Ritidian Point is the last unbuilt corner of Guam, at the island's northern tip in the village of Dededo, a beach of white sand under a cliff of fossil reef with painted caves, inside a national wildlife refuge, and its forest is silent, since the brown tree snake, arrived on cargo after the war, took nearly every bird on the island. Northern Guam is a single slab of raised reef limestone, so porous that not one river runs across it, and the cliff behind the beach is an old shoreline with caves in its face, one of which the refuge calls the Star Cave, where sixteen painted dots are read as a CHamoru calendar, a year cut into sixteen months of different lengths, reached only on a guided walk booked in advance; inside the reef line the water lies waist-deep and glass-clear over pale sand and coral heads, calm as a pool at the summer low tides, with the outer reef taking the swell. Green sea turtles come ashore to nest through the year, and their tracks often last until mid-morning, two lines of flipper prints running up the sand and back.
The path from the sand into the limestone forest is the fastest way to understand what happened to the island. The forest has trees, lizards and the sound of the sea, and no birdsong, because the snake ate the eggs and the chicks of every native bird, and with the birds went the spread of the forest's seeds, so the woods are changing shape; the Guam rail and the kingfisher survive only in captivity and on snake-free islets, and the refuge is fenced against the snake in places to try them back. A few days after the last-quarter moon, two or three times a year, clouds of juvenile rabbitfish sweep in off the ocean onto the reef flat and CHamoru families come to the waterline with their cast nets, the mañåhak run. The military base next door closes the beach some days. Ritidian is the beach Guam kept, and the forest behind it has lost its voice.