The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  A month later, Grundner received his last postcard from Bruno, who had been traveling on the east coast of Borneo, between Tarakan and Samarinda. “In this area there are no more nomads. Logging companies have been here for twenty to thirty years. All the Basap people have been settled for generations. I wanted to get two arrow quivers for your collection, but the owners didn’t want to give them away, which was understandable: they are one of their most beautiful belongings, with leopard teeth, tortoise shells, and rare stones, that they use everyday for hunting. If one was mine I wouldn’t have sold it for $5,000! Maybe on one of your next visits you will be luckier. I only ask what you would offer them as a gift in exchange? It would have to be useful and precious as well! Now I’m going to go over the mountain. Lots and lots of love, Bruno.”

  As he traveled on this last journey, Bruno sent postcards home, as he usually did, but these were unlike any he had ever sent before. They were photos of himself, many taken by Edmund on that last saved roll of film, and they showed Bruno staring into the camera or giving thumbs-up; one, to Roger, showed a Penan girl with tears streaming down her face. “Those pictures of him with his thumb up,” says Georges Rüegg, “he never ever showed signs like that. It’s theater. It’s not him. He’s communicating that everything is okay when nothing is okay. Nothing is okay for him. Bruno was always true. Always himself. He never used these kinds of gestures—they are a show! Nothing was okay. They say that Bruno is leaving, that he’s leaving us and telling us goodbye.”

  “He sent me a postcard of himself,” said Roger Graf. “He’d never done that before. It was always a snail or a monkey, but never a photo of himself!”

  Months later Charlotte Belet received a postcard dated May 23, 2000, the world’s last word from Bruno Manser. “Charlotte, you little big star. As soon as I arrive in a beautiful place, tired, I will think of you, enjoy the landscape, and with a bit of luck hunt a small wild boar.” He wrote no salutation, no hint of a return date, and didn’t even sign his name. Instead, he drew a picture. A character sticking out its tongue and thumbing its nose.

  Bruno walked across the mountains into the Kelabit Highlands and made it to Bario, from where he sent the postcard to Charlotte. He told some Penan friends he wanted to climb Batu Lawi, and they headed off together. When the great peaks rose into sight out of the jungle, he said he wanted to push on alone, that he would return soon.

  And then Bruno Manser vanished.

  Peng Megut butchering a freshly killed deer. (Carl Hoffman)

  Sixteen

  The Limbang River flowed silvery brown and swift, a hundred yards wide, deep green forest on either side. Trees leaned over the riverbanks, which were tangled and impenetrable in some places, rocky with smooth, rounded boulders and little sandy beaches in others. The air felt thick, hot, moist, and smelled rich. Like moss, earth, water, like sticking your nose in a terrarium and inhaling. Peng Megut pulled my duffel from the narrow wooden longboat and deftly fastened it to his hand-woven backpack with loops of rattan. His wrists were thick with black- and blue-beaded bracelets and thin strips of braided rattan and, on his left wrist, a black plastic analog Timex watch frozen at 9:10. Encircling each of his legs, just below his knees, were seven more braided loops. His hair was jet black, a tousled shoulder-length mullet. Tied around his waist by a nylon rope dangled a twenty-four-inch parang in a handmade wooden sheath banded with alternating black and brown fiber. He wore baggy black cargo shorts and a brown T-shirt with “Shit Happens” in big letters. The Western clothes were a costume that couldn’t hide the most powerful body I’d ever seen, a body honed from a life of pure physicality. His calves were the size of his head. His thighs were as thick as an NFL running back’s. His feet were shoeless freaks of nature, seven inches wide at the balls, a half-inch space between each of his toes.

  Peng shouldered the pack, picked up his six-foot-long wooden blowpipe tipped with an eight-inch steel blade, and walked into the forest. I followed. I had no idea where we were going, who I’d be with, what I’d see. All I knew was that Peng was the last of his kind. That here in the Ulu Limbang, the upper reaches of the Limbang River, supposedly lay patches of the last unlogged primary forest in Sarawak. That this had been the home of Along Sega and where Bruno had roamed. That Peng’s father, Suti Megut, had been close to Bruno. And that Peng promised to deposit me in Long Seridan, about thirty miles as the crow flies, in three weeks.

  The email had arrived without warning from Simon Kaelin, field director of the Bruno Manser Fund, whom I’d met in Basel before moving to Bali. “I am going to Long Gita, the exact area where Along Sega lived before with Bruno,” he wrote. He was only staying two nights, but if I met him in Limbang in four days, he’d take me into the forest and introduce me to people. The BMF was now a well-run, books-balanced, nine-person NGO operating out of a stately house in Basel working on behalf of the Penan in a much quieter and more systematic way. During a visit there, Simon had said he might be able to connect me with Penan who’d known Bruno. But he was often on the move and rarely replied to my messages. I hadn’t spoken to him in months. And I didn’t even really know what “meeting Penan” meant. It had been sixteen years since Bruno’s anguished, desperate attempts to deliver the lamb to Taib, who’d finally stepped down as Sarawak’s chief minister in 2014 after thirty-three years. By all accounts the forest was gone and the Penan were settled, and my sojourn with Michael in Kalimantan and Sarawak left me feeling that only the barest hints of traditional ways of life remained. At best, I hoped, Simon might introduce me to some old Penan who remembered Bruno and who might still occasionally go for a day of hunting. But it was worth a try.

  I flew from Bali to Kuala Lumpur, and then on to the coastal city of Miri. A Starbucks greeted me in the airport, not a good sign. From there it was a thirty-minute hop to Limbang, a small, quiet city on the banks of the river of the same name. “Danger!” warned a sign on the city’s docks. “Beware of crocodiles.” Toyota Hilux pickup trucks with off-road tires and five-gallon tanks of gas strapped in their beds rattled through town kicking up dust. Limbang still had a frontier feeling, a place on the edge of something bigger. That night from my hotel room window I watched a huge fire glow in the hills in the distance.

  Simon pulled up in a taxi the next morning with Anne Pastor, a French radio reporter. We drove to a wooden house on stilts a little outside of town, changed cars and drivers, and headed toward the city of Lawas; to get there we had to cut through Brunei. “The Penan are having a meeting near Long Adang to talk about various issues, including a new dam being proposed,” he said, as Cyndi Lauper and Adele crooned from the radio. “It’s their meeting—they’re the ones organizing it—but I’m going to just be a presence, to show our support. Anne and I will stay one night, but you can stay as long as you want.” We drove on smooth-paved two-lane roads winding through green hills; this was the same route that Bruno and Mutang and Georges and even James Ritchie had all taken many times. We cut back into Sarawak and after three hours our driver dropped us off in front of a hotel in Lawas. A few minutes later five men appeared in two jacked-up four-door black Hiluxes. Though they wore jeans and T-shirts, they were Penans. We climbed into the backseat of one of the trucks and took off, the other truck following. A single-barrel shotgun rested between the seats. In ten minutes the pavement ended, and we began bumping over dirt logging roads, the road ever climbing, past low green hills, most covered in palm oil trees. The sky turned dark, clouds descended into the valleys, and a gray rain fell. Komeok, the driver, shifted into four-wheel drive. “What kind of shoes do you have?” said Simon.

  “Just these,” I said, pointing to my tennis shoes.

  “Shit, you can’t use those.” Komeok reached an arm behind his seat, fished out a plastic bag holding a pair of cheap molded plastic soccer spikes. “I have an extra pair,” he said. “Size thirty-nine.” Exactly my size. “You can have them. And you need these,” he said, dangling a pair of thick knee-high socks. “For the leeches.”


  “If you look at satellite maps of Sarawak,” Simon said, “through the 1980s and ’90s there’s all this forest, but by 2000, when Bruno disappeared, it’s gone, or mostly. Bruno and the trees vanished together. They called him Penan Man, but now they call him the man who’s gone.”

  The road cut through thick green jungle, but it was secondary, post-logging growth, a tangled thicket so dense it was almost impossible to walk through or hunt in. A motorcycle sped by, the passenger on the back clutching a long blowpipe.

  The sun fell; we were in total darkness. Toward 9 p.m., after driving for five hours, we turned off the road, bumped and slid down a steep, deeply rutted tunnel of green so narrow that trees brushed the truck, forded a river, and stopped a few hundred yards later at a wooden clapboard house the size of a one-car garage, locked tight with a padlock. Long Adang lay on the other side of the Limbang River, which was too high to drive across. “The Malaysian gas company Petronas is building a natural gas line near here,” Simon said, “and is supposed to maintain the road, but clearly that’s not happening. Because of all the rain the water is too deep to drive across tonight. We’ll sleep here and try tomorrow.”

  Komeok pried off the lock with a hammer and screwdrivers. The floor was dirt, now oozing mud. Rain poured from black skies, the air cold. The night buzzed with millions of cicadas and crickets. Fireflies flashed above the trees, everywhere, in every direction. But as soon as our hammocks were hung, Komeok tied a board across the bed of the truck behind its roll bar and fished out a six-volt battery wired to a searchlight. “We’re going hunting!” he said. “Pig. Deer. Bear. Leopard. Porcupine. Whatever is out there.” He and another Penan jumped in the cab, a third Penan grabbed the gun and climbed into the back of the truck, sitting on the jury-rigged bench, and off they roared into the dripping darkness. I never heard them return, but in the morning two furry bodies lay outside the hut: a civet and a bearcat.

  Just after dawn we climbed in the trucks and bumped ten minutes to the Limbang River. It was one hundred feet across, a brown surging mass with swirling eddies and standing waves. “We have to cross on foot,” said Simon.

  I gulped. Changed into shorts, pulled my new plastic spikes on. A Penan grabbed my bag and plowed into the river fully clothed. I stepped in gingerly. Within three steps the water was up to my waist, pulling me hard. Komeok grabbed my hand and step by step we edged across, stumbling over hidden rocks, the current powerful.

  In the 1990s, Penan had settled in Long Adang, a cluster of simple frame houses on stilts with corrugated roofs, at the urging of the government and the Methodist Church. Chickens pecked underfoot. Packs of dogs roamed. While Simon huddled in discussions, Komeok took us to drink sweet hot tea around a long table in a neat little house with plastic floor covering and a simmering wood fire. A tiny, thin, bent, ageless couple entered the house. Their earlobes dangled six inches, empty of the weights that used to hang from them. The woman had long gray hair in a ponytail, her wrists thick with bracelets, a red-beaded choker around her neck. She clutched my hand, rubbed my arm, hugged me, rubbed her cheeks on my shoulder. They could barely hear and they spoke no Malay. Twenty billion dollars’ worth of timber had been cut from these forests, but still no road led to the village and it had no school. I thought of Mahathir’s letter to Bruno, how he’d excoriated him for denying the Penan access to development and a better life. His point might have been valid, except it hadn’t happened. The logs and forest that had so long sustained the Penan were gone; the profits had been extracted, but almost none of it had gone to the community. So much money—why weren’t there perfect roads, gleaming schools and health clinics, public transportation, running water in every house? Long Adang had little frame houses and a smattering of light bulbs, a church, a community water faucet drawing from the river, but nothing else to show for so much that had been taken away.

  Simon returned quickly. The people had decided to move the meeting from Long Adang to the forest itself. “You’ll see,” he said.

  Fifteen of us piled into two narrow, tippy thirty-foot longboats and sped upriver against the current. The water flowed fast, strong. Emerald forest lined the banks. I thought of Michael Palmieri and the endless hours he’d spent in boats like this. I thought of Bruno crossing and swimming in this very river. Mist clung on mountaintops and clouds scudded overhead and for the first time I felt Borneo’s wildness, the weight of its fecundity. We hit rapids, the motor revving at full power, Penans standing amidships and at the bow poling us forward, water sloshing in over the gunwales. At a sweeping bend in the river, shallow and filled with rocks, the inside curve a field of boulders, we had to disembark and walk as the boatmen dragged the vessel through.

  After an hour we came ashore on a sandy beach beneath overhanging trees. The Penans jumped out, climbed up the banks, walked into the forest, returned, and said this was the spot. We were at an unmarked riverbank in the middle of the forest. I don’t know how they knew, where they’d heard, how they traveled, but more Penan soon began appearing out of nowhere. Out of the woods. Emerging, materializing as if by magic from all directions. All day in groups of two or three, wearing T-shirts and blue jeans and baseball caps and singlets and polo shirts and Chuck Taylor shoes, the whole panoply of Western casual wear. They arrived and they whipped out their parangs and went to work. A fire soon blazed on the beach, Komeok singeing the hair off the bearcat, another man chopping up the civet into little pieces. “This is Menyit Along,” Komeok said, “one of Along Sega’s sons,” introducing me to a thin man with a salt-and-pepper mustache. “Bruno was like my brother,” Menyit said. “When we see the animals, when we see the river, we always remember Bruno. We hunted. We gathered sago. But then he was gone.” Perhaps it was due to language difficulties, but all my efforts to talk about Bruno were like this one—short, curt, almost rote—and I had the feeling he had been gone so long now that he’d become a myth even to those he’d once lived with.

  Men and women—there was no obvious division of labor—chopped down small trees, dragged them through the forest, stripped pliable lianas, and tied them together into a thirty-foot-long, three-sided structure a foot off the ground, with overhanging eaves. They hardly spoke. They made fireplaces on beds of mud. They built another house, this one just for Anne. They laid out food. The civet and the bearcat. Plastic bins of cooked rice. Pots of black meat in boar fat. Big slices of cucumber. And then, as evening fell and the cicadas roared and the fireflies blinked, they gathered—forty or so at this point—knee to knee in the hut, and started talking. They talked and they talked and they talked, about God, religion, cooperating with the Kelabits on opposing the government-proposed dam. Simon spoke briefly. Komeok next. The preacher led them in prayer (I heard the Malay word for God, or Lord—Tuan) and talked more. I felt overcome with sadness. Though wearing Western clothes, though all at least semi-settled and living in villages like Long Adang, they retained a powerful essence of who they had always been. Much of their culture remained intact. They could navigate with ease through the forest, build shelter in minutes, hunt, dine on game, had a deep sense of community. But where was Bruno? Why wasn’t he here, enjoying them as they were? Why did it have to be all or nothing for him? And yet it also seemed clear that compromise and compensation hadn’t worked, that none of the fantastic wealth accrued by Taib and so many others had flowed back into the community, back to the people whose land had been taken.

  I crept off to my hammock and fell asleep to soft voices mixing with the sounds of the forest, wondering if Bruno hadn’t been right. They spoke uninterrupted until dawn.

  When I woke, many had already disappeared, back to wherever they’d come from. It was then that Simon took me to Peng. “He’s the one you want,” he said, introducing us. I’d noticed him, his crazy powerful legs and his giant bare feet and splayed toes—he was the only Penan there without shoes and the only one with a traditional mullet. Bahasa Indonesia is similar to Bahasa Melayu, which Peng spoke a bit of, so we could communicate at a basi
c level. But in Penan, which Simon spoke well, Simon told him that I wanted to walk through the forest to Long Seridan, where there was an airfield from where I could fly out to Miri. For the Penan, it was a two- or three-day journey. For westerners like us, he said, maybe five days. I said I needed two people, someone to carry my bag, because I wasn’t sure I could make it on my own. Peng nodded. Counted on his fingers. He still hadn’t looked me in the eye. He spoke in the barest whisper. “Okay,” he said, “but if we don’t want to walk, we won’t. And when we want to hunt, we’ll hunt.”

  “The eighteenth,” I said. “I just need to be in Long Seridan in eighteen days.” He counted on his fingers again. Nodded. That was it. Thirty minutes later we strolled into the forest. We followed a sandy, well-worn path enveloped by trees, roughly parallel to the river. Peng moved smoothly, deliberately, pausing to check on me every few minutes. The walking was easy; in an hour we emerged into hot sunshine and the village of Long Gita. “Village,” though, seemed an overstatement for a grassy clearing of three or four rough plank houses, a new wooden house missing a wall atop ten-foot-high stilts holding three thin mattresses, a simple planked church, and three traditional Penan huts made of logs and tied together with vines, one of which appeared to be Peng’s.