TAREI-PO-KIORE
As I have said, fire sometimes sweeps down upon the forest’s enemies and carries all before it: saw-mills and their out-buildings are made into bonfires, and the stacks of sawn planks and litter of chips and sawdust help the blaze. The owner and his men are lucky if they save more than their portable belongings. Nor does the fire stop there. After making a mouthful of mills and woodcutters’ huts, it may set out for some small township not yet clear of stumps, dead trunks, and inflammable trash. All depends upon the wind. If the flames are being borne along upon the wings of a strong north-west wind—the “regular howling nor’-wester” of up-country vernacular—very little can be done except to take to flight, driving live-stock, and taking such furniture as can be piled on carts and driven away. Fences, house, machinery, garden, and miles of grass may be swept away in a few hours, the labour of half a lifetime may be consumed, and the burnt-out settler may be thankful if the Government comes to his aid with a loan to enable him to buy grass seed to scatter on his blackened acres after the long-desired rains have come.
In an exceptionally dry summer—such an extraordinary season as came in January and February of this year—the fire goes to work on a grand scale. In a tract a hundred miles long, thirty or forty outbreaks may be reported within a week. Settlers looking out from their homesteads may see smoke and glowing skies in half-a-dozen directions at once. Now the blaze may approach from this direction, now from that, just as the wind freshens or shifts. Sheep are mustered, and, if possible, driven away. Threatened householders send their furniture away, or dig holes in the ground and bury it. When the danger comes too suddenly to give time for anything more, goods are hastily piled on some bare patch and covered with wet blankets. I have read of a prudent settler who had prepared for these risks of fire by excavating a cave almost large enough to house a band of prophets. After three years the fire came his way, and he duly stored away his possessions in the repository. But just as rain does not fall when you take out a large umbrella, so our provident friend found that the fire would not touch his house. He lost nothing but a shed.
MORNING ON THE WANGANUI RIVER
If there appears any fair chance of beating back the flames, the men join together, form a line, and give battle. They do not lightly surrender the fruits of years of toil, but will fight rolling smoke, flying sparks, and even scorching flame, hour after hour. Strips of grass are burned off in advance, and dead timber blown up with dynamite. Buckets of water are passed from hand to hand, or the flames are beaten out with sacks or blankets. Seen at night on a burning hill-side, the row of masculine fighting figures stands out jet-black against the red glow, and the wild attitudes and desperate exertions are a study for an artist. Among the men, boys work gleefully; there is no school for them when a fire has to be beaten. Very young children suffer greatly from the smoke with which the air they breathe is laden, perhaps for days together. Even a Londoner would find its volumes trying. Now and again a bushman in the thick of the fight reels half-suffocated, or falls fainting and has to be carried away. But his companions work on; and grass-fires are often stopped and standing crops saved. But fire running through thick bush is a more formidable affair. The heat is terrific, the very soil seems afire; and indeed the flames, after devouring trunks and branches, will work down into the roots and consume them for many feet. Sparks and tongues of flame shoot across roads and streams and start a blaze on the farther side. Messengers riding for help, or settlers trying to reach their families, have often to run the gauntlet perilously on tracks which the fire has reached or is crossing. They gallop through when they can, sometimes with hair and beard singed and clothes smelling of the fire. Men, however, very seldom lose their lives. For one who dies by fire in the bush, fifty are killed by falling timber in the course of tree-felling. Sheep have occasionally to be left to their fate, and are roasted, or escape with wool half-burnt. Wild pigs save themselves; but many native birds perish with their trees, and the trout in the smaller streams die in hundreds.
Many stories are told of these bush fires, and of the perils, panics, or displays of courage they have occasioned. Let me repeat one. In a certain “bush township,” or small settlement in the forest, lived a clergyman, who, in addition to working hard among the settlers in a parish half as large as an English county, was a reader of books. He was, I think, a bachelor, and I can well believe that his books were to him something not far removed from wife and children. The life of a parson in the bush certainly deserves some consolations in addition to those of religion. Well, a certain devastating fire took a turn towards the township in which a wooden roof sheltered our parson and his beloved volumes. Some householders were able to drive off with their goods; others stood their ground. The minister, after some reflection, carried his books out of doors, took a spade and began to dig a hole in the earth, meaning to bury them therein. Just as the interment was beginning, a neighbour rode up with the news that the house of a widow woman, not far away, had caught fire and that friends were trying to extinguish the burning or at least save her goods. Whether the book-lover gave “a splendid groan” I do not know; but leaving his treasures, off he ran, and was soon among the busiest of the little salvage corps, hauling and shouldering like a man. When all was done that could be done he hastened back, blackened and perspiring, to his own dwelling. Alas! the fire had outflanked him. Sparks and burning flakes had dropped upon his books and the little collection was a blazing pile. I have forgotten the parson’s name and do not know what became of him. But if any man deserved, in later life, a fine library at the hands of the Fates, he did. I hope that he has one, and that it includes a copy of Mr. Blades’s entertaining treatise on the Enemies of Books. With what gusto he must read chapter i., the title of which is “Fire.”
ON THE UPPER WANGANUI
Just as a burning forest is a magnificent scene with a dismal sequel, so the saw-miller’s industry, though it finds a paradise and leaves a rubbish-yard, is, while it goes on, a picturesque business. Like many forms of destruction, it lends itself to the exertion of boldness, strength, and skill. The mill itself is probably too primitive to be exactly ugly, and the complicated machinery is interesting when in action, albeit its noises, which at a distance blend into a humming vibration, rise near at hand to tearing and rending, clattering and howling. But the smell of the clean wood is fresh and resinous, and nothing worse than sawdust loads the air. The strong teeth of the saws go through the big logs as though they were cheese. The speed of the transformation, the neatness and utility of the outcome, are pleasing enough. Then the timber-scows, those broad, comfortable-looking craft that go plodding along the northern coasts, may be said, without irony, to have a share of “Batavian grace.” But the more absorbing work of the timber trade begins at the other end, with the selecting and felling of the timber. After that comes the task of hauling or floating it down to the mill. Tree-felling is, one supposes, much the same in all countries where the American pattern of axe is used. With us, as elsewhere, there are sights worth watching. It is worth your while to look at two axemen at work on the tree, giving alternate blows, one swinging the axe from the right, the other from the left. Physically, bush-fellers are among the finest workmen in the islands, and not only in wood-chopping contests, but when at work, under contract in the bush, they make the chips fly apace. Some of them seem able to hew almost as well with one arm as with two; indeed, one-armed men have made useful fellers. Sometimes they attack a tree from the ground; but into the larger trunks they may drive stakes some few feet from the soil, or may honour a giant by building a platform round it. Upon this they stand, swinging their axes or working a large cross-cut saw. Skill, of course, is required in arranging the direction in which the tree shall fall, also in avoiding it when it comes down. Even a broken limb is a serious matter enough in the bush, far from surgical aid. Men thus struck down have to be carried on rough litters to the nearest surgeon. In one case the mates of an injured bush-feller carried him in this way fully sixty miles, taking turns to bear the burden. Even when a man has been killed outright and there is no longer question of surgical aid, the kindliness of the bushmen may still be shown. Men have been known to give up days of remunerative work in order to carry the body of a comrade to some settlement, where it can be buried in consecrated ground. Accidents are common enough in the bush. Only last year an “old hand” fell a victim to mischance after forty years of a bushman’s life. Slipping on a prostrate trunk he fell on the sharp edge of his axe, and was discovered lying there dead in solitude.