Nation

birds and the gray ravens and, of course, the grandfather birds. The island was full of birds this morning. Birds Mau had never seen before were squabbling with the familiar, everyday ones.
    And there were people, tangled in broken branches, half buried in mud and leaves, just another part of the ruined world.
    It took him a few long seconds to realize what he was looking at, to see that what he had thought was a broken branch was an arm.
    He looked around slowly and realized why there were so many birds, and why they were fighting.
    He ran. His legs took him and he ran, screaming out names, up the long slope, past the lower fields, which were covered with debris, past the higher plantations, too high even for the wave, and almost to the edges of the forest. And there he heard his own voice, echoing back from the cliffs.
    No one. But there must be someone….
    But they had all been waiting, for someone who was no longer a boy but had yet to become a man.
    He walked up to the Women’s Place—totally forbidden for any man, of course—and risked a quick peek through the big hedge that surrounded the gardens, untouched up here by the water. But he saw nothing moving, and no voice called out in answer to his cry.
    They had been waiting on the beach. He could see them all so clearly in his mind, talking and laughing and dancing in circles around the fire, but there was no silver line, nothing to pull them back.
    They had been waiting for the new man. The wave must have hit them like a hammer.
    As he went back down to the fields, he grabbed a broken branch and flailed ineffectively at the birds. There were bodies everywhere in the area just above the scoured place where the village had been. At first they were hard to see, tangled as they were with debris and as gray as the ashen mud. He’d have to touch them. They had to be moved. The pigs would come down soon. The thought of pigs eating— No!
    There was some brightness behind the clouds in the east. How could that be? Another night had passed? Had he slept? Where had he been? But tiredness certainly had him now. He dragged some leafy branches up against a big rock for shelter, crawled inside, and felt the gray of the mud and the rain and the bruised-looking sky sneak in silently and fill him up and close over him.
    And Mau dreamed. It had to be a dream. He felt himself become two people. One of them, a gray body made of mud, began to look for the bodies that the wave hadn’t taken. It did this carefully and as gently as it could, while the other Mau stayed deep inside, curled in a ball, doing the dreaming.
    And who am I, doing this? thought the gray Mau. Who am I now? I am become like Locaha, measuring the contours of death. Better be him than be Mau, on this day…because here is a body. And Mau will not see it, lift it, or look into its eyes, because he will go mad, so I will do it for him. And this one has a face Mau has seen every day of his life, but I will not let him see it now.
    And so he worked, as the sky brightened and the sun came up behind the plume of steam in the east and the forest burst into song, despite the drizzle. He combed the lower slopes until he found a body, dragged it or carried it—some were small enough to carry—down to the beach and out to the point where you could see the current. There were usually turtles there, but not today.
    He, the gray shadow, would find rocks and big coral lumps, and there were plenty of those, and tie them to the body with papervine. And now I must take my knife and cut the spirit hole, thought the gray Mau, so that the spirit will leave quickly, and pull the body out into the waves where the current sinks, and let it go.
    The dreaming Mau let his body do the thinking: You lift like this , you pull like this . You cut the papervine like that , and you don’t scream, because you are a hand and a body and a knife, and they don’t even shed a tear. You are inside a thick gray skin that can feel nothing. And nothing can get through. Nothing at all. And you send the body sinking slowly into the dark current, away from birds and pigs and flies, and it will grow a new skin and become a dolphin.
    There were two dogs, too, and that almost broke him. The people, well, the horror was so great that his mind went blank, but the twisted bodies of the dogs twisted his soul. They had been with the people, excited but not knowing why. He wrapped them in papervine and weighed them down and sent them into the current