The government, the councillor says, is like a big bird, a bird that comes from somewhere else. It’s not a bird that knows this land, and when it comes time to lay its eggs, the bird can’t get a grip on the earth – it doesn’t know how to grip this soil, doesn’t know mountain, or fjord, or swamp; it knows nothing of where to put an egg. So when the eggs come, they lie nabaut, nabaut, some in grassland where they are taken by bad men, raskol men, who make off with them. Some land in the forest and when the chick pecks its way out, it doesn’t know where it is. Or people from the village find it on their way to a garden, and they take it home to their village, and it grows there like a large and stupid child, knocking things over and cutting the wrong wood, planting the wrong seed. It sets up quarrels amongst the clans when no one can agree what to do with this big, clumsy creature.

Milton claps and takes the councillor by the hand, saying, ‘Good one, good one true.’ He tells him that long ago, before independence, when he, the councillor, was a small boy, they used to say much the same. ‘My old friend here, she knows,’ he says, gesturing to Martha, and the councillor nods sagely when she agrees that, yes, that’s what we used to say. Sort of.

‘We thought drama would do it,’ Milton says. ‘Plays and books and poetry. But, just like the big bird, we had the wrong roots. There were no roots down into the village.’

‘That’s harsh,’ Martha says. ‘There were roots, maybe not deep roots, but roots all the same.’

‘Shallow roots are no good if they don’t hold the tree,’ Milton says, and Martha feels the metaphor slip away from her. The tree that is sheltering them from the morning sun casts an imperturbable shadow.

From the other side of the table, Jericho is watching Martha. Her face is pink with the exertion of the conversation, which has returned to the welcome the councillor is planning for Laedi, and the gateway they’ve built at the top of the runway. The women will decorate it with flowers when the sun starts its slide down the sky; the plane gets in late, leaving just enough time to get back over the mountains before dark.

It’s true that Jericho has been in the present. The present is proving a good place to be, with Bili taking him back into her bed. Not that there was a bed in Collingwood Bay, just sleeping mats next to each other. There were nights when Jericho couldn’t sleep for thinking about the elders who were facing the same problem he encountered on the mountain: of satisfying the new needs while safeguarding the old. ‘It’s not your job,’ Bili says, awake beside him. ‘It’s the government’s. That’s why Laedi stays in.’ It’s a western conceit that we can solve this individually. The saviour complex. She turns on her mat and goes back to sleep. There were nights when Jericho stood at the edge of the bay watching the moon track across the water, thinking of the bark-cloth that was sewn into hats, and Hector determined there would be no sewing machines on the mountain.