A Village With Better Questions
The *tavana* had said we would be met, and at 06:20 on the second morning off Napuka, the meeting came to us.
I was on deck with the first coffee, watching the sun crack the horizon to the east and thinking about the forty-eight-hour forecast, when Hina, who had been on anchor watch, said quietly, "Alvar," and pointed.
A sail.
It was a shallow-draft pirogue, rigged with a single lateen on a mast stepped well forward, and it was coming out of the east — that is, from the open sea, not from Napuka — on a close reach at about four knots. The hull was painted in the dull blue the Tuamotu boatbuilders mix from a specific pigment their mothers' generation had got from a specific store in Papeete and which nobody got now; I recognised the colour before I recognised anything else. Two men in the boat. An older man at the steering paddle, and a younger man tending the sheet.
They came alongside without ceremony, dropped the sail cleanly, and the older man looked up at me with the grave calm of a man who had been awake since three.
"Captain," he said, in French. "I am Teva Hitirau. My grandson is Rahiti. We have come from the island you are going to. The *tavana* of Napuka sent word. You are expected."
I asked them aboard. They tied the pirogue astern on a long painter and came up the boarding ladder without fuss. Teva was perhaps seventy, lean, with the deliberate slow movements