Nation

Daphne pulled at it. Inside, it looked like sheets of papervine, rolled flat instead of being twisted up. There were marks on it. Mau couldn’t read them, but Daphne ran her finger over them and said loudly:
“ Birds of the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean,

by Colonel H. J. Hookwarm, M.R.H, F.R.A.

With sixteen hand-colored illustrations by the Author.”
    Then she turned over the sheet….
    Mau gasped. Her words were gibberish to his ears, but he knew how to speak pictures…. It was a grandfather bird! There, right on the paper! It looked real! In wonderful colors! No one on the island had been able to make colors like that, and they never turned up in trade. It looked as though someone had pulled a grandfather bird out of the air!
    “How is this done?” he asked.
    Daphne tapped it with a finger. “Pantaloon bird!” she said. She looked expectantly at Mau, then pointed to her mouth and made a sort of snapping motion with her thumb and forefinger.
    What does that mean? Mau wondered. “I’m going to eat a crocodile”?
    “Pant-aa-loooon birddd,” she said very slowly.
    She thinks I’m a baby, thought Mau. That’s how you talk to babies when you want them to un-der-stand. She wants me to say it!
    “Pant-aaa-looooon birrrrdd,” he said.
    She smiled, as if he’d just done a good trick, and pointed to the thickly feathered legs of the bird. “Pantaloons,” she said, and this time she pointed to her frilly trousers, peeking from under her torn skirt. “Pantaloons!”
    All right, it looks as though “pantaloon bird” means “trouser bird,” Mau told himself. Those frilly legs did look just like the bird’s strange feathered legs. But she’s got the name wrong!
    He pointed to the picture again and said, in a talking-to-babies voice: “ Graaaandfaaather birrrrd!”
    “Grandfather?”
    Mau nodded.
    “Grandfather?” The girl still looked bewildered.
    Oh. She needed to be shown one. Well, he wasn’t going to roll away the big stone for anyone but…
    It was quite a performance. Mau stroked an invisible long beard, staggered around leaning on a nonexistent walking stick, muttered angrily while waving a finger in the air, and—he was proud of this bit—tried to chew a tough piece of pork with invisible nonexistent teeth. He’d watched the old men eating, and he made his mouth look like two rats trying to escape from a bag.
    “Old man?” shouted Daphne. “Oh yes! Very droll! The old man bird! Yes, I see what you mean! They always look so annoyed!”
    After that, things happened quite fast, with the aid of the sand, a stick, and some pebbles, and a lot of acting. Some things were easy, like canoe, sun, and water. Numbers were not too bad, after a false start (one pebble is, in addition to being a pebble, one). They worked hard. Bird, big bird, small bird, bird flying…Nest! Egg!
    Fire, cook, eat, good, bad (good was a mime of eating followed by a big smile, bad was Daphne’s unladylike but realistic pantomime of throwing up). They got the hang of here and there, and probably something that did the job of this is or here is. Mau wasn’t too sure of a lot of it, but at least they had the start of…something.
    Back to the sand. Mau drew a stick figure and said “Man.”
    “Man,” said Daphne, and took the stick from him. She drew another figure, but the legs were thicker.
    Mau thought about it. “Pantaloon man?” he tried.
    “Trouser man,” said Daphne firmly.
    What does that mean? Mau wondered. Only trousermen are proper men? I don’t wear trousers. Why should I? Imagine trying to swim in them!
    He took the stick and carefully drew a stick woman, which was like a stick man with a woven papervine skirt and two added circles and two dots. Above the skirt.
    The stick was snatched out of his hand and, at speed, Daphne hastily drew a new figure. It was a woman, probably, but as well as the skirt there was another skirt thing covering the top of her body, with only the arms and head sticking out. Then she stuck the stick in the sand and crossed her arms defiantly, her face red.
    Ah, right. This was like the time before his older sister went off to live in the unmarried girls’ hut. Suddenly everything he said and did had been wrong, and he never knew why. His father had just laughed when he told him, and said he’d understand one day, and it was best to keep away.
    Well, he couldn’t keep away here, so he grabbed the stick and tried, as best he could, to draw a second skirt on the top half of