Kids into books - The Silent One

This week's title: The Silent One

Author: Joy Cowley

Publisher: Penguin Books, $9.95

Illustrator: Colin Edgerley

Age group: 8-13 years


Today Jonasi was not fishing. He was content to move slowly over the dark glass surface, watching the red and green of the underwater jungle and the fish that flickered though branches of coral like flocks of tiny birds, blue, yellow, glistening bands of black and silver.

On the shadowed side of some brain coral, two cowrie shells, spotted brown and white, moved slowly with their occupants. Higher up, a pink starfish spread its many arms in a patch of patch of pink sunlight. Jonasi reached down with the paddle, flicked the starfish over on its back and laughed.

Let them hunt for pigs, he thought. Let them trip over Samu and sit on Etika's spear and walk through thorny vies and nettles. One day he would go into the mountains by himself and brig back his own pig, but in the meantime he was still the best fisherman in the village.

No one had his success with a line or a spear or a net. And not a man or a boy carried in his head such a detailed map of the reef. He knew all the shellfish beds, the holes that hid the largest crayfish, the places where fish fed at certain times of the moon, the currents, the tides, the changes that came with storms. The reef, rather than the village, was his home.

Jonasi had not discovered why he was alone in the village. Sometimes people had touched his ears or their own as though they were trying to make him understand something.