RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31775, 4 September 1968, Page 19

RANDOM REMINDER

LAST ROUND-UP

One of the set pieces in Hollywood dramas of the great outdoors is the cattle stampede, and when we were young, it provided much excitement, particularly if one of Pauline White’s descendants had been left, bound and gagged—the gag was especially important, once the talkies began—in the path of the maddened animals. Although cattle-raising is of much importance in New Zealand, even to the extent where we have been told to stop eating beef, we seldom enjoy this sort of spectacular. But now and then, cattle can achieve something more than a price at Smithfield. At the Addington saleyards recently, a wellknown Canterbury farmer

was attracted by a pen of bullocks from the West Coast. He bought them. They were big steers, and they were, in the fashion of West Coast cattle, a little anti-social. When he trucked them to his farm, they would have nothing to do with a big mob of steers which were dining sumptuously on the best of winter feed and hay. The new arrivals took one look at their new surroundings, then set off at a gallop, hurdling the fence with all the grace of a Grand National field, and fetched up in a very large and heavyplantation. Nothing the farmer could do would persuade them to leave the plantation; indeed, it was usually very difficult indeed to even see one or two of them in it

But one night a member of the local school committee telephoned the farmer and asked if a hare drive could be held on the property. With the quickwittedness typical of a man who has not seen a hare on his place for ages, he gave the committeeman permission, and suggested that, as the plantation was full of hares, they might comb it.

The hare drive duly took place. A long line of shooters cautiously pushed its way through the plantation. It was only justice, really. They did not get any hares, of course: but they did not see any of the West Coast cattle, which, apparently, have converted the plantation into a sort of Sherwood Forest