‘You okay, Hunter, man?’ Tobias asked. ‘You want to come in?’

The boy sprang to his feet and was gone, running across the cleared ground where women were waiting for Tobias with their babies.

‘He’s in trouble, that boy,’ Tobias said. ‘He should go back up the mountain with you tomorrow.’

‘What’s wrong?’

Tobias waved his hand vaguely. ‘A girl he thought he’d marry.’

‘Isn’t he too young?’ Rika asked.

That night, the rain thudded down. Rika, Tobias and Lucas, the schoolteacher, ate sweet potato and a tin of fish in the house next to the aid post. The lamp flickered in the wind that gusted under the door. The room was plain, with a rough table and hard benches, where they sat as Tobias poured from a bottle of the beer that had come on the plane. There were several books pushed to one end of the table, yellowing newspapers, a box of batteries and a radio. On a shelf were more books: a medical dictionary, Cry, the Beloved Country. Tacked to the wall was a photo of Tobias receiving a certificate from a white man in a tight tie.

When Rika asked what it was with this village, its strange atmosphere, the men fell quiet from their talk of hoped-for postings, their next trip to Popondetta, their dreams of Port Moresby. She could sense their longing for escape. It wasn’t just that this village was small, isolated in the mountains. It was an uncomfortable place, pinched between the large population of Orokaivans down where the land flattened out, and the mountain people above. When the Orokaivans had come up on a raid, Tobias told her this was the first village they hit. Since the colonial government had put a stop to war-raids, the village had tried to appease the marauders by joining their churches and marrying into their clans, but the advantage never came their way; instead their border had shrunk, bit by bit, with land rightfully theirs now gardened by others. Meanwhile, up above, their mountain relatives, unscathed, maintained their borders and their art.

The rain stopped, and in the quiet that fell their voices were suddenly loud. Tobias opened the door. Across at the church, Rika could see men moving in the light of a hurricane lamp, occasional flashes from a torch. She could hear voices raised in rapid talk. From the way Tobias and Lucas listened, she judged that they didn’t like what they heard.

Lucas went to the door and called out, then left. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said.

‘He’s gone to see if the boys from the mountain are in the schoolhouse,’ Tobias said. ‘He doesn’t want them getting into trouble with the men here. That’s why we want to send Hunter back.’

‘Why doesn’t he want to go?’ Rika asked.

‘He’s been shamed by a girl up there,’ Tobias said.

‘How?’ Rika asked.

Tobias got up from the table, went to the gas refrigerator wheezing by the door and took out another bottle of beer. ‘There’s a new mission here,’ he said, in place of an answer. ‘In competition with the Anglicans. The pastor is from the coast. He tells the village that their custom ways are no good, that they must obey the new laws and believe the word of the pastors.’ He sighed, rolled a cigarette. ‘That way they’ll be rewarded with easy kago.’