s and more all communication
between the stations and the various townships was cut off. The
full extent of our losses was unknown to us, and dreary as were our
forebodings of misfortune, none of us guessed that snow to be the
winding sheet of half a million of sheep. The magnificent semi-circle of
the Southern Alps stood out, for a hundred miles from north to south,
in appalling white distinctness, and no one in the whole Colony had ever
seen the splendid range thus free from fleck or flaw. We had done all
we could within working distance, but what was, the use of digging in
drifts thirty feet deep? Amidst, and almost above, the terrible anxiety
about our own individual safety,--for the snow was over the roof of
many of the station-houses,--came the pressing question, "Where are the
sheep?" A profound silence unbroken by bleat of lamb, or bark of dog,
or any sound of life, had reigned for many days, when a merciful
north-westerly gale sprung, up, and releasing the heavily-laden earth
from its white bondage, freed the miserable remnant of our flocks and
herds. At least, I should say, it freed those sheep which had travelled
down to the vallies, driven before the first pitiless gusts, but we
knew that many hundreds, if not thousands, of wethers must have been
surprised and imprisoned far back among the hills.

Such knowledge could not be acted upon, however, for no human being
could hope to plunge through the drifts around us. Old shepherds who
had lived on the run for fifteen years, confessed that they did not know
their way fifty yards from the homestead. The vallies were filled up,
so that one gully looked precisely like its fellow; rocks, scrub, Ti-ti
palms, all our local land-marks had disappeared; not a fence or gate
could be seen in all the country side. Here and there a long wave-like
line in the smooth mass would lead us to suppose that a wire fence lay
buried beneath its curves, but we had no means of knowing for certain.
Near the house every shrub and out-building, every hay-stack or
wood-heap, had all been covered up, and no man might even guess where
they lay.

This had been the terrible state of things, and although the blessed
warm wind had removed our immediate and pressing fear of starvation, we
could not hope to employ ourselves in searching for our missing sheep
for many days to come. None of us had been able to take any exercise for
more than a fortnight, and having done all that could possibly be do