Page:The Kea, a New Zealand problem (1909).pdf/23

Rh Here and there great shingle slides come down the mountain slopes, long streams of broken boulders that creep into the gorge and spread fan-like for a mile or so across its broken expanse. In places the river has shorn them off clean; and their massive walls, often a hundred feet in height, bound the river’s torrent.

A night was spent at Lake Coleridge Homestead; and then, with my outfit transferred from cycle to horse, I skirted the lake, its wild water-fowl rising in clouds at my approach. About midday I reached the top of the pass.

At last! There before me it lay, the lonely, solemn, weird but fascinating country the Kea chooses for a home. Not a sound broke the great silence as I reined up and gazed across the apparently endless succession of snow-clad peaks. My coming seemed an intrusion. Save for the dray-track that wound easily down for a mile or so to the river-bed, passing an empty galvanised-iron hut as it went, there was no sign of man’s presence in this vast wild. Over this scene, looking then much as it does now, the giant moas, whose remains have been found in the gorge, must have strutted in search of food.

Hundreds of feet below lie the Rakaia Forks, where the Wilberforce, Mathias and Rakaia Rivers unite their forces before they charge down the gorge on to the plains. Their reinforcements are called from all the surrounding peaks. They rush from the terminal faces of the glaciers; they trickle from the snow-line; they ripple and bubble through the cushion-like vegetation of the higher slopes. Down amid the dense bush they tumble, forming numerous cascades and waterfalls. Here they rattle under a fallen monarch of the forest. There they slip and slide over the great boulders that in vain stand to stem their progress. Down they scramble, seething over the shingle of the river-bed, sweeping round the hill slopes, hurrying to join the roaring river.

Where the gorge widens out the streams of the Rakaia anastomose like silver network, with the tussocky flats filling up the intervals. Farther away lie great swamps, where