Page:Through South Westland.djvu/16

X saddles. In rain and shine we travelled; stopping where we could for as long as we felt inclined, or when the horses needed rest; covering sometimes twenty miles, sometimes fifty, in a day. When the homeward journey by Lake Hawea and the Lindis Pass, over the McKenzie Plains and through South Canterbury, came to be added to the trip here described, we found we had covered between seven and eight hundred miles.

In the second half of the narrative, the eastern plains and on to Mount Aspiring is described—that strange, little-known region we first learnt about on the West.

And lastly, to anyone who may be fired like ourselves to seek the forest world, and plunge into its untracked fastnesses, I would say: leave most of your kit behind, but take with you, as indispensable, a botany book. No after-reading quite makes up for the longing—so often unsatisfied—to know the names of plants and trees in that unfamiliar world. Let the book be Laing and Blackwell’s “Plants of New Zealand,” with its beautiful photographs and descriptions.

Leave your gun behind: the birds are so trusting and so friendly; and when there is no need to shoot for the pot, it seems a shame to disturb them.

For game on the West Coast, one only has wild duck and black swan—unless one counts grebe and pigeon as game. Many of the interesting native birds are dying out—as their forest goes,