for Ri and for Bear

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Chapter 1

Crab Meets Bird

If you had been there on that day, you would’ve noticed the water first—so calm and clear in the shallows surrounding the little island, that it was hardly blue at all. Where the sand shifted underneath, the water looked silvery white, as grainy as an old photograph of the desert. Where the turtle grass waved in the tide, it was the bleached green of a hazy summer morning.

But the palm fronds, drooping like great leafy feathers, did not wave. The cooling breeze that ordinarily swept the island from west to east had been quiet for weeks. A ravenous calm had settled in its place. The swelter and stillness would have bored almost anyone, even an old grandfather who loved nothing better than to warm his back in the afternoon sun.

To a young coconut crab like Ayu, the only worse thing than these doldrums were the questions that filed antlike through her head, in endless procession. What was she good at? What should she do with the day? What should she do with her boring, useless life?

These were not entirely new questions, of course. Ayu had never been quite sure what she was supposed to do, exactly, not in the way that a worker ant knows, for instance, that on this afternoon he will be hauling the dessicated leg of a long-dead leafhopper back to the anthill.

Not that she wanted that sort of challenge. She did not. But whatever the challenge happened to be, she feared that she might not be up to it.

Paradoxically, this fear had grown as she herself had grown—bigger and bigger in that intermittent crablike way, so big now that there were no longer any seashells that fit her. Her body was almost as large as your fist, and she could climb any tree on the island, pulling herself upward leg over leg over leg over claw. She was stronger than she looked, but she did not think that she would ever be strong enough. She was afraid of falling short, legs flailing, like a turtle flipped on its back.

From the top of the tallest palm, Ayu could look out over the lagoon and past the reef, out where the sea was a tranquil, beckoning blue. Meanwhile, her grandfather, whose own legs were too feeble to climb these days, would crouch at the base of the trunk and call up to her.

“Any luck, my girl?” he would ask hopefully.

Ayu wished she could say, “Of course, Grandfather. Stand back, please.” But the coconuts seemed to grasp their stems with some sort of animal power, like limpets holding fast to a rock. Try as she might, she could not free them. She had seen humans do it, wielding sharp knives, and monkeys too, with their long and shaggy arms. Grandfather, of course, could cut stems easily. Weakened as he was by the years, his once-mighty claw could still slice through the wiry husk of a brown nut to the sweet meat inside. The problem was his arthritic knees—all six of them. When his joints were acting up, he could hardly climb out of the burrow. Climbing a palm trunk was out of the question. The arthritis had been bad for months, but the wind had helped with the coconuts. As the green nuts turned yellow, then brown, their grip relaxed, and the wind eventually blew them to the ground. Then Grandfather would open each one, and the two crabs would eat and drink.

But since the arrival of calm weather, no nuts had deigned to fall. The two of them had scavenged a few stale husks. And Grandfather had told stories about crabs who caught rats and ate them, and crabs who foraged along the beach, for dead fish or other rotting things. These stories would put a stop to the hunger pangs, but only temporarily. So Ayu climbed, and opened her claw as wide as it would go, and clamped her pincers on the hard stems. They were no thicker than your thumb, but reinforced with tough fibers. Until this morning, her efforts had yielded nothing but failure. Try as she might, she could not slice through the green stalks.

On this morning when everything was about to change, Ayu chose a particularly short stem, holding a small young coconut, whose meat would taste more like a delicious jelly than a dry nut. She climbed so close that she could touch the greenish husk with her antennae, smell the coconut water hidden inside. Her stomach had been so long empty that it hurt a little, with the sort of hollow ache you might feel if your best friend suddenly moved away. But Ayu had no friends, only her grandfather who rested impatiently on the palm bole, shouting the usual condolences: “If at first you don’t succeed” or “A pinch in time saves nine.”

She realized that Grandfather only meant to encourage her, but she resented his attentions all the same. Or perhaps it was only the hunger that made his voice grate in her ears, like the rasp of broken shells against stone. How could she concentrate with all that talk? And she needed to concentrate. She wanted breakfast. She wanted this coconut. And even more than the coconut itself, she wanted to hear the snick of her claw snapping shut, the whoosh as the coconut fell through the air, the satisfying thump as it hit the sand.

But her grandfather’s words distracted her. “A pinch in time saves nine.” Nine what? Nine pinches? And in time for what? It didn’t make any sense. It was like her dream the night before. She had dreamed about an island that was not her own. It had different sorts of trees, trees with leaves like silver coins or human hands, trees that bore luscious round fruits with yellow rinds, and amiable nuts that fell of their own accord and cracked open when they struck the ground. Bright birds darted through the canopy, their feathers gleaming with unfamiliar colors: blue throats, orange bellies, olive backs.

She had wandered along the floor of this island forest, scuttling from tree to tree, her eyes rotating on their stalks. It had all seemed so wonderful. So unreal. And there was the problem. How could she reach such an island? For that matter, how could she get to any other island? She had her ten appendages, of course, but what good were legs and claws when you lived on the same dull patch of sand where you were born, surrounded by salty water, water with no end in sight, where great snapping fish swam open-mouthed under the waves, just waiting for the odd crab to drift in for dinner?

Besides, she was a land crab. She could dig burrows and climb trees, but she hadn’t been swimming since she was a baby. Her thick shell, so useful a defense against seagulls, monkeys, and other ill-tempered beasts, would sink her like a stone—she felt sure of that. If only she had wings, she thought, like a bird or a bat or a butterfly, then she wouldn’t feel trapped like a goby in a tidepool. She could soar beyond the horizon, far from these stubborn coconuts. She could follow the moon in its travels, find out how it passed the time on those nights when she and her grandfather were left crouching in the dark. And then, like the moon, she could return, lighting the sand with her smile.

That’s what Ayu was thinking when the whistling sound overtook her—the high rush of air through wings—and the bird alighted in the palm, a few inches from where she balanced above her coconut. But this was no dream bird. For one thing, its feathers were a stark black and white. And for another, it was big—almost three feet from tail to beak. And what a beak it was: huge and hard, yellow as the sun, curving broadly to a black and vicious-looking point.

Ayu stood as still as only a frightened crab can stand. She looked up at the bird’s thick black neck, which looked more than big enough to swallow her. A tiny patch of blue shone under the throat and two blue rings circled the eyes. The bird turned its head slowly from side to side, as if taking in the view. Then it opened its beak and made a raucous, nasal sound—klaaak, ku-klaaak—ending with a sort of sigh. There was something in that sigh that sounded familiar to Ayu, a hollow note, like the echo of an empty stomach.

Without thinking, Ayu spoke aloud. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

The bird startled, opening its wings and spreading the long straight feathers of its tail. It looked down at the crab. “Ka-klaak,” she clucked. “Well I’ll be. A crab in a tree.” She sidestepped along the palm frond to get a better look at Ayu. “You running a restaurant up here?”

Ayu knew she was being teased, and this made her feel brave. “If you help me with this coconut,” she said recklessly, “we can share it.” She hadn’t considered asking anyone for help until just that moment. She had never thought it possible—either to receive help, or to have someone to ask.

The bird tilted her enormous yellow bill in amusement. “You flatter me, sister,” she chuckled. “But I can’t open a coconut.”

Sister, thought Ayu, feeling a little shiver inside her shell. She wanted to know who the hornbill thought she was talking to—sister to a bird—but instead she asked, “Then what do you eat?”

“Eee-yah,” sighed the hornbill. “Papayas in season. Melons, figs, and bananas. Mangos when I can get them. There’s nothing like a ripe mango mellowed by the sun. You want sweet?” the bird sighed again. “That’s sweet.”

Looking up at that great yellow beak, silhouetted against the dome of sky, the little crab kept silent. After a time, the hornbill turned one blue-ringed eye toward Ayu. “Tell me more about this coconut,” she said.

Chapter 2

The Hornbill’s Tale

As it turns out, the hornbill’s name was Pie. And her beak was every bit as formidable as it looked. Not in its sharpness, but in its strength. On that first morning, the bird twisted a dozen coconuts from their stems, hopping from frond to frond while Ayu watched in amazement. The heavy fruits rained onto the sand like a barrage of cannon fire—so that Grandfather, who had fallen asleep under the tree, was forced to take cover in a nearby burrow.

When the coast was clear, he struggled back into the sunlight, waving the larger of his two claws like a flag of surrender. Pie flew to the ground, while Ayu backed down the trunk, as all coconut crabs do. After an astonished introduction to Ayu’s new ally, Grandfather sliced three nuts open, and then three more, and then finally a last small sweet one, just to top off the meal.

Pie flapped onto a stub of driftwood and stretched her wings in satisfaction. “Ku-klaak,” she crowed. “I feel lucky today.”

Ayu watched her greedily, taking in the play of light on the glossy feathers, catching the sun’s reflection on the bright hard bill, thinking that she could never, ever get enough of looking. So this is what it felt like to have a friend, she thought—a full-bellied feeling, as if you had eaten and drunk all you could hold.

Grandfather gave a small cough, the sound that he always used to introduce a story of his implacable youth, or a tale of heroic crabs of old. Ayu had listened to these stories countless times. Usually she enjoyed them, but at that moment she did not want her grandfather to interrupt the spell cast by the splendid bird.

“Tell us Pie,” Ayu said quickly.

“What’s to tell?” asked the hornbill, preening her tail feathers.

“Where you come from,” said the little crab. “Where you’re going.”

Grandfather twisted one massive claw to scratch his carapace. “Yes,” he said humbly. “News of the world. Whatever you can spare.”

Pie laughed her raucous laugh. She liked these strange creatures, tough-skinned wonders who climbed trees and drank coconut milk. The only crabs she had met before were furtive types, forever scuttling under rocks, and too rigid for pleasant conversation.

“I come,” she began, “from Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o.” But the sound of these words in her ears triggered such a flood of homesickness that she could not go on.

Ayu noticed the sudden hunch in Pie’s shoulders. She climbed onto the driftwood and gently stroked one of the bird’s scaly feet. “Was it that nice?” she asked.

Pie raised her yellow bill. “Gorgeous,” she said. “Magnificent. But not perfect—not for me.”

The long weeks of tranquil weather ended that afternoon. While the hornbill told her story, a dank wind rose from the sea, gathering heat from the sun-warmed sand. Palm fronds fluttered; palm trunks bent in the breeze. Some coconuts fell, but the crabs did not rush to gather them. The green outer husk is durable enough to float a coconut across the ocean, while the brown inner shell can withstand even a sharp rap with a stout stick. They knew the fruit would keep, for months if necessary, but the story would be better fresh.

Pie’s nasal voice seemed to rise with the waves, sometimes boisterous, sometimes shrill. She came, she said, from an exalted family, birds who spent their days high in the forest canopy, feasting on mangos, figs, and passion fruit. They were an old breed—older than the island itself, her father said, older even than the snowcapped mountains which towered above the mainland.

Because the two crabs asked so many questions—what are mountains? what is snow?—the tale went on and on. Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o was a paradise of sorts, a hornbill haven. The birds harvested each fruit in its season, raised their young in hollow trees. Pie frolicked with her sisters and brothers and cousins, playing peck-the-tail-on-the-monkey and bird-marks-the-spot. The jungle rang with their calls. “It is ringing still,” said Pie, with a hitch of her wings. “But I can’t listen. Not anymore.”

There had been a fight with her father on coming-of-age day, the day on which young hornbills choose their mates and enter their nests. If Pie had climbed into the dark tree-hole, her mate would’ve sealed the entrance with a plaster of mud and bark and seeds, leaving a narrow slit just large enough to slip a bill through. Pie would’ve been shut inside for four months, until her chicks hatched and grew strong enough to test their own wings. She would’ve depended on her mate for everything: food for herself, food for the chicks. Meanwhile, the plaster would’ve protected the nestlings from wandering snakes and tree-climbing cats.

Pie understood that this was the way hornbills always had done things. It was a good way, and she herself had loved the murky cavity where her mother had brooded over her siblings—its dim, close security. But the darkness! The days and days of it. And worse than darkness—the dependence! She knew that there were any number of males she could rely on, steady souls who would deliver the finest fruit with faithful regularity. But was there a bird who could make her heart leap in its prison? Was there a bird from whose beak she would gladly accept sustenance? Whose sun-warmed feathers would provoke love—and not resentment—for all the days of her confinement?

She didn’t believe that she had met this bird. Not yet. And so, one lambent morning, Pie flew from the family tree. To discourage pursuit, she soared over the water and to the east, squinting against the buoyant sun. She imagined that her father saw her disappear into the dawn’s brightness, like a white-bellied sea eagle, hunting the heights.

As Pie finished this portion of her tale, a white-capped wave topped the reef and ran high onto the sand where Ayu sat. Because crabs cannot cry, Ayu had never tasted tears, but the salty water that splashed against her legs and into her face seemed bitter enough.

Pie looked up at the sky, scudding with dark clouds. “Eee-yah,” she said. “I’ve heard too much about me. Your turn,” she nodded to Ayu.

Ayu looked down her antennae to the violet tips of her claws, which pinched self-consciously together. She was not used to telling stories. In fact, she was not sure if she had any stories to tell. No stories of her own, at least, about courtly pleasures or narrow escapes. It was Grandfather who kept them all inside his craggy shell, and who corrected her when she misremembered some detail of the family history. The only incident she could recall without prompting was that impenetrable hour when the fishermen had seized her parents and carried them off in an outrigger canoe. And even then, Ayu couldn’t quite say what she had actually witnessed herself, and what Grandfather had told her later. She knew that her father had been up a tree, harvesting coconuts, and that a man had climbed cunningly behind him, and tied a circlet of grass high on the trunk. When her father, like all coconut crabs, began to back his way down, he felt the blades of grass tickle his third pair of legs. Thinking he was near the ground, he let go.

Had Ayu seen him fall, watched him tumble like a coconut to the hard sand? Had she watched her mother scrabble from the burrow to help her stunned mate, seen the man pounce with his quick and nimble hands? And then, had Ayu cowered in her snail’s shell, as the man carried her parents down to the beach, their powerful claws bound with palm fibers?

“Oh,” she said finally, avoiding Pie’s gaze, “I couldn’t.”

The hornbill unfurled her wings and yawned hugely. She sidestepped along the log, wobbling a little in the breeze. “Tomorrow then,” she said kindly, and flapped off into the twilight.

As Grandfather stretched his claws above his head, his joints clicked and popped like rubber bands snapping against wood. “Yes,” he said, to nobody in particular, swiveling his antennae in the wind. “There’s always tomorrow.”

Ayu mumbled a goodnight and crept distractedly into the gloom. Her legs worked clumsily, as if supporting an unaccustomed weight. She had the feeling that she had missed her chance, that her reluctance to speak had made Pie think less well of her. Was she a shy crab? A boring crab? Something inside her shell twisted uncertainly. Perhaps she had eaten too much. The roar of waves thrashing against the reef both thrilled and frightened her, so that she hesitated on the sand, as the wind blew salt spray against her legs.

She stood for a time with her back to the water, thinking of figs and fishermen, snakes and snares. Then she sidled into an empty coconut, a remnant of the feast she’d shared with Pie that very day. Her claws curled cozily under her carapace, and she leaned against the fragrant husk. She wanted to rest, to retreat from questions into something like tranquility. But instead of sinking into stillness, Ayu dropped dizzily into a dream.

Chapter 3

An Unfortunate Tern

She dreamed that a fisherman’s boy had caught her, that he tossed her into the air with one hand, then caught her again, over and over. Before each toss, the boy seemed to weigh her in his palm, like a shopkeeper appraising an apple. The boy’s hand was warm and damp. Ayu tried to get a grip on it, to find a plump finger and crush it in her claws. But each time she tried, the boy’s skin seemed as sturdy as a coconut’s.

It was a great relief to wake from this dream, to find herself snug in the bowl of a coconut shell, to remember Grandfather’s strong claws slicing through the husk, and to recall the three of them eating and drinking together like one big happy family. Sister to a bird, indeed! Just the thought of Pie made her legs tremble, and she suddenly longed to see the hornbill and her marvelous yellow beak—that beak which could twist coconuts from their stems as if they were flower petals.

Ayu looked up into a blue circle of sky. Huddled in the bottom of the coconut, she couldn’t quite see the sun, but she knew by the hard light that it was late morning. She tried to stretch her legs and claws but, at her first movements, the coconut rocked like an egg on the sand. Strangely though, it didn’t sound precisely like sand. It didn’t sift and whisper like sand should. Instead, Ayu heard a sort of sloshing, followed by a sequence of soft, wet slaps.

In the wary silence that followed, the little crab kept perfectly still. “Pie?” she asked. “Is that you?” And then, in a much louder voice, “Grandfather?”

She wasn’t afraid, really—she told herself that—just curious, and perhaps a little puzzled. Where was everybody?

Cautiously, she extended one claw until it gripped the rim above her. Then she lifted herself upwards, straining her eyestalks to peer out. She secured only the briefest glimpse of her surroundings before the coconut rolled crazily again, and she had to let go.

This is what she saw: water. An entire ocean of it. Water spreading endlessly to the blue horizon, where it met the sky in a hazy seam. This water was unlike any she had ever seen before. It wasn’t green and silvery like the water that surrounded her island. It did not have the familiar boundary of coral reef. This water was blank and unendingly blue, marked only by the gentlest of swells.

Crouching again at the bottom of the coconut, every muscle alive with shock and surprise, Ayu could feel the swells now, the leisurely undulation of ocean beneath her, and wondered that she had not noticed them before.

She could feel the fear too, rising whenever she tried to tell herself what she had seen. Only water. But so much water. Ayu had never thought about the amount of water there might be in the world, the miles and miles of it insulating each little scrap of sand from all the others. When she had looked out over the sea from her perch in the coconut palm, she had dreamed entirely of dry land, of flowers and fruit and birds that flew. Now the fear hissed that she could not swim—and that the blank water concealed those who could.

But the funny thing was, she felt more than merely afraid. The fear was there, simmering like a black stone in the sun. But there were other feelings too, new feelings that Ayu could not yet name. You might think that, because Ayu had witnessed her parents’ capture, she would have grown into a vigilant creature, ever alert, always watchful. But the fact is that she was easily distracted—by beautiful or unusual things in the outside world, and also by the little glimmerings of her inmost thoughts. Although she knew she was trapped in a coconut shell, she had some notion of escape. And though she had seen nothing in that first inspection of her situation, she sensed that something was about to happen, something worth waiting for. She could not imagine what that something would be, but it seemed possible that she might guess it, in the same way that we can sometimes guess the longings of a complete stranger. She wasn’t actually trying to guess, you understand, because that would’ve meant looking ahead, and even a small crab knows that, in a truly peculiar situation, the most necessary thing is another look around.

This time Ayu was especially careful, using every one of her ten appendages to evenly distribute her weight around the husk. With some effort, she managed to balance her carapace atop the coconut, like the lid on a teapot. Again the sea gleamed blankly about her. She was indeed a small crab, adrift. Drifting on a vast sea, under a tremendous sky.

The sea and the sky, she thought, must be the same size, since they fit like the two halves of an oyster. In one half, she floated on her coconut, a brown mote in a field of blue. What, she wondered, was in the other half?

Ayu looked again. A flyspeck on the horizon, that shimmered and grew. Something black and white, something that cast a dark shadow. A bird with wings, searching the sea.

Pie, she thought. It must be Pie! For the first time, Ayu considered the worry her absence surely would have inspired. How Grandfather would have fretted to find her gone, and how Pie would have volunteered to comb the oceans. The crab waved one claw above her head, and the bird veered toward her. If Ayu had not been blinded with happiness, she might have noticed that the bird’s tail was long and deeply forked. That the bill was not thick and yellow, but narrow and black and dagger-sharp.

The white wings soared above her, then paused, fluttering in place. Ayu shielded her eyes against the sun and waited rapturously for Pie to speak.

But this bird—a black-naped tern—had no greeting in mind. He was hunting something to feed his morning’s hunger. He had never seen anything remotely like a crab floating atop a coconut but, whatever this something was, it had moved, so perhaps it could be eaten. The tern pulled his stiff wings alongside his body and arrowed toward his prey.

The stabbing beak knocked Ayu off balance, and the coconut shipped water. Instinctively, she folded her legs and dropped into the husk, to protect her back and belly. The coconut rocked under her weight, then righted itself. Ayu rotated her eyestalks angrily, thinking that she did not much appreciate a hornbill’s sense of humor.

“Hey—” she started to say, as the bird wheeled into focus. A bird who definitely was not Pie. By the time she identified her assailant as a tern, his second attack was already under way.

She raised both claws in self-defense. The tern swerved and circled. On the next pass, he did not dive. Instead, he hovered above the water. When Ayu swung one claw at him, the tern seized it in his black beak.

“Let go!” cried the crab, as the tern labored above her. Ayu felt herself being pulled from the coconut like a snail from its sanctum. Her third legs scrabbled against the smooth inner shell, desperately searching for holds.

Meanwhile, the tern beat the air with might and main, struggling to rise from the water. He thought that this breakfast was turning into very hard work indeed, and wondered why he hadn’t found something more appetizing—a dead sardine, for example, resting obligingly on the surface, and nicely ripened by the sun.

Although he would have denied any personal weakness, the tern was not strong enough to lift both crab and coconut. When he made an extra stroke with his wings, his head lost altitude. When he pulled harder with his neck and beak, his tail drooped to the waves. The repeated ups and downs of the contest left him a little woozy. He closed his eyes in preparation for one final effort.

Ayu noticed this strategic lapse. And she seized her opportunity. Until that moment, she had been stretched to the limit. The tern held her left claw by the elbow joint. With the other claw, she had maintained a death grip on the coconut. But when the tern dropped his guard, she dropped the coconut. Free of that ballast, the pair ascended jerkily into the air.

Even if the tern had noticed the right claw moving to his milk-white throat, it would have been too late. Ayu locked her pincers on flesh and feathers. With what little breath remained to him, the tern gasped a conciliatory, “Chee-aaugh.”

As his beak opened, Ayu swung her left claw free. Then—forgetting that they were now twenty feet above the water—she loosened her chokehold.

Though not far for some animals—fruit bats, for instance, or flying squirrels— twenty feet is a long way for most crabs. It seems particularly long when the crab is falling, quite long enough to think any number of thoughts.

As Ayu fell, she tumbled, so that her view was continually changing. At first, she saw the stark underwing of the tern, then his black legs flailing, and then the expression on his face, which was pained, though somewhat relieved. Next she saw the sea far below, and the coconut husk drifting delicately on it, like a single brown leaf on a broad blue blanket. After this, the horizon, that intangible and interminable line upon which she had gazed so often from her perch atop the palm tree.

Although Ayu had the sensation of flying, she knew she was not really flying in the way of birds or butterflies. Of all the stories that Grandfather told, not one mentioned a crab who had the power to fly, even temporarily. When her father had felt the grass tickling his legs, he had let go of the tree, just as Ayu had let go of the tern. She wondered briefly what her father had thought about during his own descent, then she saw the coconut again—much closer this time—and reached out for it like a long-lost friend.

If the tern had risen straight up, then perhaps Ayu—who had fallen straight down—would have landed safely in the open bowl of the coconut. But he hadn’t, and so she was rather lucky to splash within an arm’s length of it—although she didn’t feel lucky at the time. For when her pincers grasped the rim, the coconut turned turtle, and Ayu found herself suddenly beneath the waves.

Chapter 4

What Lies Beneath

The salt water closed over the crab like a trap door, then opened again. But not all the way open. There was air above her, but not the great blue dome of sky—only a bubble of atmosphere trapped beneath the buoyant husk of the coconut, which rode the ocean like the tiniest of hats on the most enormous of heads.

By extending her two pairs of walking legs until they pushed against the husk, Ayu was able to suspend herself above the water. She remained in this position a very long time, breathing slowly, and trying not to think of falling, or of the tern’s sharp beak. It was dark underneath the coconut, and quiet—so quiet that she could hear her joints creaking with the effort required to hold her position.

She couldn’t decide whether her situation had changed for better or worse. No doubt she was safe from the tern, but how would Pie find her now? That was the worst thing she could imagine—that Pie would not find her. It seemed hardly possible that they had met only yesterday.

When she thought of her sister bird, Ayu forgot that she was afraid of the water, afraid of smooth-skinned sharks, and afraid of great-mouthed groupers. She forgot that she could not swim. She even forgot that she was trapped beneath a coconut. For some reason, just knowing that she had a friend in the world made her feel less lonely, less adrift, although there was really no doubt that she was alone, and floating aimlessly on an unknown sea.

You might consider it strange that Ayu did not long for her grandfather, that she did not seem to miss him in the same way that she yearned for Pie, a bird she scarcely knew. Or that she did not dream of her mother and father as the coconut drifted along, of those days when she was a favored child, and still wore a snail’s shell on her back. That is sometimes the way with friends, especially new friends, a bit older and more experienced than yourself, who have done and seen things that you have only just dared to presume. Their very unfamiliarity sparks new and vivid emotions—new despair, new hope, new happiness.

And so Ayu clung to the memory of Pie alighting in the palm, of the shuff of air slipping her wings.

But even that happy instant could only temporarily stem the press of water. Sunlight flooded the ocean; it lit the sea and leaked around the rim of the coconut. The afternoon light shone into the depths, but it did not illuminate them. Here the water was very, very deep. When Ayu looked into the bottomless expanse of blue, a blue darker even than black, she found it difficult to breathe. She wondered how many palm trees it would take, standing one atop the other, to reach from the sea floor to the surface. A hundred? Two hundred? The air under the coconut seemed to thicken, curdling like a bowl of stale milk.

As you have no doubt observed, coconut crabs are rather like people in many ways. They are long-lived, agile, and inquisitive. They are sometimes brave, sometimes fearful. They cherish their friends, enjoy a good feed, and appreciate a nap in the heat of the day. Youngsters are vulnerable to attack, and soon develop a protective shell. But there are differences—most notably in the appendages, and in the lidless, jutting eyes, and in the manner of getting breath. People—like pelicans, crocodiles, and elephants—have lungs. But crabs are more like fish in this respect. They have gills, and in order for gills to function properly, they must remain wet. Remaining wet is quite easy for fish, and for all those varieties of crabs that abide beneath the waves. But coconut crabs are not like most crabs. Coconut crabs abandon the water during childhood. As adults, they live and breathe entirely on land. To keep their gills moist, they dip their hindmost appendages into water and stroke them over a sort of sponge on their bellies.

Feeling short of breath under the coconut, Ayu dipped and stroked instinctively. This remedy brought no relief. She dipped and stroked again, but the water did not refresh her gills. In fact, the air seemed to hoard its oxygen like the sea hoards its secrets.

Ayu’s thoughts, already muddled by the events of the past days, wavered from feeble to frantic. She felt drowsy, a nearly suffocating sleepiness. And agitated, like a fish flopping on the sand. Fighting the urge to take a nap, she decided to flip the coconut upright again. She wanted to see the sky. But the tern—was it waiting above her, hovering, hungry?

With one claw, she tapped against the inside of the coconut. Then she listened, dreading an answering peck, the sharp rap of that deadly beak.

Hearing nothing, she tapped again, harder this time, so that a few bits of husk flaked onto the water. Still nothing. Strangely enough, Ayu suddenly wanted the tern to respond. To hear its warring cries. She began to pound crazily against the coconut, using the dagger point of her claw like a pickax. Attack, she thought, hammering with an unfamiliar strength. Attack. She would welcome an attack. Let all the terns in the world come. She would show them who could pinch.

In less time than it takes to drive a nail, Ayu had pierced the coconut from the inside, just as she had seen her grandfather do countless times, from the outside. Waiting on the sand, under a favorite palm tree, she would have sprung up hungrily at the first sight of coconut milk dripping from the husk. But now she relaxed, breathing deeply as the sweet fresh air flooded her little dome.

Although Ayu had not realized this fact, fresh air was precisely what she had needed. It cleared her head, and allowed her to recollect the present. The afternoon light was fading. She had been floating a night and a day. She had driven off an attacker. And, for the first time in her life, she herself, alone, without any help at all, had opened a coconut. Not from the proper side, of course, and not to eat—but she had done it. And what’s more, she felt sure she could do it again.

She swiveled one eye to peer though the hole—the hole she’d made herself, in a coconut—and looked out on the new world. She couldn’t see much, really, just a round patch of blue sky, but even that made her sigh with something like delight.

That sigh seemed to echo inside, to reverberate and gain volume, as if the coconut were a sort of amplifier. But the echo carried none of Ayu’s original gladness, none of the joy, none of the satisfaction.

This sigh welled from some deep reservoir of sadness. This sigh was ancient and anguished, the sort of sigh that makes people look down at their feet. It made Ayu look down too, and she was so surprised at what loomed beneath her, that she lost her grip on the coconut.

The little crab fell through the water, but she didn’t fall very far. There was something rising beneath her, something rounded and flattened and undeniably solid. She couldn’t say what this thing might be. The only name that came to her was island, but this island was much smaller and more mobile than the only island she had ever known. Its surface was composed of overlapping and interlocking plates, beautifully patterned in brown and gold. On these plates grew clusters of chalky barnacles, and filaments of green algae. As the tips of her legs touched this island, Ayu heard a sequence of muffled clicks, the ticking sounds of shell against shell.

And then the island broached the surface, and the water poured from the interlocking plates like a wave from a rock. Ayu stood transfixed in the warm light, shipped on the broad back of a turtle.

The turtle sighed again, another great gasp, followed by a long-suffering exhalation. Ayu had met turtles before, but always at night, under a full moon, or during a high tide. Otherwise, they seldom came ashore. Turtles were travelers, she knew that, but she had never been able to learn much else. On land, they appeared harried and preoccupied. The old ones arrived in a rush to lay their eggs and take their leave, while the young hatchlings couldn’t wait to join them, scrabbling frantically to the water, wasting no time on talk.

But this turtle seemed to have all the time in the world. She bobbed languidly on the surface, spreading her long front flippers like outriggers, to steady herself.

“Hello,” said Ayu politely. “Thank you for rescuing me.”

The turtle turned her neck stiffly and gazed back at the crab with one large and luminous eye.

Ayu looked into the eye. It was hard and black and deep as a well, as if it had seen too much and understood more than enough.

“I can’t swim,” Ayu said.

The turtle dipped her head slightly, then turned away.

Ayu felt sure that the turtle had responded—in acknowledgment and in sympathy. She couldn’t explain why she felt this way, since the turtle had said nothing, but she did.

Far, far to the west, the ocean was swallowing the sun, the way a snake swallows an egg. Ayu shivered a little, just watching it. She was very hungry. After the long hours inside—and then under—the empty coconut, her stomach was empty. The rosy sky was empty, too. There were no palm-studded islands on the horizon, no blue-eyed hornbills overhead.

The turtle drew her flippers resolutely through the water, like a stiffened pair of wings. She swam away from the sunset in an unrelenting line, while Ayu rode the ridge of her back.

Ayu was no longer afraid of the water, or of terns. She knew that the turtle would protect her, that even now the turtle planned to deliver her to some safe place. Maybe that was the frightening part, this inkling she had of some ungovernable destiny in store. No matter what was happening to her, it seemed to be the right thing, and how strange it was for this to be true! That thought made her yawn in amazement. Before she could yawn again, the little crab was fast asleep.

Chapter 5

Islands in the Dream

It was still dark when Ayu woke. The moon gleamed low in the sky, nearly full, and she tried to remember what it had looked like on that evening with Pie. How many days had it been? If she could remember that, then she would know whether the moon was waxing or waning, which seemed important somehow.

She reproached herself for not paying better attention—both before Pie had arrived on their island, and afterward. Already her memory of that blue-ringed eye was blurring, as if a veil of gauze had been drawn between herself and the hornbill. Ayu did not like that feeling. From now on, the little crab resolved, she would try to remember things more clearly.

The turtle swam steadily, her flippers rising and falling like wings. The water broke around her shoulders and hissed past the circle of shell. As before, she said nothing, only heaving the occasional sigh.

To soothe the hollow ache in her stomach, Ayu nibbled some dry strings of algae. They had a vague, salty crunch, and tasted faintly of iodine. Not bad, really. Encouraged by this experiment, she used the point of her claw to lever a barnacle from the turtle’s back. There wasn’t much meat inside. Some was slippery; some was chewy.

Ayu ate more algae, then more barnacles, until she had cleaned almost a third of the turtle’s shell. Under the moonlight, it glistened a shadowy gold, streaked with chestnut and cinnamon.

The next time the turtle sighed, Ayu thought she heard a note of satisfaction in the sough of air.

“You’re very beautiful,” Ayu said.

The turtle seemed to hear these words, because her flippers moved with a new power, and even more grace.

Ayu wanted to ask where they were going, but it seemed too momentous a topic for mere questions. The turtle must have known, because she swam with such conviction. Whatever the destination, it was obviously important that she get there soon. And it was important for Ayu too, if only because it would be next—the next stage of a journey that had begun in a coconut husk.

The little crab understood that they were not returning to her own island, where Grandfather waited—and maybe Pie. That was the only island she had ever set foot upon, an island she knew so well that she had no name for it, unless that was Home. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if the turtle were taking her to Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o? She would recognize it by the fruit trees, of course, the figs and mangos and papayas. She would hear the laughing cries of hornbills. And there would be mountains on the horizon, high peaks white with snow.

But how many islands were there in this world, how many havens from the sea? She was so small really, not much bigger than she’d been in those days when she carried a shell on her back, like a hermit crab, and shrank into it at the slightest threat. The knowledge of her smallness both humbled and consoled her. She had been launched, a tiny scrap of jetsam on the vast ocean. And yet, the tern had found her, and now the turtle. From her limited experience, it seemed that the odds of rescue were at least as great as the probabilities of disaster.

This was comforting in itself. But Ayu felt even better than comfortable. She was on the move. She did not know where, but she was neither confined nor adrift. That restless summons she had suffered, gazing on the water from the crown of palms, that nagging sense of insufficiency and inadequacy, had been somehow pacified. Looking forward, over the turtle’s head, she saw the sky begin to glow with a faint reddish tint, almost like morning.

On and on went the turtle, through the day, and a night, and other days and nights. Though she did not speak, Ayu did not tire of her company. The turtle glided through the water like some ponderous bird on its seasonal migration, pausing occasionally to gulp a passing jellyfish or an unwary squid.

Ayu tried these too, and decided that squid weren’t bad, but barnacles were better than jellyfish. Unfortunately, she had eaten the last barnacle just yesterday. The turtle’s shell gleamed from stem to stern, and Ayu was justifiably proud of her work. If the turtle had been beautiful when they met, then she was absolutely ravishing now—the queen of the waters.

The little crab dipped a claw into the sea and polished the edge of her rescuer’s shell. In the bright sunlight, it glowed with a translucent splendor. Strangely enough, this reminded her of Pie’s golden bill, which reminded her in turn of the sweet taste of a coconut.

Ayu gave a sigh, and the turtle sighed with her. The sun streamed down upon the ocean, and when Ayu looked up, a line of coconut palms seemed to shimmer a claw’s breadth above the horizon. Although the trees were far off, she could clearly see their green fronds waving atop the slender trunks. But the trunks did not appear to sprout from sand. Instead, they hovered above the water, as if rooted to a low mantle of clouds.

“Oh,” she said, unsure of happiness. She had seen mirages before and knew that they looked real enough for a spell, but could not withstand the assault of time. No matter how appealing, a mirage would fade with the fading of the day.

She looked away from these trees, as a test of their substance, and was not entirely surprised to observe another forest reflected beneath the placid water. The undersea grove sparkled with color: violet, pink, orange, lime. And the plants that grew there were like none she had ever seen, except in dreams.

Some had branches, like ordinary trees, but others were hollow like cups, or sprouted like mushrooms. Some looked feathered, some thorned. There were delicate fans, five-pointed stars, many-petaled flowers.

Ayu rolled her eyes upwards, to witness the remarkable mirage that could inspire these reflections. But the sky revealed nothing beyond its customary blue dome, washed with a few sketchy clouds.

When she returned her gaze to the water, a flash of movement caught her eye. Were those birds she saw? Or butterflies? They darted and flew, but so serenely, so effortlessly.

One of them soared toward her, as if to make her acquaintance. Its body was adorned with concentric rings of purple and gold, its face masked with neon and indigo. For a moment, the creature seemed to offer Ayu an angelic kiss, but then it suddenly turned tail, splashing the crab with a few drops of salty water.

“Come back!” Ayu cried, desperately happy now, because even the most spectacular mirage did not splash you. This forest was genuine. It bloomed beneath the water, and these wonders that darted like butterflies or flew like birds, flapping their pectoral fins, were fish.

She had seen the dead skeletons of coral washed up on the beach, and glimpsed their live colors from atop the palm tree, but had never before enjoyed this turtle’s eye view. The water here—transparent as air—bathed a world in which everything looked like something else. Not exactly, of course, but in their very strangeness they reminded you of something familiar.

Ayu saw undulating snake-fish, yellow and black, opening and closing their jaws full of long, slender teeth. She saw red-striped fish with large, somber eyes, grinning fish and frowning fish, long-nosed fish, thick-lipped fish, drab fish and frilly fish. There were lizardfish, flute-fish, leaf-fish, toadfish, batfish, hawkfish, parrotfish. Fish as thin as reeds, and other fish that could puff up like strange, scaly balloons. As they drew nearer the island, Ayu even saw fish that lived in burrows like crabs, and used their fins to scuttle sideways over the sand.

She could smell the beach now, damp and grainy along the verging sea, and then the warm, sunbaked scent that rose from the dry bank above the tidelands. The turtle swam into a shallow lagoon, protected on its far side by a curving spit of sand. She floated calmly on the surface, a few dozen strokes from the shore.

Ayu stood on the tips of her third pair of legs, straining landwards for a better view. The coral forest had provided a dramatic display, but these trees on the island, these limber gray trunks topped with palm fronds! She hadn’t realized how marvelous trees could be, how perfectly appealing. She longed to feel the rough rings of bark under her feet as she climbed, to try her claws on a wiry coconut stem. And then—most wonderful of all—to drink the sweet milk and eat the tender meat. She had no doubt that she could open any coconut, no matter how obstinate the husk. This fresh confidence filled her with a profound sense of pride, so that her body swelled inside her carapace.

But the turtle, after their long voyage across the open sea, seemed to have lost momentum. She bobbed aimlessly in the lagoon, like a four-flippered chunk of driftwood. Ayu wanted to ask what her friend was waiting for. In fact, she was just about to ask, when there came a cry from the beach. Not a cry of pain, but a shriek of surprise and exultation.

Ayu noticed the girl first. She was crouching on the sand, cradling a seashell—a large tiger cowrie—in both hands. She wore a red dress printed with a pattern of white hibiscus flowers. The fabric was darker near the hem, where it had draggled in the water. Her arms and legs were tanned the color of strong tea.

“Look at this one!” she cried again, as an older boy ran wildly toward her along the strand, bare feet splashing. In one hand, the boy held a short-handled dip net.

Ayu shrank like a limpet against the turtle’s shell. She curled her legs beneath her, wishing that she were very, very small—no bigger than a barnacle, really, and even less conspicuous.

The turtle sighed audibly. Both children turned toward the sound. The boy pointed.

“What is it?” asked the girl.

The boy squinted against the setting sun, shading his eyes with a brown forearm. He shrugged. “A turtle, maybe.”

The turtle stroked a few yards closer to the children, then made a slow pirouette in the water, as if to display her shell to better advantage.

Ayu stared at the boy with the net, her legs shivering in panic. When the turtle began to turn, she scrabbled to the water line, trying to keep a low profile. After the fisherman had captured her parents, she and Grandfather had remained huddled in their burrows for two days and two nights, fearful of another raid. Grandfather had said that men often returned to a place where they had made a good catch, despite the fact that such a place logically must have less to catch than it did before. Aside from this, she knew little else of humans and their ways.

The turtle’s shell seemed to glow in the late-afternoon light, a beacon of bronze and gold. The children jumped up and down on the sand. Ayu slipped anxiously into the water, gripping the turtle’s stubby tail with one claw, only her eyestalks showing above the surface.

“A turtle!” shouted the boy, brandishing his net like a sword.

The girl stood on tiptoe. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

Ayu held her breath, wondering if she could make it to shore, unnoticed.

The turtle sighed happily, then performed another graceful arabesque.

Ayu held on tightly, twisting through the water like a leaf at the end of a wind-tossed branch. When the swirling stopped, she climbed back aboard the turtle, gasping.

The crab watched as the boy capered around an overturned canoe, stabbing the air with the net. Meanwhile, the girl continued to gaze at the turtle, rising and falling on her toes like a ballet dancer. She did not seem to notice Ayu, who suffered an unexpected twinge of regret. It wasn’t that the crab thought, I am not beautiful like a turtle. Ayu was not simple in that way. But words spoken aloud can sometimes have more power than words that are merely written or imagined, and no one had ever told Ayu that coconut crabs are as beautiful as any living thing in the world, that the violet colors of their underlegs remind you of meadow flowers, or that their rough carapace has the look and texture of an autumn beech.

Another minute or two passed, the turtle continuing to bask in the children’s admiration, and then the girl ran to her brother. A moment later, both children ran off along the strand.

Chapter 6

Appetite Comes with Eating

Ayu wondered if the turtle was waiting for the children to make their way around the sand spit and out of sight. Or for the sun to set. Or for the sky to darken to a deep blue-black. She felt wakeful and hungry and weak all at once, along with the jittery sort of relief you get after a narrow escape.

The coconuts hung suspended from their trees, shadowed by palm fronds, nearly invisible in the dusk. Each one was like a drop of water, swelling at the end of a slowly leaking faucet, gathering weight and fullness until, finally, it would grow fat enough to fall.

What Ayu wanted most was to help herself to one of these coconuts. But she did not believe she could swim to shore. It was too far for a land crab, and she could still taste the salt water she’d swallowed as the turtle performed for the children. She was truly grateful for her rescue, and for the relatively comfortable transportation to this new island, but to tell the truth she was no longer especially fond of the turtle. She had been dazzled at first, both by her beauty and her novel means of expression. At this moment, however, Ayu would not have been particularly saddened to never meet the turtle again. All that silence and sighing. It really was too much.

The little crab gazed toward the beach, at the dim line that marked the border of sand and sea. How she loved sand! Its gritty warmth, the ease with which it could be heaped or excavated, the soft sound of it sifting in air. She almost sighed—but caught herself just in time.

When the moon rose behind the palms, its full beam fell along the water like an illuminated pathway. The turtle roused from her usual daze, turning toward the moon as if it were a beacon, a signal. She sculled powerfully to shore, then began to drag her great bulk up the beach, panting hugely.

Ayu danced down from her perch on the turtle’s back. She knew that the turtle would crawl laboriously above the reach of a full-moon tide, dig a hole, then deposit a clutch of eggs. But Ayu had no interest in these activities. She was about to do something that she had never done before.

She scuttled.

She climbed.

She chose.

She cropped.

The coconut whisked downwards, then thunked on the sand.

The little crab listened with satisfaction. What a heavenly thunk! It seemed to make her antennae vibrate in the moonlight. She wished that Grandfather could have heard that sound. And Pie too. But she was hungry—very hungry—and a little proud as well. She looked from her gleaming claw to the coconut stalk that just days ago would have seemed impossibly tough. It was cleanly cut, severed as neatly as a blade of grass. This time she could not stop herself: she sighed.

After that coconut, and another, Ayu settled into an attitude of full-bellied contentment. She snuggled into the warm sand, enjoying its dry solidity after the long nights at sea. She was alone on an unknown island, but she did not feel either lonely or lost. She felt ready.

The moon cast a festive glow on the scene, reflecting over and over upon itself. One image shimmered brightly in the water, while several fainter moons glimmered on the undersides of palm fronds. And when Ayu looked across the sand spit, where the children had disappeared, dozens of little moons seemed to sway among the trees.

She had never noticed this phenomenon before and found it entrancing. She moved toward the lilting moons, unaware that they were actually electric lights: strings of bulbs swinging above the terrace of an open-air café.

As you know, light will attract many creatures: moths, for instance, and other insects. The house gecko—a type of lizard with a peculiar taste for bugs—also tends to congregate near a bulb. Some fish are suckers for a glowing lure, as are some children.

If you had been there, you might have warned Ayu to keep her distance, or better yet, to turn and scramble in the opposite direction. No doubt you realize that seaside restaurants are not among the safest places for little crabs, populated as they are with cheerfully ravenous humans.

This particular restaurant was called Lapu-Lapu. Some thought it was named after the famous warrior chief; others thought it honored a sugary rum cocktail. But neither of these groups was correct. The head cook had been a fisherman in his younger days, and Lapu-Lapu was no more and no less than the local name for a species of white-fleshed grouper, his favorite dinner.

Ayu had no inkling that she was approaching such treacherous ground, a veritable shrine to the consumption of seafood. She was close enough now to see that the lights were not really reflections of the moon, but that did not diminish her fascination. She looked curiously at the restaurant’s thatched roof, at the wicker chairs with their legs sunk in the sand, and at the people who sat smiling in them. So many people! Talking, laughing, feeding themselves with the help of shiny silver twigs.

In this setting, humans did not seem so fearsome. They did not stalk or snare, but appeared to enjoy each other’s company, as other creatures did. Nevertheless, Ayu moved cautiously. She crept along a hedge of bougainvillea, keeping to the shadows.

Beneath the din, she could hear a voice. Although this voice did not call her by name, she was drawn to it nonetheless. It was a girl’s voice—a girl with soft brown hair that fell in her face and over her shoulders, a girl who wore a red dress printed with a pattern of white hibiscus flowers.

The girl was telling her parents about the turtle. Again she used the word beautiful and again Ayu felt that peculiar regret, almost like jealousy.

Ayu circled the café, trying to get closer. She scurried under tables and behind potted plants, stepping lightly around sandaled feet. At one point, she paused unknowingly beneath the steel counter where the day’s catch was displayed on a bed of ice: painted lobsters, yellow-lined seaperch, tiger prawns, Spanish mackerel. And crabs too—flower crabs with their long blue pincers, mud-colored crabs trussed with palm fibers. According to the menu, these distant cousins could be ordered steamed or fried, served with red chilies or yellow curry, so perhaps it was a mercy that Ayu could not read.

Moving unnoticed by diners—and unaware of the nature of their meals—the coconut crab eventually reached a red azalea sprouting from a stone urn. Without stopping to think, she climbed into the urn and hid amidst the leaves. Only then did she consider the dangers of her position: a live crab among hungry humans. Perhaps it was her own feast of fresh coconut that had made her act with such recklessness. Or the sheer joy of finding herself on firm ground again—a land crab on land. But there was no doubt that the girl had something to do with it.

Ayu wanted to look at her, to listen to her. And so she had concealed herself in an azalea, beside the girl’s table, and uncomfortably close to the kitchen, where she could hear the hiss and pop of hot oil, and the snickersnack of knives.

The boy was sitting with his back to her, with that short-handled net leaning against his chair. In an eager voice, he asked his mother if he might be allowed on the beach after dinner.

The woman nodded. “Mmm-hmm,” she said, deftly peeling the shell from a grilled prawn.

The boy turned then to his father, who was licking chili sauce from the fingers of one hand. “Will you help with the canoe, Dad?” the boy pleaded.

“I don’t know,” the man said. In his other hand, he held what looked revoltingly like the severed claw of a crab.

“Nobody’s claimed it,” whined the boy.

“They will if we fix it up,“ replied the man.

“We could use it for fishing,” the boy went on. “I already made some paddles.”

“After dinner,” sighed the man.

Ayu looked past the boy to the girl, who sat facing the azalea. On her plate was a mound of steamed white rice, nothing more. Between bites of rice, she sipped from a tall glass of pineapple juice. One of the girl’s eyes seemed to be gazing far off into the distance, as if she had been momentarily distracted by a happy thought.

Ayu trembled inside, with the same shivery thrill she’d felt when Pie had called her sister.

The girl said she had discovered an island where the sun always shined, where nobody worked and mangos hung ripe from the trees.

“Where’s that sweetie?” asked the man, smiling.

“It’s called Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o,” the girl replied.

“Yeah, right,” said the boy, who had a tendency toward sarcasm.

But Ayu did not hear his retort. Her mind was reeling. Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o! She sat back in the dirt beneath the azalea, knowing that she must follow this girl, no matter what dangers might confront her. She imagined her joyful reunion with Pie—the exclamations of surprise, the stories of courage and daring.

While the little crab slipped deeper into fancy, the life of the café bustled on around her. Cooks re-stoked the outdoor grill with coconut husks; waiters delivered steaming plates and cleared empty ones. Glasses clinked, forks clattered, lips smacked, teeth crunched. Not only on seafood, but on other specialties of the house: duck, chicken, water buffalo, goat. Diners came and went in waves, until at last the evening’s shift had ended.

The girl ate a dessert of sliced watermelon and papaya. The man and boy finished a game of chess. The woman closed a letter with the word love, then announced it was time for bed.

The family filed out along a brick pathway, past the smoky outdoor grills. The girl said something to the man, who swung her up astride his shoulders. She glanced back into the restaurant, and Ayu had no doubt that the girl was looking for her. She scrambled to the rim of the stone urn and raised one claw like a flag.

The girl seemed to shout in recognition, which encouraged Ayu to extend both claws in the air, like a prizefighter who has just been declared champion of the world. She swayed forward in the electric light, hungry for happiness.

And then the boy dodged around his father’s legs. He came charging at Ayu, arms outstretched, hands grasping. In her terror, the crab teetered on the rim. The boy was nearly upon her, his bare feet churning monstrously in the sand. He bounded forward, turning in mid-leap, and at the same moment snatching up the handle of the forgotten net. He landed with his back to the urn, the sand shuddering on impact.

Ayu toppled over and lay still as stone, listening. She readied herself to pinch, to mangle if necessary. But the dreaded hand did not come. The boy had not seen her, for his eyes looked only to his precious net. She heard him running to join his family, and then their voices faded with their footsteps.

Chapter 7

Separating Sheep from Goats

As a general rule, crabs do not lie on their backs. Not while they live and breathe. But in the long moments after the incident with the boy, Ayu lay just as she had fallen, her back buried in the loose dirt beneath the azalea.

It was not fear that overcame her crab’s inclination for uprightness. Or even shock. The feeling that paralyzed her, that left her legs dangling limply in the dark, was something like shame.

She had been so certain of the girl, so quick to assume friendship. When in fact she had remained altogether unnoticed. The boy had forgotten his net, left it leaning against a chair. The girl had called his attention to this oversight, nothing more. And Ayu had waved like a shipwrecked sailor. Compared to that ridiculous exhibition, her present state of vulnerability felt like shelter, like safety.

Strength and confidence seemed to leak from her joints, leaving a vacant space behind. Into that void flowed embarrassment and disappointment. She might have died there, with the red petals drifting down upon her breast, if she had not recalled, with fateful clarity, the only other crab she had seen lying on its back: her father.

The force of that memory flipped Ayu onto her feet. And just in time, too. Among humans, there were no safe occasions for inadequacy. Even the briefest lapse could have dire consequences—something much, much worse than self-pity. Like the frying pan. Or the barbecue.

Now that the café had closed for the evening, the kitchen staff began tending to their own sustenance. A mackerel as long as your leg had been sliced into thick steaks, brushed with lime juice and sesame oil, then grilled over coconut husks. The waiters served the cooks first, then themselves, the entire crew sprawling down at the tables nearest the red azalea.

Ayu retreated into shadow, watching men and women wield their forks. She climbed out of the urn and down its far side, then made her way around the restaurant toward the kitchen, drawn by the smell of coconuts. She approached the back door, where heaps of coconut husks lay piled under the palm trees, along with various peels, rinds, and vegetable trimmings.

“Careful,” warned a voice in the dark.

Ayu stopped in mid-scuttle. Her eyes rotated on their stalks. The voice had come from behind. It was not an unfriendly voice, but it had a sort of chewy sound, like someone talking with her mouth full.

“They eat crabs, you know,” added the voice, in its ruminative way.

“Who does?” whispered Ayu, not daring to move.

“People, of course. They’ll eat anything.”

Ayu peered into the dimness. The light of the electric moons, so bright at close range, quickly faded among the tree trunks. She noticed the eye first, large and liquid, framed by long, soft lashes. Then the high forehead, sloping to a small, pink nose. The ear drooping demurely below the jawbone. And crowning this profile—a twin tiara of horns sweeping up and back with an effect both elegant and modest.

She had never seen such a creature before, although Grandfather had told stories of horned animals called sheep, who seldom acted on their own initiative, doing only as their companions did. Grandfather said that a single human could control dozens of these unfortunate beasts, herding them at whim, like a shark toying with a school of minnows. He had frequently reminded Ayu that crabs were not sheep, and Ayu had just as frequently wondered how anyone could confuse the two. According to him, sheep had only four legs, and thick, curly hair instead of a hard shell.

Was this animal a sheep? It lay on its belly at the base of a palm tree, so she could not count its legs. But it did appear to have a thick covering of hair, fine pale hairs even whiter than the sand. As Ayu crept closer, she saw that it wore a collar of rope around its neck.

She was about to ask the creature its name when a figure loomed in the kitchen doorway. A round-faced woman stepped out, holding a panful of vegetable scraps.

“Here, Pashmina,” she said, flipping the scraps toward the tree.

Ayu cowered under a hail of melon rinds and cabbage leaves. She waited for the woman to turn back inside, then peeked above the debris. The creature was standing now, on four slim legs, each leg adorned with a cascade of long, soft-looking hair. The little crab felt the shiver again, that tingly thrill which seemed to accompany all of her encounters with handsome strangers.

Pashmina smiled at Ayu. “Better come over here,” she said, “out of the light.”

Ayu scrabbled gratefully into the shelter of darkness. She could already sense the surge of affection rising inside her, and struggled to fight it down. Remember the boy, she told herself. Remember the net.

Meanwhile, Pashmina folded her legs beneath her belly and sank plumply to the sand. “You are a pretty sort of crab,” she said, as if it were some simple fact.

Ayu blushed to the ends of her pincers. “I’m—I’m a coconut crab,” she stammered.

“Really?” said Pashmina. “Coconut crab? I thought that was just something the head cook invented. You know—like pepper prawns or drunken goat.”

“Drunken goat?”

Pashmina lowered her eyelashes, but did not otherwise respond. She had taken an immediate liking to this shy crab, who seemed to know nothing of people and their appetites. It might cause her pain to know that “coconut crab” meant crab steamed in a sauce of coconut milk spiced with curry. Or that “drunken goat” was a stew of tender young goat meat, marinated in plum wine. Pashmina, of course, was a goat herself, and next in line for the table. The humans had fattened her on good grass, on sweet grain, on bread and rice and papayas; now it was her turn to fatten the humans. All the island’s goats knew of their obligations in this arrangement. Pashmina had long ago accepted her fate.

And yet, the collar grew disagreeably warm about her neck. Pashmina had the sudden urge to test it, to hurl her weight pointlessly against the tether. She looked at the crab, who looked back at her, eyes wide at the ends of their stalks. Pashmina saw admiration there, as well as curiosity, and a shy hope. She did not want to tell the crab that—in a few days time—she would be drunken goat.

Strangely enough, she felt almost ashamed of her predicament, and of the docile resignation with which she had allowed herself to be caught and tied and fed. Goats, as she knew all too well, sometimes pulled carts or carried packsaddles. While they lived, goats gave milk and mohair. And after that, meat and hides. That was the way of the herd. But how to tell this to the little crab in a way she would understand?

Ayu watched Pashmina’s eyes, and the long lashes that flickered over them like moments of sadness. She felt a strange stirring beneath her carapace, as if the hard shell had become suddenly too tight. This sense of entrapment spread outward until she could no longer sit still.

Ayu rose on her third legs and extended her claws, pincers open. She felt reckless and brave and tender, all at once. There was nothing, she thought, absolutely nothing that she wouldn’t do for this creature.

Her eyes swiveled toward the kitchen doorway, which had abruptly fallen dark.

The woman emerged from the darkness, pulling the door shut behind her. “Good night, Pashmina,” she said, in a gentle voice.

Ayu listened to the soft shuffle of the woman’s sandals on the path, until the sound faded under the hiss of waves. When she looked again at the goat, her chestnut eyes seemed even more downcast. Ayu followed Pashmina’s gaze to the rope that swung down from her neck to the ground, snaking amidst the melon rinds to the trunk of a nearby tree. The crab’s strong right claw opened and closed reflexively.

Although Ayu had not forgotten her grandfather, she did not think of him as she climbed over a wilted cabbage leaf. Nor did she think of Pie, who—at that very moment—was perched on a high branch of a mango tree on the other side of the island, less than a mile away as the hornbill flies. Stranger still, Ayu did not think of the girl with one faraway eye, the girl who had said “Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o” as if she had recently been there herself, and who had failed to notice a crab hiding beneath an azalea bush.

In fact, Ayu could hardly think at all, though she seemed ready to burst with feeling. Inside this small crab, the bond of friendship had grown beyond mere sympathy. She scrabbled towards the goat, stopping directly between Pashmina’s front hooves, her right claw raised as if in salute.

The goat bent her head to gaze wonderingly upon the crab. As she did so, the rope shifted along her neck, the noose drooping loosely below her chin.

Chapter 8

Pashmina Unbound

Neither the crab nor the goat had suspected that Ayu could jump. In general, crabs have a reputation for scuttling. Everyone knows that they can move quickly, but as a rule such movement is made either sideways or in retreat.

Later, Ayu could not say what had inspired her to leap directly into the air, seizing the rope between her pincers. For at least the third time since her skirmish with the tern, she had surprised herself with her own strength and daring.

But Pashmina had been even more surprised at the crab’s impetuous advance. It had been hard for her to see it coming, of course, since Ayu had been crouching beneath the goat’s chin. What she noticed was the quick upwards lunge of the claw, and then the weight of the crab hanging from her neck—not pinching her, exactly, although a few of her longer hairs might have been seized with the rope.

She would not have been at all frightened if Ayu’s claw had been powerful enough to instantly sever the cord. But the twisted fibers were unusually tough, and did not give way completely until the goat jerked her head with astonishment. Although Pashmina’s neck may have looked delicate and graceful, it was also lithe, muscular—and limber as a catapult.

When the crab jumped, the goat tossed her head—reflexively, in the same way that you might flinch at the approach of a bee. You suspect that the insect means you no injury, and yet you draw back, almost violently.

In this case, Pashmina swung her chin upwards and to the right, adding a centrifugal force to the already considerable pressure applied by Ayu’s pincers. When the goat’s neck reached the limits of its flexibility, her head—anchored so firmly to her body (and thence the ground)—stopped abruptly, like the end of a catapult. A catapult, as you know, can be used to hurl an object much farther and faster than ordinarily possible, even if that object is a coconut crab.

As Ayu sailed into the night air, the severed ends of the collar fell from her claw. Pashmina watched her go, rising away among the darkened trunks, tracing a shadowy arc that ended with a sharp crack—the fractured sound of shell against wood.

The goat stood still as death, listening. She was not afraid to move, just unused to it. She had been tied behind the restaurant for at least a week, and before that to a concrete post beside a thatched cottage. Her once-nimble legs had stiffened with idleness. She wanted to run to the spot where Ayu lay, silent now, after that awful note of impact. The little crab must be hurt, she thought, or worse—bleeding, broken. And it was all her fault. She had to do something. But her four hooves seemed to have taken root beneath the palm tree. Instead of bounding forward, head down, as any goat should do in times of trouble, Pashmina lifted her chin and cried—a helpless, stricken “Maaaaaaa!”

Chapter 9

Pie in the Sky

In the mango tree, Pie cocked her head to listen. Although the hornbill had not been precisely dreaming, she had been brooding (as birds will do) on the events of the past month.

After all, she had recently left her home and family behind. Bade farewell to the forest of figs and papayas, to the shadowy branches and their restless leaves. Turned her back on the snowcapped mountains and flown into the sunlight. Without saying so much as a goodbye.

During those first few days alone, with only the blue sea for a companion, Pie had imagined that she was escaping from adults. From her father, who insisted that she do as hornbills always had done. And from her own adulthood, that coming-of-age which seemed more like a prison than a privilege.

But now she realized that what she had truly escaped was childhood—the company of her lively brothers and sisters, the cacophony of her noisy cousins. There would be no more bickering over a ripe piece of fruit, no more games of peck-the-tail-on-the monkey. That part of her life was over. And now that it was over, she missed it.

If her mother had been there to comfort her, she might have cried. But alone and (she thought) far from anyone who knew her, Pie remained silent and still. The tears came, drop by drop from each of her blue-ringed eyes, but no sobs, not even a sniffle.

Perhaps that is why she heard those strange sounds, muffled by thousands of palm fronds and a mile of damp air, from the other side of the sleeping island. What was it? The crack of a shell? The bleat of a goat?

And then, silence, again. The murmuring silence of insect wings and waves on sand, the slow rustle of a land snail traversing a dry leaf, the soft sighs of humans adrift in their comfortable beds.

Pie thought of the old grandfather crab who slumbered inside his burrow, the putter and grumble of his snores rising from below, as if his groanings were the island’s own complaint. There would have been no one to hear him now for days. He was alone and would remain that way, the sole hostage in his solitary home, unless she could find Ayu.

What could have happened to the little crab? Pie and Grandfather had called her name, then searched the palm trees, then scoured the beach for some sort of clue to her disappearance. The hornbill could remember Ayu curled inside a coconut shell like a chick in a nest. But the storm had washed the sand clean. There were no abandoned husks, no tell-tale tracks. Only an absence that Grandfather experienced as pain and Pie felt as puzzlement. Where could she be? That little crab who was so shy, so eager to please? Who was, Pie had to admit, the first friend of her new, adult life.

For three days, Pie had flown in ever-widening circles around the island. The sea was flecked with flotsam set awash by the storm: throngs of coconuts, rafts of palm fronds, driftwood of all shapes and sizes, from tiny twigs to full tree trunks, along with the occasional oil drum or beach sandal. Pie skimmed low over the water to examine each bit of floating debris, half-afraid of what she might find. But there were no signs of Ayu.

Each evening she returned to the island, where she and Grandfather Crab shared a meal of coconut. There was no need for her to twist the nuts from the trees, as the wind had blown hundreds to the sand. She did not tell Ayu’s grandfather about the swift currents that swirled relentlessly toward the horizon, or the sharp-toothed fish that lurked beneath every scrap of driftwood. She did her best to reassure him, promising to fly farther the next day, describing how, from a distance, the island itself resembled a coconut crab, claws folded under its chin, as if giving thanks for a scrap of good news.

To Pie, Grandfather seemed relentlessly optimistic. “Ayu’s a tough nut,” he told her, over and over. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

But after hours in the air, the hornbill had her doubts. To tell the truth, she felt like giving up the search. It was hopeless, really. The ocean was so big, and Ayu so small. That crab, Pie thought, couldn’t have disappeared more completely if she’d tried. After all, she had vanished before dawn. She had whispered no hint of her departure, and left no message of farewell. Just like Pie herself.

The hornbill wondered—and not for the first time—if any of her own family had flown frantic through the forest canopy, calling her name. And the answer, as usual, was yes. They would have noticed her absence at breakfast. No hornbill ever missed breakfast. Her father would have organized search parties, sent scouts to question the other tree dwellers—the gibbons and the pangolins, the flying lemurs and the slow loris, with her huge round eyes.

She could almost see her mother’s worry—the base of her beak darkening to the color of a bruise, her tail feathers splayed and drooping.

Without thinking, Pie spread her wings as if to fly.

“Don’t go yet,” said Grandfather. “I have a plan.”

Pie shook her head, startled. Had she been going somewhere? Before meeting the coconut crabs, she’d had no destination in mind. She’d merely been getting away from home, or if not home precisely, from the limitations of home. What a relief it had been to hear Ayu’s bashful voice high in that palm tree, what a comfort to sit on a stump and eat and drink and tell stories of Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o.

“I don’t say,” Grandfather went on, “that Ayu’s not coming home, but I do say”—and here he sighed, deeply—“she’s not coming anytime soon.”

“It’s not her fault!” Pie blurted.

“Or yours,” said Grandfather mildly, his eyes rotating on their stalks. “You’ve been a good friend, Pie,” Grandfather went on, “but it’s time.”

By the following morning, Pie had twisted a month’s worth of coconuts from the trees. She knew that it wasn’t necessary—there were plenty on the sand already—but she felt guilty for leaving Grandfather alone.

“I’ll be back,” she’d told him, “whether I find Ayu or not.”

“You’ll find her,” Grandfather had said, “or she’ll find you.”

He reminded Pie not to worry about him (he had a few friends among the fiddler crabs and mudskippers) and to stick to their plan. Fly high and far, until she found the great current that swept north and east along the islands. Then follow that current, exploring each patch of sand and palms, seeking news of Ayu.

And so she had—flying higher and farther than she’d ever dreamed before. She had roosted on dozens of islets, some scarcely more than a damp patch of coral. She had talked to sandpipers and sea cows, plovers and pittas, hermit crabs and ghost crabs. None of them had seen or heard of Ayu.

And yet, Pie had to admit, her search had not been entirely fruitless. Pie found that she enjoyed watching the sea unfold beneath her, always beautiful and new, that she liked meeting strange animals and hearing their exotic voices. What stories she would tell someday! About birds with green legs and slender beaks, or tiny crabs who spent each low tide making elaborate sand sculptures that the next high tide would wash away.

And so the time passed until, one evening, she had spied an island speckled with countless tiny lights, as if a swarm of stars had been brought suddenly to earth. It was a large island, cultivated by humans, and the scent of mangoes drew Pie to the tree where she now sat, no longer brooding, but restless. Those sounds she had heard—the brittle crack, followed by the stricken bleat—had aroused a peculiar apprehension in her.

For some reason, she thought of the brisk whosk-whosk of her father’s wings in flight, and then of the wheezy creak of Grandfather Crab’s arthritic joints. She told herself that she was neither lonesome nor homesick, but only a little peckish. Nothing that a ripe mango wouldn’t fix.

She listened again, turning her bill doubtfully from left to right, then spread her feathers wide to catch the night air.

Chapter 10

Moonstruck

This was more like flying, Ayu thought, because she moved in an arc above the ground. When the tern had dropped her, such a long, long time ago, she’d been merely falling. But now the dark bulk of the palm trees loomed terrifyingly ahead. A sort of awe swelled inside her, along with fear and exultation, so that there seemed hardly room enough inside her carapace for all of these feelings.

She raised her claws instinctively, soaring between two thick trunks, as if she had the power to change her course. Which she did not. The path of her flight was as fixed in its way as the path of the moon across the sky.

By chance, that path had taken her safely between two trees. By coincidence, it now revealed a third tree, unmoved by her approach.

The cracking sound that stirred a goat to bleat and a hornbill to take wing was the splintering of crab shell against palm timber.

Ayu herself did not hear anything. She knew only the sudden shock of impact—and then a strange relief. She hung suspended from the palm trunk, clinging by the sharp points of her two outstretched claws. That cramped sense of swollenness had been knocked clean away. She took a deep breath, filling all of the new space inside of her with warmth and air.

The breach in the underside of her shell widened like a trap door. Ayu wriggled out and down from the old husk, in the same way that you might shed a tight-fitting sweater. This was not the first time she had molted, of course. All crabs molt many times over, since their hard outer skeletons cannot grow with them as our inner ones do.

Each molt marks a milestone in a crab’s life, a graduation of sorts, not only from smaller to larger, but from less to more—more capable, more competent, more mature. But with this growth comes danger.

Ayu paused beneath her cast-off shell, the husk dangling from the tree like some translucent ghost of a crab, pale and vacant. She clasped a ridge of bark as tightly as she could with her tender new claws and shivered in the breeze. On her home island, she would have dug a snug burrow in the soft sand, then waited overnight while her fresh shell hardened. Grandfather would have brought sweet bits of coconut to eat, and cool water to drink, and—to pass the time—told stories of the days before the fishermen came.

But what should she do now? In this strange place, where the night glistened with unknown perils?

First, get down from the tree, out of the moon’s glare, where any hungry bird or beast could see her. And quickly.

Then find shelter—a thorny bush, a wind-downed branch, a pile of leaves. Any place where she could protect her suddenly thin skin, her newly defenseless belly.

Was that wings she heard? The beat of the surf? Or the rhythm of her own thumping heart?

Move, she told herself, as her third legs touched the sand. There, to that clump of cactus. She backed beneath an overhanging limb of spines, then folded her claws before her, like the two halves of a shield.

The wingbeats passed above like a swift shadow, fading, fading, then gradually re-approaching, as if the hunter were circling its prey.

Ayu did not dare look, but the white goat, stepping gingerly into the moonlight, turned her head upwards. Through a window in the palm fronds, Pashmina saw the silhouette of a broad-winged bird with an odd protuberance on its beak, almost like a horn. The bird banked and wheeled, its wings whisking air. Then it was gone and the quiet came again. The hum of insects, the whisper of waves.

Pashmina peered uncertainly into the palm forest, afraid of what she might find there. Oh that poor little crab. Tears clouded her eyes, and another bleat gathered in her throat. The goat hung her head, humiliated by her own fear. It’s all my fault, she thought, almost choking with shame, as if the tether had been tightened like a noose.

She stared down at her front hooves, nearly hidden by a tangle of green, sniffing pitifully. The stale scent of cabbage leaves infiltrated her sensitive nostrils. How long had it been since she’d tasted anything fresh? Not for days and days. Not since she had been tied behind the restaurant kitchen. Her head drooped even lower. Stale cabbage and bitter rinds—that’s all she could look forward to—stale cabbage and bitter rinds, until that deathly fragrant evening when she would find herself on the menu.

Pashmina raised a slender hoof to her chin, aiming a futile scratch at her collar. She missed—or, at least, she thought she missed. She tried again, bending her foreleg to catch the rope that was no longer there. She missed again, then stamped the ground in frustration.

In her anguish, the goat had forgotten the object of Ayu’s leap. She did not remember the noose falling from her neck, the rope severed by a claw. She knew only that she had tossed her head, flinging the little crab high in the air.

Of course, if Ayu had not cut the collar, Pashmina would not have been at liberty to follow her into the shadows. At precisely a rope’s length from a palm tree, the tether would have thwarted her progress. The goat would not have continued into a leafy thicket, or raised her eyes upwards, through an opening in the forest canopy. And she definitely would not have seen a hornbill, wings spread wide before the moon.

Underneath the cactus, Ayu lowered her claws and looked at the sad curve of Pashmina’s elegant neck. Although the severed collar had fallen in the dirt, its encircling imprint remained in the goat’s fine white hair. This beautiful absence astonished the crab.

Had she really done that? Had she actually helped a stranger? Was she a crab with grit and pluck? The sort of crab you could trust in a pinch?

Her heart swelled with love for the mournful goat. “Here, Pashmina,” she said, remembering the woman in the kitchen doorway, the note of fondness in that voice.

Pashmina twisted toward the sound, stiff-legged and startled, ready to run. Before her, the dark trunk of a palm tree loomed upwards. And on it, the dull glint of the clinging shell, like the memory of a coconut crab.

“Ohhh,” said the goat, relieved to see Ayu looking quite intact, though strangely pale. She stepped forward and raised her head to nuzzle the ghostly husk. But at her touch, the shell dropped from the tree and smashed on the ground.

Pashmina stared at the shattered fragments of claw and carapace, too stricken even to blink. “Maaa,” she whimpered. “Maaa.”

“Shush,” gasped the crab, thinking of the hunter’s wingbeats, never suspecting that their rhythm had been that of a familiar hornbill (the only hornbill, in fact, with which she had ever been familiar). But any freshly molted crab—even one who is justifiably proud of her abilities—feels keenly exposed. Without her ordinary armor, a crab must defend herself by vigilance and by stealth. As much as she wanted Pashmina to notice her, Ayu did not want to attract the attention of a potential predator, winged or otherwise.

She scrabbled out from under the cactus. “Come on,” she beckoned.

The goat looked on the crab with disbelief. She recognized the voice, despite its newly commanding tone. But surely this crab was much bigger than her little friend. And not just bigger, but shinier and smoother. This crab practically gleamed, as if her shell had been buffed to a glossy brilliance.

“Who are you?” asked Pashmina suspiciously.

“It’s me,” Ayu whispered, “the coconut crab. I molted.”

“You what?”

“Molted.”

“I don’t understand,” said the goat, her head askance, gazing at the crab with one large, liquid eye.

“I’ll tell you later,” Ayu said in a rush. “Shouldn’t we be getting away from here?”

For the first time that night, Pashmina realized that she was free. She smiled sheepishly, which is not particularly hard for a goat, then tossed her head so that a lock of white hair fell between her spiked horns.

“You’re right,” she said, touching her muzzle to the ground. “Let’s go.”

Ayu grasped a clawful of neck hair and swung easily aboard, as if she had been riding goats all her life. She settled herself onto the soft crown of Pashmina’s head, protected on either side by the graceful curve of horns.

Chapter 11

The Fugitives

Although she had been honestly grateful for the turtle—for that broad back which had buoyed her to this island—gratitude did not begin to describe what Ayu felt for the goat. For one thing, Pashmina was not covered with algae and barnacles. The goat’s luxurious hair was as soft and comfortable as a feather bed. She was also tall and sure-footed. And dry.

The coconut crab sat between the goat’s two sheltering horns, riding with a giddy sort of rapture. With the turtle, she had been a passenger. With Pashmina, she was an accomplice.

Together, the two friends stole farther and farther from the café, skirting the dozy village of beach huts and bungalows, keeping carefully in the shadows.

From time to time, Ayu whispered in the goat’s ear, and the goat whispered back. The crab was thrilled by the furtive confidence of these exchanges.

“Do you smell something sweet?” Ayu asked, as they tiptoed though a dark orchard.

“Mangoes,” murmured the goat. “Haven’t you tried them?”

“Not yet,” the crab admitted. “I’m new here, you know.”

The goat chuckled under her breath. “I know,” she said affectionately.

Ayu could feel the blood surging into the very tips of her antennae. She pulled her legs firmly beneath her carapace, to stop their trembling. What was it about this goat which made her feel as if every word were a gift?

She had liked the turtle well enough, but had not found much sympathy in sighing. And while she had been in awe of the hornbill, her admiration had made her bashful. But with Pashmina, she was positively chatty. And the more they talked, the more the crab wanted to tell.

She told about the tern and its dagger beak, about the fishes that flew like butterflies, and about the little girl with the faraway eye who spoke of Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o. That island of everlasting sunshine, where goats did no work, and the fruit hung ripe on the trees.

The part about the goats was her own invention, of course, but it seemed reasonable to the crab. After all, the girl had said nobody worked, which had to include goats, didn’t it? If the island really was so wonderful, then it must have goats. She was sure of that, and so why not mention it?

But for some reason, Ayu did not mention Pie. Or her own desire to visit Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o. She could not explain why she hid these secrets or if, in fact, they were secrets at all.

Nevertheless, when Pashmina cried, “Let’s go there,” the crab shuddered apprehensively, as if she’d been caught in some sly deception. Ayu had been enjoying herself so much, perched cozily on Pashmina’s regal head, slipping stealthily through the dark, responding to each of the goat’s exclamations with yet another amazing tale. She had never been the one who told the stories. She hadn’t realized what power there was in deciding which parts to leave out.

When Ayu described the episode with the tern, for instance, she left out the pain she’d felt on the initial attack—that sense of absolute betrayal. Nor did she tell about her father—the brief flash she’d had of him falling while she’d been falling herself. By omitting these fearful details, she found it easier to forget that she had ever been a young crab alone at the top of a palm tree, too weak to open a coconut.

Of course, Ayu knew that neglecting to tell Pashmina about the boy did not mean that she herself had forgotten about him—or his net. In order to reach Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o, they would have to find and follow the girl. In order to follow the girl, they would have to outmaneuver her brother. The crab flexed her claws doubtfully. They were still soft from the molt.

“Do you really,” Ayu paused, all the bluster gone from her voice, “really want to go?”

“We have to go somewhere,” Pashmina said, stepping from behind the ribbed buttresses of a banyan tree. “They’ll be after me, you know.”

Looking ahead, Ayu saw a shimmering ribbon of sand, and beyond that the black and silver sea, stretched out beneath the moon like a blank invitation. Was Pie’s magical island really out there? She tried to imagine herself climbing a fig tree while dozens of hornbills called their noisy greetings. But this did not seem even remotely possible.

“Who are they?” Ayu whispered, although the beach was empty.

“The cooks.”

Ayu was about to ask why when she remembered the sounds of the café. Underneath the talk and laughter, besides the sizzle of sesame oil and the clink of forks, there had been the persistent crunching of teeth.

The crab did not feel herself shudder or hear herself sigh. But when Pashmina lifted her head slightly, Ayu nestled fondly into the goat’s silken hair.

“Don’t worry,” Pashmina said. “We’ll make it.”

“I’m not worried,” Ayu replied, suddenly brave again. “But I’ll have to hide a few more hours,” she said, raising one claw in the moonlight, “until my shell hardens.”

The goat nodded her head in what she hoped was a reassuring fashion. She wasn’t actually sure they would make it, but it had seemed like the right thing to say. She was suddenly very tired, so tired that her thoughts began to tumble together, like pebbles into a trough. “I’m glad,” she said, which wasn’t really what she’d planned to say, but it sounded better than I’m sleepy. She lay down behind the banyan tree and yawned so precipitously that the crab, balanced atop the goat’s head, was forced to clutch two clawfuls of goat hair to save herself from sliding off.

“Pash,” said the crab, laughing, but the goat was already asleep.

Chapter 12

Lines in the Sand

Pashmina dozed dreamlessly, her four legs folded beneath her belly. Because she had not expected freedom, she was neither elated nor agitated. What she felt, rather, was a great sense of relief. She had not harmed the little crab after all. And now they were together, on the verge of some fantastic adventure, before which she would be grateful for a good night’s sleep.

Between the goat’s twin horns, Ayu kept a snug watch, her eyes rotating from beach to forest and back again. She didn’t know precisely what she was looking for, but was delighted to stay awake and find out. So far, her sojourn on this island had been more thrilling than any dream she could ever have imagined. The world was so big, so complicated! There was so much she wanted to know—come to think of it, was there anything she didn’t want to know? As soon as Pashmina awoke, Ayu resolved to pepper her with questions about humans and their ways. Where they lived, what they ate, how they fashioned their outrigger canoes from wood and caulk and cord.

A gauzy dawn came and went, leaving a bright landscape both strange and familiar. There were the familiar palm trees, but also smaller trees with dark leaves that waved in the breeze like friendly hands. There was an emerald lagoon and its customary coral reef, but beyond the reef a procession of brightly painted boats prowled the deeper waters. And between the trees and the lagoon there was an ordinary expanse of white sand—ordinary except for the small figure of a girl coming barefoot along the beach, stooping occasionally to pick up a shell or a bit of smooth glass.

Ayu recognized her immediately, in the same way that you might recognize your favorite cousin walking up the street, long before she was close enough for you to see her face. The girl wore a faded blue dress patterned with moons and stars. As she walked, a flock of shore birds flushed repeatedly ahead of her, calling twee-wee-wee, before settling down again to probe the shallows with their long, thin beaks.

“Pash,” Ayu hissed.

“Mmmm,” murmured the goat happily, eyes still closed. Although no one had ever called her “Pash” before, she found that she liked it.

Ayu used her newly hardened claw to delicately pinch and lift one white ear. “It’s her!”

“Who?” yawned the goat, tilting her head sideways, so that the crab dangled like an earring.

“The girl!”

Pashmina opened one eye wide. Being a goat, that’s how she always looked at important things: with head turned, one eye focused on the object of interest. The girl stood at the water’s edge, the waves lapping at her toes. She held the hem of her dress in one hand, folding it into a makeshift pocket. The thin cotton bulged with shells of all shapes and sizes: smooth cowries, whorled conchs, horned turbans. When the girl bent to grab another cowrie, the goat backed into the shelter of the banyan tree.

“Are you sure?” Pashmina asked, peeking around the thick trunk.

Ayu clambered up between the goat’s horns. “That’s her,” she said.

With the pointed end of an auger shell, the girl sketched a design in the wet sand and began decorating it with driftwood and flower petals.

“What’s she doing?” whispered the crab.

“Making some sort of picture, I think.”

The girl looked up suddenly, as if she had heard something. She turned away from the lagoon and seemed to gaze at a point halfway between herself and the banyan tree.

Neither the crab nor the goat moved.

Pashmina studied the girl’s face. Did she know this human? There was a slight resemblance to the schoolteacher’s daughter, but she couldn’t be sure. People were tricky, always changing their clothes or their hair or even their scent.

Ayu wanted to wave, but not with both claws, as she had under the azalea. She thought perhaps a casual flip with the right pincer, or an easygoing salute, or maybe just a greeting—a dignified good morning or a cheerful hello. It should have been a simple task to choose one of these alternatives, but shyness overcame the crab. She froze, suspended between the goat’s horns, as if trapped in a spider’s web.

In the distance, a boy’s voice came crying, “Breakfast! Time for breakfast!”

Clutching her dress and its hoard of shells with both hands, the girl started away.

Pashmina sprang from behind the banyan tree. “Hey,” she called. “Wait!”

But the girl was already running, her quick feet splashing the thin water at every step.

With the crab clinging fast, Pashmina cantered across the sand to the edge of the lagoon, then stopped. From her goat-high perch, Ayu gazed down at the girl’s handiwork. It was indeed a picture—a picture of a tree with many branches. The trunk was fashioned from driftwood, its leaves from seaweed. At the tip of each branch, the girl had placed a flower petal: yellow hibiscus, red rhododendron, white bougainvillea. At the very top of the tree, the girl had drawn a bird.

The bird’s wings were stretched wide, as if it were just landing or taking off. Its tail was long, the feathers rounded at the tips. But none of these details captured the crab’s attention like the beak. The bird’s beak was large, and curved, with a hump on the top.

As Pashmina tilted her head to focus one eye on the picture, a wave washed the near edge, setting several flower petals adrift. “I saw a bird like that,” said the goat. “Last night.”

“Oh?” asked the crab, wishing she had told Pashmina all about Pie when she had first mentioned Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o.

“Yes,” Pashmina said, “when you molted. When I thought you were—”

Another wave curled along the beach, then receded, taking most of the picture with it. Only the very topmost branches remained etched in the sand, along with the hornbill.

Ayu looked down the shore, where the girl was just disappearing around the next point. “Let’s go,” urged the crab. “We’ve got to talk to her.”

Pashmina trotted forward a few steps, her hooves dipping daintily into the surf. The water felt deliciously warm on her legs. How long had it been since she last set foot on the beach or played in the sea? How long since she had chased a butterfly?

“Hold on,” she said to Ayu, whirling on her hind legs like a rodeo horse. The goat plunged ahead, a bit awkwardly at first, until her hooves found the firmer sand just above the advancing tide. Then she stretched into a gallop, moving faster and faster, until her hoofprints seemed to erase themselves before even the waves could cover them.

Chapter 13

A Bird’s Eye View

There was no denying it, Pie thought, from her perch atop the thatched roof of the café. Humans were interesting creatures. As a species, they were neither notably graceful nor exceptionally beautiful. But they had such peculiar manners, such curious habits. Not to mention their knack for doing strange and impenetrable things. Although she had spent only one night on the island, she was beginning to like the place.

Since dawn, the bird had watched and listened to a veritable parade of humanity. At first light, a woman had shuffled out of the forest, then stopped, hands on hips, in a little clearing strewn with melon rinds. Beneath the melon rinds, the ground looked as if it had been trampled, repeatedly, by an animal with small, sharp hooves. The woman had raised her round face to the heavens, opened her mouth, and then closed it without speaking, releasing only a little huff of air.

She did not look happy, although Pie had to admit that she did not seem particularly unhappy either. The woman rolled her head slowly from side to side, like a flower nodding on its stem. A thoughtful smile bloomed on her lips. She shuffled back into the forest, slightly faster than she had come.

After that, many people had flocked to the clearing—some thin and sleepy, rubbing their eyes with the backs of their brown knuckles, others fat with life, clutching cups of hot tea in their eager hands.

Now Pie could see two young men walking with their eyes cast down, as if they expected to find a great treasure on the ground. They stepped cautiously, almost tiptoeing away from the kitchen. Each wore a white apron tied firmly about the waist and one held a loose coil of manila rope in his hands. At regular intervals, the men would look meaningfully at each other, each pressing an upright index finger to his silent lips.

Many people came to the café to eat breakfast. Some ate platters of rice fried with eggs and shrimp. Some ate toasted bread with butter and jam. One young girl in a blue dress ordered a dish of mangoes, cut into thumbnail-sized cubes that she devoured one by one, stabbing each cube with a toothpick, then popping the orange fruit into her mouth.

Just watching her made the hornbill hungry again. She flew in a wide loop over the beach—passing high above the young men in white aprons, now scratching their heads perplexedly—then back into the forest, to the now familiar mango tree.

When Pie returned to the café, the girl and her three tablemates walked out from beneath the thatched roof and paused on the sand.

The hornbill opened her beak and let a mango pit fall to earth. She felt good and full.

“Look,” the girl cried. “A hornbill!”

The man and woman shaded their eyes with their hands, squinting upwards.

“Keep an eye out for others,” the man said, still squinting. “I believe this species travels in flocks.”

Pie, listening to these words, struggled to keep her tail feathers from drooping. She blinked several times, then ducked her head, as if to preen a stray plume.

The girl and her parents moved down the beach, gazing up at the trees for the other hornbills which only Pie knew were not there.

The boy did not go with them however. Instead, he stooped to gather a small chunk of coral. He took aim at the bird, not meanly, but with a sort of experimental malice. He threw and missed.

Pie inclined her head to look at him. “Kek-kek-kek,” she said, opening her wings for balance.

The boy spread his arms like wing bones. “Kook-a-lek,” he replied, in what he considered his best bird imitation.

Pie lifted herself into the air and circled the boy, calculating wind speed, altitude, and distance. She took aim, not maliciously, but with a sort of nostalgia, recalling all of her childhood games of bird-marks-the-spot. She did not miss.

“Hey!” shouted the boy, wiping the mess from his hair. He grabbed up a handful of crushed coral, but by then Pie had already flown off, yelping loudly: “Ayip-yip-yip.”

She rose upwards with the warming air, each beat of her strong wings whisking her higher and higher.

Yep, she chuckled to herself. I kind of like this place.

Chapter 14

For All to See

When the goat and the crab next caught sight of the girl, she was following her family away from the beach, toward a bungalow only a short walk from the café. The parents walked together, side by side, with the children trailing behind—the girl clutching her trove of shells, the boy chopping his net though the air like an axe.

By then, Pashmina was no longer breathless, but she still felt exhilarated. Never had she known such power in her limbs, such speed in her gait. They had tracked the girl’s footprints to the café, the goat’s hooves fairly skimming above the sand, neither of them recognizing that their path had begun to describe a circle. A circle that, if closed completely, might more resemble a noose.

Since Pashmina had been tied behind the kitchen, the seaside terrace at the front of the café looked unfamiliar to her. Ayu, as you might recall, had been there only once before, when the scene had been lit by electric lamps, winking like little moons beneath the sky. So it was not recognition but the sight of people that stopped them, hungry people with their heads bent over their plates, jaws working like locusts, as if they could never get enough to eat.

If you had been watching, you might’ve thought that the goat had stepped in a hole with both front feet. She stopped that fast—collapsing clumsily to her knees, her chin plowing the sand while the crab clutched wildly at one horn with both claws.

Cheechak, the bent-toed gecko, had been watching—not for stumbling goats, of course, but the sudden movement naturally caught his eye. Before he could think, Pashmina had regained her footing and sidestepped behind a banyan tree, the crab dangling behind one ear like a ten-legged article of jewelry.

Normally the lizard would’ve been sleeping at that time of day, behind a picture frame in the bungalow. But the unusual buzz of activity had awakened him. As a house gecko, he considered it his duty to keep watch—from a safe distance, of course.

When his humans were inside, Cheechak would observe them from above, slinking upside down on his adhesive toes, high in the rafters. Even when the boy climbed onto a chair, the net could not reach the rafters. But when the family went out, the gecko preferred a more panoramic perch, on a corner of the outer wall, just beneath the eaves of the thatched roof.

Although Pashmina and Ayu kept themselves hidden from those seated in the café, they remained in plain view of the gecko. Cheechak had seen plenty of goats; they were a common sight in the village. Crabs were common too, but what kind of crab was this?

The face reminded him of a hermit crab. He knew an entire colony of hermit crabs, nocturnal creatures that cowered at the base of a coconut palm during the day. But this crab didn’t carry a shell on its back, like the others.

The gecko stared at the crab, who climbed down the goat’s leg, then up the trunk of the banyan tree.

He licked one eye, using his tongue like a window washer.

The crab kept climbing—a skill that the gecko had not previously associated with crabs—until she reached the height of the windowsill.

He licked the other eye.

The crab resumed her climb, her own eyes rotating on their stalks. As she moved closer to the gecko’s hiding place beneath the eaves, she appeared to grow proportionately larger.

From his vantage point, the gecko could now see that the crab was not only much bigger than every hermit he had ever met, she was bigger than any other kind of crab on the island. In fact, either one of her claws looked more than formidable enough to crush the average household lizard.

He licked both eyes, several times, in rapid succession.

One branch of the banyan tree arched toward the bungalow, reaching almost to the roofline. The crab began to scuttle stealthily along this branch, pincers raised.

Cheechak held himself as still and unmoving as a patch of moss or crust of mold. If you looked very closely, you might’ve been able to catch the subtle rise and fall of his ribs as he breathed in and out. While he breathed, he focused on only one thing: the wooden wall of the bungalow. He examined its hue and texture with the careful attention that a skydiver gives her parachute. A moment later—as if by magic—his skin had adopted the same weathered colors, in the same grainy pattern.

This was one of the two tricks that every house gecko knew. Because the other trick involved the embarrassing process of shedding one’s tail, then making a desperate jump for the nearest vertical surface, Cheechak always tried this strategy first. Be the wall. It had worked many times before: against supposedly clear-sighted birds, snakes, and humans. He wasn’t quite invisible but, then again, he didn’t have to be.

Most of us see only what we are looking for. Even if Ayu had been considering lizard for lunch (which she wasn’t), it would’ve been easy to overlook Cheechak’s wall-colored silhouette. Our eyes and their attached brains are mostly interested in the differences that they can discover, in sharp edges and abrupt ends. But the gecko resembled only what was already there.

Ayu paused at the end of the branch, which sagged a little under her new weight. She stretched one claw towards the eaves, hoping to pull herself onto the thatch.

To Cheechak, the purplish tips of her pincers looked like violet death. The claw passed within a few inches of his bungalow-hued nose. It was too much to bear. Slowly, ever so slowly, he turned his head away from the crab. If he’d had any eyelids, he definitely would have closed them. He did not, he thought to himself, want to see it coming.

And then the goat spoke.

“Jump!” she cried, a plea as well as a command. “Jump!”

Cheechak’s head snapped to attention. And this is what he saw: the crab, flying through the air, her legs splayed wide enough to capture the sky. But behind her—and moving even faster—the net, so close that he could clearly distinguish the tiny knots that bound the mesh to the frame.

The gecko knew this net intimately. The boy carried it wherever he went, wielding it like a hatchet, chopping at unwary beetles and inattentive butterflies. It had a short, straight handle and an oval frame, made of some sort of flexible wood, with a shallow mesh bag. Cheechak had seen other lizards imprisoned in the mesh and paraded about like trophies: a frantic blue-tailed skink, a sad-eyed green anole. The woman had eventually negotiated their release—but Cheechak preferred not to test her powers of mercy.

The boy was screaming something. So was the crab. And there was another voice too—Cheechak wondered who it could be—and in the next moment—everything seemed to be happening so slowly—he wondered what had happened to his bent-toed grasp on the eaves.

The crab was airborne—anybody could see that—but she was not flying away from him. Come to think of it, the gap between them seemed to be closing. Was he flying too? Had he also jumped at the goat’s command? If so, their paths—as described by the simple laws of physics—would intersect very soon.

Amazing, thought Cheechak, realizing that the crab was even bigger than he had first thought. The width of her carapace was nearly twice his full length. Her underside was beautifully tinged with maroon and blue, with a ridged surface that provided a convenient grip for his toes. He held on gratefully. He’d never felt a crab’s belly before; he hoped she wouldn’t consider him rude—he hated to be rude—

And then their flight was over. With a rattle of thatch, the crab landed safely on the roof, her two pairs of walking legs poised like a grasshopper’s, ready to leap again. When Cheechak closed his mouth, one of the voices stopped screaming. The crab fell silent too, but not the boy.

“Did you see that?” he groaned, the disappointment almost strangling him.

“See what?” asked the man, turning up the path to the bungalow, followed by the woman and the girl.

The boy pointed at the roof. “Crab,” he choked. “Gecko.”

Ayu crouched on the thatch, trying to camouflage herself amidst the dry palm fronds. In her desperation to avoid the net, she hadn’t noticed the tiny lizard. And she wouldn’t have recognized him as a gecko anyway. There were no people on her island. Hence, there were no houses, which meant no house geckoes. In fact, she had never even heard the word before. What, she thought, is gecko? Did I gecko?

Meanwhile, Cheechak had scrambled out from beneath Ayu’s lowering carapace and onto her back. He raised himself with his forelegs, as if performing an athletic push-up, and peered down at the banyan tree. What a leap she’d made! And from a swaying branch too, as if it were just an ordinary stroll across the rafters! In his excitement, he failed to recall that—only moments earlier—he had been deathly afraid of the crab.

“You,” he breathed out. “Are amazing.”

Ayu was startled to hear these words. Partly by the compliment—which she still didn’t quite believe that she deserved—and partly by the source: the voice seemed to come from her own head. Keeping one eye fixed on the humans, she rotated the other on its stalk.

“Geck—” the boy stammered with frustration, “geck-geck-gecko!” He again hurled the net at the roof.

Cheechak flattened himself against the crab’s shell. He’d never mimicked the colors of another living creature before but—watching the net soar upwards—he desperately wanted to try. Be the crab, he repeated silently. Be the crab.

Ayu focused one part of her attention on the approaching net. She felt completely in control of the situation, as if there were plenty of time to track the net’s progress through the air and determine an appropriate response. After the initial evaluation, she was forced to admit that the boy had excellent aim. The net—in its parabolic course—was arcing precisely toward them—her and that unknown voice of praise, a small voice, so intimate that it had seemed to emanate from within her own shell. She was intensely curious about that voice. As a young crab she would have kept both eyes riveted on any threat—especially a fast-moving and well-aimed threat—but she was undeniably older now: stronger, braver, more confident.

Turning one eyestalk, she looked back over her shoulder. And this is what she saw: a small brown lizard, the drab color of weathered wood, that suddenly and inexplicably transformed into something else, something that remained a lizard, except that its skin became maroon and satin, just like her own, with the same intricate patterning, the same gorgeous depth of color. The word came to her as quick as a thought: beautiful.

And—nearly as quickly—came the net. Very soon Ayu would make the connection in her mind, would know that both crab and lizard were indeed beautiful, but there was no time for that realization at the moment. She raised both claws and caught the net by its oval frame, instantly rendering it no more dangerous than a coconut stem. The wood splintered wonderfully in her grasp, and she did not care where the fragments fell.

Chapter 15

They’re Only Human

Pashmina stood on her hind legs and peered through a small window, high on the rear wall of the bungalow. Ayu, crouching between the goat’s horns, watched with her. She was very curious about this family: mother and father, daughter and son. Cheechak, poised atop the crab’s carapace, looked for the boy first. He was lying face down on a narrow bed, his hands cupped over his ears.

“Time to pack,” said the woman cheerily.

“Geck-oh,” groaned the boy.

The girl started to cry. “I don’t want to go,” she said.

“Hmm,” said the man, hoisting her into his arms. “But aren’t you taking us to Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o?”

The girl pressed her face against her father’s shoulder, while he shuffled about the room in absent-minded loops. He would pick up a notebook, carry it a few paces, then put it down on a pile of clothing, only to grab it again on the next pass. When the pair neared the window, Pashmina dropped back on all four legs.

“Why is she so sad?” Ayu whispered to Cheechak.

“People have problems too, you know.”

“Like what?” asked the crab.

“I’m not sure,” the lizard confessed. “It’s just something we geckoes say.”

As you might have guessed, human behavior inspires much speculation among house geckoes. After all, without humans, there would be no houses. This does not imply that geckoes are, like dogs and cats, domesticated creatures. They are not. With humans they are neither friendly nor fierce, although they are occasionally furtive, feckless, finicky, or fastidious. House geckoes live alongside people but seldom understand them in the way that a horse or a hamster might.

“This is her home,” Pashmina said. “She’s sad about leaving.”

“Are they never coming back?” asked Ayu, thinking of her own island and its sole occupant.

“They go away,” said Cheechak, shrugging his shoulders. “They come back. That’s what people do.”

Behind the three animals, two men in white aprons walked dejectedly toward the café. One of them carried a jumbled coil of rope, its loose ends dragging on the path.

If either the gecko, the crab, or the goat had looked over their respective shoulders, they would have noticed the men stopping suddenly, then smiling at each other like long-lost friends. They would have seen the first man drop into a stealthy crouch, so that the hem of his apron brushed the ground like a grass skirt. But they did not look over their shoulders, because their attention had been drawn back to the bungalow’s small window.

The boy was standing on the bed now, looking at his father. “Can we take the canoe?” he pleaded.

“No,” said his father, still carrying the girl. “It’s too far without a sail. We’ll take the ferry.” He kissed the girl on the top of the head. “Besides,” he added, “I don’t think we’ve plugged all the leaks.”

The girl had stopped crying. She opened her eyes. Although a few damp tears still clouded her vision, she could see clearly enough. Her mother was gathering several neat piles of books and clothes on the wooden table. Her brother was frowning uncertainly, clutching a torn shred of netting in one hand. And—in the back window—the face of a white goat was peering curiously at her.

She stared back. It was certainly peculiar to catch sight of a goat peeping in a high window. And more peculiar still that the goat looked so familiar, as if she had seen it somewhere before. But what the girl found most peculiar were the two additional faces atop the goat’s head. One appeared to have the rotating eyestalks of a crab, while the other, much smaller, possessed something very much like the lidless gaze of a gecko.

When the girl opened her mouth in surprise, the three pairs of eyes widened simultaneously, as if each creature had been expecting her to speak. But in fact only Ayu wanted a word from her, although even the crab herself could not have said precisely what she would’ve liked to hear. Some recognition of their shared regrets, or the pain of leaving, something about Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o, or about the image of the hornbill sketched in the sand. Ayu wished again that she had told Pashmina about Pie, and wondered again why this omission made her feel so uncomfortable—as if it were somehow disloyal to admire both goat and bird, and to desire equal measures of their friendship and admiration.

Stretching her neck like a giraffe, Pashmina knew nothing of the crab’s anxious thoughts. She had simply been curious to discover what the girl might say, until the boy’s mention of the canoe had reminded her that—if they sincerely planned to remove drunken goat from the evening’s menu—they were still in need of a boat themselves.

Cheechak likewise had no inkling of Ayu’s distress. His attention had been captured by a more pressing source of anxiety. It was mid-morning now, and the sun had risen warmly above the palm trees. When he looked away from the girl, the gecko could see three nearly motionless shadows projected on the bungalow wall: goat with horns, crab with claws, and lizard with halo. At least, it looked like a halo—a sort of loop that crowned the space above his head. The mere presence of the halo was disconcerting enough, but what he found truly alarming was that the loop appeared to be growing stealthily larger, big enough to surround the crab now, and before too long it would encircle the goat’s head as well.

Cheechak could feel a familiar panic spreading through his limbs, hear the familiar voice sounding between his ears. Be the wall. Be the crab. Be anything, in fact, other than what he was: an inadequate and solitary lizard. Watching the wall, he could now detect some finer details in the looming halo. It appeared to be braided from numerous strands of coarse fibers, some of which, unraveling, cast their own stray shadows. Really, he thought, it was more like a noose than a halo, and at this realization he instinctively flattened himself against the crab.

His quick, slight movement seemed to trigger a veritable cascade of other actions. The halo’s silhouette passed first over his head, then the crab’s, and finally the goat’s, where it paused momentarily, as if suspended in the air by two invisible hands. Which is when Cheechak noticed the shadows of four hands made visible—each hand attached to a long arm readying to pull the noose taught. And also when—observing the outlines of himself and his companions, like the three layers of some outlandish cake—that he recognized that he was no longer solitary, that he was no longer trying to protect only himself, and that, in this situation, camouflage was not a viable strategy. There was no help to be found in just being the crab. He needed to be the gecko.

But what good was it to be a gecko when the noose was about to tighten? What use was his meager strength against the might of two grown men? His eyes followed the rope from Pashmina’s neck to the stubborn hands that held it, then up the long brown arms to the human faces and their confident grins. Cheechak saw the muscles in the men’s arms flex, in preparation for a final, triumphant yank.

And then the gecko looked down at the crab, who was looking at the girl, who was looking at the goat, who was looking over her shoulder at the men. And at that moment something happened, something that the gecko had never experienced before. He felt a seismic shift in awareness, as if the island itself had shuddered in its bed. Perhaps Pashmina and Ayu had felt it too, for they were now looking at him, while he was looking at them. They were looking at each other, three creatures related by naught except friendship and circumstance. Their eyes met for the merest instant but in that fraction of a fraction of a second, all of Cheechak’s questions were answered. Without another thought, he jumped.

Chapter 16

What the Fates Allow

Later, telling their story at the café, the two white-aproned men could not explain precisely how the goat had escaped. From some failure of imagination, neither human could grasp the notion of cooperation among animals, and neither suspected the talent for teamwork and timing in that trio of goat, crab, and gecko.

It all seemed like coincidence to them—the attack of the gecko (that’s what they called it: “the attack”)—because the lizard had leaped unpredictably onto the closer man’s face, landing with its four legs straddling his nose. He was not afraid of a house gecko, the man assured his audience, but the suddenness had surprised him and he stumbled backward, knocking the other man off his feet. And when he brought his hands to his face to remove the gecko—well, naturally, he had dropped the rope.

The goat meanwhile had reared onto her hind legs like a prancing horse and—although the men could not believe their eyes—the noose had fallen from her neck as if sheared by a knife. They showed the two severed ends to their co-workers, who clucked their tongues and sucked their teeth at this evidence of bad luck. Obviously it had been an inferior rope.

“It all happened so fast,” the man sighed. Like a single wave upon the sand. By the time he had recovered his balance, the gecko was gone, and the goat too.

On the open terrace, a small girl sat behind a green-husked coconut, sipping its water through a straw. She drank slowly, savoring each repetition of the story. By mid-morning, the gecko had grown to the size of a house cat, with whip-like tail and feline claws. And the goat wore a tiara atop her head, a garland of seashells woven between the twin tips of her horns.

The crab, however, appeared to have been forgotten. Unlike the others, its description did not blossom like a rose after rain. The two aproned waiters did not mention it at all, though the girl listened closely. Perhaps, in their excitement, they had failed to notice its violet-tinged claws, or perhaps those claws were the inspiration for the shell garland. In any case, none of the men or women at the café seemed to care that the story had only two marvels because, in their minds, only one was really of interest: the goat.

Although geckoes must be wary of cats, spiders, snakes, and owls, they do not ordinarily find themselves on a human menu. Goat, on the other hand, was the principal ingredient in many favorite dishes on the island. Besides drunken goat, there was curried goat, and honey-roasted goat, and goat with cinnamon and apricots. Now that this particular animal had escaped, many people found themselves suddenly craving a taste of goat, and the head cook found himself peppered with questions: What was he planning for dinner? When would he change the nightly special? Why didn’t he recapture the goat? Where could he get another? How about drunken water buffalo?

The head cook was not an unusually inflexible person but, when it came to the ingredients for his dishes, he did not like surprises. He sat down at an empty table and mopped his forehead with a damp towel. The breakfast rush was over, and it was time to prepare for the lunchtime crowds. On a typical day, the staff looked to their tasks without any instructions; they had worked together for so long that no one needed to be told to chop garlic or grind cumin or peel papaya. The café wasn’t an assembly line, where each person repeats the same small action over and over, and it wasn’t a potluck, where everyone does just what she pleases. It was a going concern, and each person did whatever task was necessary to keep it going. On some days, the cooks scrubbed silverware and the dishwashers fried sweet potatoes and the waiters heaved ice onto the fish trays, hauled yucca from the next village, or hunted down stray chickens.

But on this peculiar day, when so many strange events had already occurred, the staff gathered uncertainly around the head cook, waiting for him to determine their assignments. Ordinarily he was quite a decisive person but the early morning barrage of questions had left him exhausted. He dabbed at his forehead with the towel again, then draped it around the back of his thin neck. He yawned. He scratched his right cheek, just in front of the ear, where a mosquito had bitten him. Finally, he looked up at the sky and said, “What? Is this a sign?”

The two young waiters looked at each other with anxious smiles. Yes, they nodded. The moon, the rope, the gecko—what else could it be?

The head cook raised his skinny arms over his head and yawned again. “The planets?” he asked. “They do not want us to serve goat?” He turned in his chair until he could see the round-faced woman. The two of them had been married a very long time, so long that they could often finish each other’s thoughts.

“But how can that be?” he went on, as she looked back at him, tolerant but unsmiling. (He knew, of course, that she had been fond of the animal.) “Can it be human to do only what the fates allow?” The cook stood up now, as if asking the questions himself had given him new energy. “That’s like saying we can’t climb because we haven’t got claws!” He looked about the café at his staff; he was related to many of them, and liked them all. Some of them were nodding noncommittally, while others looked puzzled, unsure of the point he was trying to make. “Or that we can’t swim,” he continued, raising his voice, “because we haven’t got fins!”

“Or,” interrupted a small girl sitting on the open terrace, “that we can’t fly—because we haven’t got wings!”

The two waiters shook their heads enthusiastically. That’s right, they agreed. We can’t fly. Not far anyway.

But the head cook went on like he hadn’t heard the girl at all. In fact, he began to shout, as if the increase in volume might make his argument more convincing. “Are we going to let the moon and stars tell us what to eat?” he cried. “Are we going to let superstition run our lives?”

When nobody responded to his questions, the head cook glanced at his wife. To tell the truth, he had not yet decided what to serve for dinner, but he was leaning toward mackerel. “What do you think?” he asked her.

“I think,” said the round-faced woman, “that superstition brings bad luck.”

Chapter 17

Dimness Visible

Pashmina moved swiftly through the trees, running not with panic but with purpose. Her hooves rose deftly above fallen trees, leaped easily over ruts and gullies, found the open passage through tangles of vines as if the way had been marked with neon.

As she ran, the goat could hear her two friends talking excitedly. Disconnected words streamed away behind her: “hornbill” and “hero,” “coconut” and “canoe.” It didn’t seem to matter that their conversation was lost in the noisy rustle of leaves and branches. Nor did their extra weight slow her down in the slightest. Pashmina felt stronger and more confident than she ever had in her life. She was not a docile creature with a rope around her neck, placidly munching on melon rinds. She was a free goat.

She couldn’t be entirely certain what that meant, of course, because freedom and certainty rarely coincide. But she was happy to be going someplace, even if she didn’t quite know how to get there. She paused, panting, in an open grove of smooth-barked palms. Looking ahead, through a gap in the green fronds, she could see a white expanse of sand and then the calm green water of the lagoon.

Her first instinct was to canter onto the beach and run as fast as her legs could carry her—the last time she had done that, it had felt so wonderful! But then, remembering the morning, she realized that her gallop across the sand had taken place just a few hours ago! So much had happened to her since she’d met that crab! It was as if her whole previous life had been punctuated by commas and semicolons and then—out of the blue—here came dashes and exclamation points! To think that yesterday she had been content to be tied to a tree, waiting for the end of the sentence. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Period.

Then Pash, said the crab—and everything changed. Pash—a sound which made her ears flip upwards and strain to listen . . .

“Pash!” she heard, almost hissed in its urgency. “Get down!”

The goat dropped to her knees, startling a colony of hermit crabs that had gathered round a dried coconut husk. The little crabs, some no larger than a thumbnail, retreated so frantically from the potential threat that their shells spun shudderingly on the sand, like brightly colored tops fallen on their sides. Some of the shells were sharply pointed, like periwinkles, others sculpted like turbans, and still others shaped like spindles, augers, or helmets. But Pashmina took no notice of them, only sinking submissively into the shadow of the palm trunk. “What?” she asked, surprised at the unfamiliar tone in Ayu’s voice. “What is it?”

“Look,” said the coconut crab, still whispering, one eye rolling on its stalk to signal her distraction.

Pashmina gazed meekly across the sand, the happiness leaking from her like ice cream from a dropped cone. She didn’t know what she was supposed to see, but the exhilaration she’d felt—the pleasure of movement and the joy of freedom—seemed to dwindle with the sense that her friend was annoyed with her. In her brief, sheltered life, the goat had seldom paid attention to such feelings, as even the most sociable of herd goats tend to be a trifle thickheaded, content to mill about, graze, and chew their cuds. You can hardly blame them, of course, as a career of milk, meat, and leather leaves little room for introspection.

But this goat, as we know, was different. Her eyes did not have that marbled, maniacal stare that many goats adopt as a defense against sympathy. In fact, as she considered how unfair it was that Ayu should be irritated with her, when she had done nothing wrong, and wanted only to please her—this beautiful and fearless and many-legged creature who had now twice saved her from the rope—the goat’s eyes began to shine with a deep reservoir of feelings, so many feelings that, in the confusion, she forgot that she ought to be looking at something. She blinked, blinked again, then brushed one eye with the soft hair of her foreleg.

At the water’s edge, the boy and his father were alternately pushing and pulling at a weathered, single-outrigger canoe. Despite her slightly blurred vision, the goat could see that the canoe had once been brightly painted; there were streaks of blue on the bow, and traces of white and yellow on the outrigger. When the man was ankle-deep in the lagoon, the canoe began to float. The boy climbed in, then reached down for something: a long-handled wooden paddle, clumsily carved. The boy stroked frantically for several seconds, and the canoe rocked lazily in a slow circle around the man.

“Please let’s take it Dad,” said the boy, holding the paddle as if it were a giant spoon for stirring soup. “Please.”

“It doesn’t belong to us,” the man said.

“It doesn’t belong to anybody,” complained the boy.

“Someone probably lost it in the storm,” replied the man, grabbing the bow with both hands. He pulled the canoe back onto the sand and waited for the boy to climb out. “If it’s still here when we get back from Grandmother’s island,” he said, dragging the boat a few yards farther toward the palm trees, “we’ll finish fixing it up.”

“Yes!” shouted the boy. He jumped in the air, then hit the ground running, the sand flying happily from his heels.

The goat, watching from the shadows, experienced an odd shiver of recognition. Again she wiped the water from her eye with a foreleg, blinking. But this time, when her vision cleared, the crab was crouching on the sand beside her, gazing at her with the same mix of tenderness and curiosity that, earlier in the morning, had been bestowed on the crying girl.

“Are you sad, Pash?” Ayu asked, with only a trace of annoyance in her voice.

“No,” said the goat, “I mean, yes, I think I was—but I don’t, I’m not . . .” And then, looking at the crab—so brilliantly contained in her elaborate shell—she couldn’t say what she had felt, really, other than intensely, amazingly happy, then wretchedly confused, and so she said, “I’m not brave like you.” And then, seeing that her friend would protest, she rushed on—“I haven’t fought with terns or swum with turtles. I haven’t . . .”

And here her voiced tailed away, because now Ayu did look undeniably crabby: waving both claws in a gesture of exasperation, while her eyestalks wobbled crossly.

“Pash,” she cried. “I didn’t do any of those things on purpose—they just happened!” And then, her claws slumping to the sand, she groaned, “I don’t even know how to swim . . .” Ayu pulled her legs beneath her carapace, as if she were trying to make herself as small and compact as possible—an old habit left over from her days in a snail shell. When the man and the boy had mentioned the storm, she’d felt a real shiver of despair. How would she ever make it home? she thought forlornly. What if she never saw Grandfather again? The goat and the gecko both imagined she was some kind of super-crab but, if that hornbill hadn’t shown up, she might have starved to death on an island loaded with coconuts.

With that thought, Ayu began to heap sand onto her back, as if she wanted to bury herself at the base of the palm tree. To Cheechak, who had been clinging to her carapace with perfect crab-colored camouflage, this was an incentive to rise and reconsider his position. He didn’t understand what the crab and the goat were making such a fuss about, when the real problem, in his mind, was how to paddle a canoe without the benefit of opposable thumbs.

To Pashmina, watching through a gauze of tears, it appeared as if an integral part of the crab had incomprehensibly detached itself, like a soul in preparation for leaving the body. Her little gasp of surprise sounded almost like a sob, and when Cheechak turned his head to look at her, the shock made her flinch. During her personal storm of emotion—a virtual squall of feelings—she’d forgotten all about the gecko. In hindsight, it probably would’ve been more tactful if she’d simply said, “Oh, hello,” but instead she exclaimed—“I didn’t even notice you!”

Under ordinary circumstances, this wouldn’t have bothered Cheechak a bit, since avoiding notice is what geckoes do, but in the contagious atmosphere of doubt and self-pity, an inner voice whispered No one does. And while no sane gecko would mind in the slightest if he escaped the notice of every owl, shrike, hawk, house cat, boa constrictor, and boy-with-net that ever crossed his path, even the most independent of domestic lizards appreciates the attention of his friends. His skin unconsciously turned a pale, mottled hue—the embarrassing color of damp newspapers or moldy squash. Because he did feel embarrassed—who did he think he was, anyway, palling around with beautiful creatures that everyone wanted to look at?

This round-faced woman, for example, moving slowly toward them—she obviously couldn’t take her eyes off Pashmina. She held her left hand stretched out before her, palm up, bearing three lumps of sugar. One for each of us, Cheechak thought, before recalling that the human, like everyone else, probably hadn’t noticed him either. Her right hand was hidden behind her back—no doubt it concealed a second offering, another gift for the goat who, oddly enough, was still staring at him.

The gecko saw the goat’s nose twitch at the sweet scent of sugar even before her ears began to tremble with the woman’s honeyed voice.

“There you are, Pashmina,” she said, with what sounded like genuine affection. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

Cheechak expected the goat to stand up, like any goat would, and take the sugar, to nibble at the woman’s open palm and submit to her caresses. But instead she kept one liquid eye fixed on himself—or maybe it was only the crab that she was looking for, since he was still standing above Ayu’s now hidden carapace. As he watched, a tear welled in the corner of Pashmina’s eye, gathered itself into a taut droplet, and reached plumply for the sand. It seemed to fall so slowly that he could see himself reflected in its mirrored surface, his skin darkening with the imperceptible speed of a summer sunset, becoming ever more violet and variegated, like a crab shell buried in sand.

Perhaps that explains why he did not see the round-faced woman’s right arm snaking the collar around Pashmina’s neck. By the time he noticed her long fingers tying the knot, it was too late. There was nothing a gecko could do—except wish that he had done something sooner.

The woman stood up smartly, tugging on the rope that had been hidden along with the collar. “Come, Pashmina,” she said, her voice changed now, its sweetness tempered by a tinge of regret.

The goat stumbled to her feet, looked back once at the sand beneath the palm tree, and whimpered plaintively. “Maaa,” she said, as if that one syllable could capture all the pain and puzzlement of the moment. She tossed her head against the tether and stamped her front hooves. “Maaa,” she repeated, as the round-faced woman regained her balance, dug in her heels, and yanked with real force.

The goat staggered into line behind the woman. She took a few submissive steps, then glanced again at the sand, as if she expected help to spring from the shadows of palm fronds. When the woman yanked the rope a second time, the goat bleated loudly and with anguish. The sound seemed to echo among the tree trunks, overpowering the rustle of leaves and hum of insects. It mounted through the dim air and burst through the forest canopy, resonating, receding, then rising afresh. For a few seconds, the entire island seemed to shudder in distress. Long after the woman and goat had disappeared from view, you could still see a small patch of sand trembling in the shade of a palm tree.

Chapter 18

Humble Pie

As the sun drooped toward the horizon, the hornbill felt her spirits sag with it. Another day done, and she was no closer. Even worse, she no longer knew what or who she was supposed to be getting closer to. When she’d left home, the whole idea had been to go farther—beyond the confines of nest and island, beyond the clutches of family. No destination had been necessary. When she’d left Grandfather Crab, however, the bird had felt a real mission. Find the little coconut crab—and reunite her with her only living relative.

But what if Ayu, like herself, had wanted to get away? True, the crab hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort, but wouldn’t the hornbills be saying the same about her? Wouldn’t they be thinking, Gee, we thought she was happy here with us? Maybe they believed she’d been kidnapped, although that would have been easy to rule out. Even when hunters were stealthy enough to avoid the eyes of the forest, they always left tracks, with their five-toed feet, or their rolling carts, or their sharp-prowed canoes. On the morning after Ayu’s disappearance, she and Grandfather Crab had circled their island’s perimeter, looking for that characteristic groove in the sand, but they could find no sign of humans landing on the beach.

It was like the crab had sprouted wings and flown off, like a bird. A funny thought—but wasn’t it also funny how much she missed a friend she had only just met? And wasn’t it funny that she worried so much about the lonely old crab, when her own parents must have been yearning for even the tiniest scrap of news? Or maybe, she thought, with a sudden pang, they were not yearning, but resigned, or even angry—maybe they wouldn’t be happy to see a daughter who couldn’t fulfill her family responsibilities.

Although Pie had just eaten, she sniffed at the mango that hung from the branch above her. Its skin had turned a golden yellow-orange which, for this particular variety, meant it was very ripe—perhaps too ripe. She sniffed again. The sweetish, near-fermented smell made her eyes water.

From beneath the tree came the quick sound of bare feet hurrying along the path. The hornbill stepped into an opening in the foliage and looked down. It was the boy she had marked earlier in the day—just after breakfast, in fact. When he paused briefly, she considered marking him again, but her heart wasn’t in it.

For some reason, she thought of a story that her father used to tell when she was a chick. He had lived for some months in a mainland forest, inhabited by humans. One day, while flying above the riverbank, he had come across a young woman dragging a little boy by the arm. The boy was struggling to get away, and crying so loudly that a spry grandmother came rushing out of her hut. “What are you doing to that boy?” she asked. “This is my son,” the young woman responded, “and I am going to throw him into the river!” The grandmother clasped the top of her head in surprise. “Whatever for?” she asked. “Because,” said the young woman proudly, “his father is the best swimmer in the village!”

Although Pie had heard this story many times, she had never understood it before. From the way her own father had laughed at the end, she’d guessed that it was just another strange tale about humans and their impenetrable doings. Every bird or animal who’d lived among people knew a few such tales, and most of them were similarly hard to explain.

“Kek-kek,” she muttered to herself.

“Kook-a-lek,” came the reply.

When Pie looked down, there was the marked boy again, looking up—and holding something in his right hand. An undersized green mango, too hard to eat but not to throw.

Keeping one eye on this potential projectile, she turned her head and grasped the yellow-gold fruit from the branch above her. The mango’s skin split inside her bill, and the sugary tang of sun-ripened mango pulp revived her sporting instincts. As the boy’s arm drew back, the hornbill spread her wings to offer a more tempting target. After the arm came forward, she hopped nimbly onto the next branch, allowing the green mango to clatter harmlessly amidst the leaves, then bump its way back to the ground.

She waited calmly for the boy to bend over and retrieve his weapon. When the pale skin at the nape of his neck was exposed, she opened her bill, loosing her own missile. Gravity seized the oozing, yellow mass and bore it inexorably toward its target. Ordinarily, Pie would not have celebrated early. She knew from experience that an unexpected gust of wind could affect even the best-laid trajectories, but this drop-shot was a thing of beauty.

The leaves of the tree looked dark green and glossy in the lingering light. As the mango tumbled through sun and shadow, it shed golden droplets of syrupy nectar while, in the target zone, the boy’s thatch of chestnut hair parted like a theater curtain.

“Kuk-kuk,” she said admiringly.

Hearing her quiet chuckle, the boy turned his face upwards. Pie, whose gaze had remained fixed on the mango, noticed with some satisfaction that its skin split fully on impact, bursting in a mango-colored spew of pulp and juice.

The boy’s first howl communicated surprise and outrage, in that order. As a matter of fact, his surprise was so great that he dropped the green mango he had stooped to retrieve, using both hands to wipe the juice from his eyes. Pie hopped into the air and flew a slow victory lap around the tree, before alighting again within plain view of the boy.

“You—you—you,” he shouted, the pitch of his voice rising with each syllable.

Pie cocked her head to one side, the better to watch the show. From her superior vantage point, the play of emotions on the boy’s face triggered a procession of linked responses: his dismay was her delight; his indignation, her elation.

The bird and the boy looked each other in the eye. Not unexpectedly, both liked what they saw. A worthy opponent. An intelligent adversary. And the promise of more fun to come. The hornbill smiled in the hornbill way, her hard yellow beak opening slightly, and her short gray tongue peeking out from inside. The boy’s smile began at grudging and progressed to pleased, if not precisely appreciative.

They were both still smiling when the cry came. It was too far away to be loud and yet, at the same time, it felt too close to be ignored. They both heard a whimper, a wail, and a moan. There was anguish in these sounds, as if some animal were witnessing the end of something very dear to her, something vitally important. Because both the boy and the hornbill had been lucky so far, neither had ever experienced anything that painful. They didn’t understand their own sympathy with this pain, and that lack of understanding made them uncomfortable.

Yes, the boy had been shocked when the mango struck his face, but the hurt had been all on the surface. He had yelled at the bird, but the noise of his protest had been likewise only clatter. These terrible cries, however, betrayed a wound beneath the skin.

The bird and the boy looked away from each other, not knowing what to do or how to react, almost embarrassed to be subject to such strong emotion, together, when they had only just met. The boy glanced down at his bare feet, which were spattered with mango pulp, then began to run. Although he couldn’t have said why, he hoped his parents would be home in the bungalow.

As the boy raced away, the hornbill flapped her wings, lifting herself from the branch. The bird rose into the air, fell momentarily, then rose again, like a swimmer struggling, out of her depth. The contest with the boy had been only a distraction after all, and the overwhelming awareness of her dilemma came flooding back.

What to do? What to do? Although she couldn’t have pointed to her location on a map, she had a feeling that she was now closer to home than to the island where she’d met the coconut crabs. Wing-beats strengthening now, she lifted herself higher, until she could see out above the canopy of trees. There was the village below, with its thatch-roofed huts and sandy paths. There was the café, its lights twinkling in the sunset, a few early diners already hunched over bowls of lobster soup or plates of fried plantains.

Pie pulled herself upwards, ascending in an ever-widening spiral, until she could see the forest’s dimming edge, and a paler crescent of sand, the blue water of the lagoon, and the darker blue beyond the fringing reef. Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o, she thought, as the wind spilled from her wings, the island receding beneath her, if I knew where you were, would I go to you?

As the buildings and trees dwindled to the size of pebbles and twigs, the ocean seemed to expand. Its blueness grew large enough to encircle the island, then to dwarf it and, eventually, to mirror the dome of dusky sky. Pie climbed higher and higher into that dome, feeling the air thin and cool beneath her feathers, and cool and sharp inside her throat. Although the sun had sunk beneath the western horizon, a few reddish streaks of light reached like claws around the curvature of the earth.

Never had Pie flown so high, and never had she seen so far. Even the most remote clouds seemed to possess the hard contours of mountains, their shadowed fringes like shrouds of snow. Because she could see so clearly, the hornbill expected herself to think clearly as well, but this did not occur. If anything, her desires became even more muddled. When she imagined that the clouds were mountains, they loomed just like the snowcapped peaks she’d known as a child, impossibly familiar and therefore impossible to consider as a real destination. She sighed, setting her wings for the long glide back to the mango tree. The air was very cold now, cold enough so that she could feel its chill entering the hollow spaces in her bones. Again she thought of home and again she chided herself, but gently this time, realizing that no matter how small something looked from a distance, its true significance remained unchanged.

Chapter 19

The Society of Hermits

Deep breath, Cheechak commanded himself, deep-breath, deepbreath, deepbreathdeepbreathdeepbreathdeepbreath. But it was no use: his thoughts continued to race, heart and lungs in hot pursuit. The round-faced woman had dragged the white goat away, and the beautiful-fearless-heroic crab had buried herself in the sand. What what what was up with that?

If you had not been looking closely at the sand under the palm tree, you might not have noticed the gecko at all, but only scattered handfuls of hermit crabs, cowering in their variegated shells, and in their midst a slight fluttering, like a tiny leaf. The insubstantial quality of this fluttering came partly from the dusky light and partly from a trick of camouflage. Only a small patch of skin moved as the lizard breathed, a portion that extended from the underside of the chin to a point midway between the forelegs, and this patch of skin resembled nothing so much as the sand beneath it. Cheechak hadn’t made a conscious decision to match the coloring of the sand; he didn’t have to. Despite all the unusual circumstances of the day, he remained a house gecko, and such feats of mimicry came naturally to him.

What might seem miraculous to us—the ability to change one’s skin color, run up walls, and leap many times one’s body length—are the ordinary realities of a gecko’s life. Each requires a certain amount of practice, of course, but Cheechak had (mostly) overcome any insecurities he might have had about these skills. But how could he rescue the goat? How save his friend from tomorrow’s menu? How live with himself if he didn’t, at the very least, try?

He didn’t know. He had no idea at all, really, this being his first encounter with a life-or-death situation. Once more he tried to slow the pace of his breathing, hoping, in turn, to reduce the headlong rush of his thoughts. Deep, he told himself, taking a breath. And hold it.

An instant of silence entered his ears—and then he remembered the echoing wail of Pashmina’s cries.

Only clarify, he thought. Clarify, scarify, scared-to-die . . .

He took another breath, held it, longer this time—long enough for the image of the woman’s strong legs, braced to yank against the goat, to begin to lose its alarming power.

As his vision cleared, the gecko realized that the jittering procession of fear-inducing images—a round face, a rope, a collar—had slowed, gradually, to the pace of a slideshow. If he’d had any eyelids, he would have blinked with relief. But he didn’t, and couldn’t, so instead he looked around at the sand beneath the palm tree.

The surface was pocked with hoofprints and footprints, little hillocks and valleys of sand. If you didn’t already know better, then you might’ve guessed that some sort of festivities had occurred there, a game of tennis or volleyball, a bit of light-hearted recreation involving humans and goats.

The nearest hermit crab, who made his home in a thick-shelled, ruby-colored triton, pushed two pairs of legs down to the sand and balanced himself on them. The hermit held his larger claw above his eyes, in what looked to Cheechak like a mock salute.

“You are in it now, brother,” said the crab, gruffly.

“What do you mean?” the gecko asked.

The crab walked his house across the sand, one laborious step at a time, until he stood directly before the lizard. “Trouble, man. You are in it, and deep.”

The crab’s cavernous voice seemed to rouse all the other hermits to action. To Cheechak’s amazement, they gathered in groups of three, five, and more—hermit crabs of many different sizes, shapes, and colors—so many that the sand around him suddenly resembled a bountiful garden of shells.

The gecko tried to suppress the obvious question. Considering the dire nature of the situation, it seemed frivolous to ask. But curiosity got the best of him. “So,” he asked, “hermit crabs aren’t . . . hermits?”

The gruff-voiced crab waved his claw toward the crowd. “As the Great Hermit herself once said, ‘Number is Empire.’”

An orange-legged crab nodded in agreement. “There is strength in numbers,” she said enthusiastically.

“And safety too,” added one of the smaller crabs, who wore a sharp-tipped miter shell so that it pointed directly upward, like a little hat.

After this statement, the hermits nodded all together, moving their entire upper bodies, as if hinged at the abdomen. To Cheechak, the effect was temporarily dizzying. Although he hadn’t moved his feet, the sand seemed to shift beneath him, and he found himself struggling to maintain his balance.

His belly dipped to the sand, then his chin. What was happening? The sand beneath him appeared to be quivering, shuddering like a live animal. Was it an earthquake?

Then another voice came: its volume muffled but the tone unmistakably crabby.

“Who,” said Ayu, shaking herself irritably, “are you talking to?”

Cheechak felt himself propelled upward, atop the coconut crab’s rising back. He grabbed wildly for a firmer hold on the carapace, while his lizard skin cycled through a kaleidoscope of reds, purples, and violets.

Once again he was amazed at Ayu’s size and strength—not compared to a goat, of course, but she truly was an amazing crab! He stood tall on his perch, proud to be her friend. He’d been wondering when she would snap out of her bad mood and—now that she had—they needed to talk about what to do next.

Before he could open his mouth to speak, however, Cheechak’s gaze found the hermits. To his surprise, every crab had retreated into its shell, pulling its larger claw tightly into place, like a trapdoor. Some had drawn their bodies in so violently that their shells continued to wobble on the sand.

The miter-shelled crab was the first to peek out again. She lifted herself on spindly legs and took a few tentative steps backwards. “Are you,” she asked, “the Great Hermit?”

Cheechak giggled. “Me?” he replied. “I’m a house gecko!”

The triton-shelled crab spoke next. “Not you, brother,” he growled.

Ayu looked around her in the darkening gloom. Even though she knew that Pashmina would not be there, the confirmation of this knowledge brought tears to her eyes. Why hadn’t the goat run away from the woman? Why hadn’t they all run away? If only she had been paying more attention, she could have swung herself onto Pash’s horns, instead of crouching there like a sand flea, paralyzed by what—shock? fear? Neither really, and yet the fact of her inaction remained. The round-faced woman had captured Pashmina. And Ayu had allowed it to happen.

In her embarrassment, the coconut crab grew annoyed with the crowd of hermits that ringed her like an audience in a shadowy theater. Why, she wondered, are they all looking at me?

“What?” she shouted at them, waving one claw over her head so crazily that Cheechak had to duck. “It was my fault,” she screamed, “I get it!”

“No,” protested the gecko, but his small voice was drowned out by the chorus of hermits.

“She gets it,” they repeated to each other, their voices tumbling excitedly across the dark sand. “She gets it.” And then, raising their claws above their heads, they all chanted in unison: “The Great Hermit gets it!”

Chapter 20

Fit to Be Tied

Looking at the familiar heaps of melon rinds, dried to the color and consistency of tree bark, Pashmina could not help but asking, How could I have let this happen? She gave one more half-hearted tug at the rope, then retreated, panting, to the shadows of the palm fronds, beyond the range of the kitchen lights.

If the old rope had been sufficient to tether a smallish goat, then the new one—made from three twisted strands of braided manila fiber—was sturdy enough to hold a smallish elephant. Pashmina had been trying its strength for the past hour: bucking, twisting, pawing, stamping. And what did she have to show for it? Tired legs, a stiff neck, and a sore hoof. The rope was too much for her, too much for anybody. Even Ayu couldn’t have cut it, she thought glumly.

Oh why hadn’t she said something? She’d seen the round-faced woman coming—and she knew what sugar cubes usually meant in a goat’s life. But she’d been feeling so sorry for herself, so sure that Ayu was about to emerge from the sand, crook one claw around her neck and apologize for her bad temper, that a sort of paralysis had taken control of her limbs.

Not that she had wanted to be captured. Of that she was sure. She was not one of those goats who got all weak in the knees at the thought of sacrifice or barbecue. (Weren’t they the same thing, after all?) She’d accepted her lot because she hadn’t been able to imagine an alternative. Now that she could see at least one other possibility, acceptance was not an option. It did not matter that the round-faced woman had always treated her kindly. Something inside of the goat had changed, and she wanted nothing more than to be back with the crab and the gecko, planning their escape from the island.

So why hadn’t she run? If she had done anything other than whimper and bleat, then she still would have had a chance, at least. The goat hung her head. From this downcast perspective, the rope looked as thick as her foreleg, which drove her feelings even farther downward. She was doomed.

Inside the kitchen, the splash and clank of dishwashing competed with the clatter and sizzle of cooking. Waiters lifted steaming trays of food to their shoulders and strode resolutely through the café, dispensing fragrant bowls of steamed rice and platters of crisply fried plantains.

The head cook stood before the hot grill, a long-handled spatula in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, contemplatively turning first the reddening prawns and then the thick slabs of fish, while an assistant brushed both with a garlicky sauce of lemon juice and sesame oil. On the terrace, the round-faced woman bid goodnight to a trio of satisfied diners then moved to welcome four regular customers: a couple and their two children, a boy and a girl.

“The mackerel special is going fast,” she told them, a hint of regret in her voice.

“We’ll have three then,” said the father, smiling, “plus one extra bowl of rice and a glass of pineapple juice.”

The girl looked at her father. She didn’t want to tell him that she had no appetite. How could anyone eat at a time like this? She had rushed outside the bungalow when she’d first heard the goat’s distant cries. In their awful wake, the island seemed to shudder with quiet. After several minutes of silence, her brother had come churning along the path. Although he rushed quickly past her, she detected an unusual smell about him—something like overripe mango. And then the silhouette of a large bird had passed silently overhead, like a dark crease in the darkening sky, circling upward and away.

She was looking at the place the bird had vacated—trying to decide what to call an empty sky that was not really empty—when the cook’s wife trudged by, leading the goat by a rope. The woman’s round face was lowered, as if saddened by some private thought, and though the girl stared unapologetically at the pair of them, neither woman nor goat looked toward her.

The girl had waited a few more minutes for some sign of the crab or the gecko, then followed the path to the café, walking with a forced nonchalance, as if she had no interests other than the warm evening and the rising moon. As she made her way past the terrace, she could hear the hungry laughter of people expecting a good meal, but when she circled around to the back, a terrible thrashing noise came from behind the kitchen.

To the girl, it sounded as if someone was simultaneously beating the ground with clenched fists and lashing it with palm fronds. She peeked around the corner of the restaurant, but could see only a large pile of coconut husks in the gloom. So she tiptoed out among the palms, moving from shadow to shadow, until she gained an unobstructed view of the little clearing outside the kitchen door.

There stood the goat, front legs splayed like a bull about to charge, her thin sides heaving with the effort to breathe. After a while she began pawing at the rope that drooped from her neck, then hammering one hoof at the point where the braided fibers brushed the dirt. Again the girl looked for the crab, and again there was no sign of the violet-tipped claws. Instead, she noticed the cook’s wife standing just inside the open doorway, her chin down, her arms folded across her stomach. When the woman raised her head to speak, the girl slipped behind a palm trunk, out of sight. “Don’t,” the woman had said sorrowfully. “Don’t, Pashmina.” But the goat had bucked and twirled against the rope like a pinwheel on a string.

The memory of that horrible moment made the girl look down at her fingernails. She wished that she had told her brother what she’d seen. Then again, he might not have wanted to be helpful, considering what the crab had done to his net. Still, he didn’t seem unhappy now, with his elbows on the table and his hair still damp from the shower, talking with their parents about tomorrow morning’s ferry and the leaky canoe. But the girl knew there was no help for it; the time for telling had gone.

She waited until the woman left the terrace with her family’s order scribbled on a notepad, then announced that she needed to wash her hands. The café’s washrooms were in a small wooden hut, separated from the dining area by a short, sandy path, lined with jasmine shrubs. The girl ran down the path then dodged around the hut and turned toward the kitchen. She didn’t know what she planned to do, but she hated the idea of the goat struggling alone, at the end of her rope.

Chapter 21

Moonlight and Mathematics

A pinch in time, thought Ayu. She knew what it meant now. Watching the hermits do their work, using their nimble claws to cut and sew, it all suddenly made sense.

She had managed to put two and two together, but the hermits—in their combined strength—had multiplied ten by ten by ten. It was hard to believe what the little creatures had accomplished in just one night.

Working together, they had pushed one of the boy’s paddles upright and lashed it to the forward outrigger boom with twine made of coconut fibers. Then Cheechak had sent her up all the nearby palm trees and told her to cut everything green. The green coconuts, the gecko explained, would be their provisions for the journey: food and water in one convenient package. The green fronds would supply shade during the long, hot days, along with something even more important—forward motion. A sail of tightly woven palm fronds could drive the canoe downwind as quickly as any crew of strong humans.

She hadn’t suspected that the lizard would have a talent for organization but there he was, perched atop the paddle that had miraculously become a mast, calling out instructions to teams of hermits scrabbling over the canoe and across the sand.

“Heave,” he shouted, as the moon cast his long-tailed shadow across the scene. “Heave!”

A squad of the largest hermits hauled in unison on a coconut-fiber rope, raising a triangular sail so that its most sharply pointed end angled downward, toward the prow of the canoe. The sail’s two spars were fashioned from bamboo poles that Ayu had cut to length only an hour earlier. Under the moonlight, the palm-frond sail cast a darker green shade over the sand, and Ayu was not surprised to see that its shape reminded her of a giant crab claw.

She liked the hermits, of course, but their obsession with calling her “The Great Hermit” seemed more than a little strange. Ayu had tried to explain that she was a coconut crab, not a hermit crab, but when pressured, had to admit that yes, she had indeed carried a shell once upon a time. And then, when she’d insisted that she was not at all great, the hermits had wagged their antennae knowingly. Naturally, they whispered to each other, the Great Hermit was very humble. If she had not been so humble, then how could she be so great?

In any case, the entire tribe of hermits seemed absolutely willing to do anything within their powers to help Ayu and her friends. And their powers were considerable. While various sets of crabs stitched and sewed and gathered, another set sketched equations on the sand, using their claws to draw intricate sequences of numbers and operations. They determined the appropriate area for the sail, given the length of the canoe and the speed of the wind. They estimated the distance to Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o, then calculated the number of coconuts needed to sustain one goat, one crab, and one gecko for the journey. (The answer was 42.)

All the while they chanted encouragement to each other, or at least what sounded like encouragement, phrases like “Mighty is geometry,” “Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success,” and “Order and symmetry, chance and necessity!”

This oddly phrased optimism gave Ayu the hope that the sail and rigging soon would be finished, that the canoe would be well-stocked with coconuts, and that she and Cheechak and Pashmina would somehow find themselves scudding over the blue water, on their way to another island. There remained only one problem: how to rescue Pash.

She’d been pondering this predicament while they all worked and now, with the moon past its zenith and settling in a slow arc toward the western horizon, she’d progressed no farther than the gruff words of the hermit with a triton’s shell. “First things first,” he’d growled. But where to start?

Ayu thought back to that long-ago morning when she’d looked out from the top of a palm tree while Grandfather waited hopefully below. It began, she thought, with no little astonishment, with a bird. A bird that had twisted a coconut from a tree. A bird with a beautiful yellow beak and blue-ringed eyes. A bird who’d called her sister.

Since that day Ayu had defended herself from a hungry tern, crossed the sea on a turtle’s back, and splintered a boy’s airborne net. She had cracked her first coconut—and many more thereafter. She had outgrown a childhood shell and severed a binding rope. She had learned something of human habits. And she’d made two new friends. They were a trio now, but the canoe and its provisions represented the real possibility that they would eventually become a quartet.

If they could sail to Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o, then surely they would find Pie. And wouldn’t the hornbill be surprised to see her, the little crab who had once been too weak to harvest her own breakfast?

Ayu gazed up again at the crab-claw sail, which waved slightly in a whisper of breeze. As the wind freshened, the upper spar creaked almost timidly against the mast, then began to began to rattle. All at once, the sail filled with air, pushing the canoe until it heeled over onto its lone outrigger.

The unexpected movement nearly threw Cheechak from his perch. “Drop the sail!” he yelled, dangling from the mast by a foreleg.

The hermits loosed their grip on the rope. The upper spar fell a few inches, then stopped, held aloft by some stray strands of coconut fiber.

Another gust of wind came and went. Again the sail filled then fell, opening and closing like a great pair of shadowy green pincers.

“It’s stuck!” shouted the gecko.

“Heave!” grunted the hermits, hauling briefly upward as they attempted to free the rope.

Once more the spars jerked open and the giant claw waved in the wind, like a signal to the moonlit sky. Then the sail dropped clattering into the bottom of the canoe as the hermits tumbled backward across the sand.

Cheechak waited until the canoe had finished rocking, then spiraled down the mast and onto the outrigger, moving so quickly that even Ayu, with her rotating eyes, had trouble tracking his progress. “We’re good to go,” he declared, stopping within a claw’s length of the crab.

Ayu lifted one leg over her carapace and scratched that part of her shell where her nose would be, if crabs had noses. “We’re not going anywhere without Pash,” she said. “Are we?”

“Of course not,” declared the gecko, his skin already beginning to adapt to the bluish tint of the outrigger’s faded paint. “We’re not going without her; we’re going for her.”

Chapter 22

She Who Hesitates

For a few seconds, Pie forgot to fly. That’s how weird it had looked. Her powerful wings ceased their noisy beatings against the air. In the sudden silence, the hornbill only looked and listened.

Beneath her, the moonlight shone liquidly on the lagoon and grittily on the sand. Where the light struck the palm trees, it dispersed into fronds of shadow. A confusion of electric bulbs glimmered around the café’s terrace, dangling from the eaves and railings, hung from tree to tree. As she watched, one string winked into darkness. Must be closing time, Pie thought distractedly.

But the strange movement that had caught her eye . . . what had it been? She blinked and stared downward again. Oddly enough, it had looked for all the world like a crab’s claw, waving at her. But a giant claw, too big to be real.

Pie shook her head, trying to clear her vision. She’d been thinking about home, family, and the little crab. Also the boy and that piercing wail they’d both heard, that terrible cry of pain and longing. But her thoughts had jostled together like flotsam in a stormy sea. Perhaps that was why she’d imagined a giant claw. Who knew, maybe she’d imagine a giant mango next . . .

The hornbill soared over the beach, circling lower and lower, reluctant to accept that she might be seeing things that weren’t really there, no matter how improbable. And yet, she could admit to feeling tired, very tired, more tired than she’d felt at any time since leaving home. This was partly due to the late hour, no doubt. She wasn’t an owl or a nighthawk after all, but only an ordinary daytime bird with too much on her mind.

Eventually Pie spotted what looked like a derelict canoe with an upright mast. That will make a nice perch, she thought, flaring her wings to land. She tried grasping the top of the mast with her toes, but found that it was smaller than she’d anticipated. She wobbled precariously for a few moments, wings outspread, before finding her balance. When she dared to look down, she noted the rounded silhouettes of coconuts in the bow of the boat, and a rippling pile of palm fronds at the base of the mast. So she’d been mistaken—this canoe hadn’t been abandoned; instead, it was being readied for a long journey.

For some mysterious reason, the idea of traveling made her feel even more wistful—as if she hadn’t already been wandering from island to island for weeks on end! She sighed aloud. Would she ever understand herself? She preened her feathers and tried to relax, but her perch was too precarious for comfort. She sighed again, then felt her stomach rumble.

“Aren’t you hungry tonight?” the mother asked. “This mackerel is very good.”

The girl shook her head. After what she’d just seen behind the kitchen, she felt too bewildered to eat. Instead, she sipped pineapple juice through a straw, one slow sip at a time, allowing the sweetness to linger on her tongue. If only she’d been able to stay back there, hidden behind a palm trunk, to discover what would happen next! But instead her brother had stood by the washrooms and shouted her name, embarrassingly loud, calling her to the table.

Besides, she’d never really liked the looks of mackerel. They were predatory fish with sharp noses and smooth skin, as fast and powerful in the water as falcons in air. Her father or brother occasionally caught one, trolling a wiggling silver lure behind the ferry as the boat passed over the reef and into blue water. But more often than not the mackerel escaped by severing the line with its teeth.

She watched her brother chew a mouthful of rice, wondering how long she should wait before announcing that she was going back to the washroom. Not that she actually needed to use it, of course, but how else could she return to the scene behind the kitchen? When the cook had stepped outside, one hand holding the knife, her heart had lurched into her throat, like a panicked hiccup. Until that moment, she had been captivated by the actions of the round-faced woman, who had emerged from the same door only a few minutes earlier.

The girl had paused in the shadow of a palm tree, her small hands pressed against the ribbed trunk. She’d been trying to get a better look at the goat, who was lying down, with a collar around her neck, a rope attached to the collar, and the rope tied to a tree—but a different tree, about ten steps away. The goat was not lying calmly with her head up and her legs folded beneath her, in that familiar goat-like way. Instead, she lay sprawled on her side, one cheek in the dirt, her flank heaving. A cloud of dust hung in the air; the girl could smell its dry, moldy scent, like decaying melon rinds.

The girl was worried. The goat’s wheezy breaths were loud enough to hear over the sizzle of frying pans and the splash of dishwashing. Was she strangling herself? The girl had just made up her mind to go closer when the kitchen door opened, casting an oblong of light onto the coconut husks and potato peels.

“Oh, Pashmina,” moaned the cook’s wife, her hands wringing a dishtowel. With surprising speed, the woman leaped down the kitchen steps to the ground, sank to her knees by the goat, then turned and sat, legs splayed, in the dirt. She cradled Pashmina’s head in her lap and began stroking the soft white fur on the goat’s neck.

To the girl’s amazement, the goat did not struggle or even try to rise. She simply sighed, a single long breath—in, then out. Although her family owned no pets, the girl had seen other people lavishing affection on dogs or cats. But never, ever, had she seen someone treat a goat this way. Goats were herded across the road, pushed into the backs of trucks, pulled bawling into markets. They were appreciated, certainly, but this was much more than appreciation. This looked suspiciously like love.

The woman continued to pet the goat, leaning her own head over the two curved horns, whispering words of comfort. From the girl’s vantage point behind the tree, it seemed as if the goat’s breathing had settled into a regular rhythm, and the girl likewise began to breathe more easily. Surely this was a good thing, she thought.

That’s when the cook’s narrow shoulders obscured the doorway.

At first, the girl didn’t notice the knife. What caught her eye was the man’s overall look of unhappiness. His head slumped forward on the thin neck, and his arms dangled dejectedly at his sides.

“You’ll have to do it,” he said, raising the hand that held the weapon. Its blade was not the shortest in the kitchen, not the trim, angled model used for peeling and paring. Nor was it the long flexible type that was best for filleting fish or slicing thin slivers of chicken. But its keen point and sturdy spine gleamed sharply under the electric light.

The goat started to her feet, scrabbling frantically in the dust. The woman remained seated, her apron damp with tears.

And that’s when the girl’s brother called her name. Loud enough for her to hear behind the washroom door—if she had been inside the washroom. Then louder. Then louder still.

The girl saw that the goat was staring fixedly at the cook. At the same time, she noticed that the cook was gazing down at his feet. The woman, for her part, was looking at neither of them. Instead, she was carefully examining her hands, as if expecting the goat’s silky hair to reappear beneath her fingers.

Pushing herself away from the palm trunk, the girl turned and ran toward the washrooms. A few steps from her brother, her left foot caught on a yellow extension cord. The boy saw her stumble and closed his mouth. The string of lights that stretched from the washrooms to the kitchen flickered and danced, then glowed brightly again.

The girl looked at her brother, who gave her a long, questioning glance, during which he seemed to decide that he didn’t really want to know what she’d been doing.

“Dinner’s ready,” he said.

Chapter 23

On Second Thought

Pashmina stood behind the kitchen, too agitated even to lie down. She hadn’t moved since the two humans had gone back inside, as if some invisible force was holding her to the spot.

“Are you sure?” the woman had asked, still sitting in the dirt.

“No,” the cook had said, “but what does it matter?”

“I don’t know,” the woman had replied, getting slowly to her feet.

She had looked at Pashmina then, closed the short distance between them, thrown her arms around the goat’s neck, pressed her face against the soft white hair.

The cook had remained in the doorway, the knife in his hand lowered so that its tip pointed at the wooden threshold.

The woman had climbed the steps, kissed her husband’s cheek, and pushed past him into the kitchen. “Back to work,” she’d said briskly. “We still have customers at their tables.”

What, thought the goat, could it all mean? Only one thing for sure—that she would never understand the ways of humans. How could she, when she hardly understood the mind of a single goat? The relief she had felt when that woman stroked her head! More than relief—a kind of enjoyment too, also comfort, and with that comfort a pleasurable sense of belonging to someone else, a captivity of her own accord. But was such a thing even possible—voluntary captivity—now that she knew what it was like to gallop on the beach? If, at that moment of surrender, the woman had removed the rope, would she still have wanted to run away?

Pashmina shook her head and stamped her hooves, even the sore one. Everything had been so different when Ayu had first cut the collar—for one thing, she hadn’t been expecting freedom. But now she most definitely was—and she was getting tired of waiting for it. Even if, in the end, she decided not to accompany her friends, she wanted to talk to them. Maybe the crab hadn’t seen what had happened on the beach, buried as she was in the sand, but the gecko certainly had. And hours had passed—plenty of time for Cheechak and Ayu to come and rescue her. What was taking them so long?

The noise of the café had gradually dwindled to the occasional murmur and clink. The waiters had eaten a late meal, switched off the terrace lights, and gone home, while the dishwashers had restocked the shelves with clean plates and bowls, then hung the pots and pans on hooks to dry. All the diners had long since finished their desserts, settled their bills, and headed for their beds. In fact, only three people remained awake in the village.

Two of these sat at a small table inside the kitchen, ordinarily used for slicing vegetables. It was their voices that drifted indistinctly into the night, as the ice cubes shifted dissolutely in their glasses.

“Can we do it now?” pleaded the woman’s voice.

“You don’t need my help,” replied the man wearily. “Just get it over with.”

“You’re right,” the woman said. She stood up and walked, empty-handed, to the back door. She was thinking that she wouldn’t need the knife.

The hornbill rose above the island again, both restless and hungry. She circled the familiar mango tree, preparing to land, but at the last moment decided that mango wasn’t quite right. She wanted some other flavor—something sweet, of course, but differently sweet. Her wings buffeted the air, producing a rhythmic chuffing sound, almost like a steam engine.

Had she seen a papaya tree on this island? Or a fig? She thought she had smelled melons at some point in her travels, but where? Although the moon was bright, she still found it hard to get her bearings. From above, the canopy of leaves created a patchwork of shadows, some dark and others darker still. As she neared the café, the bird could see that all the terrace lights were now off. The kitchen windows still glowed, however, and a single string of lights illuminated the palm trunks on the far side of the thatched roof.

Ayu moved excitedly along the path, her two pairs of walking legs alternately flexing and reaching, flexing and reaching, so that the noise of their progress sounded like a gardener raking leaves.

“So,” she asked Cheechak, raising her voice above the rasp and crackle, “what’s the plan?”

“Find Pashmina, cut the rope, run back to the canoe, sail away.”

“That’s it?”

“You think we should do more?”

“No,” said the crab, hesitating as they approached the café’s dark terrace. “But what if something goes wrong?”

“If I knew something was going to go wrong,” replied the gecko, “then I would’ve made a different plan.”

Ayu heard the edge of irritation in her friend’s voice. She rotated one eye upward, regarding the unlit string of glass bulbs she had once thought were moons. “Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” said Cheechak. “And don’t worry. Like the Great Hermit says, ‘Our fears outnumber our dangers.’”

Ayu rolled both eyes. “Now you sound like my grandfather!”

“I have confidence in you,” Cheechak said simply. “And I’m sure he does too.”

The girl crouched low in the shadow of a palm bole, trying to make herself as small and as quiet as possible. It had been more difficult than she’d thought to leave the bungalow without waking her family. Her father, she learned, slept soundly—but with a periodic sharp intake of breath, an aahh that sounded almost like surprise. Her mother occasionally stretched her arms overhead, like a swimmer performing a slow sidestroke. And, between irregular intervals of almost unnatural stillness, her brother’s legs would churn as if he were running in sand. None of these sounds or movements indicated wakefulness, but she’d had to be sure.

Once safely on the path, the girl had sprinted straight for the café. Only when she’d rounded the corner of the washrooms did she resume her stealthy gait. It took a minute or two for her breathing to slow, for the beating of her heart to subside. When she could hear again, the night seemed unusually loud. That was one of the reasons she was trying to be so quiet. She could see the goat now—alive, thankfully—but alone and agitated, stamping her feet like an impatient child.

The voices of the cook and the round-faced woman wafted from the open windows, but the girl could only make out a few words: now . . . don’t . . . right. On the opposite side of the clearing, beyond the goat, something or someone was scrabbling in the dark forest. At first the noise had been quick and regular, like the rasp of a rake through leaves, but now it had become intermittent, almost furtive. Farther away, above the treetops, some night-flying bird flogged the air with a powerful chuff-chuff-chuff.

When the girl heard the sound of chair legs scraping against the kitchen floor, she held her breath.

The round-faced woman stood in the doorway. The girl’s eyes went straight to the woman’s hands, looking for the knife. It was not there.

The girl watched as the woman went to the goat and began petting the soft nose and curved horns. The goat did not stand still for these ministrations; instead, she seemed to lean into the woman, to answer the pressure of hands with a perceptible upthrust of the head.

“I will miss you, Pashmina,” the woman said, moving her fingers to the goat’s neck.

The girl—who was still too afraid to breathe—tried to lean around the palm trunk for a better view. In the play of light and shadows cast by the string of bulbs and the open doorway, it was hard to see what was going on, exactly. The woman seemed to be struggling with the rope collar. For one brief, horrible moment, the girl thought she meant to strangle the goat.

Then the woman straightened up, sighing. She glanced back at the doorway before rummaging through her apron pockets, looking more exasperated than murderous.

The girl exhaled—at last—then dared a swift, timid gulp of air.

Chapter 24

Twist of the Knife

“I need something sharp,” the woman said, almost casually, tossing the words over her shoulder toward the kitchen doorway. But the reactions of the girl, the goat, the gecko, and the crab were anything but casual.

The girl gasped audibly, drawing the goat’s gaze to her hiding place in the shadows. The two exchanged a glance simultaneously sympathetic and distressed. At the same time, the gecko retracted like a coiled spring, then leaped upward. He landed several feet high on a palm trunk, and climbed immediately out of sight. Meanwhile, the crab felt a shudder in all of her many appendages. In her hindmost legs and in her walking legs. In the hinges of her powerful claws and in the tips of her perceptive antennae. Although she couldn’t have told anyone why, exactly, Ayu sensed that, in the next few moments, everything she had ever seen or done in her life was about to come together: every purpose, every distraction, every triumph, every fear.

The cook appeared in the doorway, holding a meat cleaver in his right hand. “Will this work?” he asked, showing the blade to his wife. The dull metal gleamed flatly under the electric lights.

The woman shrugged. “Maybe if you do it,” she replied.

Both the goat and the girl watched, motionless, as the cook approached. Ayu saw the goat but not the girl, who remained just out of her field of vision. Pashmina’s head drooped dejectedly, her neck tracing a downward curve, as if the rope around it were impossibly heavy. The cook swung his arm as he walked, and with each swing the blade in his hand rose a little higher.

Still wondering where she had smelled watermelon, the hornbill circled high above the café. When the silvery glint of the cleaver caught her eye, she slipped a little air from her wings and dropped down to see what the humans were doing outside so late at night.

There was a round-faced woman in the little clearing behind the kitchen, standing beside a white goat. A man with skinny arms and a shiny brow moved toward her, a blunt-shouldered knife in one hand. Strangely enough, the bird spied the head of a small girl hiding behind a palm trunk and, a few yards behind the girl, she saw a familiar boy peeking stealthily around the corner of a thatch-roofed hut.

What Pie couldn’t yet see was the house gecko clambering across the string of light bulbs that hung above the scene, approaching a position directly over the goat’s downcast head. Nor did she spot the coconut crab scuttling swiftly along the dim forest floor, claws raised, pincers poised for the attack.

Still, the situation was unusual enough to provoke the hornbill’s curiosity. She set her wings and banked sharply lower, until her yellow beak was barely clearing the tops of the palm fronds.

The girl was so agitated by the sight of the swinging blade that she paid no attention to the nonchalance in the cook’s shambling gait, or the indifference in his weary eyes. Though he did not love the goat as his wife did, neither did he crave the goat’s death. If goat were not on the menu tomorrow, then he would serve beef or chicken or fish. At this hour, he wanted only to complete his chores and get some sleep. Setting the goat free was merely the final task in a long evening of work. If his wife had been able to unknot the rope, then the entire business would’ve been much simpler but, in the cook’s considered opinion, life wasn’t always as simple as it could be.

Certainly it would’ve been much simpler for the girl if she had recognized the lack of menace in the knife now suspended above the goat’s head. Instead of joyously welcoming the heavy blade’s cleaving of the rope, however, her mind searched frantically—and mistakenly—for a way to prevent a cleaving of the neck. She was too far away to grab the goat; too small to stop the cook’s arm. Scanning the ground beneath her feet, she could find no object to throw. There was only crushed coral and dried leaves and a dusty extension cord that suddenly jerked like a snake.

The girl glanced back to see her brother holding the other end of the cord—the end attached to the string of lights. When he flicked his eyes toward the dangling bulbs, she knew exactly what he meant. She didn’t stop to wonder what he was doing there or why he had followed her. Instead she grabbed the cord herself, with both hands.

“Now!” she yelled.

The gecko could see that he wasn’t going to make it. And neither was the crab. While his lizard legs carried him swiftly along the string of lights, his lizard brain calculated distance, speed, and angle of rotation. Judging from the downward arc of the blade, there would not be time for him to leap onto the man’s face before . . . before it was too late. And yet, while aware of this horrible possibility, his lizard muscles and lizard tendons continued to function, operating on the principle that there is always hope, even when no hope appears to be forthcoming.

He was going to leap, no matter what, and he could see from the determination in the crab’s fierce gaze that she was going to pinch—no matter what. From the looks of it, she was aiming for a place somewhere between the man’s right kneecap and the hem of his cook’s apron, a soft place where her powerful claws could do real damage.

As he prepared to launch himself on his final trajectory, the gecko felt the wire tighten under his toes, as if to catapult him on his way. He saw the goat notice both himself and the crab, converging like arrows on a target. Cheechak wondered whether Ayu also knew what he knew, and if Pashmina too, was aware of how close they had all come to continuing their adventures. The thought was a melancholy one—though it took less than an instant—and for that less-than-an-instant fraction of time, he allowed himself to feel sad and exhilarated and airborne, all at once.

And then he saw the bird.

Like the girl, the boy, the goat, the gecko, and the crab, the hornbill did not apprehend the cook’s true intent. Her confusion was understandable, of course. It can be difficult to predict what an adult human will do next under any circumstances, but if that human is swinging a meat cleaver above his head, then occasional misunderstandings are only to be expected.

Pie could not have said exactly what she wanted to accomplish by flying at the man’s glistening forehead. But fly she did. If you had been there on that day, her beak—sharp and hard and yellow—would have caught your eye and held it. It certainly caught the cook’s attention, in spite of his overall state of weariness and distraction. With the hand holding the cleaver already on its way down, aimed at the thick rope that hung from the goat’s neck, his only option for self-defense was to duck.

As he tucked his head behind his elbow, however, two other distracting events occurred, one immediately after the other. First, a voice shouted No—or maybe it was Now, he couldn’t be sure. Then the lights went out.

Chapter 25

The Impact of Impact

Every instinct in Pashmina told her to run from the scene behind the kitchen—and fast. At the moment of truth, when she could see her friends coming for her—even as the cook’s blade was flashing through the air—she’d discovered that she no longer needed to question where her true devotion lay. But now Ayu wouldn’t move and the goat couldn’t bear to leave her behind—not even temporarily.

At least she’d managed to convince the little crab—with Cheechak’s help—to scramble into the undergrowth and out of plain sight. But they were still too close for comfort. After all, the humans were still there—and yet Ayu insisted on standing atop the goat’s head, trying to get a better view!

With the overhead bulbs mysteriously dark, the only illumination came from the open doorway. That oblong of light fell slanting across the body of the cook, who was lying facedown on the ground. Near his right hand, the cleaver gleamed harmlessly among a scattering of melon rinds. At his side the round-faced woman knelt again in the dust.

“Poor thing,” she said, supporting what appeared to be a rumpled bundle of feathers in her outstretched palms.

The cook raised himself onto his elbows, held his head between his hands, and groaned mightily. “What hit me?” he asked.

“You knocked heads with her,” said the woman.

“With who?” asked the man. “A rhinoceros?”

“Silly,” the woman replied, stroking the yellow beak, “can a rhinoceros fly?”

The cook turned a pained gaze on the bird. “That’s a hornbill,” he said. “My grandmother used to watch the sky for them. Whenever she saw one, she’d say ‘Luck soon come.’”

Ayu teetered on the tips of the goat’s horns, leaning toward the cook and his wife. “Pash,” she whispered excitedly, “I think that’s Pie!”

“Who’s Pie?” asked Cheechak.

“She’s the bird I haven’t been telling you about!”

The goat and the gecko exchanged puzzled glances.

“I mean,” the crab went on, openly apologetic now, “it’s a long story, but . . . she’s the reason I’ve been trying to get to the island of the hornbills.”

Pashmina lowered herself into the shadows as Ayu began the tale at the beginning, recalling the long hunger of those windless days. Because the three animals did not dare to take their eyes off the humans, however, the telling was somewhat distracted.

“If not for her,” Ayu concluded, “I’d probably have starved to death.”

“And if not for you,” Pashmina replied, “I’d definitely be goat stew.”

“Pash,” the crab asked, finally allowing herself to settle more securely between the goat’s horns, “do you see why I can’t leave her with the humans?”

At this juncture, Cheechak leaped from a nearby branch onto his preferred perch, atop the crab’s carapace. “Listen,” the gecko said, his skin already abandoning the brown of bark for a delicately mottled violet, “as far as I know, humans don’t eat hornbills. But you are a crab and you are a goat and as friend to you both I say we need to get out of here—now.”

“Cheechak’s right,” said Pashmina. “I’ve never seen hornbill on a menu. And the woman really isn’t”—and here the goat searched for the right word—“bad.”

By this time the cook was on his feet, alternately massaging his forehead and rubbing his chin. He stooped to examine the place where the goat had been tied. The ground was littered with short strands of rope, as if the animal’s leash had been shredded with multiple pairs of powerful shears.

“What’s this?” he mumbled, still dazed from the concussion of beak and brow.

But the round-faced woman had risen too, cradling the hornbill in her arms, and had already turned her back on him. “Don’t forget the knife,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll need you to cut some bamboo.”

Chapter 26

Magnitude and Direction

Even after the cook had closed the kitchen door, the coconut crab would not leave.

“But how will she find us?” Ayu asked, despairing at the image of the hornbill searching a lonely sea.

“We can draw arrows along the path,” said the gecko. “If she recognized you, then she’ll look for us as soon as she wakes up. She can fly—she’ll catch up to us in no time.”

If? thought the crab, a fresh wave of despair sweeping over her carapace. She hadn’t considered that possibility. What if Pie hadn’t seen her at all? What if she’d been attracted only to the most obvious oddities of the scene: man and goat and cleaver, meeting long after midnight, under a wobbly string of electric moons?

Ayu watched as Cheechak scratched a tiny arrow in the dust, then looked up at Pashmina, who nodded in agreement.

“We should go,” urged the goat, using one hoof to sketch a larger arrow, a sign that would be visible from the air. “It’ll be light soon.”

At the far edge of the lagoon, the island ferry rested on its shallow keel, awaiting the morning’s passengers. To Pashmina its dim silhouette looked like a near relative of their own little canoe, only much larger, and propelled by a rackety gasoline engine instead of a palm-frond sail. Turning back to her friends, she had to admit that she was impressed by their sail—and by the little hermit crabs who had made it. They were so serious in their calculations, and so openly in awe of Ayu. “You’re right, G.H.,” they said. “Of course, G.H.,” and, “At your service, G.H.”

When the goat inquired about these initials, the coconut crab only rolled her eyes. “Don’t ask,” she said.

Now that dawn was near, a shadowy assortment of human travelers began to gather on the sand. They stood in loose groups of two or three, holding baskets, carrying shoulder bags and small children. At that distance, it would’ve taken a careful inspection to recognize the boy standing obediently beside his mother. For one thing, he was without his customary short-handled net; in its place, he held a wooden spool wrapped with fishing line. The girl with the faraway eye would’ve been even harder to spot: she was asleep in her father’s arms, her head resting on his shoulder.

But the animals were not especially interested in the outrigger ferry or the people preparing to board it. At least not yet. For the moment, they were concerned mostly with how to launch their own canoe.

The goat had tried pushing against the rear outrigger boom, but so far had only managed to nudge the craft a few yards closer to the water. Strangely enough, the harder she tried, the more difficult it became to move the boat. When she lowered her haunches and used all of her strength, the prow of the canoe seemed to bite like an anchor into the sand. A similar thing happened when she tried to pull the canoe with the coconut-fiber rope that the hermits had affixed to the mast. A gentle tug would result in an inch or two of progress, but a real yank would only tip the stern forward while the bow stubbornly dug in.

Pashmina paused with the rope between her teeth, breathing heavily. Ayu stood nearby on the sand, surrounded by hermits, with Cheechak perched anxiously on her carapace. In the ensuing quiet, they could faintly hear the voice of the ferry captain calling his passengers aboard.

The sight of the humans climbing into their boat only added to Cheechak’s mounting fear. He couldn’t name the cause exactly, only this vague sense that time was fleeing and they should flee with it. The gecko looked up at the sky, which had grown noticeably bluer. “This,” he muttered grimly, as if to himself, “was supposed to be the easy part.”

The hermit in the triton’s shell nodded in reply. “Clearly,” he growled, “there are opposing forces at work.”

“What do you mean?” asked the lizard.

“Gravity, for one,” said the hermit. “Also friction.”

“Then what should we do?” asked Ayu.

“I suggest,” the hermit grumbled, “that we do the math.”

All the hermits at once began drawing a diagram in the sand, using their larger claws to sketch an outline of the canoe, the mast, the rope, and the goat.

The miter-shelled crab drew an arrow pointing straight down from the top of the mast. “That’s gravity,” she said shyly. “It only has one component.” Then she drew another arrow along the sketch of the rope, which angled downward from about the middle of the mast to the picture of the goat.

“That’s me,” said Pashmina, letting the rope fall from her mouth.

“And when you pull,” the little hermit continued, “your force has two components.” She added a pair of smaller arrows to the diagram: one pointing down, like gravity, the other aimed in a direction parallel to the ground.

“Simple matter of addition,” muttered the triton-shelled hermit.

Ayu looked at the sketch for a moment, then turned her gaze on the canoe, the mast, and the now dangling rope. She was about to shout I get it, but stopped herself just in time.

The young waiter stood at the back door of the café as dawn arrived. He tied a white apron around his waist, blinked his eyes a few times, then sleepily scratched the back of his head, just behind the right ear.

He was pleased to see that the goat was gone. That meant the cook would be at the butcher shop this very moment, overseeing the production of shoulder, rib, and tenderloin. The waiter thought it strange that the cook had left the goat’s rope behind—and stranger still that he’d sliced the rope into at least a dozen short pieces—but, then again, the cook was an unusual man. For instance, since closing time yesterday, he had somehow managed to acquire a pet hornbill—a beautiful young bird—now sleeping on the terrace, in a bamboo cage.

The waiter scratched his head again, this time behind the left ear, and turned to re-enter the kitchen. That’s when he noticed an odd mark in the dust. Was it the track of a seagull? No—more like a tiny arrow, pointing. And what it pointed to was another, larger arrow—both of them aimed in the same direction, along the path to the beach.

He stepped onto the path, looked down at the arrows, then up at the sky, where a white scattering of clouds still glowed with a rosy hue. He lifted both hands to his head and scratched vigorously, until his hair stood in disorderly tufts, like thickets of grass in a shifting wind. He knew that he ought to begin setting the tables for breakfast, but the arrows seemed to beckon him away. They appeared on the path at regular intervals—all of them large now, after that first tiny one, and each visible to any observer who had passed just beyond its predecessor.

The waiter paused, head down, as if checking his bearings. When he looked up again, he could discern a glimmering of the lagoon between tree trunks, along with a patch of fine sand, and something that was moving, something white. He quickened his pace, wanting to find out exactly what he would see when he reached the last arrow.

By the time he realized that the white something was an animal—a familiar animal, in fact—the waiter was sprinting, his thin knees pumping up and down beneath his apron, his sandaled feet churning the sand.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Stop that goat!”

Chapter 27

All Over but the Shouting?

Everyone looked up when the shouts began: the goat, who was holding one end of a rope in her teeth; the gecko, perched atop the mast; the coconut crab, poised at the base of the mast, holding the other end of the rope in her claws; the nine hermits who had clambered aboard the canoe; and the numerous other hermits scurrying busily over the sand. Even the sleepy humans who had already settled themselves on the ferry raised their heads with curiosity. What they saw was a white-aproned man running full speed across the beach, wildly waving his arms, and screaming—a little hoarsely by now.

The girl recognized the waiter immediately. She shaded her eyes with one hand, trying to see what the man was so excited about. Through the sun’s glare, she could just make out the silhouette of a small outrigger canoe with its sail lowered. From that distance, she couldn’t have distinguished anything as small as a crab or a gecko, of course, but what was that animal standing at the water’s edge?

A goat!

The girl climbed onto the ferry’s narrow wooden bench, placed one hand on her father’s shoulder for balance, then stood on her tiptoes, straining upward for the best possible view. At that moment, the captain started the gasoline engine. The noise of the motor muffled the waiter’s cries, but the girl could see that he was still yelling and—amazingly enough—looked to be gaining speed.

Meanwhile, the captain’s mate had jumped into the shallows and begun pushing the ferry into deeper water, using his full weight to rock the craft from side to side. As the wooden hull lurched free of the sand, the girl’s father wrapped an arm around her legs, to steady her, and for that she was grateful.

From his high vantage point, Cheechak guessed that they had only a few more seconds to escape. Despite this calculation, the gecko’s mind remained remarkably serene. He had moved beyond panic and only wondered, calmly, if there was something about waiting tables that built human stamina.

Pashmina looked at Ayu but did not open her mouth. After all the planning, she did not want to drop her end of the rope. Ayu, for her part, realized immediately that their scheme for affixing the rope’s other end to the base of the mast—in order to change the angle at which force could be applied—was no longer practical.

The nine hermits also looked at Ayu. It was to have been their job to weave the rope’s many thin strands into a secure loop, just as they had for the rope used to raise the sail. But there was no longer time for that—and they all knew it. Nine pairs of eyes swiveled expectantly on their stalks. Ayu twisted one claw idly in the rope’s frayed end, a shaggy tangle of damp fibers. When she tried to unwind her claw, the fibers clung fast to its rough surface—as tightly as a grabby octopus. The idea came to her like a bird. Ayu twisted her claw among the fibers again, then once more, for good measure.

The coconut crab nodded to the hermits like a captain to her crew. “When Cheechak gives the word,” she said, “hoist the sail.”

From the girl’s perspective, everything that happened next seemed to take place in an orderly sequence, each action leading inevitably to the next, like the slick quick fall of a row of dominoes. The ferry was moving steadily away from shore, the motor’s initial racket reduced to a rumbling hum, and its path from mooring to reef brought it within a stone’s throw of the outrigger canoe, still grounded at the water’s edge. The girl could see the beautiful crab now, standing before the mast, her two claws stretched wide before her carapace, as if she meant to measure some great gap.

One claw seemed to sprout the rope that stretched a few feet away to the goat, who had braced her four legs in the shallow water ahead of the canoe, ready to pull with all her might. As the girl watched, the pincers on the other claw opened like a pair of pliers, then clamped themselves onto the mast, right at the base.

At the other end of the canoe, the waiter leaned down, breathing heavily, and grasped the stern with both hands. From somewhere above the scene came a faint chirp, like the call of a house gecko. The goat apparently took this as a signal, because she reared violently backwards, jerking the canoe up and over a ridge of sand. The waiter stumbled forward into the water, maintaining his hold on the stern, but losing one sandal in the process. As he was looking down to find it, another chirp sounded, and the palm-frond sail shot upward as if by magic.

As you know, the sail had been fashioned in the shape of a giant crab claw, with two bamboo spars. The blunt end of the longer spar struck the waiter just under the chin, so that he made a little gurgling noise, then sat down splashily in the lagoon. He also let go of the canoe.

The girl heard one more chirp. The goat reared again. And this time her powerful yank pulled the canoe perfectly beneath her front hooves, so that she seemed to rise and step aboard in one elegant motion.

The girl twisted herself around and called her brother’s name, but he was already standing at the rear of the ferry, holding the wooden spool in one hand and the fishing line in the other. Every few seconds he would twitch the line enticingly, so that the silvery lure at the end fluttered like a wounded minnow. You missed it, she thought, already wondering how she could convince him of what she’d seen.

When she turned back to the little canoe, she noticed that it was sailing more or less toward the same gap in the reef as the ferry, but moving rather more slowly, under a fickle breeze. The waiter had wobbled to his feet and stood in knee-deep water, rubbing his chin. He raised one foot, removed his remaining sandal, and threw it dripping onto the beach. Then he untied his apron and tossed it soggily onto the sand as well.

The waiter’s eyes narrowed as he watched the canoe meandering over the calm lagoon. When his shoulders hunched suddenly forward, the girl thought for a moment that he’d fainted. The splash came not from a fall, however, but a dive.

The animals gathered at the base of the mast. Ayu raised her claws high. “We did it!” she cried.

Cheechak, standing atop her carapace, spread his front legs as wide as he could, but still couldn’t get them all the way around one of Ayu’s wrists. “Amazing,” he beamed.

“The right pinch at the right time,” rumbled the triton-shelled hermit, while the other hermits nodded in agreement.

Pashmina ducked her head beneath the sail to nuzzle the coconut crab. “You saved us,” she smiled, keeping her head down as the spar swung across the canoe, rattling in the breeze.

With the sail angling over the water like a wing, the canoe changed direction, falling behind the ferry and cutting across its wake. When Ayu looked up, she saw the girl with the faraway eye waving enthusiastically—apparently at them. The girl’s excitement reminded the crab of that first night at the café, when she’d been so sure of friendship, only to land on her back in the azalea. It was not a pleasant memory. Nevertheless, her heart surged again, as the girl really did seem to be trying to communicate, bouncing again and again onto her toes and pointing at something behind them.

Chapter 28

Such Sweet Sorrow

The coconut crab allowed herself one more glance at the girl on the ferry. Yes, Ayu thought, she’s definitely trying to tell us something. And it’s not good-bye.

Strangely enough, however, every other human on the boat was looking in another direction—at the boy in the stern, who was struggling with both hands to hold onto a wooden spool.

“He’s fighting a big fish,” Cheechak said.

Ayu shuddered involuntarily, thinking of all the sharp-toothed predators that Grandfather used to warn her about, then brightened almost immediately, when she considered how happy the old crab would be to hear the story of her pinch—a pinch that really did save nine.

It was a pleasant thought, but Ayu knew this wasn’t the time for daydreams. For one thing, there was the matter of steering. If they wanted to follow the ferry to Pemanggi-anggi-sanggi-o, then they would have to keep it in sight—no matter where it turned. The crab clambered across a pile of coconuts to the rear of the canoe and grasped the remaining paddle in her claws. The idea had been to rig it as a rudder, but that plan had been scuttled with the waiter’s arrival.

A brief gust of wind sent the little canoe skimming closer to the ferry. While the animals watched, a sleek powerful fish leaped low over the water. It had a gleaming blue back and narrow bronze bars on its silvery flanks. The mackerel’s sharp face was fixed in a fiendish grin, and a shiny metal lure hung from the corner of its jaw. As the fish re-entered the water, the sunlight glinted off one dark eye, like a wink.

Some of the passengers on the ferry pointed at the spot where the fish had disappeared; others whooped and hollered, offering the boy their encouragement. But Ayu noticed that the girl continued to look only in their direction, persisting in her attempts to get their attention. If anything, the crab thought, the girl’s movements seemed to have become even more frenetic. She was bouncing so fast now that her head bobbed like a parakeet’s.

Ayu latched two strong pairs of legs onto the stern, then dipped the paddle into the water with its blade upright.

“Push the handle to the left,” said Cheechak, “and we’ll turn to the right.”

Ayu pushed gently, as instructed, and was pleased to feel the canoe respond. After a few moments, she pulled the handle back toward her body, which caused the canoe to veer in the opposite direction. “This is going to take some practice,” she told the gecko.

Aboard the ferry, the girl had stopped bouncing and begun to point at the water with a violent, stabbing motion, as if she wanted the crab and her friends to peer into the depths. Ayu gave a brief glance over the side—and there to her surprise was the mackerel again, the fishing line pulling at an oblique angle to the jaw, so that its grin looked more like a grimace.

For a brief moment their eyes met, and the crab was about to speak when the fish suddenly surged away, as if frightened by some other, unseen danger. The mackerel’s headstrong rush staggered the boy at the other end of the line. If not for his mother’s firm hold on the waistband of his shorts, he might’ve been jerked overboard.

Instead it was Ayu who found herself flailing. Something had grabbed the blade of the paddle. Something—or someone—stronger and heavier than any coconut crab. But by the time she’d managed to rotate her eyestalks toward the threat, Cheechak was already in motion.

When the big mackerel had fled, the little gecko had immediately looked for the source of danger. And there again was the waiter—the very same man who’d held the noose over Pashmina’s head outside the bungalow—grasping their paddle. Cheechak recognized the muscular arms reaching from the water, the confident forehead beneath the wet mop of hair, but—most of all—he recognized the bridge of the nose. For the first time since he’d met the beautiful crab, the gecko knew what would happen next.

He skittered down the paddle’s shaft, then up again, adjusting his trajectory so that his four feet, each equipped with five uncannily sticky toes, would land precisely astride the damp furrow between the waiter’s eyebrows.

He leaped; he landed. Precisely on target. Even as the waiter’s hands were clawing upward, however, Cheechak was already preparing for his return leap onto the now liberated paddle.

“Hard to starboard!” he shouted.

Ayu had no idea what this meant, but pushed the paddle’s handle sharply to the left. As the blade pivoted to the right, Cheechak jumped back aboard. The sail rattled against the spars and the canoe accelerated across the wind, leaving the waiter spluttering in its wake.

This new tack brought them even closer to the ferry, so close that Ayu could clearly see the girl’s jubilant smile.

The boy had been so entirely focused on the fish that he’d only just noticed the little outrigger canoe and the man treading water behind it. Due to the events of the past few days, he was perhaps not quite as amazed as some of the other humans to see a white goat under sail. True, he did experience a slight twinge of disappointment to observe the goat piloting the very same canoe that he and his father had lately repaired for themselves, but his heart had grown more generous since his encounters with the hornbill, and he did not begrudge the goat her freedom.

In a few more days, after his family returned to the island, boy and hornbill would meet again—and both would be happier for it. But at the moment his attention remained on the fish, which was unusual for its size, and for its tenacity, and for its ability to jump while hooked. Most mackerel fought in a straightforward, underwater fashion, swimming hard and fast against the pull of the line until they tired—and could be summarily hoisted into the boat. But this fish changed depth and direction at whim, sometimes diving toward the coral, sometimes soaring like a missile through the air. The boy fixed his gaze on the line angling tautly into the water. If the mackerel jumped again, he wanted to be ready.

As the little canoe continued to approach the ferry, the boy hazarded another glance in its direction, then dared to lift one hand from the wooden spool.

“Watch out!” he shouted, waving desperately, then pointing at the line.

But it was already too late. The mackerel was on the move, its powerful tail lashing the water’s surface, propelling it—in one magnificent leap—up and over the bow of the canoe.

If the goat had not seen the fish coming, she might have been strangled by the fishing line, which hummed in the wind like an over-tuned guitar string. But she had seen it, and dipped her horns gracefully as the line passed unhindered above her head, then fretted itself against the mast.

When the goat raised her head again, the boy could see the coconut crab poised between the goat’s horns, with a familiar gecko perched atop the crab’s mottled carapace.

“Oh no,” the boy groaned, as the crab lifted her claws in readiness for parting. He jerked frantically on the spool, trying to free the line, but by this time the fish had completely circled the little canoe. There was no hope of holding it.

When the boy looked in the water again, the mackerel was swimming calmly below the surface, just beneath the boy’s own reflection. The mackerel was grinning. And the boy was too.

© 2016 Peter W. Fong

Credits: The images that open the chapters in this book are by John James Audubon (3), Nicolaes Berchem (8, 10), Marcus Elieser Bloch (28), Etienne Dennise (18), Daniel Giraud Elliot (2), Walter Hood Fitch (13), an as yet unidentified Japanese artist (19), George-Louis Leclerc (9), and Albertus Seba (cover, 1, 4–7, 9, 11, 12, 14–17, 20–27).