The team of douen men with axes climbed down a next level and started chopping again. This level had some douen houses in it; the men just left them there so. Their owners had already abandoned them. Wasp nest houses. Tan-Tan had scorned them when she’d first seen them. Now, she would give anything to be safe back in Benta and Chichibud’s house; anything for the douens not to have to do this thing.
The men chopped and chopped till they cracked off a next section of the daddy tree. Another team of douen women made off with it, heading seawards. And is so it went, level after level, until all that was left was the big stumps and buttress roots of the daddy tree. It had sticky sap all over the forest floor, and shards of douen houses.
It had a mako big hole in the bush canopy in the place where the daddy tree crowns used to be. Tan-Tan looked up at the cerulean blue of the evening sky. Is you do this, you worthless one; is you let the sky into the bush like this.
All through the new-made clearing the douen people gathered in circles round the weeping stumps of what used to be their daddy tree—waiting, waiting. Some of them had lit their lanterns already. Lantern light, sky light; when last had this part of the bush been so illuminated?
Finally the last team of douen women had flown back from the sea. They fluttered down to join the rest of the village in the circles. Benta started to rock from foot to foot. Everybody followed suit. Res began a chant deep in his throat, a wail that resembled a douen baby crying. Tan-Tan caught the words for “home” and “food” and “thank you.” The wail got louder. So a child would lament a dead parent. Other douens joined in, some chanting low and passionately like Res, some screaming, ululating, crying. They keened their loss to the sky. Each one was thanking the daddy tree for sheltering them, mourning its loss. The sound filled up the air, pierced into Tan-Tan’s ears like knives, beat against her body like fists and slaps. The baby she was holding woke up crying again. She let him go on this time. Now is the time for him to bawl. Tan-Tan felt say she didn’t have any right to be part of their mourning, but the tree had held her in its arms too. Quietly she whispered, “Thanks. I so, so sorry. Thanks.”
Slowly the douen wail died down, leaving only the children still sobbing. Next thing Tan-Tan knew, Res pulled out his pissle from his genital flap and peed on the stump in front of him—a green, thick piss that curdled the raw wood wherever it landed. The rest of the douen men did the same, wherever they were standing. The daddy tree stumps were dissolving!
“Papa God!” Tan-Tan exclaimed. “Is what them doing?”
*Burying the daddy tree,* Abitefa explained. Her words-them were mushy, for her teeth were falling out as her mouth grew into a beak. Tan-Tan had to strain to understand her.
*I never see this before, I only hear about it,* Abitefa continued. *Them making the burning water. It go hide the old tree and help the new tree grow in faster.*
“So then how them does piss without melting down the whole place all the time?” she asked. Kret could have burned off her leg that day!
*Them body water don’t always burn, only when them wish it to. What Kret do you, he wasn’t supposed to do.*
“And how it is that no boys ain’t there helping them?”
*Too young. Boys can’t make the burning water yet, them have to turn man first.*
Tan-Tan clicked her tongue in wonder. “And we does say a man not a man until he old enough for he pee to make froth.”
The light of day was almost gone. The men finished their job. All that was left of the daddy tree was a green soup, smelling like ammonia and blood. It made a rank mud on the forest floor. Picking his way carefully round the redolent pools, Chichibud hopped over to his family. Tan-Tan had known him from she was a small pickney. She knew how to read his emotions in his body language. She’d never seen him sadder than this night. But all he said when he reached to them was, “Allyou have any of the tree sap on you? On your foot bottom, anywhere? Wipe it off careful with dead leaf. Don’t touch it! Throw the leaf-them down here so then let we get out of the way. The little teeth coming any minute now; the smell of the sap does call them.”
Little teeth? Tan-Tan gave the baby back to its father. She made haste and obeyed Chichibud. All round her douen people were wiping any trace of sap off themselves and moving briskly out of the clearing into the tree cover. They clustered together. Nine-ten of the douens dipped some long sticks in the sap and piss soup and made a trail out of the clearing, away from where the rest of the village was standing. Tan-Tan went to stand with Chichibud and them.
*We safe upwind. We could watch from here,* Benta said. With her beak she gently pulled Abitefa to her, tucked the young douen woman beneath her breast. Abitefa hunkered down into a ball, warm against the deep keel of her mother’s body.
One-one, more light from lanterns sprang up in the darkness; bouncing, disembodied glows. Tan-Tan remembered the douen myth from back home, about how people could be drawn into the bush by douen lights and the sound of their voices, going deeper and deeper until they were lost for good. And Tan-Tan knew she was lost for true, so far away from herself that she couldn’t know how to come back.
Nobody spoke. What was going to happen? Tan-Tan asked Chichibud what they were waiting for, but a voice from out of the darkness said in a deliberate, contemptuous Anglopatwa, “Chichibud, hush that tallpeople up, you hear? None of we want to hear she voice tonight.” Pressed down with shame, Tan-Tan clamped her lips together.
A hissing sound was coming from the darkness beyond them; a hissing that turned into a rustling that became a chittering then a crunching. A bright red wave poured into the cleared space where the daddy tree had been. From the lantern light Tan-Tan could see a gleam here and there of a thousand thousand shiny carapaces: the little teeth. The wave moved closer. Tan-Tan strained to see. They looked like lobsters, an army of scavengers each the size of her hand, climbing over one another in their eagerness to get to the mixture of daddy tree sap and piss. The noise was their feet running, climbing over anything in their way, even their compères. The noise was their mandibles; cutting and biting, tearing up anything that had sap on it and bearing it away: pieces of wattle and daub; daddy tree leaves and branches that had been left behind; a scrap of some hinte weaving; a leg ripped off one of their own; anything, anything. And so them tear it up, is so them eat it.
Tan-Tan felt a whimper in her throat but she couldn’t hear herself over the noise of the little teeth feeding. She shrank away from the sight in the clearing and leaned up against Benta’s side. She heard an animal scream; the little teeth were taking down a mammal that had been foraging in the clearing and had probably gotten some sap on its feet. The beast was the size of a small dog, but the little teeth bore it down to the ground with the sheer weight of their piled bodies. Tan-Tan couldn’t take her eyes off the roiling mass that hid the beast. It stopped screaming. Seconds later the little teeth that had attacked it were moving on again. Only gnawed bones were left.
And quick as it start, it finish. The little teeth gobbled up everything in their way, followed the trails of sap out of the clearing, and disappeared into the night bush. The ground in the clearing was bare, but for the bones of creatures that had been caught in their path.
“The little teeth does leave nothing behind but them guano,” Chichibud said. Is true; in the lamplight Tan-Tan could see the droppings everywhere, little pellets littering the clearing. And then the most astonishing thing of the whole night; as Tan-Tan watched, shoots started to push up through the ground, growing right before her eyes!