I stand there and try to remember the few words of English I know. I smile to be polite.

“What are you doing here?”

The man straightens up slowly, pressing his hand into the small of his back and wincing. He’s covered in sweat, and he wipes his forehead with his handkerchief. It’s filthy with brown stains. His pale face is streaked with red blotches and swollen with mosquito bites. His lips are puffy.

He swipes at the clouds of mosquitoes that are drawn by the heat of his blood.

“What are we doing?” he replies. “We’re measuring, drawing lines. We’re surveyors, her majesty’s surveyors. Isn’t it obvious?”

He starts to gather up his tripod, but I want to get to the bottom of this.

“Who gave you permission to do this?”

The surveyor glances at me out of the corner of his eye.

“The government, of course! You don’t know that? The land you walk on, those trees, the lakes, rivers, the air that you breathe, the fish you eat — all that belongs to the government. And the government doesn’t need permission from anyone. If you don’t like it, why don’t you take it up with them!”

The man starts to laugh, but then he sees that I’m not reacting, that I don’t seem to have understood him.

He heaves his tripod onto his shoulder.

“Look, you Indians are lucky,” he says. “The government is going to build you free houses — nice wooden houses with windows, a kitchen, bedrooms. One day you’ll have a school, a clinic, just like in town. Say goodbye to your tents full of holes, your old log cabins. This is progress, even for Indians!”

He turns on his heels and disappears into the forest, followed by a thick cloud of thirsty mosquitoes.

I hurry back to tell Manie. Everyone is in an uproar. The worst thing is that we weren’t even consulted. The government wants to build us square wooden houses just like the ones the whites have. What for?

“We live the way we do so that we are always free to move our houses,” Manie says solemnly. “That way we are at home wherever we pitch our tents.”

And why now? Where’s it been hiding, this damn government? When you do need something, you never know where to go or who to talk to. The young people say the government’s like a wolverine. You can recognize its tracks, smell it, see the damage it leaves, but it’s still invisible. You can never catch it, and it will avoid any trap you set for it.

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