Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

“Mua,” I began, making my voice stern, even though I needn’t have bothered, as he would compliantly answer any question posed to him, “this is very important. You once knew the chief, am I correct?”

He stared at me. “Don’t be frightened,” I told him. “The chief said you should tell me.”

It was as if I had told him he would be eating nothing but Spam for the rest of his life, so quickly did his face transform itself into a mask of joy, and Tallent looked at me once, warningly, before translating his answer: “Did he?”

“Oh yes,” I said blithely, unthinkingly cruel. “He said you should tell me everything.”

He craned his neck upward then, as if directly behind me he’d see the chief, conferring upon him a blessing, but of course the light was gone by then and the chief was nowhere to be seen.

“We were friends,” he said, his face sad again.

“The night you were led into the forest — do you remember that?”

He let out his breath. “Yes. They took us very, very far in and left us. They had to.”

“When was this?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“It’s all right.” I thought. “The two people you were taken away with — were they men or women?”

“Men.”

“Are they here? Are they part of your group?”

He exhaled again, noisily. I began to discern that he, like the chief, was growing impatient with my questions. But while I had sensed that the chief’s impatience was born out of a sort of weariness with the subject — not to mention a wariness — Mua’s felt different: he was waiting only for me to ask the correct question, after which he could and would tell me all that I wanted to know and all that he wanted to say. But “No” was all he replied.

This went on and on and on, me asking the (apparently) incorrect questions again and again, Mua giving up little smidges of answers with each, so that it was not until late that night, when I sat down with Tallent and we began to work through his notes, that the cumulative information revealed itself as a real story.

One night — Mua did not know when, as I have stated, but if we were to believe the chief, it would have been around one o’ana ago — Mua and two other men were led into the forest by the hunters. They had all known that this would happen, and indeed, they had been waiting for it. When Mua was younger, he had seen other men and women who were becoming mo’o kua’aus being led into the forest, always late at night, always by the village’s best hunters. In fact, almost all of the people in his group, except for Ika’ana, Vi’iu, and Eve, were people he remembered being led away.

They walked into the forest for a night and a day and then another night, until on the second night Mua could feel the air around them become crisper and lighter and knew that it was dawn. Each of them had carried a palm-leaf package heavy with food that they had tied to their spears, and although they could keep the food, they had to surrender their spears to the hunters. They had known that their spears would be taken from them, for a mo’o kua’au is not a full human and therefore has no right to carry a spear. But when the moment came for them to sacrifice them, one of Mua’s peers refused.

“He would not,” Mua recalled. The hunters commanded the man, and threatened him with their own spears before simply attacking him, trying to seize it from his grasp. They were, after all, the best hunters in the village.

But the man, although becoming a mo’o kua’au, was still strong, and fought back. Years before, Mua said, this man had been one of the people elected to abandon the mo’o kua’aus in the forest. The hunters stabbed at the man, but he dodged their thrusts, springing from place to place, until finally, when even Mua could see him tiring, he turned and sprinted away into the forest, his spear still in his hand.

One of the hunters made to follow him, but he was stopped by another. “Leave him,” he said. “He’ll only get lost. He won’t find his way back.” And then, without another word, they left, with their spears and two extras.

“I was very sad,” Mua said, “because these were my friends. I had fought with them and hunted with them, and they had all attended my vaka’ina, and now they were leaving me without saying goodbye. But I understood that this was the way it must be.”

“Did they eat the opa’ivu’eke at your vaka’ina?” I asked.

He shook his head. “They had many fewer o’anas than I did,” he said.

“Have you seen them in the village?” I asked.

“No. They are dead.”

He said this with such fierce certainty that we were surprised.

“How do you know?”

He shrugged. “I know,” was all he said. And then he began his chant: “He kaka’a, he kaka’a.” I’m tired, I’m tired .

“Wait,” I pleaded with him and with Fa’a, who was already standing, ready to take Mua back to the others. “Mua, what happened to you and the other mo’o kua’aus?”

He sighed. “We walked and walked. We ate the food. Sometimes we caught something to eat, but it was difficult without our spears. One day we came across a stream, very deep, very fast, and stayed there for a long time. There were plants that grew around the trees, and we ate those. The man I was with was becoming more and more of a mo’o kua’au by the day — he forgot and forgot, and I had to watch him like a child. I did more and more of the work. One day I came back from getting us something to eat and I saw that he was dead.”

“How did he die?” Tallent asked gently.

“He was in the river,” said Mua. He shook his head. “He forgot to ask permission to drink its waters, and the water choked him and he died.” We were all quiet.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“I left.”

“And did you ever find the other man, the one who ran from the hunters?”

“No,” he said. “But he was becoming more of a mo’o kua’au as well, so I think he is perhaps dead too.”

“How would he have died?”

“Maybe he fell? Or maybe he too forgot to ask permission to take a drink and was cursed and killed.”

“But how did you meet up with”—I gestured toward the group—“the others?”

“Ah,” said Mua. “Well, I walked and walked, and some days I had food and some days I didn’t, and then one day I met up with some of them, and then with others, and then we hunted as a group and ate as a group, and fought against the others when we needed to.”

I felt Tallent look at me. “Which others?” I asked.

“The others,” he said, a bit impatiently. “The others in the forest.”

“Hunters?”

“No, no, not hunters — mo’o kua’aus.”

“There are others?”

“Of course.”

“How many? Where are they? Why don’t you speak to them? Why were you fighting? Why—”

“He kaka’a, he kaka’a,” he sang, almost mockingly, as if he knew how desperate I was for the answer, and Fa’a stood with a resolute air.

“Wait,” I told him, but this time it was Fa’a who shook his head, Fa’a, who never contradicted any of us, and we all fell silent.

“Tallent,” I hissed at him as we watched them go, “We need to sort this out right now.”

“We need to figure this all out tomorrow,” Esme interjected, a little too decisively for my taste (she had unfortunately returned from the creek just in time to insert herself into the proceedings).

“Tomorrow,” Tallent agreed. “It’s late.” And although I hadn’t noticed it before — we had quickly grown accustomed to the village’s hours — in that moment I noticed that it was indeed very late, and that everything around us had grown so quiet that the only sound aside from our own voices and the nearby snores and grumblings of the dreamers was, as always, the fire, hissing to itself in the still air.