HOLIDAYS IN THE BACK COUNTRY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1054, 6 November 1959, Page 8

HOLIDAYS IN THE BACK COUNTRY

by

Joan

Poulton

WHEN I was a child I lived with my ten brothers afd sisters on a high country sheep run in the South Island. Every summer we rode away over a 5,000 foot pass through the mountains to our Back Country. We two small girls, we were nine and ten when we first went, rode two ponies, Brownie and Pan. Our mother, who went with us twice, rode a spirited pacing pony whose name was Pauly and who loved gingernuts. One or other of our elder sisters would be in charge of the expedition, measure out the food needed for two or three weeks, ration the clothes and weigh the loads for the packhorse. If the loads were uneven the heavier oné would gradually slip round and underneath his tummy. None of our packhorses liked that. We always took one and sometimes two packhorses, carefully choosing the quietest out of the regular pack team which travelled steadily between the homestead station and Quail Flat, the Back Country one, taking in stores and bringing out rabbitskins all summer before the winter snows blocked the track. The track was too steep and narrow ever to get a cow out to Quail Flat. We could see it clearly from our house. The foothills were two hundred yards away past the woolshed and cattleyard and across a wide shingle river-bed. They rose steeply from the river-bed and the track wound across them in great S bends up to the saddle, which was close enough above us to hear, on a late summer morning at daybreak, the shouts of the musterers, the barks of their dogs, and the murmuring maas of five to ten thousand sheep pouring over the mountain tops on their way to shearing like @ mass of maggots. It took a fast rider four hours for the seventeen miles from the homestead to Quail Flat. It took the pack team six to eight hours. It took us all day. Our quiet packhorses always had their own little ways. One called Darkie always saw the chance of an earlier halt at every track leading off from the main one. It usually led up to a rabbiter’s camp; he had packed to them all and knew them better than we. Once he had got on to @ natrow track it was hard to turn him, he would trot on, fast and resolute, packs bouncing, and we would trot behind, both faster and faster until we could find a place to gallop past and head him off. Twice we arrived right in the camp before we could stop him. The rabbiters would be surprised but pleased to see a human after weeks on their own. Once we all had to swim the Clarence River in flood. The track normally did cross it backwards and forwards and saved high climbs over steep spurs, but ‘we had looked at the creamy rolling flood and decided not to risk ourselves. Our packhorse otherwise. When we came down to one of the little grassy flats which alternately edged the river. he left it and set off full gallop over the stones. We galloped after him which only made him go faster. Finally we let him go. We were worried about the horses’ legs among the boulders, and decided that if he were determined to cross the river he’d be better to do it in his own time and not at a hand-gallop. When we saw him in the water with all our blankets, sleeping-bags, spare clothes and food on his back and us two days from home we decided we’d have to go too. He waited for us on the far side and we all got across successfully although

it was nervous work in the flood. There is always the worry that boulders, rolling down unseen in the heavy siltladen water, will break the horses’ legs. We had to sit very easily, with our feet drawn up out of the stirrups and water, so that we wouldn’t unbalance our horses as they swam. Our blankets were rather wet, but it was summertime and some rabbiters in a nearby camp who had watched our crossing in astonishment, dried us out and boiled us a billy of tea. Another of our packhorses was Dolly. She was a wanderer, and had to be hobbled at night

or we would wake up in the morning and find ourselves and our possessions a long ride from home and Dolly on her way there. She was a very sweettempered horse to groom and load, but once on the track she liked to lead. Most of the way led down a long river-bed and the pack-team each summer chose themselves a track and wore it into steps, a square of clear ground, a ridge of shingle and each following horse stepped exactly into the square and over the ridge, our own horses likewise; the ponies found the steps a long stretch for their shorter legs and often balanced dot and carry on the ridges. Dolly liked to go first but once’ in front would slow down the pace too

much even for us, so one of us would nip past her at a turn, but not for long. At her first chance Dolly would rush snorting past and without compunction push the offender right off the track. Merely uncomfortable on the river-bed, but over the Pass the track was cut out of rock and dropped away one, two or three thousand feet and there Dolly could be dangerous, There was one place on our track called Dead Horse Gully. A whole packteam was destroyed here. There were twenty of them coming home one evening. They were well down from the Pass, down to where the track takes three sharp zig-zags across a precipitotis flax-

gtown slope, They were jingling home fast, empty packs on their backs, thinking of the chaff waiting for them in the long line of feedboxes in the packhorse yard at the station. A young impatient horse jostled past the old leader and fell. He tripped the leader, and one after the other the whole twenty fell and slid fifteen hundred feet down the glassy flax and over a rocky bluff into the river-bed far below. The packman riding at the rear was left watching them aghast. To get to them he had to ride another hour down the track to the station where he collected some of the mén, and then up the river. They found all the horses dead and had to cut their packs and harness off them. When we arrived at a new camp there were many chores, from unsaddling and grooming the horses, to collecting firewood, to cooking the meal.. But our special task was to collect dry tussock to put under our sleeping bags. Tussocks are large tufts of coarse wiry grass, sometimes sparsely dotted about, sometimes covering the hillsides in a tufty mat of flaxen grass which ripples and bends this way and that under the sway of the wind. The young tussock is golden, wiry, tough, like hay to sheep, cattle or horses who all thrive on it, but we looked for last year’s growth and if we were lucky many years before that. It was grey and came out in easy handfuls and made a wonderful bed. There we would lie on our springy tussock, our blankets folded round us in a neat envelope in our sleeping bags, our clothes a pillow under our heads, the Southern Cross and the Milky Way brilliant above us; the round clear sky cut into by the strong mountain peaks, the river rolling softly over the boulders beside us, stags roaring in the mountain valleys and moreporks in the trees calling to each other; two days’ ride from home across a mountain range.