The Last of the Taniwha by Lesley Cameron Powell Tahu was different from other boys. Things happened to Tahu. Some folk said it was because he was half Maori, half Scots. His father, Andrew Cameron, said it was because he was the seventh child of a seventh child. In any case Tahu had the strangest adventures; but the most exciting of all he told nobody about. At first it did not seem like an adventure at all. Tahu woke up to find that he had slept in and missed the bus that was taking the school to the city for the day. His mother, cross that his sisters had not woken him, made him help in the house. It was ten o'clock before he could go down to the beach. ‘You mustn't go in the surf by yourself, Tahu,’ his mother called. ‘I'm not,’ he answered. ‘I'll go in the pool.’ He could see that he would have the whole place to himself. The day was glorious. The sun shone on the white wave-crests, and the distant sea was so blue and beautiful that he was glad he had missed the bus. Trailing a stick, Tahu made his way to the southern end of the beach where the river's last bend before it lost itself in the ocean made an ideal swimming pool. It was here that Tahu's father had taught all his children to swim and to dive. Their mother did not like the pool. However deep they dived nobody had ever been able to touch the bottom. Tahu's mother said a taniwha lived down in its depths, and so she would never swim there, but her children all swam so well that she had given up worrying about them.