The largest game in the colony are the wild cattle. These, like the goats and pigs, are descendants of tame and respectable farm animals. On many mountain sheep-runs, annual cattle hunts are organised to thin their numbers, for the young bulls become dangerous to lonely shepherds and musterers, and do great damage to fences. Moreover, the wild herds eat their full share of grass, as their fat condition when shot often shows. Generations of life in the hills, fern, and bush have had their effect on runaway breeds. The pigs especially have put on an almost aristocratic air of lean savagery. Their heads and flanks are thinner, their shoulders higher and more muscular, their tusks have become formidable, and their nimbleness on steep hill-sides almost astonishing. A quick dog, or even an athletic man on foot, may keep pace with a boar on the upward track; but when going headlong downhill the pig leaves everything behind. The ivory tusks of an old boar will protrude three or four inches from his jaw, and woe to the dog or horse that feels their razor-edge and cruel sidelong rip. The hide, too, has become inches thick in places, where it would, I should think, be insensible to a hot branding iron. At any rate, the spear or sheath knife that is to pierce it must be held in clever as well as strong hands. Even a rifle-bullet, if striking obliquely, will glance off from the shield on the shoulder of a tough old boar. Wild pigs are among the sheep-farmer’s enemies. Boars and sows alike prey on his young lambs in spring-time, and every year do thousands of pounds’ worth of mischief in certain out-of-the-way country. So here again the sportsman may plume himself upon making war upon a public nuisance. In bygone days these destructive brutes could be found in numbers prowling over open grassy downs, where riders could chase them spear in hand, and where sheep-dogs could bring them to bay. They were killed without exception or mercy for age or sex; and the spectacle of pigs a few weeks old being speared or knifed along with their mothers was not exhilarating. But they were pests, and contracts were often let for clearing a certain piece of country of them. As evidence of their slaughter the contractors had to bring in their long, tufted tails. These the station manager counted with care, for the contract money was at the rate of so much a tail. I have known ninepence to be the reigning price. Nowadays, however, the pigs are chiefly to be found in remote forests, dense manuka scrub, or tall bracken, and if caught in the open it is when they have stolen out by moonlight on a raid upon lambs. The thick fern not only affords them cover but food: “the wild boar out of the wood doth root it up,” and finds in it a clean, sweet diet. Many a combat at close quarters takes place every year in the North Island, in fern from three to six feet high, when some avenging farmer makes an end of the ravager of his flocks. Numbers