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as Haki fell into the bottom of the canoe. Haki raised himself as the men dipped their paddles into the water to pull the canoe downstream, and looked back at the horseman now halted on the bank.
    “Pakeha scum!” he shouted at him.
    The man turned his horse around and rode away.

Chapter 4
     
    I opened my eyes, expecting to see blue skies and green water and feel the wood of the canoe underneath me, but instead I saw white walls and a green curtain and felt a soft bed beneath me. Memories of the dream faded. A rustle of papers made me look to the right. Mum sat there, a folder on her lap and a pen in her hand. She looked over at me and smiled. “Nice to have you back, son. You had us worried for a while.”
    “What day is it?”
    “Saturday. It’s been five days now since the accident.”
    I frowned, trying to remember. I put my hand up to my ear but it felt whole. As the memory of the dream faded, I remembered Mark sitting by my bed telling me that they’d taken off my leg. I looked down the bed and saw the sheet lie flat where my left foot should have been. I felt sick.
    “Are you all right?” Mum asked.
    “I’m going to throw up.”
    I saw the panic in her eyes as she threw down the papers that were on her lap. She snatched up a plastic container and held it as I tried to vomit, but nothing but green bile came up. A nurse came in and took the container from Mum.
    “It’s the drugs,” she said. “They can make you nauseous. I’ll ask the doctor if I can give you something for it. Have a sip of water.”
    She held the straw to my mouth and I drank a mouthful. It washed the vile taste from my mouth but didn’t make me feel any less nauseous. She took the container away and returned a few moments later with another, this time with a syringe in it.
    She fiddled with the tubes that led into my arm, and then instead of injecting the syringe into my skin, she injected it into a plastic valve kind of the thing in the line.
    “That should make you feel better.” I wasn’t sure about that but I took her word for it. “Although it can make you feel sleepy.” She left.
    “Where’s Mark?” I asked Mum.
    “He’s gone back to Auckland. He’s got to be in church tomorrow, he said. And he took those two mates of yours with him, the ones that were in the accident. You’ve had a few visitors since you’ve been here but I’m not sure that you remember. They’ve kept you sedated most of the time.”
    I remembered what Mark had told me, not knowing if it was true. “They took off my leg?”
    Mum looked down at the papers on her lap. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes.
    “It was too badly damaged and the best thing was to take it off.”
    “They didn’t ask me what I thought of that! Did they ask you before they chopped it off?”
    “It was the only thing that could be done. We were driving down at the time. Mark was on the phone to us because they needed someone to sign the consent forms right there and then and he was the only one available. After talking to the doctor, we realized that there was nothing that could be done but to take it off to save your life. We told him it was ok to go ahead. It broke my heart.”
    “So that’s it then – I’m a cripple!”
    “They tell me that you can have a prosthetic leg, and that you’ll walk like a normal person.”
    “But I won’t be a normal person – I’ll be person with half a leg.”
    “Better than being dead.”
    “I’d rather be dead!” I yelled at her.
    “I can understand that you’re angry, Bevan, you’ve suffered a loss and you have a grief process to go through. This is the angry phase.”
    “I have a right to be angry.”
    “Maybe you do, but you don’t have to take it out on everyone else. We’ve all got to come to terms with this.”
    “This is my pain, my loss, not yours. I’ve got to come to terms with it.”
    Mum looked sad. “Believe me, Bevan, it is as much my loss as yours. I gave birth to a whole baby, one