A First Year in Canterbury Settlement

by Samuel Butler

Start your dray, then, from town and join it with your sheep on the way up. Your sheep will not travel more than ten miles a day if you are to do them justice; so your dray must keep pace with them. You will generally find plenty of firewood on the track. You can camp under the dray at night. In about a week you will get on to your run, and very glad you will feel when you are safely come to the end of your journey. See the horses properly looked to at once; then set up the tent, make a good fire, put the kettle on, out with the frying-pan and get your supper, smoke the calumet of peace, and go to bed.

The first question is, Where shall you place your homestead? You must put it in such a situation as will be most convenient for working the sheep. These are the real masters of the place—the run is theirs, not yours: you cannot bear this in mind too diligently. All considerations of pleasantness of site must succumb to this. You must fix on such a situation as not to cut up the run, by splitting off a little corner too small to give the sheep free scope and room. They will fight rather shy of your homestead, you may be certain; so the homestead must be out of their way. You MUST, however, have water and firewood at hand, which is a great convenience, to say nothing of the saving of labour and expense. Therefore, if you can find a bush near a stream, make your homestead on the lee side of it. A stream is a boundary, and your hut, if built in such a position, will interfere with your sheep as little as possible.

The sheep will make for rising ground and hill-side to camp at night, and generally feed with their heads up the wind, if it is not too violent. As your mob increases, you can put an out-station on the other side the run.

In order to prevent the sheep straying beyond your boundaries, keep ever hovering at a distance round them, so far off that they shall not be disturbed by your presence, and even be ignorant that you are looking at them. Sheep cannot be too closely watched, or too much left to themselves. You must remember they are your masters, and not you theirs; you exist for them, not they for you. If you bear this well in mind, you will be able to turn the tables on them effectually at shearing-time. But if you once begin to make the sheep suit their feeding-hours to your convenience, you may as well give up sheep-farming at once. You will soon find the mob begin to look poor, your percentage of lambs will fall off, and in fact you will have to pay very heavily for saving your own trouble, as indeed would be the case in every occupation or profession you might adopt.

Of course you will have to turn your sheep back when they approach the boundary of your neighbour. Be ready, then, at the boundary. You have been watching them creeping up in a large semicircle toward the forbidden ground. As long as they are on their own run let them alone, give them not a moment's anxiety of mind; but directly they reach the boundary, show yourself with your dog in your most terrific aspect. Startle them, frighten them, disturb their peace; do so again and again, at the same spot, from the very first day. Let them always have peace on their own run, and none anywhere off it. In a month or two you will find the sheep begin to understand your meaning, and it will then be very easy work to keep them within bounds. If, however, you suffer them to have half an hour now and then on the forbidden territory, they will be constantly making for it. The chances are that the feed is good on or about the boundary, and they will be seduced by this to cross, and go on and on till they are quite beyond your control.

You will have burnt a large patch of feed on the outset. Burn it in early spring, on a day when rain appears to be at hand. It is dangerous to burn too much at once: a large fire may run farther than you wish, and, being no respecter of imaginary boundaries, will cross on to your neighbour's run without compunction and without regard to his sheep, and then heavy damages will be brought against you. Burn, however, you must; so do it carefully. Light one strip first, and keep putting it out by beating it with leafy branches, This will form a fireproof boundary between you and your neighbour.

Burnt feed means contented and well-conditioned sheep. The delicately green and juicy grass which springs up after burning is far better for sheep than the rank and dry growth of summer after it has been withered by the winter's frosts. Your sheep will not ramble, for if they have plenty of burnt pasture they are contented where they are. They feed in the morning, bunch themselves together in clusters during the heat of the day, and feed again at night.

Moreover, on burnt pasture, no fire can come down upon you from your neighbour so as to hurt your sheep.

The day will come when you will have no more occasion for burning, when your run will be fully stocked, and the sheep will keep your feed so closely cropped that it will do without it. It is certainly a mortification to see volumes of smoke rising into the air, and to know that all that smoke might have been wool, and might have been sold by you for 2s. a pound in England. You will think it great waste, and regret that you have not more sheep to eat it. However, that will come to pass in time; and meanwhile, if you have not mouths enough upon your run to make wool of it, you must burn it off and make smoke of it instead. There is sure to be a good deal of rough scrub and brushwood on the run, which is better destroyed, and which sheep would not touch; therefore, for the ultimate value of your run, it is as well or better that it should be fired than fed off.

The very first work to be done after your arrival will be to make a yard for your sheep. Make this large enough to hold five or six times as many sheep as you possess at first. It may be square in shape. Place two good large gates at the middle of either of the two opposite sides. This will be sufficient at first, but, as your flocks increase, a somewhat more complicated arrangement will be desirable.