In the morning, low fog cloaked all within yards. But as they moved on, it lifted, and bright green fern-like plants soon began to replace the mamane trees, filling every gap in the forest, perky and shiny like children come to play. Reddish-pink clover spread over the black gravel like the brightest area rugs. So near a volcano, this was the Earth itself starting over again—what the whole planet must’ve looked like, Lett thought, before even the first wiggling creatures began to rise up from the water and the soft mud.

They hiked north toward the Hamakua Coast. They passed through rain forest and navigated many streams. They saw waterfalls. They crossed plantation lands, including one Kanani had lived on as a girl. They passed through a couple small junctions with mom-and-pop stores offering homemade dried fish, fruit turnovers, and ice shaves. Kanani went into one for water and food, and Lett meanwhile spied a family of touring mainlanders staring at her, as if to say, just look at that dirty island woman.

She then led him north along the coast. She knew the exact way now. They followed a winding road and she stopped at a hillside cemetery. She went quiet and walked away from him, passing among the tombstones. Most were sooty and crumbling, but one was a glossy new gray. She stood before it, hands clasped at her waist, head bowed. Lett thought he heard her speaking and moved to her, but she waved him away.

“My faddah,” she said afterward.

And they had marched on, following the coast road.

It seemed like he’d been in this valley much longer than two weeks. It took him the first week just to get his strength back, recovering while holed up in this shack that Kanani’s people had given him. Like everyone down here, he had no electricity or mail service. No addresses existed. He boiled or purified his water, and his light was candles. The first couple days, the valley dwellers had passed to stare at this outlandish haole with his pink skin and sandy blond hair wanting to curl after an afternoon rain. Old Samoans, the skin hanging off their once-corpulent bodies. Wiry Asians in cast-off plantation work clothes. Dark-skinned paniolos in worn riding hats. Even a white couple with leathered faces, salt-and-pepper longish hair, and knives on their belts. Some must’ve wondered if he wasn’t plainly lolo, or worse yet, dangerous.