Long Before Henderson

The birds chattered as they spread their wings and were carried on the wind from the sea. Sitting with closed wings on the waves they called still. They were most talkative though on the cliffs and amongst the rocks where they nested and raised their young. Day and night the birds talked.
He stood and scratched his belly. He was thin. He closed his eyes and listened to the calls of the birds. He knew the cries and could see in his mind the birds that made each one.
The birds left only enough time between their calls for his heart to beat once or twice and even in those interludes there was no silence. The surf whispered and the grass made a dry counterpoint in the breeze. Only the man was quiet.
He could walk the whole of the world in half a day; he had never known anywhere else. Every nesting site and every rock pool; every one of perhaps a hundred tiny beaches he knew absolutely. He recognised every plant and every animal in every hiding place on the island. The island held no secrets from him save for the meaning of its speech, and even that, he felt, with the passage of time he was beginning to comprehend.
With each sunrise he walked the island. He went from one source of food to another and from time to time to the little beach where fresh water bubbled for him to drink. The spring was so close to the sea that he stood in salt water to quench his thirst with fresh.
His journey, although he knew every step, was not easy. In the main the island was composed of rock, sharp rock. Without the grass wrappings he made for his feet he would have walked daily a bloody trail; even with them one slip and he would be cut. He bore numerous scars. He loved the beaches; he went down to the water, took off his grass shoes and bathed his toes.
The ocean was a generous friend to him. It cleaned his wounds and brought him food. He loved its hushed voice in the places where it was calm and sometimes he heard it chant with a rhythm that brought to his mind memories of his mother singing as she held him close.
Still, the ocean was powerful and capricious. When it tired of peace and of gentle whispers it raged; it rose in great storms. Sometimes he feared that it would take back the world into the deep dark waters; that nowhere would be left for him or for the birds.
When the stormy mood rolled over the ocean he went to his shelter, to the cave where he had been born. He had always lived there and there he could be away from the terrible sky.
A sandy path ran to the cave mouth and its floor was covered with a thick layer of grasses and dried seaweeds. The entrance way was narrow and normally the interior had a gloom that to him felt like company. He felt close to his people there.
When the storms came and the ocean roared lightening flashed through the world and lit also the deepest corners of his home; it was only in those brief moments that he could clearly see the details of the little cave, and of the little shrine on its rocky shelf, and of the tiny god his father had carved to live there.
Whether he could clearly see the god's face or not, each evening on his return to the cave he gave his respects to the shrine. He made gifts of pretty shells and of fine pebbles polished by the sea. He did all of the things his mother had taught him; kept the routine that she had kept and, when the stars were right, sat in vigil so that the world would know that he cared; would know that he watched for the daily return of the sun and would, perhaps, one day send other people to be with him, here in the world of light and land.
His mother had told him time and again that the shrine and its tiny god would help to bring others back to the island. He would go straight from the shrine and watch across the ocean willing the folk from his mother's stories to come back into the world from the lost lands.
There had been other islands, she had said; islands full of people. Often he tried to repeat her words to himself and to remind the little god of his mother's promises. As the days of his life passed though, he found the repetition more difficult; the sounds came reluctantly into his mouth and his tongue rolled stiffly around the words his mother had spoken daily. He kept them though as well as he could, for all that the distance between his memory and his voice seemed often too great for these greatest of truths to travel.
Father, the only other man he had ever known, had taken to the ocean and had not returned. He had the vaguest memory of the boat, a marvellous thing of wood, and of his father's face, but it was really only because of the stories, the simplest of tales that his mother had told him, that he had any idea at all of what his father had been like.
Mother had lived on in lamentation of her lost mate. Birds will do the same. She lamented his decision to go to look for the others; she wept to recall his disappearance. She took his absence to mean that the other islands of the world were lost. The world had come down only to their island. And now the world had come down only to him.
Mother had died a long time ago. A wasting had come over her and a deep sadness had carried her away from him. In her last days she had paid heed only to the shrine, as if resolute attention to the tiny god and the sending of her son to watch the sea could by themselves bring the whole world back from oblivion, into a new age of people, of speech and song.
'Do not leave me here alone' he had begged; his last words spoken to another. But she had told him that she must go. She had said that when it was his turn she would be waiting for him.
At first he thought he would die of his grief, from the absence of another voice and the end of his mother's songs. But he had lived. He had not wanted to, but he had lived.
He took his survival to have meaning. He had been taught that the world was full of meaning. he kept the shrine and he kept watch. He waited for the others to come , and if they did not, he knew that finally he would go where his mother had gone. There she would be waiting for him. His father too perhaps.
And now he spoke little. The birds and the ocean and the breeze did not listen to his kind of speech. They knew him only as Man and his folk were dying from the world. His might be the last words and he guarded them for the ears of the tiny god.
As his hair had turned white he had grown in understanding of the voices of the world around him, but he could not yet be sure if they were telling him that the others would never come, or if that, if only he were patient enough, they would surely appear.