the plentiful white-throated ground doves faded from the air. The birdwatcher puzzled over the disappearances.
Donal was wandering in the island forest late at night when he heard an unearthly cry and frantic wings beating above his head. He shone his light toward the roof of the trees and spotted a hapless crow stuck in the wide jaws of a common brown tree snake, genus B. irregularis. The bird’s pinfeathers were disappearing into the snake’s jaws, swallowed alive inside the muscled coil, slowly poisoned with each chomp and chew. Soon only the desperate beak of the bird poked out, squeaking like a baby. Donal stood and watched the snake slowly close its jaws over the tip of the beak, then drop its head in postprandial fatigue. The snake’s eyes stared unconcerned into Donal’s. He swept his light across the canopy of the forest and saw what had been there all the time. The night treetops were inhabited by a writhing mass of snakes in a constant agitation to eat. Thousands of them wound deliberately through the canopy, hunting birds and eggs. They had already eaten all the ground life—rats, skinks and geckos. Their slender muscular bodies stretched great distances between branches, and the birds who had no inkling of danger continued to build nests on the sturdy thick branches their omnivorous neighbours preferred. The snakes ate anything—Hedmidactylus frenatus, Gehyra oceanica, Lepidodactylus lugubris, emoai slevine, emoia caeruleocauda and emoia atrocostate. They ate the last Micronesian kingfisher on earth. They even ate the birdwatcher’s pet parrot and those last fifty-three words.
Night after night Donal watched the snakes gracefully stripping off the life of the island, live winding sheets coiled round living bodies. They had no predator. They worked the roof of the forest like foreign cod-fishers, hardy, fearless and cryptic. They succeeded at the expense of others.
We cannot choose whom we are free to love.
Together Nyssa and Norea, wearing her yellow hat, waded along the shore, the young girl describing to her grand-mother all she saw. Nyssa said, Nana! A huge spider nest hanging under the wharf, full of babies.
Reading the girl’s tone Norea answered back, Let’s kill them! There’ll be hundreds of those nasty things.
She handed Nyssa one of her shoes and said, Get the mother first! The girl struck the big spider in the middle, watched it fall over and said, Nana! Its legs are waving.
Good, said the old woman. What are the babies doing?
They’re all climbing up through the nest and out the top.
Take hold of the nest at the opening, said Norea, and sink it under the water!
Nyssa reached into the nest hanging from its strong sticky threads. She pushed her fingers under the cracks and she swiped the nest away from the wood. Norea stood in the water listening. Nyssa plunged the nest under the water and a cloud of baby spiders crawled through the opening at the top, swarming up her arms.
Nana! she cried. They’re all over my arms!
Norea spread her wide old hands around Nyssa’s thin arms and brushed them down, shaking them over the water, whisking the spiders from her own arms and hands and plunging them down under the water. Then she pulled the sticky web off Nyssa’s fingers and put that under the water too.
Nana! screamed Nyssa. They’re still on me.
Norea bent down and scooped great handfuls of sand up from the bottom. She slapped it on Nyssa’s arms and a tiny shard of shell flew into Nyssa’s eye. The girl brushed the sand and the last of the spiders off her arms then clapped her wet, salty hand over her face.
There’s something in my eye, she said.
Norea walked behind her back to the shore and sat down beside her. She said, Take your eyelid and pull it down over your eye. Your tears will wash it out.
But the shard was lodged there and stuck. Nyssa said, I can’t get it out. I need the eyestone.
Norea said, No you don’t. Give it some time. Let your own tears do their work.
But the shell stayed lodged. Nyssa begged to go to Moll’s hut and Norea, who never refused the girl anything, followed her through the back of the settlement to Moll’s path of spat-out bones.
Norea called through the closed door between the skull of the whale and the spine of the seal, The girl’s got something in her eye.
It’ll go away.
Norea pushed the door open and Nyssa walked into the glooming toward the taste of earth. Moll was crouched down in the corner.
Moll said