Read Nation for Free Online

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 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