There was a god anchor in the middle of the island, a brown stone cube half buried in sand and soil. Heavy vines grew over it and wrapped around a huge tabago tree. Carved deeply into the tree’s dry bark, in the language for children, were the signs: MEN HELP OTHER MEN. Next to it, wedged into the wood, was an alaki, a carved black stone on a long handle. Hold it one way, it was an axe. Hold it the other, it was an adze, good for hollowing out a log.

He pulled out the axe and learned the lesson. So had many other boys; Mau climbed the tree one evening and found the hundreds of marks all the way up the trunk where generations of grateful boys had left the axe, or one like it, for those who came after. Some of them would be Grandfathers now, up in the cave on the mountain, back home.

They would be watching, with eyes that could see for miles, and perhaps they watched him when he discovered the log, well seasoned, and not too well hidden among the pandanuses at the back of the little island. When he got home he’d say he found it, and everyone would say that was lucky, and perhaps the gods had put it there. Now that he came to think about it, his father and a couple of his uncles had gone off fishing near the island early one morning without inviting him to come with them….

It had been a good time. He knew how to make fire, and he’d found the little freshwater spring. He’d made a spear good enough to get fish from the lagoon. And he’d made a good canoe, firm and light, with an outrigger. All you had to build was something that would get you home, but he’d worked on this canoe with knife and skateskin so that it whispered over the water.

He hadn’t rushed his last day as a boy. His father had told him not to. Clean up the camp, he’d said. Soon you will belong to a wife and children. That will be fine. But sometimes you will look back fondly on your last day as a boy. Make it a warm memory, and be back in time for the feast.