Cows give us more meat, and milk, butter, even cheese. Nor do they drown in the river, the way our stupid sheep did. And the river here — the Why-Mow-Ana, Haare and his people call it — can become a death-trap after heavy rain. It thunders past, booming and roaring, dragging rocks along its bed, bursting its banks to gouge new channels.

We hear it thundering in the night sometimes. People have drowned, trying to cross it. There are calls for a bridge, but it will need to be a high one to stay above the floods.

Yet on summer days, the Why-Mow-Ana is the most gentle of streams, glittering across the stones. Children swim by the big shelves of rock, or at the bend below the cemetery. Janet and I, or Haare’s younger sister Ngaio, or Hahona if she is not busy, lead Aggie down there. She sits and listens to them playing, or paddles in the shallows.

Eleven years. I finished school long ago. I wonder if my initials are still carved under the lid of the desk that I shared with Haare?

We learned to read and write well there, well enough for the farming life, anyway. Father cannot write, in spite of Mother trying to teach him. He placed a hand on my shoulder once, when I showed him a page in my spelling book. ‘Och, you’ll be a cleverer man than me, Niall, lad.’ I just hope I’m as good a man as him.

In our last year at school, when we were thirteen, Father helped build a roof of wooden shingles for the school-house. The old one of raupo reeds was so thin that rain leaked through and dropped on us as we sat at lessons. ‘Nine sevens are sixty-three. Nine eights are seventy-two. Nine nines are — Ow! Sir, there’s water falling on my head!’

Mr McDougall used to laugh, and get us to multiply the number of drops. He was such a good teacher. I hid behind our house and cried when the news came that illness had finally ruined his poor lungs, and he had sunk into death. Mrs Marshall the new teacher (‘new’: she’s been there for nigh on four years now) is good, too. The wee ones love her. Her husband and his horse were swept away in the Why-Mow-Ana one winter day. He lies in the cemetery, not far from Mr McDougall.

So much has changed since we sailed on the Princess Louisa for this new land and the treasure Father hoped to find here. It has changed most for Aggie, of course. I will speak of that later.