." "You listen to the experts sometimes?" "When they talk sense. Not when they give you half a story and hope you'll forget the other half." "What's the other half of erosion?" The answer was the tangle of lucerne at his feet, but he was too irritable to think of that. He mumbled something that I did not hear, then walked round to the mower blade and pulled it ‘back a yard. The discussion was over, But when he was in his seat again, steering the tractor with one hand and _tripping the mowetr with the other, watching ahead but all the time glancing back, age settled on him a second time and I found it hard to see him as one of the new school of farmers whose science their fathers regard with such | suspicion. -~ a some

RAILWAY ROUTES

F I had not been reared in a district in which everything was either black or white, every man against you who was not for you, and every politician a scoundrel who said No when the answer your interests demanded was. Yes,

I might have found it strange’ that the railway line in Reefton kept such a safe

distance from the town. But I had seen @ man’s arm broken in a brawl over @ survey peg. I had seen a family walk out of church when another family walked in who supported a different tailway route, I had seen fences cut and neighbours threatening one another with violence over a proposed road deviation of 30 or 40 chains. I had been in Tapanui and I knew the story of Cheviot. So I did not have to ask what had happened in Reefton. I knew that it would be some variation of that original theme; as a resident soon told me that it was. And when I had returned to the east coast again and reached Kaikoura-distracted from politics by an epidemic of typhoid-I knew that there must be a similar explanation of the cleavage there. I did not bother to ask, and I do not yet know, what local convulsion had divided that lovely little township in two. I knew that it would not seem a strange story if anvone had gone out of his way to tell it to me. Most of ali I knew that it would not be a story at’ which any outsider could scoff unless he had long ago sold all his possessions and given them to the poor. There is no city in New Zealand,

and no street, in which someone is not holding out his hand for increments that he has not earned or laying plans for diverting the stream of traffic his way. Not to do it ranks as folly, and the folly usually leads to failure. But when a farmer does it, or tries and fails, when his triumph appears on a map and his failure becomes a local legend, he is a rogue or a fool for two generations. I was not looking for rogues in Reefton or for fools in Kaikoura; nor am I trying to draw attention to them now, I am drawing attention to the fools we all are, and must always be, if we think we can eat our cake and have it tooexploit one another and wholly escape the consequences. I am writing my own epitaph.

MORNING TEA .

* * MONG the surprises of back country roads are the invitations you receive in unexpected places to stop for tea. I can remember the day when the only notices you ever say in No Man’s Land were the crude X’s of somebody’s brew-

ery, not always put there by the brewer | himself, or equally crude reminders of

the Day of Judgment. I don’t think the last were ever intended to be jokes, or ever put there by zealots with a sense of humour, but one warning that used to recur as often as there was a rock face to carry it was "Prepare to Meet thy God." The first time I saw it I thought it had been left by a wag with strong opinions about the piece of road that followed, a long steep hill subject to slips. But in those days no one joked about God. : In the same way when I saw "Morning Tea" on a broken piece of box board on the roadside near the Boyle river I suspected a more modern wag and was not inclined.to stop. Then it occurred to me suddenly that I might be wrong, and. when I went back I thought that no tea sign I had ever seen had stopped me with better justification. The kettle was steaming on the stove and the stove

was burning wood. Ihe scones were fresh from the oven and the cakes home-made. I had two cups of tea and was offered three, and soon had a strong conviction that the inspiration to open that tearoom came from the lady’s heart and not out of her purse. So I asked her how she came to be there, "I could not believe that your sign was real," I said to her. "What brought you to a place like this?" "Hunger; hunger and thirst. I arrived here one night to visit my brother who was helping to build a bridge. I was wet and cold, and the cup of. tea he gave me. was heavenly. Then the idea got into my head that others passed along the same road in the same state and that it would be lovely to bring them into a warm room and give them a steaming cup of tea. So here I am, It’s rough, but they seem to like it." Of course they like it. Fresh tea, crisp cakes, a singing kettle, the smell of burning wood-many lonely miles from anywhere. But it is only women who go into business to give pleasure to other people. Men never have such nice impulses as that, or translate them into action if by any chance they do have them. (To be continued)