High Country Sheepfarmer

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 553, 27 January 1950, Page 8

High Country Sheepfarmer

WENTY-FOUR years ago I stood on one of the northern buttresses of Mount Torlesse, looking up the gorge of the Waimakariri into the wider valleys of the upper basin. In the centre, lay a tather drab jumble of tussock hills; but on each side and behind rose tier upon tier of ranges, seemingly endless, theicr shoulders rising from the dim shadowy valleys and their heads white with snow. I asked my companion what country this was, who lived there and what they did. Even today I don’t need the photograph I took then to bring the picture to my mind; even today I can feel the eager curiosity and the excitement those peaks and hidden valleys roused in me. No ordinary life could be lived in such surroundings and surely, no ordinary men would be found there. I have since come to know that scene very well indeed, for my home has been in the upper gorge for nearly twenty years. Curiously enough, not one of those youthful sentiments, which passed through my mind so long ago, has become tarnished with the years. The ranges and the river valleys are still places of mysterious attraction; the life is still. tinged with the romantic glamour of the open spaces, and the men are just a little more than life size. HIS station where we live covers about 63,000 acres of mountain country, ranging from~rideable tussock hills to the jagged tops of mountains over 6,000 feet high. On this area we rcarry about 10,000 fine-half-bred sheep, an average of not more than one sheep to every five acres. People sometimes say to me, "Of course, sheep never go up there, do they?" Indeed they go up there, and if there was anything higher to go up they would go up that, too. There’s no top too high, no bluff too steep, no gorge too deep, for the wandering sheep to poke into, looking for a tasty bite. A farmer from the plains once said to me, "What do you chaps do all the year? You don’t have to do a lot of cultivatiom and sow crops, you don’t have fat lambs to look after, and you don’t have any harvesting----what do you do with your time?" I said, "How long does it take you to run your sheep into the shed to get them. shorn?" "Oh," he said, "we can round them all up in half a day, I suppose." "Well," I said, "it takes us three weeks, not allowing for wet weather, and we have.to do it four times in ‘six months." We seem to spend our whole time in the ‘short mountain summer mustering sheep in, and turning them out again; the unfortunate creatures seem tb be everlastingly wanted for something. ‘Tailing, shearing, dipping and weaning; and finally the autumn muster. It must be a weary life for them, and occasionally we feel it’s a weary life for us; but it’s very fascinating all the same. Getting out of a warm bed at half-past two in the morning, and eating tough chops by candlelight when you’re not hungry, may seund an unromantic sort of occupation, but I defy anyone to say he feels no excitement, no anticipation, when he steps outside the

hut as the first hint of daylight is picking out the outlines of the hills, and sees the stars dimming as the light grows stronger; hears the tumble of the mountain stream where he washes his face, and the little sigh of wind'in the birch trees. S men get older they tend to leave the real high country and go to places where they can do their mustering on a horse-‘"pigskin country" as they call it, I suppose that’s natural, but it’s not thé same-nothing can really compare with the walk up the creek in the dawn-four or five men in single file with twenty or thirty dogs scrambling over the rocks all round themthe pull out on to a spur just when the sun strikes the pale grey shingle-top and turns it to the colour of angels’ wings, the first smoke, when the men sit on'a rock before they separate on to their beats and the dour early morning silence is relaxed. If you are lucky and have the top beat, you climb on to the very top, happy in the knowledge that your hardest work will have been done in the cool of-early morning and you can stride along in the high thin air and see, perhaps half terbury, spread beneath your feet. It’sa glorious picture, isn’t it? I’m just waiting to hear somebody say, "How about the stormy days? — the bitter searching winds, the driving sleet, and the long tramps through snow in the autumn muster?" Yes, that’s true; often it’s hard, often it’s bitterly cold, and always a man must go on, because he’s one of a team. I could tell you a story of a blizzard, when the men came down the last spur holding each other’s sticks, because that was the only way they could keep together; even then the leader would have lost ‘his way but for a dog. HAT’S another thing about the High Country. It has two kinds of inhabitant, men and dogs; and I often wonder which is the more important. Certainly one can’t do without the other. We have to have so many dogs, five or. six each, and their family trees and characteristics are the subject of endless gossip. Talk about a mothers’ meeting! See a row of shepherds sitting on the sheepyard rails on a summer’s evening when the sheep are safely in the shed, Hear the pedigree of the latest pup and the wonderful run he did on the blind spur that morning-and the hats are pushed on to the backs of the heads and someone says, "Well, he was out of Ferguson’s Lass, and she was by Jack Hart’s Corby, and that breed always started youngI remember a pup I had .. ." And so the tale goes on and the dogs sit round

"The High Country has two kinds of inhabitant, men and dogs," says DAVID McLEOD, "and I often wonder which is the more important." Of the "Men at Work" talks recently broadcast by 3YA none was more successful — and certainly none was mofe typical of New Zealand-than David McLeod’s contribution, "High Country Sheepfarmer,’ which is reprinted here. A second edition of it is to be heard soon by overseas listeners to Radio New Zealand.

just like their masters, tired, quarrelsome, humorous or sedate, according to their characters. Of course, it isn’t all musteringeven in the "season," which. lasts from about November 20 to the end of May. If there’s wet weather at shearing-time there may be leisure for all hands until the sheep are dry again. There’s so much extra work afid long hours in the High Country, that we don’t expect the men to do much when a slack day comes. HEARING time is always interesting in spite of the hard work. Wool is a fascinating product, and everyone likes to see the bins fill up with fine white fleeces; and we all pull a few locks out of the top line and hold them up and admire the fine crimp and the long staple; and talk learnedly of 58’s and 64’s-and hope the classer won’t overhear and tell us it’s only 56’s. Those are the figures by which the fineness of the fibre is measured, and it takes a practised eye to recognise them. If we have a good gang of shearers-eight or ten men is the usual-they may turn out over 1,000 sheep in a day. If the weather’s fine and they go on doing that for a week, then things get really hectic. The musterers have to try, not only to muster enough sheep to keep the shearers going, but they must also try to get them turned out again, for there’s little feed round the homestead paddocks for five or six thousand sheep. The pressers must press wool for their lives, and the bales must be carted away almost every day. As for the boss; well, he must be out with the musterers a good deal of the time; available at the shed whenever he’s wanted; superintend the branding; draft the incoming mobs; and most

vital of all-keep the cook in a good humour. There ‘we go again-I could talk for an hour 6n station cooks and never tell half I know. OT all the hard work is done-during the season. When the seasonal musterers have left, the winter sets in with its short days and heavy frosts, often running down to 30 degrees for days on end. Then we begin to think about snow-the bugbear that always menaces the High Countty. When the air gets still and cold and the. sky is leaden and yellowish, the old hands look round and talk about 1918 and 1939, and -even reicall the almost’ mythical stories of the 795 snow, when a well-known statior lost all but a’ few hundred of its 23,000 sheep. If snow comes early in the winter it may lie a long time; the short days and the low sun too weak to clear it, even off the sunny faces. Then the men must get out and find the mobs of sheep huddled on the ridges where the snow is thin, or worse still, buried in drifts where it has been driven by the wind. Hours must be spent tramping a track, and then the string of sheep must be persuaded to follow it down, It’s always astonishing to me to see some great rangy wether, slabsided with hunger, but game and determined, struggle through to the man-made track, and plunge off down the hill piloting his companions to safety. The snow’s bad enough, but that’s not all we have to worry about. Snowedin sheep are a perfect target for the kea, and often we come across a litter of torn bodies and crimson bloodstains on the snow, or a single sheep with the tell-tale mark upon his back. Then the cold night vigil is added to the labour of the day time, The real killer ig

elusive, and the chance to catch him comes very rarely. Funnily enough, in spite of our constant war with the kea the high country men have very little bitterness against him. We like the gay comedian, and the fight is typical of the rather primitive struggle of high country life. He lurks above us in the rocks, swooping down upon his scarlet wings and screaming his eldrich cry, and we hunt him how and when we can, with stick and gun and trap, and with the lure of a captured call-bird. I knew an old man who turned from mustering ‘to kea hunting for a living. He used to go out for days at a time with a loaf of bread and a pound of butter, his billy, and an old raincoat for cover. He boiled his tea and pieces of kea in the same billy, and spent:the nights sitting by a fire on some far cold spur, his old shotgun across his knees, One night he was caught out on the hill in an earthquake. The mountain shook, the trees thrashed in the air, and great boulders jerked from their seats and went hurtling down, bounding from ledge to ledge‘and crashing through the bush. The old man plunged downhill in the darkness, dropping his gun in his panic, and only by some miracle managed to reach the flat. HE High Country has art uncertain future; so much depends upon things beyond our control. I’m certain of one thing: it’s had a very notable influence upon New Zealand life and character. There’s been nothing quite like it anywhere in the world. There was something grand and _ spacious about the life, something which brought out the best in everyone and exaggerated all their peculiarities; as I said before, the High Country men are just a little more than life size. Up and down the South Island from Queenstown to the Awatere, the High Country life has been set apart from the rest of the country. The lads went up the gorge as boys, and there many of them stayed, to become such men ds any country should be proud of. They formed a community of their own with its own talk and its own interests, and any man who became notable in that community was a man in the full sense of the word. It didn’t matter whether they were owners, or musterers, packmen or rouseabouts, all of them were judged by the same stand-ard-of courage and skill and — ance, ‘I shall always feel proud ~ have part in a life which has something epic about it; to have walked upon the hill with the musterers and to have lived the best part of my life amongst the mountains. My family have been born and bred "children of the misty gorges," and wherever they go and whatever they do, there is"ho finer heritage than that.