force into it. It rang and whimpered as if in agony and he heard its fellows take up the low chorus to right and left. Moi jumped through it and waited. Then Tiputoa saw that the thing was a kind of palisade erected diagonally across the path. He had run against it, not quite head-on and the thing, being as resilient as a supplejack, had flung him to the ground. He found that there were eight of the hard cords strung between the posts. He went to the post he had first seen and climbed over. Through the trees the path still ran. It was changed, being no longer the foot-smoothed earth that he had known but rather a narrow rut such as water will make on an exposed slope. With a clod resolution he had never known before Tiputoa moved along the path, spear held with both hands at the ready position diagonally across his body. He wished he had some fighting weapon rather than the eel spear but this would suffice. The thought came to him that at last he had entered the heroic world he had dreamed of. Oh, the pity of it that only a dog could see him as he faced the unknown! Weird cries came from time to time through the trees. One, several times repeated, was low and deep, not unlike a trumpet not but with something of a living quality about it. In the distance another, sharper and thinner, appeared to answer it. Quite involuntarily he shuddered as the realisation came to him that it was probably a taniwha calling to its young. He pressed on. Then he heard the worst sound of all. It began in the far distance, not unlike a whirring of innumerable wings, something like the sound that a host of pigeons make as they fly from one miro tree to another in the berry season. Deep in the heart of the whirring there was a drumming sound as of pounding feet, feet stamping faster than any he had ever heard. The sound came closer and closer, moving at a fantastic speed. Tiputoa stood stock still. Indeed, in spite of all his new-found courage he could not have moved an inch. The sound came closer and closer. With the noise of a fierce wind, not so loud as it was unearthly, with the pounding and whirring intensified beyond all imagination, the thing swept close by, apparently not far from the ground, about a spear's throw away through the trees. He saw a glow as if of a swiftly moving fire and listened as the monster hurtled away in the distance. He felt force of the wind it created with its passing and smelt the foul reek of its breath. It had a strange sickliness with something of the character of burning to it. For a long time he did not move, Moi pressed silently against his leg, shivering. When Tiputoa stepped out of the bush on to the edge of the kumara field his feet touched rock. There had been no rocks there that morning. This place, a flat-bottomed shallow valley above the swamp, did not contain a single stone and yet here rock. He walked across it and found it slightly warm beneath his bare feet. He discovered that it was about three spear lengths across. On the other side there were small small stones and the trees silhouetted black against the night sky looked rounded and unfamiliar. He sat down at the end of the rock, which was level with the bare stony ground, and wondered what to do next. His wounds had stopped bleeding and did not trouble him. He felt utterly exhausted with the terror of the past few minutes and with the excitement, too. The second monster came almost before Tiputoa had realised that the whirring and the pounding had begun again. He saw the glow of it before it came in sight and he had just leapt to his feet as it came over the brow of the rise on one side of the little valley. Its two great gleaming eyes glared at him and he could see nothing else as it rushed down straight to where he was standing. All that was manly in Tiputoa swept from its hidden depths. His right arm swept back. “I die like a warrior,” he screamed and hurled the threepronged spear with all his might between the wicked, gleaming eyes. The rushing wind and part of the monster's body flung him to the ground but even as he fell he knew that his spear had hit hard for as it passed him the creature seemed to wince and it had howled in agony before it crossed the field and vanished over the far slope. The little fat man knew that this time he had been really hurt. He had a gash on the side of his head and another on his right leg. He had a feeling too that the monster had stamped on his right foot as it had passed. He crawled towards the edge of the bush and collapsed. As his senses faded he felt something hard and cold near his hand, something about the size of a patu but hollow like a container. “I have broken off a taniwha's tooth,” he thought, holding it close to him. “I, Tiputoa, the Useless One, have fought a taniwha. I, Tiputoa ….” And merciful unconsciousness, like a grey cloud, descended on him. They found him in the morning in the kumara field with his dog watching by him, near dead from loss of blood, and they carried him back to Karakatahi. They also brought his spear, broken in two and with one prong missing. They did not laugh when later he told them he had fought a taniwha for had he not been wounded and did he not bring back its gleaming tooth? What probably influenced them too was the fact that fearsome old Te Maunga-i-tawhiti watched over him as a mother over an only child, sitting outside the house chanting the incantations which would ward off evil and restore health. It was the old man who questioned him first about his adventures and if he were impressed could the others doubt?