Nation

watched from the thick foliage of a grass tree as they dared one another to go near the stone, to touch it, to give it a little push—and then someone had shouted that he’d heard something, and within seconds they’d vanished into the trees, running for home. Mau had waited a little while, and when nothing happened, he had climbed down and gone and listened at the stone. He had heard a faint crackling right on the edge of hearing, but then a grandfather bird on the cliff above was throwing up (the ugly-looking things didn’t just eat everything, they ate all of everything, and carefully threw up anything that didn’t fit, taste right, or had woken up and started to protest). There was nothing very scary at all. No one had ever heard of the Grandfathers coming out. The stone was there for a reason. It was heavy for a reason. He forgot about the sound; it had probably been insects in the grass.
    That night, back in the boys’ hut, the older boys boasted to the younger boys about how they had rolled away the big stone and how the Grandfathers had turned their ancient, dry old faces to look at them, and tried to stand up on their crumbling legs, and how the boys had (very bravely) rolled the big stone back again, just in time.
    And Mau had lain in his corner and wondered how many times this story had been told over the last hundreds of years, to make big boys feel brave and little boys have nightmares and wet themselves.
    Now, five years later, he sat and turned over in his hands the gray round thing that had acted as a holder for the mango. It looked like metal, but who had so much metal that they could waste it on something to hold food?
    There were marks on it. They spelled out Sweet Judy in faded white paint—but they spelled out Sweet Judy in vain.
    Mau was good at reading important things. He could read the sea, the weather, the tracks of animals, tattoos, and the night sky. There was nothing for him to read in lines of cracked paint. Anyone could read wet sand, though. A toeless creature had come out of the low forest and had gone back the same way.
    At some time in the past something had split the rock of the island, leaving a long low valley on the east side that was not very far above sea level and had hardly any soil. Things had soon taken root even so, because something will always grow somewhere .
    The low forest was always hot, damp, and salty, with the sticky, itchy, steamy atmosphere of a place that never sees much new air. Mau had forced his way in a few times, but there wasn’t much of interest, at least not at ground level. Everything happened high above, up in the canopy. There were wild figs up there. Only the birds could get at them, and they fought over the little morsels, which meant there was a steady rain of bird poo and half-eaten figs onto the forest floor, which in turn was a permanent feast for the little red crabs that scuttled around and cleared up anything that dropped in. Sometimes pigs came down to feed on the crabs, so the low forest was worth an occasional look. You had to be careful, though, because you often got a tree-climbing octopus or two in there, after baby birds and anything else they could find, and they were hard to pull off if they landed on your head. Mau knew that you must never let them think you are a coconut. You learned that fast, because they had sharp beaks. *
    Now he came around the huge broken rocks that stood at the entrance to the valley and stopped.
    Something much bigger than a bird plop or a pig had hit the forest. It couldn’t have been just the wave. Some enormous thing had charged through, leaving a line of smashed trees into the distance.
    And not just trees; it had left treasure behind. Rocks! Gray round ones, brown ones, black ones…good hard rocks had a lot of uses here, where the mountain rock was too crumbly to make decent weapons.
    But Mau resisted the temptation to collect them now, because rocks don’t go anywhere and, besides, there was the dead man. He lay by the track, as if the creature had tossed him aside, and he was covered in little red crabs whose big day had come.
    Mau had never seen a man like this before, but he’d heard of them—of the pale people in the north who wrapped their legs in cloth so they looked like a grandfather bird. They were called the trousermen, and were as pale as ghosts. This one didn’t worry him, not after the memory of yesterday, which screamed all the time behind a door in his head. This was