Nation

in a shaggy-headed grass tree. Mau knew that, even though he couldn’t see up through the tangle of vines; grandfather birds were very clumsy and didn’t so much land as crash slowly. It hopped around up there making the nab-nab grumbling noises, and then there was the familiar sound of throwing up and a shower of small bones pattered around the forest floor.
    The tree shook as the grandfather bird took off again. It flapped out into the open, saw Mau, decided to watch him for signs of being dead, and landed heavily on a branch of a tree that could barely be seen under its weight of strangler vines.
    For a moment boy and bird stared at each other.
    The branch snapped.
    The grandfather bird squawked and leaped away before the rotted wood hit the ground, and disappeared, flapping and squawking with injured pride, into the undergrowth. Mau paid it no attention. He was staring at the cloud of fine yellow dust rising from the fallen branch. It was punk dust, what you got when rot and termites and time hollowed out a dead branch. And this one had been up in the air, out of reach of the damp. The dust was like pollen. It would be the best ever for starting fires.
    He took the biggest lump of branch that he could hold, stuffed both ends with leaves, and started back down the mountain.
    There were pigs rooting in the fields again now, but he had no time to shoo them away. One piece of papervine soon breaks, he thought, and five bound together are strong. That’s good to know and it is true. The trouble is, I’m the one piece.
    He stopped. He was taking the other, steeper track down to the vill—to the place where the village had been. The wave had surged across the island here, too. Trees were broken and everything stank of seaweed. But on the other side of the shattered trees was a cliff that overlooked the low forest.
    Mau carefully tucked the tubers and the punk branch under some grass and pushed his way through the tangle of vines and branches at the edge of the cliff. It was possible to climb all the way up or down the cliff quite easily. He’d done it before. There were so many roots and vines and creepers growing over the stone, and so much soil and old birds’ nests had made a home for every drifting seed, that it was more like a vertical meadow, with flowers everywhere. There was papervine, too. There was always papervine. He cut enough to make a sling for his club, while whispering belated thank-yous to the Papervine Woman for her ever-reliable hair.
    Now he slid to the edge and pushed aside a spray of orchids.
    Mists were rising everywhere below him, but he could see the track the monster had left through the forest, a white scar half a mile long. It stopped at the group of fig trees that grew in the highest part of the low forest. They were massive. Mau knew them well. Their trunks had huge buttresses that looked as though they might reach down to the roots of the world. They would stop anything, but the steam and the spread of the tree canopy meant that he couldn’t see what it was that had been stopped.
    But he heard a voice. It was very faint, but it was coming from somewhere below Mau. It sounded a bit like singing, but not a very big bit. To Mau, it just sounded like “na, na, na.”
    But it was a human voice. Perhaps it was another trouserman? It was a bit squeaky. Were there trouserwomen? Or it could be a ghost. There would be a lot of ghosts now.
    It was past noon. If it was a ghost, then it would be very weak. Mau was the Nation. He had to do something .
    He started to climb down the cliff, which was easy enough even with trying to move quietly, although birds flew up all around him. He shivered. He didn’t know how to make a ghost bag. That was a woman’s task.
    The a-bit-like-singing went on. Perhaps it was some sort of ghost, then. The birds had made such a racket that any living person would surely have stopped and investigated.
    His feet touched the tangle of flaking stone and tree roots that was the floor of the lower forest, and he moved silently between the dripping trees.
    “Na, na, na”— clink! —“na, na, na”— clink!
    That sounded like metal. Mau grasped his club in both hands.
    —“give, for, wild, con-fu-sion, peace”— clink! —“Oh, hear, us, when, we, cry, to, Thee”— clink! —“for, those in per-ril on the sea!”— clang! —“drat!”
    Mau peered around the buttress of a giant fig tree.
    There was a lot to see.
    Something had been wrecked, but it was