At dinner Aaron shut down any discussion about the demands, orchestrated by Eremiah, for Bougainville’s provincial autonomy and the immediate resignation of its members in the House of Assembly unless the contract with the mine was renegotiated. When the kiap said they should let the place go - he’d been there, those black munkas were a stubborn lot - Aaron had come close to a rebuke.

‘You’re still working for the government, Dick,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t help if our own people speak against unity.’

‘It’s only us here. We can talk it as it is.’

Aaron gestured to the open door, where haus bois came and went with trays, past a line of women sitting in the corridor.

‘You know the last time your skin-brother Jacob was here, he had that Malaysian bloke with him?’ the kiap said. ‘Looking at the timber. That’ll put money into the village.’

‘There are regulations,’ Aaron said, his tone even and neutral. ‘It’ll need thought.’

‘No thought’s going to be necessary if there are dollars,’ the kiap said. Outside, the sky had darkened over the fjords and the forests. ‘It’ll be a job getting into the mountains, but Lim reckoned they won’t need to if they log in from further down Collingwood Bay. The reef’s a problem up here, coming in so close; they won’t get barges in this far up unless they blast the reef, and that’d be a problem for the cray fishing.’

‘Is Lim interested in cray?’ Rika asked.

‘He’s got boats down at Milne Bay.’

Aaron was very silent. And then, in a mild voice, he asked the kiap if he knew the story of Jiwu.

‘Who?’

‘Jiwu.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Haven’t you read Monckton’s account of setting up the station here?’

‘Can’t say that I have,’ said the kiap.

‘Jiwu was a clan leader when Monckton arrived in the 1890s. But he hadn’t been when the Merrie England went past on a reconnoitre a few years earlier. When the governor had staked out land for the station, he’d found the fjord clans fragmented and demoralised. They’d been scattered by raiding tribes from the west, and their villages destroyed. The people were suspicious and surly.’

‘That’d be right,’ the kiap said.

‘The governor didn’t meet this man, whom he called Giwi,’ Aaron continued. He heard nothing of him. Jiwu’s village was inland and he’d watched the raids from the ridge. When he saw the government boat, he realised several things. First, that the warfare with the raiders had to be settled before the white man arrived. Second, that the large canoes that could bring the sea-raiders round the coast in any weather were slow and clumsy when manoeuvring close to land. And third, that the enemy’s war-spears were made of hardwood – heavy, capable of inflicting serious damage, but their range was short.

‘So Jiwu devised a plan. He built a sham village low at the tip of a headland. And tucked in along the edge of the fjord, he hid the small canoes our people use for reef fishing. As you know, they can’t go far out to sea, but inshore they are fast and manoeuvrable. He hid there with his warriors, and waited, their spears tipped with bush-poison.’