The Watchers

Near the coast Polly found a small building with a forest of antennas on its roof and one scientist inside, surrounded by screens. On them, jagged lines wandered up and down, and a map of the island was dotted with tiny coloured circles. Each circle was an earthquake, most far too small to feel. Polly landed on the desk and tilted her head at the nearest screen until her round black-rim glasses slid down her beak. The scientist smiled and turned the monitor toward her.

This is how the people here live safely on top of so much fire. Before a volcano erupts, the ground usually trembles for days or weeks, hundreds of small earthquakes as the melted rock pushes upward. The scientists watch those tremors day and night, and when the pattern starts to look dangerous, they can ask a whole town to pack up and leave in good time. The mountain still does as it pleases. But the people get a head start.

The scientist told Polly an old story from a small island off the coast. Many years ago a volcano there woke in the night, and a slow wall of lava began moving toward the town's harbour, the town's whole living. So the people pumped cold seawater onto the lava, for weeks, until the front cooled and hardened and stopped, just short of the boats. They had not beaten the volcano. They had bargained with it.

Before she left, Polly pressed one small foot into the scientist's ink pad, then walked a neat line of prints across the corner of his map. He laughed, tore the page free, and pinned it to the wall among his photographs of erupting mountains. One green parrot, he wrote underneath, who came to read the earthquakes. Polly thought that a fine thing to be remembered for.