And three great fig trees, whose buttressed roots had withstood centuries of cyclones, raced out of the future and came as a big surprise. His last thought was: Perhaps who raised the mountains high would have been a better line in the circums —

Captain Roberts went to Heaven, which wasn’t everything that he’d expected, and as the receding water gently marooned the wreck of the Sweet Judy on the forest floor, only one soul was left alive. Or possibly two, if you like parrots.

On the day the world ended Mau was on his way home. It was a journey of more than twenty miles. But he knew the way, oh yes. If you didn’t know the way, you weren’t a man. And he was a man… well, nearly. He’d lived for a month on the island of the boys, hadn’t he? Just surviving on that place was enough to make you a man….

Well, surviving and then getting back.

No one ever told you about the Boys’ Island, not properly. You picked up stuff as you grew, but there was one thing you learned very soon:

The point about the Boys’ Island was that you got away from the Boys’ Island. You left your boy soul there and were given a man soul when you got back to the Nation.

You had to get back — otherwise something terrible happened: If you didn’t get back in thirty days, they came and fetched you, and you’d never be a man, not really. The boys said it would be better to drown than be fetched. Everyone would know you’d failed, and you’d probably never get a wife, and if you did get a wife, she’d be a woman none of the real men wanted, with bad teeth and smelly breath.

Mau had lain awake for weeks worrying about this. You were allowed to take only your knife to the island, and he had nightmares about building a canoe in thirty days with just a knife. It couldn’t be done. But all the men in the Nation had done it, so there had to be a way, didn’t there?

On his second day on the Boys’ Island he’d found it.