‘You’re tired,’ he said as he arranged a blanket over her. He was still talking about Don when she fell asleep, his hand resting on her back.

AT DAWN THE NEXT MORNING, THE SKY WAS GOLD TOWARDS THE rising sun. Women were hanging paintings on lines of bush-rope strung along the far side of the dance ground, ready for Leonard’s camera. The bark fabric of some was heavy, slightly spongy, painted in reds and blacks. Others were delicate as if the bark had been spun into lace. Creamy buffs, ochre yellows, rusty reds. It took two women to position a large cloth so that the rope could hold its weight and its edge didn’t rest on the wet grass. A landscape of mountains. Smaller cloths were painted in the pattern of the curled vine, like the one sent to Rika in Moresby. On others, a tumble of leaves, cassowary eggs, the design of the bush snail, the teeth of river fish. Some were wild and free, a perfect play of line tumbling across the cloth in celebration or joy, conjuring something, Rika didn’t know what, the mountain perhaps, a deep seat of emotion, the balance that can be found in the disorder of forest.

More women, their backs as straight as house poles, were arriving with bundles of folded cloth. They shook them out and added them to the lines of bush-rope. The mist in the valley had gone, the peaks rising into a clean sky.

‘What is that?’ Rika asked Boja, looking at a painting quite different from the others. ‘Is it the sun?’

‘Nogat,’ Boja said. ‘It is the spider who lives in the ground.’

The background was painted black, and the legs that stretched out from a small centre were made from strips of pale cloth, sewn over the black. Spider legs? To Rika they looked like the rays of the sun.

‘They sew them on with a bone from a flying fox as a needle,’ Leonard explained. ‘It’s an old technique they use for the most important cloth. It’s a cape to wear at a ceremony.’

‘Who painted it?’

‘The paramount chief make it,’ Boja said.

‘Nanaji?’

‘Lady chief,’ Boja said. Waving his arms and talking fast to the women, he called out across the dance ground. Turning with him to look, Rika saw Nogi coming towards her. She was wearing the same headdress of soft white feathers, and looped across her chest were beads and necklaces. Fresh, pungent herbs were tucked into her armband. Her eyes took in Rika, uncompromising and direct.

‘She say you are welcome,’ Boja said.

‘Please tell her I think it is very beautiful.’

‘Ancestor story,’ Boja said, translating as Nogi spoke. It was the mark of the female ground spider, who taught the first woman on the mountain how to weave a string bag.

Listening to the story of the spider weaving her web, and the ancestor woman feeling its strength that could carry a baby, everything in Rika went towards that cloth, and she wanted it. Spider-leg sunrays. She wanted to show Aaron, she wanted it as proof. Of what, she didn’t know. That the mountain existed? That she was there? Even as she was thinking this, Nogi took off one of her necklaces and placed it over Rika’s head with a quiet run of words.