The mist was still in the valley when she came out of the house. It lay in the bowl of the valley floor like still water, grey-white and perfectly level at the height of the garden fences, the mountain ridges on either side rising above it into the early blue of the sky. She stood for a moment on the step outside the low door and watched it. The mist did not move. The air was cold and clean and smelled of the fire inside the house and the wet grass of the compound beyond the fence.
She sat down on the step. The step was a flattened log, worn smooth on its upper surface from years of use, cool and slightly damp at this hour. She had her work with her — the bilum she had been making for ten days, folded and tucked inside itself so that the growing fabric lay protected. Beside it was the small bundle of bark strips she had prepared from the tu-lip tree behind the garden. The bundle was wrapped in a piece of old banana leaf to keep the strips supple. She set them both beside her on the step.
The compound was swept and empty. The fire inside the house had been burning since before first light, banked overnight with hardwood that was still holding at this hour, and the smoke moved out of the eaves in a thin column that the still air carried straight upward before dispersing. The smell of it reached her on the step, familiar and unnoticeable in the way that a smell known all one's life becomes part of the air itself rather than distinct within it. Beyond the compound fence the gardens began — the sweet potato mounds in their rows, the taro in the lower section near the creek — and beyond the gardens the secondary forest rose to the ridge that blocked the eastern sky.