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me about him yesterday. He said he was killed.’
    Jackson grunted. ‘Yeah, that’s what he told me. Then he said a bit of him survived and now lives down there. He’s always talking about taniwha. When I was little, he scared the crap out me with his stories.’
    Just then a loud croaking sound filled the air. Craarrk! Craarrk! Matt spun around. ‘What was that?’
    ‘That’s the cry of the taniwha. You hear it whenever you come near his home.’
    Craarrk! Craarrk! This time it was longer and louder. To Matt it sounded like the sort of noise you would’ve heard in a dinosaur swamp—perhaps from a pterodactyl flying overhead. It came again, and Matt realized why he’d thought of pterodactyls: the noise was coming from above the ground. He searched around and located the source. High in an old pine tree was a grey bird. Matt thought it might be a heron, because it had the same shape as the white herons he’d seen down the West Coast. But this was a smaller bird and the only white was around its face.
    ‘There’s the taniwha,’ he said, pointing it out to Jackson. ‘And look, it’s got a nest.’
    ‘Hone says that’s just one of his forms,’ said Jackson, smiling. ‘Sometimes he splits into two. Other times, he’s just one. And the nest is the place where he hides the things he steals.’
    Matt noted the smile and felt that the ice between them had broken. ‘What does he steal?’
    ‘All sorts of things. Whenever you find sumtin missing, that’ll be Old Tani.’
    ‘Must have a lot of stuff up there, then.’
    Again Jackson smiled. ‘Yeah. Maybe some has fallen down and been buried in the ground. Maybe there’s jools and stuff. We should take a look.’
    Matt looked around the area. It seemed as good a place as anywhere. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Let’s find Old Tani’s jewels.’
    Matt wore the headphones draped around his neck so that Jackson could also hear the sounds. He’d only been scanning for a few minutes when they got the first screech from the headphones. Jackson dug down with the trowel and found it was the tab off a beer can. He laughed. ‘Old Tani’s been on the booze.’
    They found five more tabs before the headphones gave a different sound. ‘Try there,’ said Matt. ‘But take it easy. Scraping away at it is best.’
    Jackson knelt down and scraped the plants away, revealing a dark surface of humus. A couple of centimetres below that, the colour changed to the grey-white sinter that was found all over Whakarewarewa, except this was powdery as if it had been ground up and dumped on top.
    After scraping for several more centimetres, Jacksonstopped and looked up at Matt. ‘You sure sumtin’s there?’
    Matt stepped forward and wiped the sensor over the bare ground. Sure enough, it squealed just as it had before. ‘Yep! You just have to dig deeper.’
    A bit more scraping revealed deeper coloured material that was more granular. Then they ran into another humus layer, and there was the object: links of metal forming a chain.
    Jackson leant over to pick it up.
    ‘Hold it!’ said Matt. ‘I want to photograph it.’ He pulled his camera out of the bag and took shots from three different angles. ‘OK, you can pick it up now.’
    That was much easier said than done. The moment Jackson pulled on the chain it fell to bits. ‘It’s just junk,’ he said.
    ‘There must be more than that to give the signal we got. Try scraping away on that side.’
    Three scrapes and a larger object was revealed, about the size and shape of an egg yolk. Jackson picked it up and they studied it together. The surface was black with tarnish. Jackson gave it a rub between his thumb and finger and a golden surface was uncovered. ‘Hey! It’s gold,’ he said, excitedly.
    Matt took it and rubbed it on his clothes, exposing a golden locket. ‘Yessss!’ he hissed. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ This was just the sort of thing he’d imagined finding when he was back in Dunedin.
    ‘See if it opens,’ suggested