boat when I noticed a stirring in the water, a grey fin slicing towards us. A shark! I yelled. I was petrified, and sat down quickly. Uncle laughed and rocked the boat and I was almost crying because I was scared we'd tip over. ‘Don't tease him. Dad,’ Tamihana said. He came and sat down by me and told me not to be afraid. We warched the fin circling the boat, the grey shadow gliding through the water. The shark was huge, longer than the boat, at least it seemed longer to my small eyes. Uncle Pita threw some fish to it, some of the fish that we had also caught in the pots. The shark rolled over and went ‘gulp, gulp’ and the water swirled. ‘That shark is our friend,’ Uncle began. ‘He looks after us and he's very old and very tapu. Nobody around here ever dare to kill him. He protects us.’ I was surprised and still afraid. The shark came to the side of the boat and began to scratch against it. ‘Itchy ay, e hoa?’ Uncle whispered to it. Then he put his hand over the side of the boat and caressed the fin. ‘He always comes to us about this time,’ Uncle continued. ‘And every time I feed him. I been feeding him for a long time, very tapu, very sacred. Don't know how old he is, a thousand years perhaps. Many Pakeha try to get him, but he's too sly. Aren't you, my friend?’ Uncle put his hand down again. Then the shark seemed to disappear, slicing out to the sea, magically fading so that I wondered whether I had dreamed it all. ‘You ask your Nanny about the shark,’ Uncle confided. ‘When she was a small girl she almost drowned in the river mouth. All she remembers is crying for help and then going under. Then next thing, she's lying on the sand. She looked up and she saw that shark going away. That shark is sacred and helps our people. You only have to call him if you're in trouble and he'll come. Nanny didn't believe it until it happened to her, and now she won't let anyone harm that shark. So you just remember, mokopuna, if ever you're in trouble in the sea, you pray very hard and call him and he'll come. He'll come…” I asked Nanny about the shark when we got home. Her eyes glistened and she told me that everything that Uncle had said was true. ‘It's not lies,’ she said. ‘The Pakeha think so, but he's blind.’ I was glad that I was Maori. And that night, I dreamed that I was riding astride that shark rushing happily through the glistening water, laughing…. The sun shone bright again the next day, the laughing lights fleeing away from the wind, across the sea. ‘Can't catch us! Can't catch us!’ they seemed to whisper and skittered across the waves again, leaving sparkling footprints behind. I had woken early, and we had had porridge for breakfast followed by a big mug of cocoa. ‘Eat up, mokopunas,’ Nanny had said when we had looked dismal and were reluctantly stirring our porridge. ‘It'll make you big and strong,’ she said. We had never liked porridge, but when we tried Nanny's porridge, we even licked the plates because it was so good. Nanny had just chuckled to herself, ‘Beauty ay, good ay?’ and the other children had chuckled with her. After breakfast, I had gone with Albert to pick up the groceries from the mail box. The groceries came every Tuesday and Thursday along with the mail. Then I'd watched Nanny and Grace making Maori bread in the kitchen. Nanny had big strong arms and she pummelled and prodded the dough to make it firm. She gave Kara and Pare a piece of dough each, and they made gingerbread men, brown and puffed, smiling with the crooked lips which my sisters had given them. Kara wouldn't eat hers; she said she'd show hers to Mum as proof that she could cook. So Pare said she'd leave hers for Mum as well, but she'd just have a taste, just a wee taste mind you, but ended up eating her gingerbread man. She started to cry then, so Nanny said she could make another, perhaps the next day. Now, here I was, lying in the tall grass at the top of the cliff, watching the clouds scudding past. Far below, I could hear the small piping screams of the other children, playing on the sand. I had been playing with them too, but sneaked off to be alone for a while. I always went off alone when I was happy. Then I could talk to myself and indulge in my fantasies with nobody to shake their heads and cluck ‘Tsk, tsk.’ I won't tell you what I dreamed about, because daydreams are like wishes: if you confide them they break into little pieces and won't come true. And I so wanted my dreams to come true! I crossed my fingers