The chiefs watched her, Janape too, and Rika knew she had not got it, whatever it was that had offended them.

‘Janape?’ Her voice was asking. ‘Janape, friend of mine? What happened? What did Don do?’

Janape looked away. ‘We go now,’ she said, and Rika felt it as a rebuke. As the women walked quietly down the spur to the river, she felt the disappointment that had registered on Nogi’s face. The sky was clear, there was no sign of clouds, Huvaemo glowed in the afternoon light. But among the women, the mood had changed. The knowledge of being closed out even as she was welcomed in bred an edgy anxiety she could not quite place as coming from them or from herself.

For the first time, Rika felt that she should not be there. Not her, and not Leonard either.

WHEN THE TIME WAS RIGHT AND NANAJI GAVE THE SIGNAL, THE GATES opened and the clans from the high villages burst into the amorire, singing their arrival. Feet stamped the ground, kundu drums kept the rhythm, each with its own voice, plumes mimicked the birds of the sun. Young men set the pace with a high step and perfect timing. Behind them came the women singing the cloth that moved against their skin. Nogi, in her soft white headdress and with the ground-spider cloth with its sunray legs hanging from her back, led the women. Beside her was Kimame in her plain bark-cloth and red parrot feathers.

Janape took her place in the dance, small Lilla dancing beside her. At the end of the line, Josephine’s hair sprung out, dark and glossy. The woman whose breast had been swollen came out of the dance to take Rika’s hand. Even Hunter’s mother took a turn, her voice rising into the piercing staccato of the women’s voices above the drums, before she returned, glowering, to the long trench of earth oven where pig was cooking for the feast when the dancing ended.

Leonard stood well back to film. Boja had had three small platforms built for him around the dance ground so that he could capture the wide circling of the dance. While he stood back, those too old to dance, or too young, came in close – almost touching the dancers – moving in and out as the double lines looped and circled. Rika moved with them. She squatted low and filled her lens with the dancing cloth, as if by taking the small space of the paintings, she could draw into the image the spirit that was evident in every step of the dance, and that she was struggling to comprehend. She filmed cloth, and she filmed feet stamping the ground, calling up the ancestors. She raised the camera to Janape’s face, and Lilla’s, to other women and girls she was learning to call friend.

She took Lilla’s place and joined Janape in the dance, with its strange pauses she never quite anticipated. She circled the amorire with her, in the midst of the cloth and the plumes and the kundus. Dancing beside Janape, held by the sureness of her step, Rika understood that the quality she had not been able to name in her sister-friend, but had seen in her from the first, came from contentment. Janape lived in place. And Rika felt sorrow in the split of her own life that had brought her so far from the place where she started, and the premonition that she would live all her life out of place.