drifted on the plains for many feet deep. Gullies had been filled
up by the soft, driving flakes, creeks were bridged over, and for
three weeks 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;