Nation Read Online Free PDF Page B

Perhaps…perhaps the Grandfathers had sent it?
    “Thank you,” he said to the empty air.
    The Grandfathers had spoken to him. He thought about this as he gnawed the mango off its huge stone. He’d never heard them before. But the things they wanted…how could a boy do them? Boys couldn’t even go near their cave. It was a strict rule.
    But boys did, though. Mau had been eight when he’d tagged along after some of the older boys. They hadn’t seen him as he’d shadowed them all the way up through the high forests to the meadows where you could see to the edge of the world. The grandfather birds nested up there, which was why they were called grandfather birds. The older boys had told him that the birds were spies for the Grandfathers and would swoop on you and peck your eyes out if you came too close, which he knew wasn’t true, because he’d watched them and knew that—unless there was beer around—they wouldn’t attack anything bigger than a mouse if they thought it might fight back. But some people would tell you anything if they thought you’d be scared.
    At the end of the meadows was the Cave of the Grandfathers, high up in the wind and the sunlight, watching over the whole world. They lived behind a round stone door that took ten men to shift, and you might live for a hundred years and see it moved only a few times, because only the best men, the greatest hunters and warriors, became Grandfathers when they died.
    On the day he had followed the boys, Mau had sat and 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.