LEAVES OF GRASS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 505, 25 February 1949, Page 19

LEAVES OF GRASS

By

SUNDOWNER

LIVING WITH SHEEP

ALF-WAY through Southland I began to feel confused. I was not tired physically, but I was seeing so many new things every day which were at the same time old things

that I wanted time to think about them. So I welcomed an _ opportunity that happilv

came to me of retreating into a tussock valley out of sight of the road and spending some days there among the cattle and sheep. Shepherds visited me once or twice, and a colony of stilts as often as I even looked in the direction of the swamp in which they were breeding. But my constant companions were sheep. The cattle might have been more companionable if I had been; but their

owners had asked me not to let them wander further down the valley than the patch of big matagouris in which I was camped, and that proved easy. All I had to do when they came too near was to rush suddenly out of cover, shout "umbalapa,’ and ‘sool’ on an imaginary pack of dogs. As they were young cows with young calves, led by half a dozen growing steers, they would soon be half a mile away; and after three days of this they did not come near at all. The sheep on the other hand ssckoeed me calmly, and when the sun was hottest even settled in with me under the matagouri bushes. As they were run sheep mustered at most four times a year, I was surprised that my presence gave them so little concern. Even when I went to the creek to bathe, a walk of some distance without clothes, they did no more than move a little out of my way, and they usually returned again if I had driven them from a sweet patch of grazing.

I think Whitman, if he had been a New Zealander, would not have wished to go and live with cows, but to loaf his days away among sheep. And I think they would have been hill sheep, ewes and lambs on tussocks, with creeks in the gullies, and outcrops of rock on the ridges. I think he would have found more there than a poet could easily absorb, especially if the faces had patches of olearia and manuka, and the flats clumps of matagouri. I am sure he would have spent hours just sitting on the tussocks and watching, counting the number of nibbles sheep make in a second, noting how soon they detect an approaching storm, how many hours in summer they spend lying in the shade, how often they get up and at once lie down again, how they will feed in the open quite unaffected by the sun, then

decide instantaneously that it is too hot and run for the shadow of a bush or a bank. I can see him taking in all these things for hours, with the burble of the creek and that blend of scents giveri off by tussock, meadowsweet, matagouri, Maori onions, swamp-grass, and swampmud, taking it all in and wanting nothing else till the Sun dropped over the hill, the sheep climbed up to the ridges and camping benches, and as he watched them going over the skyline he saw suddenly that the stars were out. But these were hill sheep; and the life of a hill sheep is so much fuller than the life of a sheep sharing a treeless paddock with hundreds of others that they ‘have not much more than their voices in common. * * Bo ECAUSE ‘the Mataura river was in flood when I reached Gore, and *the Waikaia when I reached Riversdale, I spent a night at Waipounamu before (continued on next page)

Through New Zealand To-day

"THOSE DAYS ARE DONE"

(continued from previous page) pushing on to Switzers: a profitable night as well as most pleasant. My

host had been born on the west side of the river and now owned two blocks on

the east side, one on the present river flat, the other on the terrace some hundreds of feet higher up that must have been the river level once. He was a good farmer, with the geniality that comes partly from success, partly from good health and good sense; but he was not

a typical Southland farmer. He was not a Scot, not a Presbyterian or a Puritan, not married to a Scottish wife. It was perhaps. typical that he owned a trotter or two, since that seems to be one of the ways in which the farmers of Southland conduct. their war with Mr. Nash, But he also owned and raced a thoroughbred, shot ducks but apparently did not fish, ‘bred his sheep with great care, but would have nothing to do with cows, and yet could find time to locate a sitting turkey and rescue the clutch as soon as the mother. started to trail them through the wet grass. If I asked him a question he was perfectly frank and onen and gave

me good answers; but he had lived long enough in Southland to have Southland’s caution with strangers. He gave me much information, but there was usually a little pause between my question and his answer, and a touch of emphasis in the answer, that taken together seemed to mean something like this: "I don’t know why you asked that question, or what use you will make of the answer, but what I'm telling you is the truth, and I don’t care what you do with it." He was cautious, but he was certainly not conservative. "Those days are done" rounded off most of his discussions and expressed most of his attitudes. Why did he no longer use draught horses? Because "you couldn’t get a man to-day to drive them. Those days are done." Did farmers still use drain-pipes? "Yes, when they can get them. But bull-dozers make the bed for them. Ditching days are done," Wouldn’t cows on that country pay better than sheep? "They might, but who would do the work? «I’ve no family of my own, and it’s useless trying to hire milkers. You can’t get men up at four o'clock these days, and work them seven days a week. Those days are done." c And so it went on. If farmers find it hard to change their ways, he gave no sign that he did. He had come through three or four revolutions in 20 or 30 years, and did not once ask what the world was coming to. It remained a very good world to him, and I could not help thinking as I talked to him how much wiser he was than the moaners ani grawemte, © a

DEATH OF A HORSE

READ a brilliantly horrible story once about the death of an elephant. It was the first elephant the author, a young official in Burma, had ever shot, and he had no desire to shoot it. But his prestige as an Englishman was at

stake. If he refused to shoot, the contempt he knew the Burmese already

had for him would make further work among them impossible. If he did shoot, he was likely to miss or to perpetrate a slow and muddled murder

which he had not the stomach to endure. He shoots and hits; hits several times again, and finally brings the elephant to its knees. But it will not die. Even when it rolls over it goes on breathing and bleeding until he is sick with disgust and shame. % * * CAN’T remember at the moment where I read it, or how long ago, but it came back to me when a_horse lay down in the Kelso show-ring and died slowly in the presencg of all the spectators. It was, I was told, a very old horse to be competing in a show-ring, but it was like the elephant: it went down but would not die. Women turned their backs on it, but when they faced round again expecting’ everything to be over it gave a great shudder and gasp and came back to life for several minutes. . The point of course was that its death was horrible because it was the death of a horse. All, or nearly all, of the spectators were farmers or farmers’ wives who would have thought very little of the death of a calf and nothing at all of the death of a sheep. I have seen farmers’ daughters and farmers’ wives. attending farmers’ days in slaughter-houses and _ chattering and laughing through an afternoon of butchery. But horses don’t often die, and except in mercy are hardly ever killed. Their deaths, when they do happen, are an event and a shock, and only the insensitive take them calmly. As long as she lay in the ring this game old candidate for ribbons made everybody silent and depressed; and many, when a tractor came and dragged her away by the neck, looked the other way for five minutes and pretended not to know.