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they would make a bid for peace—the Kesa would be given the opportunity to punish this farmer themselves.
    And so the next day Kau went to Opoku and requested an audience with the Kesa chief, a massive man named Chabo. The chief had a leopard skin draped across his broad shoulders and wore a
necklace of sun-bleached cowrie shells. He listened in his hut to the grievance, and then the farmer was sent for.
    The farmer was an honest man, and when Chabo repeated Kau’s accusations he admitted to the rape. “But it was justified,” said the farmer. “Who knows how long that woman has been taking from me? How much I have lost because of her? How much food has been stolen from the mouths of my family?”
    “But what of my wife?” said Kau. “What of my wife?”
    The farmer looked to Chabo, then punched at the air with wild arms. “Do we not kill the monkeys caught in our fields? She is fortunate.”
    Chabo’s head gave a slight nod, and though again Kau protested this time he was silenced. The chief pointed at him. “It was wrong for your wife to steal from this man. Do you agree?”
    Kau could not deny the truth of that. Though the Ota shared everything among themselves, he knew that this was not the way of the village. “Yes,” he said. “That was wrong.”
    Chabo then addressed the farmer: “But you, by taking his wife you have taken all that you are owed.” The farmer began to argue but Chabo stopped him as well. “It is settled,” he said.
    The farmer was leaving the hut when Kau spoke. “One is not equal to the other,” he said.
    Chabo tilted his head, annoyed. “Explain to me what you mean.”
    “One is not equal to the other,” Kau repeated. “My wife is worth more than any amount of cassavas taken from this man.” He turned to the farmer. “I will replace with meat twice over all that you have lost. Would you accept this?”

    The farmer shrugged. “I would.”
    “But in exchange,” said Kau, “I must be allowed to bring one of your wives into my own hut. Only then will all be truly even.”
    Chabo laughed. “You are very bold.”
    Kau slapped his hands together. “Is what I suggest not an equal trade? Is a Kesa woman somehow worth more than an Ota woman?”
    “Yes,” said the farmer. “Much more.”
    Chabo started a speech but then faltered and checked his words. “I have made my decision,” he said at last. “It is time now for you to return to the forest.”
     
    THAT AFTERNOON KAU brought the news of Chabo’s verdict to his camp, and although there was again much anger and posturing for battle, the small band knew that to make war with the Kesa would only bring about their own destruction. “No,” Kau told the elders. “He said return to the forest, and that is what we should do.” And so it was decided.
     
    EARLY THE NEXT morning the Ota began their exodus. The band traveled north for several days, journeying into a part of the forest that only the oldest among them had ever visited. In this new land they built new leaf huts, and it was not long before Kau, hunting alone, heard the angry trumpetings of elephants fighting in the distance. He started for that far-off battleground in a steady trot, and the sun was setting when he finally reached them. From a downwind treetop he watched an enormous male humiliate a
broken-tusked bull, then raise its trunk to celebrate the banished king’s retreat into the darkening forest.
    Kau began to stalk the solitary old bull, and at spots along the trail he would cover himself with handfuls of the elephant’s steaming dung, replacing his own smell with that of his prey as the doomed creature cut a great meaningless circle in the forest.
    On the third night he decided that the time to kill had arrived. He tracked the bull to a clearing in the forest, then watched as the weepy-eyed beast licked at an oozing gore hole. The elephant drifted off into a motionless and standing sleep, and a stray breeze rustled high branches as Kau crept across