Through manuka-scrub and savage matakuri the track lay to Black Hill, where it rose behind the rain; stark with bare rock, and rotten with papa, and slippery with blue tussock that lay flat to the wind. One by one the boys swarmed it, as white ants swarm a wall; riding headlong up the dried water-courses, swinging aside from the sky-flung bluffs, and taking each man his separate beat, with the rain spurting off his oil-skins, and the wet gear harsh in his hands.
Above the cry of startled duck and the occasional anger of a kea, rocketted the stock-whip talk as the lashes licked after the heaving flanks. From the sheltered lea of great bluffs they started the cattle; from age-hollowed limestone caves; from deep guts ripped out by water-spouts and yet pallid with snow in the meadows, and from little gully-bottoms where the drowned scrub baptised them into new pains and sorrows. Scott strained his colt’s stifle on a shingle slip where he tried to prevent a stampede, and Mogger put out his elbow when he left the saddle in a blind creek. But he pulled it in again by aid of a stirrup-leather, and collared his bolting mob on the slope below.
Beyond a patch of mic-a-mic Ted Douglas saw a horseman whom he had not sent. He stood in the stirrups with the rain blowing across him.
