Nation

just a dead man. He didn’t know him. People died.
    Mau didn’t know what to do with him either, especially since the crabs did. Under his breath he said: “Grandfathers, what shall I do with the trouserman?”
    There was a sound like the forest drawing its breath, and the Grandfathers said: HE IS NOT IMPORTANT! ONLY THE NATION IS IMPORTANT!
    This was not a lot of help, so Mau dragged the man off the broken track and into a deeper part of the forest, with an army of little crabs following in a very determined way. They’d had years of fig seeds and bird plop. They’d put up with this like good little crabs, they seemed to say, but now it was time for their perfect world.
    There was another trouserman farther along the trail, also dropped by the creature. Mau didn’t think about it at all this time, but just dragged him into the tangle of undergrowth, too. It was the best he could do. He had walked too much in the footsteps of Locaha lately. Perhaps the crabs would take the soul of the man back to the trouserman world, but here and now Mau had other things to think about.
    Something had come out of the sea on the wave, he thought. Something big . Bigger than a sailfin crocodile, * bigger than a war canoe, bigger even than…a whale? Yes, that could be it, a big whale. Why not? The wave had hurled big rocks beyond the village, so a whale wouldn’t stand a chance. Yes, a whale, that would be it, thrashing around in the forest with its big tail and slowly dying under its own weight. Or one of the really big sea squids, or a very big shark.
    He had to be sure. He had to find out. He looked around and thought: Yes, but not in the dark. Not in the twilight. In the morning he’d come with weapons. And in the morning it might be dead.
    He selected a couple of useful-looking rocks from the monster’s trail and ran for it.
    Night rolled over the jungle. The birds went to bed, the bats woke. A few stars appeared in the desolate sky.
    And in the tangle of broken trees at the end of the trail, something sobbed, all night.
     
    Mau awoke early. There was no more fruit on the round metal thing, but a grandfather bird was watching him hopefully, in case he was dead. When it saw him moving, it sighed and waddled off.
    Fire, thought Mau. I must make fire. And for that I need punk wood. His punk bag was a muddy mess because of the wave, but there was always punk in the high forest.
    He was hungry, but you had to have fire. Without fire and a spear, you could never hope to be a man, wasn’t that right?
    He spent some time hammering the metal thing between the two stones he’d taken from the monster’s track, and ended up with a long sliver of metal that was pretty bendy but very sharp. That was a good start. Then he chipped one stone against the other until he had enough of a groove to allow him to bind the stone to a stick with papervine. He wound papervine around one end of the new metal knife to make a kind of handle.
    As the sun rose, so did Mau, and he raised his new club and his new knife.
    Yes! They might be sorry things that a man would have thrown away, but now he could kill things. And wasn’t that part of being a man?
    The grandfather bird was still watching him from a safe distance, but when it saw his expression, it shuffled off hurriedly and lumbered into the air.
    Mau headed up to the high forest while the sun grew hotter. He wondered when he’d last eaten. There had been the mango, but how long ago? It was hard to remember. The Boys’ Island was far away in time and space. It had gone. Everything had gone. The Nation had gone. The people, the huts, the canoes, all wiped away. They were just in his head now, like dreams, hidden behind a gray wall—
    He tried to stop the thought, but the gray wall crumbled and all the horror, all the death, all the darkness poured in. It filled up his head and buzzed out into the air like a swarm of insects. All the sights he had hidden from himself, all the sounds, all the smells crept and slithered out of his memory.
    And suddenly it all became clear. An island full of people could not die. But a boy could. Yes, that was it! It made sense! He was dead! And his spirit had come back home, but he couldn’t see out of the spirit world! He was a ghost. His body was on the Boys’ Island, yes! And the wave had not been real, it had been Locaha, coming for him. It all made sense. He’d died on land with no one to put him into the dark water, and he was a ghost, a wandering