After reading the above very short and very imperfect description you will be able to understand that a New Zealand bush is not an easy one to cut a road through, even for pack-horses, especially when, as in this case, the line you wish to follow led you across the shoulders and spurs of a huge mountain which were furrowed by innumerable deep gullies, watercourses, and rivers. The New Zealand bush is a very beautiful one, yet a very silent and lonely one; not a sound is to be heard in it, with the exception of the doleful dirge of the wind among the tree-tops, the coo of pigeons, the occasional ka, ka of the New Zealand parrot, or the rarer, bell-like note of the Tui bird. However, such as it was, we had to chop our way, for over forty miles, through it, so with plenty of bad language, but heaps of determination, we buckled to and tackled the job. Te Kepa took the lead with his men, tomahawk in hand, and chopped away the vines; our men followed closely after, who cut away the undergrowth and cleared a road sufficiently wide enough for the pack-horses following behind us, these taking every opportunity of tumbling down, entangling themselves among the vines, rubbing off their loads and generally making themselves a darned nuisance. Of course we had to have the scouts out on all sides of us, and likewise strong covering parties, as it would have been far too good a chance for the Hau Hau to have missed, not to have taken advantage of us as we floundered along that miserable path. They did not do so; why, we never heard, but I fancy myself it was on account of the unceasing downpour of cold rain, which was certainly quite excuse enough to keep any self-respecting savage in his happy home. All this work fell very heavy on us, as the regulars were of but little use in the bush, either as axemen or coverers, but we should have made light of that had it not been for the rain, that not only drenched us but turned the soft loamy bush soil into liquid mud, in which we sank nearly to the knee, and forced us to corduroy the path so as to enable the wretched pack-horses to get any footing, while men, horses, packs, arms and everything soon became plastered and caked with mud. Presently we came to a gully with perpendicular rocky banks, in the bed of which, swollen by the rain, raged a torrent. Fortunately it was not a very wide one, not more than from thirty to thirty-five feet, but it was quite sixty feet in depth. It was impossible to make roads up and down this fellow; our old picks and spades, probably used by Wellington’s men in the Peninsular War, were no use here, and we had neither drills nor explosives. No, it must be bridged; and I wondered how this was to be done. Now we had in our heterogeneous corps several old and skilled bushmen (men who live and work in the bush), the two boss men of whom were Nova Scotians, and what these two men, Brothers Jake and Vic M’Farlane, did not know about how to handle timber was not worth learning.