A Nose is a Nose is a Nose

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 927, 17 May 1957, Page 26

A Nose is a Nose is a Nose

by

SUNDOWNER

APRIL 23

FORGOT when I mentioned the noses of animals the other day-especially the noses of cows-that cows usually respect their noses while we treat ours with some contempt. When I went to milk Betty this morning I used a different bucket for the washing water. It was a bucket that had been filled

with quinces for two days, and I rinsed it with hot water when I

emptied it. But Betty smelt quinces as soon as I began to wash her, and tried to turn round to the bucket. I had, of course, forgotten the quinces and told her sharply to stand still. She continued restless and I continued irritable, and the result was an appreciable difference in her yield. When the truth later dawned on me I could myself smell quinces in the now thrice-rinsed bucket. Something like that probably happens every day. Our dogs, our cats, our cows, and our horses, our sheep when we are handling them, and our pigs always and everywhere, detect smells beyond our reach or our interest. They are messages that mean much to them: frighten them or tempt them or anndéy them or repel them. I have often noticed that if I have patted my dog my cat shrinks from being stroked immediately afterwards. I have read somewhere, and it could be true, that wild animals know at once when they smell another animal-lI mean smell it from a distance-whether it is friendly or hostile or harmless. This means for, say, a rabbit that it knows ‘dog from cat, cat from ferret, and all three from man; which would not be difficult. But it must be difficult in countries with a more diverse fauna than ours to know precisely what enemy has passed or is approaching and what possible victim is near at hand; what animal will help, directly or indirectly, in the search for food. and what creatures, big and small, can be completely ignored. My own rabbits, I

notice, ignore my sheep when both are feeding, but they never so far forget themselves, if the sheep suddenly stop nibbling, as not to stop, too, and listen. Then, almost invariably, their nostrils twitch. =

APRIL 25

bd a * \/ HEN Dick Morris died so suddenly the other day-I was going to say so tragically, but that was not the word for Dick-I remembered that at our only meeting he told me that his books were his eyes and ears. There was no boastfulness in the remark, and no

Suggestion that DOOKS were of no importance. He meant simply that

he had been denied what the world calls a good, that is, a bookish, education. What books would have done for him if they had come his way I can’t pretend to know. I am inclined to think that he would have, found them if he had felt strongly that he needed them, and that they would have done nothing at all for him but spoil him if they had been thrust on him. In any case, they were not thrust on him. Dick observed, thought, and spoke with the freshness of an illiterate. It was a part of his charm that he did not know what others had seen and said, and spoke therefore with the naivety of a child. I never listened to him. without thinking of the Biblical warning against the wise and prudent. He saw so clearly, and especially heard so clearly, because he was one of the babes who had things revealed to them. I have never heard why he chose to withdraw himself from the world and live in the bush, but I like to think that it was for Wordsworth’s reasonbecause the world was too much with him. He was not willing to go through life getting and spending and doing nothing else. He did, in fact, find getting a simple matter, but managed it in his own way. One of the best riflemen I know told me that Dick "ran

rings round: him" when they hunted ceer together, invariably getting four or five out of a mob to his two or three. It was a strange method of earning a livelihood in a man of such gentleness. But even Thoreau felt sometimes like eating a woodchuck raw. os te

APRIL 28

« it STRANGE report Teached me_ today from West Otago. Wild pigs, which had disappeared from all the settled land before I was

out of my teens, are now, I am

told, back again; not only back, but wandering over country where they had not been seen since the first gold tushes. The return, I gather, is confined to hilly country still in tussock, fern and scrub, and within a few miles of the Blue Mountains. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Since the Blue Mountains are now a State forest, they probably give pigs more cover than they had a hundred years ago, and since State forests are usually forbidden territory to men with tifles, dogs and guns, pigs have probably been increasing in number for years, and have now burst out of their forest retreat for better rooting, scavenging and grazing. They have also, perhaps, been chased out by forestry deer cullers, Whatever the -explanation is, the situation, if it has been accurately reported, shows what happens in settled country if settlement relaxes its pressure and turns its back. If war or pestilence or any other convulsion short of atomic destruction depopulated New Zealand, the bush would be back in 50 years, and most of the birds with it. It would not be the New Zealand the whalers found, since many creatures have come with the white man which would survive and fight one another for a place. But it would be a wild country in which horses, cattle, sheep and goats would jostle one another for the grass the rabbits had not eaten and pigs and dogs would fight for the available flesh; their own when rabbits and sheep were scarce, It will not happen in West Otago if I still know the people there. But until yesterday I thought I knew their country, and it is clear that I don’t know it any longer. _ (To be continued) eee —