The kakas are something like cockatoos, but
dark coloured, and with immense bills and claws.
But the bird I should most like to see is the
great moa; I do not see why he should not still
be living in the dense forests towards the west
coast, or rather in. their neighbourhood. Moas
have been very plentiful here at one time, for I
cannot take a walk across the flats without
seeing portions of the larger bones, such as
those of the thigh, leg, and wing. There are
several in my hut now, but none perfect. I
have seen some of the bones full three I'eet long,
and the joint of part of a thigh-bone is fifteen
inches round, the circumference of the bone just
below the joint being ten inches. These bones
I picked up on the surface of the earth, where
they must have lain ever since the bird died,
and must have consequently wasted; still, now,
though greatly decayed, they are as heavy as fresh
ox bones. I also frequently see collections of
small quartz pebbles up to the size of a walnut,
sometimes lying on the flats miles away from
any place where stones are to be found, and no
doubt from the gizzard of the bird.

We have had a fine winter here, though
occasional rains and mild weather, melting the snow
on the mountains, have kept many of the rivers
too high for the miners to get at their beds.
This has been especially the case on the Shotover,
where the precipices that shut in a great
part of its course make it very difficult, and
often impossible, to turn it. The floods which
have come down that river every few weeks have
done immense damage to the claims upon it.
They sweep everything before them. A young
Irishman was packing some rations to his claim
on the Arrow while the Shotover was rising;
he sent his load over in the ferry-boat, and
rode his horse—he was washed off and
drowned. Another man was washed from his
tent door by the side of the Arrow River at
Fox's. People saw him carried away, but could
not save him. There was a regular clean sweep
in the Arrow River and Shotover— dams, races,
pumps, water-wheels, huts, winter stock, and
everything in the way of rations, carried away.
Flooded rivers may well come down in force
when they run at from five to seven knots an
hour, and sometimes, I believe, still more, even
when the water in them is low.

We crossed some frightful mountains on the
road from the Dunstan to this place. My mate
and I left some of our blankets at the former
township, and got a fifty-pound bag of flour,
besides tea, sugar, bacon, cheese, &c., both for
use on the road and at Fox's, where flour was
then eighteeu-pence per pound, and sugar, I
think, three shillings. While at the Dunstan
we had to pay only sixpence to sevenpeuce per
pound for sugar.

Well, we started after weighing our swags,
which were about seventy-three pounds each,
and made Fox's in three and a quarter days.
Fifty miles by the road we came, sometimes
having to hold on by tufts of grass and rocks,
to prevent ourselves from going too fast to the
bottoms of hill-sides and gullies, and then having
to do the same to get to the top of another height.
Sometimes we rolled up our trousers, and took
off our boots, to cross piercingly cold streams
that rushed over rocks and sharp slate-stones;
sometimes we had to walk after dark to reach
some camping spot where there were supposed to
be sticks enough to boil a kettle of tea; then,
after a few hours of uncommonly sweet sleep,
we would get up at daybreak to breakfast, roll
up our tent and blankets, and go at a mountain
as steep as the roof of a house, and so high
that it would take three or four hours to climb
to the top of it.

I was glad enough to get to Fox's. We had
walked up to the Dunstan, one hundred and
twenty miles, with about fifty-pound swags on
our shoulders, in four and a half days.

When I knocked off packing up here, I walked
over to the Dunstan to fetch what we had left
behind, but some one had been there before me,
and claimed everything—blankets, shirts, boots,
revolver. Such robbery was rare in Victoria,
where a man has been known to pin up his
standing tent, go to England and back, and, on
his return, find everything as he left it.

It rained for twenty-four hours heavily, on
Sunday, the twelfth of July, and there were
several landslips about the Shotover and Arrow
Rivers. At a place called Butcher's Point, on
the Shotover, a party of seven men were living
together in a hut, on the mountain-side, a little
above the river. Six were sleeping, and one
was outside, looking out for the boulders that
every now and then came thundering down from
above. Then, all on a sudden, at about three
o'clock in the morning, away went the whole
hill-side, carrying with it the hut and the
doomed six into the river. Nothing has been
seen of them since; the man on watch was left
standing unhurt. A man living on the Arrow
River came outside his tent about the middle of
the same night, when a landslip took his tent
to where he will never see it again, but it did
not touch him. An enormous amount of
damage has been done on both rivers; several
poor fellows who lost all else in the flood, had
to run for their lives.

Many horses have been killed here by falling,
and I have heard from several people that a
man was to be seen 'lying dead, with his
swag, under a precipice, where no one could
get near him. It was somewhere towards
the upper part of the Shotover, last summer.
More than fifty lives are known to have been
lost on that river by floods and land-slips this
winter. Twelve men were killed in a mob
at one place, six in a hut at another, five at a
third, and so on. A good many of the bodies
were recovered, some most frightfully smashed
and torn. There cannot have been floods for
very many years at all like those of this winter,
as is shown by the drift timber and other signs.

Rees, a squatter, who has the cattle-run here,
also slaughters for the butchers, besides having
many other irons in the fire. Last week he had a
mob of fat cattle which he had bought down in
Southland, and was driving them up by the side