The barrister looks at his watch. ‘I’m in time for the plane today,’ he says. Bili’s assistant is on the mobile fixing it. The car is waiting, so the uncle steps out into the sun and reads the statement:

We are indeed forever indebted to you, or as lawyers would put it, we carry a perpetual debt not only at this present but for as long as our land remains with us. Our land is our birthright. We are born into it and die into it. Land and our continuity are two in one. They are inseparable.

That evening the landowners come to Laedi’s house. Jericho cooks sausages on the barbecue. Bili hands round beer and Coca-Cola. They try to make the occasion celebratory. They have won. The land is saved. It cannot be logged. The uncle makes another speech, this time thanking Bili, but frustration fills the air around them. The next day they will fly over the ranges to Collingwood Bay and take the news of their victory to their people. There will be dancing and feasting. But something inside the old men knows that a power has been unleashed. They’ve seen it raw, and they do not trust that it will not come their way again. That night, and for many nights to come, the elders will dream bad dreams. One dreams of a large iron ship at anchor off the beach of the village, another of rafts loaded with logs. Another dreams of a wounded forest boy standing before a bulldozer, trees with sap of blood.

That evening, Bili is exhausted. Between court and the barbecue, while Jericho stayed with the landowners, she went back to the office. She had to arrange for an injunction to be served on miners who are encroaching into village land on a river to the north-west. She too is dispirited at the endlessness of it. One victory, and it’s no more than a pebble saved from the tide.

Jericho has learned enough not to tell her she’s feeling that way because she’s tired, she’s been working too hard, no rest for weeks. He doesn’t say what he fears about the impossibility of mediating between two cultures, two ways of proceeding, that this is less a victory than a stay of execution. Even Laedi says the country must come into the modern world, that its minerals and forests offer possibilities – they can’t be locked up for ever.

‘Stay here,’ Laedi says to Bili when the landowners have gone. ‘After last night you should stay here.’

Jericho sees a glint of tears, or thinks he does, but Bili shakes her head. If she doesn’t go now, when will she go. Will tomorrow be safer?

So Jericho drives her back to the flat and gets out of the car with her, rides up in the lift.

‘Shall I stay?’ he asks.

She nods. He thinks it’s a nod. ‘If you do,’ she says, ‘you’re not to make anything of it.’

‘Promise,’ he says.