Station Amusements in New Zealand
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. PIG-STALKING. IT was much too hot in summer to go after wild pigs. That was our winter's amusement, and very good sport it afforded us, besides the pleasure of knowing that we were really doing good service to the pastoral interest, by ridding the hills around us of almost the only enemies which the sheep have. If the squatter goes to look after his mob of ewes and lambs in the sheltered slopes at the back of his run, he is pretty nearly certain to find them attended by an old sow with a dozen babies at her heels. She will follow the sheep patiently from one camping ground to another, watching for a new-born and weakly lamb to linger behind the rest, and then she will seize and devour it. Besides this danger, the presence of pigs on the run keeps the sheep in an excited state. They have an une
...asy consciousness that their foes are lookingafter them, and they move restlessly up and down the hills, not stopping to feed sufficiently to get fat. If a sheep-farmer thinks his sheep are not in good condition, one of the first questions he asks his shepherd is, "Are there any pigs about ? " Our run had a good many of these troublesome visitors on it, especially in the winter, when they would travel down from the back country to grub up acres on acres of splendid sheep pasture in search of roots. The only good they do is to dig up the Spaniards for the sake of their delicious white fibres, ? and the fact of their being able to do this will give a better idea of the toughness of a wild pig's snout than anything else I can say. It may be strange to English ears to hear a woman of tolerably peaceful disposition, and as the advertisements in the Times so often state, "thoroughly domesticated," aver that she found great pleasure in going after wild pigs ; but the circumstance...
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