12 Cannibal Adventure

by Willard Price

  Where the cage met the deck Roger prised the wires just far enough apart for the small bat to go in and out. The little fellow at once joined its mother. Smarty, the baby crocodile, always curious about everything that went on, came to investigate. The little bat stared at it with big round eyes. Then it came out of the cage to get a closer look. It was not old enough to know that crocs eat bats and any other living thing they can get hold of.

  But Smarty also was too young to know that he was supposed to be a killer. He gave the newcomer a few friendly whacks with his tail. That was the beginning of a curious companionship between the little flying fox and the cannibal croc who had not yet learned that he was a cannibal.

  Roger went to see how his brother was getting along. Hal, resting in his bunk, said, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be up in a day or two. But what happened to you? You’re limping.’

  ‘Nothing much. Log fell on my foot.’

  Just now, while Hal was suffering, was no time to add to his distress by telling him how he, Roger, had barely escaped being crushed to death.

  ‘What’s going on in the village?’ Roger asked. ‘Everybody seems to have gone wild.’

  Chapter 20

  Tale of the tails

  ‘A lot has happened since you left,’ Hal said. ‘Another man was killed.’

  ‘Where? In the village?’

  ‘No. Out in the jungle. He was attacked by a man with a spear. He staggered back to his home in this village and, just before he died, he told his story.

  The man sneaked up behind him and drove his spear clear through his body. He fell down and nearly passed out. He didn’t see his enemy clearly, but only noticed that he had black legs.’

  ‘What do you mean, black legs? These people are brown, not black.’

  ‘I’m only telling you what he said. He said the man’s legs were black from the knee down.’

  ‘Did he have any idea who it was?’

  ‘For years there has been war between this tribe and the tribe in the next valley. He was sure his assailant had come from that other tribe.

  ‘Men came to ask me to help the man who had been speared but when they found I was not able to move they got Captain Ted to go ashore and see what he could do. Call Ted in. He’ll tell you what happened after that.’

  Roger called, and the captain came from the deck down the companionway to the cabin.

  ‘Tell Roger about the chap who was speared yesterday.’

  ‘Nothing much to tell. I’m no doctor. I managed to stop the bleeding but that was all I could do. He mumbled something about black legs and passed out.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Everybody was hoppin’ mad. The men got spears and axes and wanted to start right out to fight the tribe that had done this thing. But one of the old men advised them to wait until dark, then take the enemy by surprise.

  ‘They wanted me to go along - not to fight, but just because they had seen me do magic tricks and thought I would bring them good luck. Well, I couldn’t say no. I tagged along.

  ‘It was a stiff climb up the mountain, and stiff climb down the other side. Must say, I was pretty well tuckered out. But they were fresh as daisies, and just rarin’ to get into action.

  ‘The village over there was the funniest thing you ever saw. All the houses six feet up in the air on stilts. Every one with a ladder so you could climb up to the door. I guess they thought they’d be safe from attack by other tribes if they had their houses perched up that way.

  ‘There was a light in one of the houses and a lot of talk coming out of it. We snuck up close and listened. Seems like all the men of the village were there having a powwow about how they were going to come over to this village and wipe it off the map. One loud-mouthed fellow said they should kill not only every man here but also every woman and child down to the smallest baby.

  ‘One man said they should also kill the three foreigners, meaning us, because we were friends of these people. And everybody agreed to that.

  ‘Well that’s when I really got interested. I didn’t care for the idea of us three having our heads chopped off by those devils. So I began to think what we could do.

  ‘I walked in under the house. No danger of being heard, they were making too much noise. I saw something sort of waving above my head. You know these grass tails the men wear. It’s very strong grass, just about like wire. The floor of the house was not solid, but made of slats, with cracks between. The men were sitting on the floor, and the tails were hanging down between the slats.

  ‘I got the crazy idea of tying the tails together so that when the men tried to get up they would find that they were tied to the floor. Then our men could bang them up a bit and drive some sense into their heads. Then perhaps they would leave the people of this valley, and us, alone. It would teach them a good lesson.

  ‘I told our men about the scheme and they thought it was good magic. They tied every tail to another tail. Then they stormed up the ladder and into the house. The rascals in that house got the surprise of their lives. They tried to get up on their feet but found that something held them to the floor.

  ‘I shouted to our men not to kill anybody but just give them a good roughing up. But that wasn’t their idea of how to fight a war. They paid no attention to me. To them, it was just a question of kill or be killed. They had heard how their women and children were going to be murdered along with themselves. So they did what was natural for savages to do. They lopped off every enemy head in that room. It was all over in ten minutes.

  ‘They brought the heads and some other parts back here and put on a feast that lasted all night. One fellow had those black legs. I saw them - they were really knee-length rubber boots probably taken from some white man.

  The fellow who had brought them home as prizes tried to chew them but they were too tough. He complained that this enemy must have had very tough skin. He boiled them in one of those big stone pots to make them tender, but they were still too tough. He kept on boiling them most of the night, but no luck.

  ‘Finally he discovered that they would come off. So he took them off and put them on his own legs and now he is strutting around the village as proud as a peacock wearing a couple of bunches of grass and black rubber boots.’

  Roger and the captain went up on deck and watched the wild dance of victory going on in front of the village.

  Only the men were doing the dancing. The women and children whom they had saved from certain death stood around and admired their husbands and fathers as being great heroes. The men had painted their faces red, blue, green and yellow. Some had used white paint and looked like ghosts. No matter what the colour was it had not come out of a paint pot. All were made from the various clays found near the village.

  Some were freshly tattooed. Some had seashells dangling and jingling from their waistbands, and all wore fresh new grass skirts. Every man sported a giant boar’s tusk through his nose that made him look like a wild animal.

  Some wore necklaces made of crocodile teeth. One man had a snake necklace - a live snake with head and tail tied together. Another wore a live snake as a belt, and yet another had hung two skulls from his shoulders and clashed them together in time to the music.

  The music was hardly music, but rhythmical noise, made by blows on the great wooden drum, whose sound would be heard even in the valley of the enemy tribe beyond the mountain. The dancers chanted at the top of their lungs, each in a different key. They waved spears, bows, axes above their heads.

  Chief of all their ornaments was a head-dress of waving plumes. These were the fabulous and famous feathers of the birds of paradise, found in only this part of the world.

  Roger had never seen such a wild and beautiful sea of colours in all his life. Many of the plumes rose five feet above the men’s heads.

  They can’t be real,’ Roger said. ‘What bird could have plumes five feet long?’

  They’re real, all right,’ the captain assured him. ‘Of course not all bird of paradise p
lumes are so long. In fact there are fifty different varieties of bird of paradise. But the men have chosen the best they could find.’

  One man carried so many that they made a great bush of colour on top of his head, so large that he could not walk straight into the wind but had to zigzag back and forth like a tacking sailboat.

  ‘Why don’t we see any of these marvellous plumes in America or Europe?’ Roger wondered.

  ‘Because they’re barred by customs officials. Before you were born women used to wear them in their hats. It was the finest thing a lady could wear. But so many birds of paradise were killed to supply ladies’ hats that laws were passed against importing them. Now they’re hard to get, and terrifically expensive. Every one of those plumes is worth from a hundred to two hundred dollars. I wouldn’t be surprised if the value of all you see there would come to a million dollars.’

  ‘I’d settle for just one plume,’ Roger said.

  Then you’d settle for about ten years in prison.’

  That means we can’t take any back?’

  ‘Not from a dead bird. Only the natives are allowed to kill them. But there’s one way you could take some back. On live birds. You work for the zoos, and zoos are allowed to have living birds.’

  That’s all I want to know,’ Roger said. ‘Pavo and I are going to take some of those birds alive.’

  Chapter 21

  Birds of paradise

  Pavo didn’t know the English name of the bird.

  ‘What’s a bird of paradise?’ he asked.

  He and Roger were sitting beside Hal’s bunk. The sick man said, ‘Roger, there’s a little handbook of New Guinea animals on that shelf. Show him a picture of a bird of paradise.’

  He had forgotten for the moment that these primitives did not understand pictures.

  Pavo stared at the pictures. ‘What is it? Man? House? Tree?’

  ‘Bird,’ Hal said. ‘There’s its head. Those are its wings.’

  Pavo pointed to the magnificent shower of feathers larger than the bird itself and said, ‘I know this. That is rain.’

  ‘No. Those are feathers, plumes, like the ones the dancing men are wearing today on their heads.’

  The wrinkles disappeared from Pavo’s forehead. He understood. ‘I know where. Up river, near waterfall. I take bow and arrow. I kill one.’

  ‘No. We want one alive.’

  ‘Alive? No can do. You come near - they fly away.’

  Hal looked at Roger. ‘He’s right, you know. It won’t be easy to catch one.( You’d better wait until I can go with you.’

  ‘What good would that do? How would you catch one?’

  Hal shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  That makes two of us who don’t know. I don’t need to wait for somebody who doesn’t know. I’ll go and see the birds and figure out some way to catch one.’

  ‘No harm in trying,’ Hal said. ‘But 1 bet you’ll come back with an empty bag.’

  ‘It won’t be any emptier than your head,’ Roger retorted.

  But the problem puzzled him as he and Pavo trekked through the woods to the waterfall. How could you catch a bird without coming near it?

  Around a bend in the river they came upon the enchanted wood with a lovely waterfall around which flew scores of birds of paradise in all the colours of the rainbow; now and then they dropped to the pool at the foot of the fall to take a sip of water or splash in for a quick bath. The air was full of gorgeous plumes, red, green, gold, turquoise, amethyst, emerald, yellow, lavender, magenta, pink, maroon, peacock, pansy-violet, rose and purple.

  Never had Roger seen anything like this. He was looking at the most gorgeous birds in the world. The wheeling and soaring and swooping of colours made him dizzy.

  One hardly noticed the birds themselves in this great cloud of plumes. They seemed to float in the sky rather than fly.

  He remembered what he had read about the excitement when the first of these birds had been brought dead to Europe. The natives who had caught and killed them had cut off their legs and wings before shipping them to Europe. This gave rise to the fable that these ‘birds of the gods’ as they were sometimes called, had no use for feet or wings, but simply floated like clouds in the air and never came down to earth. One writer in England believed that birds of paradise ‘keepe themselves continually in the ayre, without lighting on the earth, for they have neither feet nor wings, but only head and body and the most part tayle’. - And to Roger also it seemed that these heavenly creatures were ‘for the most part tayle’. The tails were sunbursts of plumes that did not just stream out behind, but rose into the air and fell in a great shower around the bird, so that the bird itself could hardly be seen and the sky was simply full of brilliant balls of feathers.

  Some looked like flying fountains, some like showers of colour, some like explosions of fireworks.

  No wonder that, until the law stopped it, fashionable ladies of Europe and America wore these magnificent plumes on their hats, and you could tell how rich the lady was by counting the number of plumes and multiplying by £50 or £100 for each plume. In some cases her headgear was far more expensive than her jewels. Anyone looking at these whirling spheres of colour must agree with the naturalist Wallace who wrote that New Guinea was a country that contained more strange and beautiful natural objects than any other part of the globe. Surely the Komodo dragon was one of the strangest of animals, and the bird of paradise the most glorious of birds.

  The most glorious in colour, not the most glorious in voice. A humble little brown wood thrush could sing better. These were no nightingales, no mocking-birds. They made a great variety of noises but none of them could be called singing. They cried like babies, they whistled like boys getting out of school, they mewed like cats, they cawed like crows, they squealed like pigs, and they produced a growling bubble like the rumbling of an elephant’s stomach. They couldn’t make music, but they more than made up for it by their flashing display of colour.

  And they knew how beautiful they were. They showed off their plumage to the best possible advantage.

  They had made themselves a stage where they put on frequent performances, The stage was a branch of a mango tree near the waterfall. Here they would gather in a long row and put on a dance.

  it was not their feet that danced, but their feathers. They had the ability to vibrate this magnificent cloud of plumes, and this dazzling sight of trembling colour caused small animals to sit and watch as if in a theatre.

  Roger saw them pluck off leaves in front of them so that everything and everybody could see the performance.

  But their best efforts were to attract the attention of the females, plainly dressed in brown and grey, with no gorgeous plumage, who sat near by lost in admiration of their gentlemen friends.

  After each performance the actors would preen themselves, combing with their beaks the long gauzy plumes which might have become a bit tangled during the dance. Then, heads held high, they let out a single loud note which echoed over the valley and put on another dance.

  They were not all alike. Roger tried to identify each kind by looking at the pictures in the handbook Hal had lent him. That one at the end of the branch was a Prince Rudolph, the next was a Princess Stephanie, then a King Bird of Paradise, a Magnificent, a Superb, a King of Saxony, and a beautiful Emerald.

  In the next intermission the birds had some refreshments. They dined on the mangoes that hung about them. Roger laughed to see their odd way of eating.

  Every bird had a long curved bill. He got a fragment of mango in the end of his beak. But though his bill was long his tongue was short, too short to reach up to the end of the beak and get that morsel. So he would toss the bit of food up into the air, then hold his mouth open so that the food could drop straight down his throat.

  Roger came closer to get a better look. The birds at once took off into the air, whistling, mewing, squealing, clicking and hammering, leaving him wondering how he was ever going to catch one of the glorious creatur
es.

  Certainly not one of them would let him get close enough to put a sack over it, or a net, and they flew too fast to be caught with a lasso.

  His brother had predicted that he would come back with an empty bag. Apparently his brother was right. That big chump thought nobody was as smart as he was. Roger ached to show him that he could do a few tricks too. But how to get one of those birds?

  It was no use, he would have to come back empty-handed.

  Then a glimmer of an idea came into his head. He remembered hazily what he had seen a native boy do in one of the islands of the South Seas.

  The boy had caught a bird - not with sack or net or lasso, but with chewing gum!

  He got the gum from the breadfruit tree. Well, there were plenty of breadfruit trees in the New Guinea forest. Roger looked about and saw one nearby. He went to it, drew his bush knife, and slashed the trunk. Out oozed a white sticky juice. Roger put some of it in his mouth and chewed it. It became almost like chewing gum, but without flavour.

  ‘Help me up,’ he said to Pavo. ‘Up to that branch.’

  Pavo leaned down and got the boy on his shoulders. Roger took the gum from his mouth and smeared it along the top of the branch.

  This was the same branch that the birds had been using as a stage. Surely a bird would come back to it, if they just waited long enough. They went back a fair distance and sat down on a log.

  About fifteen minutes later a King of Saxony flew down and seemed about to land on the branch. It was a wry large, grand bird, but Roger shouted and scared it away.

  ‘Why you do?’ Pavo asked.

  ‘I don’t want big old bird,’ Roger explained ‘Zoo no want-it die soon. Young bird live long. Zoo pay big money for young bird. Besides, no room in sack for big bird.’

  The sacks he and Pavo carried would certainly be too small to accommodate a bird with plumes five feet long.

  Another half hour went by before he had better luck. Two young birds came down to sit on the branch and peck at the mangoes. Their plumes were short but their colours were marvellous. One was a gorgeous Emerald and the other was called a Ribbon-Tail because its plumes were like the many-coloured ribbons we wrap around Christmas presents.