Jericho wants to stop her, say Rika isn’t idealistic any more, rather the reverse, but Bili is pointing at the files on her desk, requiring his attention. Should the landowners want their land logged, she is saying, they have to register it with the full consent of all clan-holders, which can take months, even years, if it’s done according to the book. The registered land is then leased to the government, who leases it back to the logging company. ‘A good system in theory,’ she says, ‘but in practice it’s easily circumvented.’

In the Collingwood Bay case, a company was formed by businessmen who’d been over there and seen the quality of the trees, and where their ships could come in. They then found landowners living in town, and as everyone in town is looking for money, it wasn’t hard to persuade them to make the claim that would sign over the land. With a few more payments, a conspirator in Forestry and another in the Titles Registry, the land was registered and leased to the state, which then leased it back to the company that set it all up in the first place. A tidy profit all round, and the people living in Collingwood Bay, on land they thought of as theirs, inalienable and eternal, would have known nothing about it until the bulldozers and chain-saws arrived. If the clerk in Forestry hadn’t found the documents as the result of a word here, a whisper there, a countercurrent running against the wages of corruption. He knew exactly how to read them, and who to go to. When he arrived in Bili’s office, barges loaded with logging equipment had already left Alotau and were moving slowly up the coast.

‘We got an injunction against them landing with only days to spare,’ she says.

FOR THREE WEEKS, DAY AND NIGHT, JERICHO IS WITH BILI WHEREVER she goes. He meets her friends, rides in her car, works out in the gym with her. He accompanies her to a conference, immerses himself in the labyrinthine politics of biofuels and development, a misnomer if ever there was one, and when the conference ends, he watches her speak to the press. ‘Oil palm,’ an Australian journalist says. He is belligerent. ‘Shouldn’t you be encouraging biofuel? Reduce our reliance on oil.’ Bili smiles. Oh, that smile. ‘Let me remind you,’ she says in a voice that sounds like somebody else, ‘that the island of New Guinea comprises one of our planet’s largest stretches of unbroken rainforest. We must weigh that advantage against the cost of deforestation.’ She talks on: the net increase in carbon emissions, the impoverishment of communities, and her colleague from Conservation Melanesia talks of the loss of habitat, frog species, bird-winged butterflies, botanical plants. Afterwards they go for a drink in the hotel bar. Their beers sweat in their hands, fans whirl above them, cicadas shrill in the trees, the sun dips into the mountains and while everyone else looks tired, as if the fight has drained them – they’ve smiled that smile too often – still Jericho is exultant. Just by being there, with Bili, in this land of his birth, he is exultant.