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lost three quarters of its great mammals, marking the demise of its mammoths and camels and horses, giant bears and giant ground sloths and saber-toothed cats. Pleistocene overkill, Martin called it. Yet for all its dramatic crashing of giants, the megafaunal blitzkrieg of North America removed but a few dozen species. South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Madagascar all suffered similar mass extinctions of their megafauna. All followed close on the heels of their settlement by humans; all had damning bone piles and spear points as smoking guns; none came close to matching the sheer numbers of species Steadman was now counting among Oceania’s missing. With the invasion of the Pacific islands, Earth’s avian roster was pared by 20 percent. Oceania had hosted what Steadman would announce as “the largest single extinction event ever detected for vertebrates.”
    How those thousands of species had ultimately died amounted to what Steadman summed up as “the triple whammy.” With the first scrapings of sea canoes against sandy shores came three major forces against the life of islands. The canoes landed hungry people bringing pointed weaponry and fire, colonists who of course hunted the island birds for food and feathers, and who habitually burned and cleared for their crops what had once been the birds’ forests. Beyond hunting and habitat loss, the third force came in the form of an accomplice.
    The Lapita and their Polynesian descendants habitually stocked their canoes with supplies, not only for the long haul across the water but also for the extended stay once they arrived. They brought their taro and yams for planting and their stone adzes and fire skills for clearing and burning the fields. They also brought animal food, in the form of the domestic chicken, pig, and dog. And most religiously of all, the Pacific voyagers packed their rat.
    Rattus exulans , the Pacific rat, was a constant companion of the seafaring clans. On almost every one of the islands that bore any sign of Polynesians, there were signs of their rat. The rat often traveled with a purpose, as a snack for the long overseas trips and as a self-perpetuating crop of protein to be planted and harvested in the new homeland. For the twentieth-century archaeologist digging up Oceania’s past, the bones of Rattus exulans became a marker of human habitation as sure as the shards of Polynesian pottery. A sleek little mammal from Southeast Asia—with the climbing skills of a squirrel, but with no wings or fins—the Pacific rat had a presence across thousands of miles of the world’s largest ocean that could only be explained by human transport. And in time the rat would be recognized as a force of nature to nearly rival its keepers.
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    It wasn’t until the thirteenth century—long after the settlement of Hawaii, of Easter Island, of nearly every speck of habitable land across the breadth of the South Pacific—that the little clan of Polynesians and the rat they called kiore finally set sail on that long journey southward, tacking into the trade winds, to the last great unexplored landmass of the Pacific.
    The colonists of Aotearoa had landed well. For the kiore , there were fruits and nuts for hoarding, edible insects the size of mice, lizards and little birds with undefended eggs and nestlings. For the kiore ’s people, the M ā ori, there were beaches where they could comb for mussels and crabs, club a cornered seal, or scavenge a beached whale. There were waters in which to dive for conchs, spear and hook fish, harpoon a dolphin. Seabirds by the millions nested on the cliffs and headlands, to be plucked like berries. Inland lay great forests, with rich soils for growing crops, but also, as they were soon to discover, two-legged monsters.
    In their three-thousand-year tour of the Pacific islands, the Aotearoans’ ancestors had walked among giant geese and rails that reached to the waist.