A group of women was already hurrying towards the village. Josephine ran to join them as a band of young men came down the waterfall path. In the open space beside the river, Albert crouched with his hands in front of his face and looked at Rika as if through a camera. Obi spoke briefly to Nogi. Across the water, a tall Orokaivan policeman emerged from the trees. He was carrying a rifle, and with him was Hunter, his head hung low, looking at the ground.

Rika made a move towards the path. The clouds had come over, obscuring the sun. Janape put out her hand to restrain her. ‘Wait,’ she said.

When the riverbanks were quiet again, and the voices had disappeared into the bush, Nogi came up close to Rika, taking her arm in a hard grasp. She looked straight into her eyes. ‘Josephine,’ she said. ‘Will Don come for her?’

Alone with Nogi and Janape at the edge of the river, Rika understood what she had been slow to grasp, and Leonard had not told her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘He will not come.’

Hunter, betrothed to Josephine and shamed by Don, had fled to the village by the airstrip. Just that week, after the big rain, he had been caught under the pastor’s house. He had pushed a stick up between the bamboo slats of the floor to wake the pastor’s daughter, in the hope that the girl would creep out and join him. Instead he roused the father. The village woke to the thwack of the pastor’s belt and Hunter’s cries as he fled into the bush. When he slunk back to the village at the end of the day, the pastor was calling down the wrath of heaven, declaring him a sinner, cuckolded by a white stranger, the centre of a scandal, hanging around where he had no land and no rights. Compensation and righteousness were on the pastor’s mind, the more so as he had attempted to save the boy and bring him to Jesus.

Tobias rescued Hunter that night and kept him in his house with the policeman, who’d arrived in the village on his way up the mountain to find the tauba who was making a film. Tobias, taking advantage of the policeman’s presence, persuaded him to escort Hunter to the high village. It was an arrangement the pastor accepted, knowing that the presence of the policeman would strengthen his demand for recompense, and shame the boy.

Climbing up from the river with Janape, Rika stumbled under the weight of her ignorance.

‘You did not tell me,’ she said.

‘You did not see.’

When they reached the village they found Leonard, and a large crowd gathered in the amorire. Men were shouting back and forth, and Hunter was crouched on the ground with his knees drawn up. Clouds were rolling in over the peaks. ‘Uncle of Hunter,’ Janape said, as a man walked over to the boy, yanked him to his feet and thrashed him with a long switch of vine. Hunter shrieked and leaped until he was knocked to the ground and lay there taking the blows with his arms around his head.