Dad knelt by the driver, gasping and shaking. Mr Ross and Tipene crouched beside him. After a couple of seconds, Mr Ross raised his head (his going-to-town shirt was filthy; Mrs Ross would be really annoyed). ‘He’s alive!’ he called up to Mum and me.

Another car had arrived, too. Nana Florence and Grandad Matiu with Nana Whina. ‘Still getting into trouble at the river, you two?’ Nana Whina shouted down the bank. ‘Don’t you ever learn?’

Tipene and my father looked up together. Under their sodden hair, their faces split into grins. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ Tipene went. ‘But this time we’re the good guys!’

They got their photos in the paper. The truck driver got out of hospital with a broken wrist a couple of days later. And our valley got a new bridge.

So I was thinking about all that, the day I wandered along the riverbed. About fifty metres past the bridge, someone called to me. No, it was magpies, warbling and squawking in the old orchard. The trees don’t give much fruit now, though Nana Florence reckons the plums taste better than ones from the town supermarket. The old orchard is where she and Nana Whina were when the big earthquake struck. There’s been some scary stuff happened in our valley!

I don’t go to the orchard much. Once when I was nine or so, Mum and Dad and John and I were all there, getting pears for stewing. A couple of magpies started dive-bombing us, swooping and shrieking. One whacked my head with its wing as it skimmed past, and I got a real fright. Dad said they must have a nest nearby. Either that, or they were trying to snatch the butterfly clip in my hair.

About a year after they found the carving and nearly drowned, Dad and Tipene were down on the riverbed near the orchard and saw something glittering among the stones. It was a little round piece of paua shell. Paua, miles from the sea? They took it to Grandad Matiu; he used to study old history and stuff like that. He thought it must be from another carving, maybe washed out of the swamp by the same flood that carried away the carved panel. It’s kept on the marae, along with the panel. Nana Whina’s mother Ahorangi said prayers in the meeting house over the new find.

She — Ahorangi — is buried at the urupa, near the marae. There’s a little memorial to her on the grave of my great-grandparents Duncan and Lily, up in the old part of our cemetery; they were best friends. Yeah, maybe South African people could learn from seeing how our Maori and Pakeha people get along? But the tour is wrong; I still believe that.