Page:Reminiscences of Earliest Canterbury 1915.pdf/217

 it was getting low in the chest, my mother used to mix it with manuka or biddy-biddy. The former was too aromatic, and we preferred the latter, which was pulled green, tied up in small bundles, and dried.

All through the ’forties my father grew wheat, cut it with a reaping hook, threshed it with a flail, and ground it at night or on a wet day in a great hand-mill like a coffee-grinder. The bran was sifted out, and the flour made into bread and cooked either as a “damper” or in a camp oven.

On the day when the famous first four ships passed Pigeon Bay Heads on their way to Lyttelton, my father was occupied yoking the first four bullocks, which he was breaking in as workers. One of these animals had a curious history. When, as a calf, he was taken from his mother, he sulked, and refused to take milk with the others. He wandered about, a miserable little thing, until about the end of the first week, when he attached himself to a sow with a litter of small pigs. The sow adopted and reared him, rooting up for him and her own litter the fern root which was very plentiful in the bay. Eating his fern root, and living and sleeping with the pigs, he was at twelve months old very small