TATA-HAU by Enid Tapsell Tama slept in a good bed with clean sheets in his new house and was glad he was not Maori like his next door neighbours. Tama was an individualist—a ‘rugged individualist’ was what he liked to think he was. He had picked up the expression somewhere and he used it whenever he could edge it into a conversation. This was his pakeha half talking. His Maori half he carefully submerged and ignored. It worked very well. He was employed on a job where all his mates were pakehas and he lived properly and sensibly in his new house which had been built for him under the new Maori Housing scheme, on land given to him by his Maori mother. A little inconsistency like that did not worry Tama, but sometimes despite all his efforts to suppress unseemly instincts, something managed to break through, and there were occasions when the experience was truly terrifying. Now as Tama lay in his good clean bed he dreamed—and in his dream he was running. He had been running for a long time and he was frightened. Fearfully he crept down an alleyway between two dilapidated whares. He could see they were paintless, for although it was night and dark, every detail stood out clearly. Slipping weatherboards, cock-eyed window-panes, paling fences with most of the palings missing—everything decrepid, old and yet familiar. He heard movements, the sound of a man scolding, a woman replying indignantly. That was Peta's voice. He didn't want to see him. Tama crept back again along the dark shadowed alleyway to the crumbling, rotten earth that fell away to the stream below, wide shallow steam-misted and fearful. With heart beating wildly he edged along the cliff-top and turned down the next opening between two old shacks, until he reached the back of the houses; no way out here … he was back on the other side of Peta's place beside a shaky board partition. More quarrelling. He moved … the crazy sagging partition fell with a shattering sound … noise, noise everywhere … Like a bewildered rabbit he darted down the first cul-de-sac, then back again along the crumbly cliff edge, to be confronted with a cleft of soft vari-coloured earth over which he could not jump … more noises and voices everywhere. He jumped down the crumbling cliff face which gave with his weight—soundlessly—then he was on the terrifying river bed. He knew he'd been this way before. He had always known and feared this river. He recognised every stone, every contour, but when had he known it? No matter. He found safe stepping stones and was on the other side coming around a concealed bend towards another house; a long rambling place, actually two houses joined together with a sagging verandah across the front. Everything was decayed. No paint on the walls, no fences, no garden, no vegetation anywhere. The house stood high off the ground on piles and the ground around it was silica crusted. In shallow depressions filled with warm water there lay Maori mats—six or seven—maybe more. ‘My beautiful whariki—oh the carelessness of these lazy women!’ he thought. He stooped and picked one up, then another. They were damp and warm and fell away rotten in his hands. So odd, all these valuable mats had belonged to his kuia, his grandmother Titihuia—heirlooms! He recognised that one, and that one, by the patterns. One was of fine mountain kiekie and others of