On reaching the river it was so swollen as to be unsafe to attempt fording, and so, lighting my pipe, I sat down under the shelter of a large boulder, and presently fell asleep. When I woke up, after some considerable time, and remembered where I was, I feared that Cook and Butler must have passed while I slept, and was on the point of returning to the station, when I observed two horsemen a long way down stream, apparently searching for something. I speedily understood what was on foot. My friends were laboriously seeking for my dead body, having naturally supposed, when they could not find me at the paddock, that I had tried to ford the river and been washed away. The idea of these two men spending the morning hunting for a supposed drowned man, who was enjoying a sound sleep near them all the time, was so ludicrous that I could not refrain from an immoderate fit of laughter when they arrived.
Butler was hot-tempered, and anything approaching to ridicule where he himself was concerned was a mortal insult. He turned pale with passion and rode off, and I do not think he ever entirely forgave me for not being drowned when he had undertaken so much trouble to discover my body.
It was at Mesopotamia that I noticed so many remains of that extinct bird, the "Moa," and it appeared that some of the species had inhabited that locality not very many years previously. Indeed, some old Maoris I had met on the Ashburton said they remembered the bird very well. It was not uncommon to come across a quantity of bones, and near by them a heap of smooth pebbles which the bird had carried in his craw for digestive purposes, and I recollect one day employing a number of the bones in making a footway over a small creek.
A complete skeleton of the Moa bird is to be seen in the British Museum.
I had now obtained a fresh contract for making cuttings, draining swamps, and bridging over some ten miles in the Lower Ashburton gorge and Valley, and I was busily engaged all the summer and autumn. There were some extensive patches of swampy ground where great difficulty was experienced in passing the heavy wool drays, and to make a feasible road over them was one of my tasks, and an interesting one it proved, giving some scope to my engineering ability. Having laid out the proposed line of road over the marsh, I cut from it at right angles, and some 300 feet in length, a channel wide and deep enough, I calculated, to convey away the flood water during heavy rains, and from the upper end of this channel I cut four feeding drains, two running along the road line, and two diagonally, all four meeting at the top end of the main channel; over the latter, at this point, I constructed a wooden bridge of rough green timber from the forest, distant about eight miles. I sunk a row of heavy round piles or posts about a foot in diameter at each side of the channel, which was fifteen feet wide, securing them with heavy transverse beams spiked on to their tops; over this I laid heavy round timber stretchers, about nine inches in diameter and four in number, upon which were spiked closed together a flooring of stout pine saplings from two and a half to four inches thick. The floor between these was then covered with a thick layer of brushwood, topped with earth and gravel. The road embankment was then carried on from each side till the swamp was cleared. I am particular about describing this, as it was my first attempt at bridge building and draining, and of all the thousands of bridges I have since constructed, I do not think any one of them interested me more keenly than these in the Ashburton Valley when I was a lad of nineteen. The bridges and roads over the marshes proved quite satisfactory, and it was a real delight to me when the first teams of wool drays passed over safely. I was at the same time engaged on the cuttings, and got some of them completed before the severe winter set in.
I was so busy this season that much of my time was necessarily spent in supervising between the forest and the work, and I had a rough hut erected at the former, where I could live during my visits.
Once, on passing to the forest, I met with an amusing accident. I was riding a huge sixteen-hand black mare and had heavy swags of blankets strapped before and behind the saddle, in addition to which I carried a new axe, some cooking utensils and a large leg and loin of mutton, which I had called for at the station, fearing that my men were out of meat. Near the forest I had to cross a small stream with steep banks. There had been heavy rain the previous night, and the little stream was a rushing torrent, and as I forded it, the water reached to the girths. The opposite bank was steep and slippery, and the huge animal laboured so in negotiating it that the girths snapped, and the entire saddle, with myself, slipped over her tail into the rushing stream. In this manner we were carried down; immersed to nearly my armpits, but securely attached, for some two hundred yards, before I was able to extricate myself and incumbrances by seizing a branch as we swept by a bend in the stream.
With some difficulty I succeeded in getting all out safely and fortunately on the right side. The mare was quietly feeding where she had emerged.
Where the work went on in the valley I had a couple of tents for my gang of navvies, some of whom were sailors. I always found these excellent workers, and specially handy and clever in many ways, where a mere landsman would be at fault. I worked with them, and shared everything as one of themselves, even to a single nip of rum I allowed to each man once a day. They treated me with every respect, and I had not, so far as I can recollect, a single instance of serious trouble with any of them. They received good wages, and earned them, and if any man among them had been found guilty of reprehensible conduct, the others would have supported me at once in clearing him from the camp. When the day's work was over, these sailor navvies would all bear a hand to get matters right for the night and the next day. Mutton was put in the oven, bread made, and placed under the ashes, firewood collected, and water in the kettle ready for putting on the fire at daybreak, then the nip of rum and pipe alight, and yarns or songs would be told or sung in turn, till the blankets claimed us.
This was a very severe winter, and as the snow began to lie heavily I was perforce obliged to stop work for a month or two, and for that time I accepted an invitation from Cook and Brabazon to keep them company at Mesopotamia. Butler had left for Christchurch, where he would remain for an indefinite time.