Seru came out an hour before the tide turned. The village was quiet. The dogs had settled. The generator at the newer house on the road side had been off for hours, and without it the only sounds were the reef, the palm fronds, and a frog calling from the wet ground near the path. He walked along the side of the house between the wall and the croton hedge, the hedge leaves dark and slightly waxy in the starlight, their smooth upper surfaces catching a faint reflected gleam. The lower surfaces faced the ground and caught nothing. The path was packed earth between the wall and the base of the hedge, worn smooth and slightly lower than the surrounding ground from years of feet taking this same route.
He had walked this path in the dark enough times that his feet carried him without needing his direction. They knew the slight dip near the corner of the house where rainwater pooled after heavy weather. They knew the three flat coral stones he had laid across the dip years ago, one after another across the lowest ground, placed there the morning after the second time he had slipped and gone down on one knee in the dark. They knew the place near the dock where the hedge grew close to the water's edge and the path narrowed to a sideways shuffle, the croton leaves brushing his shoulder as he turned and pressed through.
He carried the hurricane lamp in his left hand and the net bin under his right arm. The bin was a square plastic crate, white when he found it and bleached by years of sun to a pale grey. He had found it on the reef flat on the east side of the island after a period of heavy weather from the north, the crate washed up above the waterline and lying on its side, empty and undamaged. He had carried it home and kept it for a while near the shed for miscellaneous purposes and had then put it into service as the net bin, and it had been the net bin since. The crate was cracked along one corner from being dropped off the dock, and the crack was bound with black electrical tape that had dried and cracked and been replaced twice. The crack had not spread.