his hand lay the perfect piece of greenstone, limpid and smooth and beautiful.

‘Tahu! Tahu!’ he heard his mother calling. She was walking in his direction, gathering driftwood. Slowly he got up and went to meet her.

That night Tahu hid his greenstone in a special place. Through the winter months, whenever he could escape from the others, he looked at it and polished it on his arm.

All the next summer when he swam with the other children in the pool, he took his greenstone and hid it out of sight of the others. Some days he swam alone and there was no sign of his friend.

One day in midsummer, Tahu went early to the pool with his greenstone, hoping to be alone. The air was very hot, and he found Tiria, Jimmie and Kath already there.

‘Come in, Tahu,’ they said. ‘Try to get to the bottom.’

Tahu took his place on the rock behind the others. First Tiria dived. Then it was Kath's turn. As she bent forward, she flicked back her long arms. Her fingers caught the back of Tahu's hand, and he felt the lovely smooth pendant slip from his grasp and drop into the pool.

Tahu knew that it was gone forever, although he dived for it again and again.

Every day through the summer he went to the pool, but the taniwha-man did not come back.

Sometimes, at home, Tahu's mother says, ‘You should not swim in that pool; a taniwha lives there.’

‘Nonsense,’ her husband says. ‘Haven't they all swum there? And who has come to harm?’

Only Tahu knows that in a way they are both right, and at times he begins to wonder if he dreamt it all. He goes every day to the pool in the river, just in case one dreamy afternoon when the sea-water is blue and beautiful and the sun high and hot, Tangaroa will decide the time has come for the last of the taniwha to come back to the land.