ed to, I was to be entrusted with the charge of them, in company
with a Scottish shepherd, by name Campbell, who was a new arrival in the
country.

The sheep numbered four hundred, and we had to drive them nearly three
hundred miles, and deliver them in as good condition as when they left.
We started early in December, the hottest time of the year, carrying
what we needed for camping out on one pack horse. It was by no means a
pleasure journey to drive, or rather feed, sheep along for three hundred
miles at ten to fifteen miles a day, over dry and hot plains with not a
tree to shelter one, and to stay awake turn about night after night to
watch them. Mr. Lee accompanied us as far as the Waiou river, over which
it occupied the best part of a day to cross the sheep, then he left us
to proceed to Christchurch to seek and bring back the Government Scab
Inspector to meet us at the Hurunui river, the boundary, and there to
pass the sheep, otherwise they would not be permitted to enter the
Canterbury province.

It may appear strange that it would occupy a day to cross 400 sheep over
a river, but it is a very difficult thing to induce sheep to take to the
water; indeed, by merely driving them it is impossible. Where the water
is at all fordable, several men wade in, each carrying a sheep, and when
half-way across the animals are loosed and sent swimming to the other
side, but not infrequently this plan fails, by reason of the sheep
turning and swimming back to the mob, and the operation may have to be
repeated many times before it is successful. The object is to give the
mob a lead, and when sheep get a lead they will follow it blindly, no
matter where it will lead them to. When the river is too deep for
wading, men on horseback ford or swim over, carrying sheep on their
saddles, and drop them in midstream till the required lead is obtained.
As soon as the mob understand they have to go, a panic seems to take
them, and they make such frantic efforts to rush on that to prevent them
hurting each other is sometimes impossible. An unfortunate instance of
this occurred while I was at Highfield. We were driving a large mob of
sheep to the yards to be dipped, and had to pass them over one side of
the rocky gorge leading to the Highfield plateau before mentioned. Some
of the leaders near the edge took alarm, and a few fell over the cliff.
Seeing their comrades disappear, others followed, and then the whole mob
made for the precipice,