Under the circumstances these words were consolatory; and when I came to hear the story, this was the way the accident happened. As I mentioned before, even this drift had thawed till it was soft at the surface and worn away almost to the rocks. During a rapid descent the nose of the sledge dipped through the snow, and stopped dead against a rock. Mr. U—— was instantly buried in the snow, falling into a young but prickly Spaniard, which assaulted him grievously; but F—— shot over his head some ten yards, turned a somersault, and alit on his feet. This sounds a harmless performance enough, but it requires practice; and F—— declared that for weeks afterwards his neck felt twisted. The accident must have looked very ridiculous: the sledge one moment gliding smoothly along at the rate of forty miles an hour,—the next a dead stop, and F——flying through the air over his passenger's head, finishing feet first plump down in the soft snow.
Looking back on that time, I can remember how curiously soon the external traces of the great snow-storm disappeared. For some weeks after the friendly nor-wester, the air of the whole neighbourhood was tainted by dead and decaying sheep and lambs; and the wire fences, stock-yard rails, and every "coign of vantage," had to be made useful but ghastly by a tapestry of sheep-skins. The only wonder was that a single sheep had survived a storm severe enough to kill wild pigs. Great boars, cased in hides an inch thick, had perished through sheer stress of weather; while thin-skinned animals, with only a few months growth of fine merino wool on their backs, had endured it all. It was well known that the actual destruction of sheep was mainly owing to the two days of heavy rain which succeeded the snow. Out of a flock of 13,000 of all ages, we lost, on the lowest calculation, 1,000 grown sheep and nearly 3,000 lambs; and yet our loss was small by comparison with that of our neighbours, whose runs were further back among the hill, and less sheltered than our own.
Long before midsummer our cloud-shadowed hills were green once more; and I think I see again their beautiful outlines, their steep sides planted with semi-tropical palms and grasses, whilst the more distant peaks are veiled in a sultry haze. During that peculiarly bright and lovely summer we often ask each other, Could it have been true that no one knew one mountain from the other, and that hills had been apparently levelled and vallies filled up by the heaviest snow-fall ever known. But whilst the words were on our lips, we could see a group of palm-trees, ten feet high, with their topmost leaves gnawed to the stump by starving sheep, that must have been standing on at least seven feet of snow to reach them; and there was scarcely a creek on the run whose banks were not strewn, for many a long day, by bare and bleaching bones.
Chapter VI: Buying a run.
Like many other people in the world, I have occasionally built castles in the air, and equally of course they have invariably tumbled down in due time with a crash This particular castle however, not only attained to a great elevation in the visionary builder's eyes, but it covered so vast an area of land, that the story of its rise and fall deserves to be placed on record, as a warning to aerial architects and also as a beacon-light to young colonists.
This was exactly the way it all happened. The new year of 186-found us living very quietly and happily on a small compact sheep-farm, at the foot of the Malvern Hills, in the province of Canterbury, New Zealand. As runs went, its dimensions were small indeed; for we only measured it at 12,000 acres, all told. The great tidal wave of prosperity, which sets once in a while towards the shores of all colonies, had that year swelled and risen to its full force; but this we did not know. Borne aloft upon its unsubstantial crest we could not, from that giddy height, discern any water-valleys of adversity or clouds of change and storm along the shining horizon of the new world around us. All our calculations were based on the assumption that the existing prices for sheep, wool, cattle, and all farm-produce, would rule for many a long day; and the delightful part of this royal road to wealth was, that its travellers need not exert themselves in any way: they had only to sit still with folded hands whilst their sheep increased, and it was well known that a flock doubled itself in three short years. The obvious deduction from this agreeable numerical fact was, that in an equally short period your agent's payments to your bank account would also be doubled. In the meantime the drays were busy carting the wool to the seaports as fast as they could be loaded, whilst speculative drovers rode all about the country buying up the fat cattle and wethers from every run. These were wanted to supply the West Coast Diggings which had just "broken out" (as the curious phrase goes there), and so was every description of grain and dairy produce.
We squatters were not the only inhabitants of this fool's paradise. The local Government began planning extensive works: railways were laid out in every direction, bridges planned across rivers, which proved the despair of engineers; whilst a tunnel, the wonder of the Southern Hemisphere, was commenced through a range of hills lying between Port Lyttleton and Christchurch. All this work was undertaken on a scale of pay which made the poor immigrants who thronged to the place by every ship, rub their eyes and believe they must be dreaming, and that they would presently wake up and find themselves back again in the old country, at the old starvation rate of wages. Small capitalists, with perhaps only one or two hundred pounds in the world, bid against each other as purchasers of quarter-acre sections in the fast-springing townships, or of fifty-acre lots of arable land in the projected suburbs. Subscriptions were raised for building a Cathedral in Christchurch; but so dear was both labour and material, that 7,000 pounds barely sufficed to lay its foundations.
The paramount anxiety in men's minds seemed to be to secure land. Sheep-runs in sheltered accessible parts of the country commanded enormous prices, and were bought in the most complicated way. The first comers had taken up vast tracts of land in all directions from the Government, at an almost nominal rental. This had happened quite in the dark and remote ages of the history of the colony, at least ten or twelve years before the date of which I write. As speculators with plenty of hard cash came down from Australia, these original tenants sold, as it were, the good-will and stock of their run at enormous prices; but what always seemed to me so hard was, that after you had paid any number of thousand pounds for your run, you might have to buy it all, or at any rate, some portion of it, over again. Land could only be purchased freehold from the Government, for 2 pounds an acre; and if a "cockatoo" (i.e., a small farmer), or a speculator in mines, fancied any part of your property, he had only to go to the land office, and challenge your pre-emptive rights. The officials gave you notice of the challenge, and six weeks' grace in which to raise the money, and buy it freehold yourself; but few sheep-farmers could afford to pay a good many hundred pounds unexpectedly to secure even their best "flats" or vallies. Hence it often happened that large runs in the most favourable situations were cut up by small investors, "free selectors" as they are called in Australia, and it used to be rather absurd the way one grew to distrust any stranger who was descried riding about the run. The poor man might be looking for a stray horse, or have lost his way, but we always fancied he must be "prospecting" for either gold or coals, or else be a "cockatoo" disguised as a traveller.
Such was the state of things when my story opens. Shearing was just over, and we knew to a lamb how rapidly our flocks and herds were increasing. A succession of mild winters and early genial springs had got the flock into capital order. The wool had all been sent off to Christchurch by drays, the sheep were turned out on the beautiful green hills for ten months of perfect rest and peace; whilst the dogs, who had barked themselves quite hoarse, were enabled to desist from their labours in mustering and watching the yet unshorn mobs on the vallies. Although our run was as well grassed and watered as any in the province, still it could not possibly carry more than a certain number of sheep, and to that total our returns showed that we were rapidly approaching. The most careful calculations warned us that by next shearing we should hardly know what to do with our sheep. It is always better to be under than overstocked, for the merino gets out of condition immediately, and even the staple of the wool deteriorates if its wearer be at all crowded on his feeding-grounds.