Chapter 62: Matters of Human Nature I

Every good thing that happened on that island that year arrived holding something else by the hand.

The houses were no different.

Through the months of winter, the hundred survivors had eaten out of one cauldron. One fire in the middle of the camp, and later in the plaza. One pot.

Everything anybody caught or dug or shot went into it, and everybody ate out of it in line.

The name for that is tribal cooperation, and it is worth saying plainly, because the whole of what follows is about it breaking.

It had worked beautifully.

Because when a hundred people are three bad weeks from dying, sharing is not a philosophy. It is common sense.

That was the good side of the houses, and everybody had seen it coming. A door, a hearth, a room of one's own.

Nobody had thought about the other half of it, which is that a hearth is a place to cook, and a door is a thing you can shut.

The first couple cooked their own supper not long after they moved out of the camp.

Then a family with small children stopped walking down to the plaza and ate at home.

Eating alone was never the problem.

It started with a fish.

One of the men off the rafts kept a single cod back at the shore, gutted it there, and carried it up the hill under his coat.

Not for himself. His woman was carrying, and she had been sick for a fortnight, and she could not keep down what came out of the common cauldron.

Nobody on that island would have said one word against it. He could have asked at the fire and been handed the best fish in the basket and a blanket to carry it in.

That was the whole of it, and it was so small that nothing happened at all.

Then it was the elk.

Half a dozen men went north after it and were gone for days. They came back at dusk with the carcass slung on poles, the first big kill since the thaw.

By the time it reached the plaza it was missing a hind leg.

Nobody said anything about that either.

They had done the work, so it seemed fair enough. Six men. They keep one leg. Everyone else gets the animal.

Then it was the whole raft.

The raft went out at first light on a good day, the best day of the season, and did not come back until nightfall. They split the catch on the sand, gutted it there, salted what would take salt, carried it up to their own houses and hung it in their own rooms.

None of it went anywhere near the plaza.

So it was raised the next day, in public. The men were not ashamed of it, and they had no reason to lie.

"We caught it. We keep it."

It did not stop there either.

By high summer the common pot was feeding a fraction of the people it had fed at the thaw, and the rest still expected it to be there.

It would have been easy enough to shout at them. To name the men, and make an example of somebody, and be done with it.

Here was the trouble.

Not one of those men had done anything wrong.

A man puts his own woman and his own child in front of everybody else's. That is not greed and it is not treachery.

It is the most ordinary thing a human being does, and anybody who argued otherwise was arguing with human nature and going to lose.

And it was worse than ordinary. It was new.

Six months earlier not one of them had a wife, or a son, or a room, or a bowl of his own. A slave has none of those things. A slave has a number and a place in a line, and no reason on earth to hold anything back for anybody, because there is nobody who is his.

Now there was.

And the first thing every last one of them did with it was put a door on the front and start looking after their own.

They had been given exactly what they were promised, and it was pulling the tribe apart.

There was a second half to it, and it was uglier, because it had nothing to do with families at all.

What do you get for working harder than the man beside you?

Until now the answer was nothing. Nothing at all, because everybody was equal, and for the sake of not burying people in the frost, that had been right.

But a fisherman with a sick wife and a doorway with no door in it is not three weeks from dying any more.

He is looking at the man who spent the afternoon sitting in the sun. He is watching that man eat the same supper.

Why would he not keep score?

That was the question underneath all of it.

How do you reward the men who work, and still keep the tribe whole?

Nobody at that fire knew.

They simply felt it, all summer, getting worse.

The fights came more often by the day. Small ones, all of them, and every single one entirely legitimate.

The goats were the first real trouble.

Every animal they had bought in the spring belonged to everybody, which meant they belonged to nobody.

So the goats, the ducks, the pigs and the rest got tended when there was time, and there was never time.

Then there was the roofing.

A man had spent the better part of a week on somebody else's roof. On the slabs, in the sun, because that house had a family with a baby in it and his own had one man in it and no baby.

His own house still had no door.

So was he owed something?

By whom? By the family? By all of them? And in what, exactly?

He did not want their thanks. He had their thanks. It was worth nothing, and there was still a hole where his door should have been, going into autumn.