Kiri.

In her story, Kiri started going along with her mother at fourteen. Her job was to hold the lamp and keep quiet. It took her two years to notice that Hine handed her the instruments in the wrong order. It was never carelessness: always the same crooked order, so the daughter would have to guess which one came next and get ahead of it. When Kiri understood it, she said nothing and kept holding the lamp. She doesn't remember a single conversation where her mother explained anything about the trade. Not one. And everything she knows, she knows because of her.

The kakapo is the only parrot in the world that mates in a lek system: males display in courtship arenas and boom, females travel long distances to choose and then leave. There's no pair bond. The female incubates, feeds, and protects the chicks alone.

On Kiri's island nobody asks who anyone's father is: women raise their children alone, and that's not told as a biographical fact. She raised her two children like every other woman there. The one time an outsider asked her if she didn't feel lonely, it took her a while to understand the question. One of them is still on the island; the other crossed over to Pukenui and calls rarely.