by Peter Ryan
At Kiakum we found that the natives knew very little about the war. They had never even seen a Japanese, and had met so few white men that Les and I were regarded as curiosities. It was a relief to find that the mission had no hold up here – we would certainly find the people much easier to get on with. Only one man spoke pidgin, and though he offered to clear out his house for us to sleep in, we declined the offer and slept beneath the house. On the following day we asked the natives to build two thatched houses in a secluded spot about half a mile up the hill from the village proper.
For the next ten days we remained at Kiakum, receiving many visitors from the remote mountain villages, all eager for definite news of the war, of which, up to that time, they had heard only the wildest rumours. We would go down from our house each morning at about ten o’clock and remain in the village till the afternoon, receiving all our visitors there: only Kiakum people were allowed to approach the house. We got on famously with the natives, relations being as cordial as they had been with the Bawan people in 1942. Each day I took the medical kit with me to the village and gave injections, dressed wounds and ulcers, and dosed colds and malaria. Once we had to cut the tips off two toes of a boy who had kicked a stone and developed such a bad infection that the toes were just rotting away. The job was done neatly and successfully with a pair of sterilized wire clippers and a local anaesthetic, and the patient was walking round again the following week.
While I did medical work Les talked to the people, losing no chance for pushing our cause, and noting every scrap of information they brought. Pato unearthed one story which, whether true or not, amused us. He was told that when the Japanese heard of my visit to the Chinese camp they were so enraged that they put a price on my head – two cases of meat and £5 (in Australian money) to any native who brought me in, dead or alive.
Les laughed. ‘Two cases of meat and a fiver! I didn’t realize anyone valued you as highly as all that!’
One constant visitor to the camp was the village idiot, a powerful man clad only in a strip of bark. Unlike most natives – whose skins are usually very clean – he had a heavy beard, and a moderate growth of curly hair all over his body. He was extremely dirty, and one could smell him from a distance. Our introduction to this man was startling. We were bending over the wireless one night deciphering a message, when there was a loud thump behind us, and there he was. He had leapt from the doorway right to the centre of the floor. In his hand we could see an enormous savage-looking bush-knife glittering in the lamplight. Les and I looked at each other nervously, uncertain whether to dive out the side of the house or to tackle him and risk having a limb severed by the knife. Our dilemma was solved when we saw the agitated countenance of the pidgin speaker from the village appear round the doorway.
‘Long-long man, master,’ he said. ‘Master sit down, now ’e all right.’
We sat down rather reluctantly. ‘Long-long’ is the pidgin word for ‘mad’, and it was well applied to our visitor. With a weird gleam in his eye he stuck his knife quivering into a beam of the house and came to inspect us more closely. He felt our boots, hands, and faces, rubbing his paws all over our clothes and making queer chuckling noises in his throat. Scared as I was, I could not help laughing at Les’s expression of girlish coyness when our grimy friend put a hand down the back of his shirt. Then, apparently satisfied that we were human, he moved about the house inspecting all our belongings.
The Kiakum pidgin speaker crept inside and explained to us that all the people were frightened of the long-long man, though he was never violent unless violence was offered him. We gathered that the poor man enjoyed a kind of prestige among the people, though they also feared him. We thought they would probably resent it if we did not treat him well, and for that reason we allowed him to come and go at will, giving him little presents of meat and biscuits from time to time, and even establishing a kind of friendship with him. We could not help wishing, however, that he would confine his social activities to the daytime. Several times at night we woke with a start to hear an extraordinary chattering in the hut, and the torch revealed this naked, gibbering madman dancing round the bed, bush-knife in hand. When, later on, we finally left Kiakum, he broke down and cried like a child.
Our radio could not pick up ordinary broadcast programmes, but we found that at two o’clock in the morning we could receive a news broadcast and some music from an American station – I think it was in San Francisco. We had not realized how much we missed music, nor how ignorant we had become of what was happening in the world outside. We had developed a state of mind which suggested that the Markham River was the boundary of creation. As soon as we discovered that we could tune in to this programme we ordered the sentry to call us at two every morning, and spent half an hour or so listening first to music and then to the news bulletin, ‘just in case the war has ended, and they haven’t told us’, as Les put it.
On 29th May we made an inventory of our stores. We were running low in certain items, especially sugar, biscuits, and salt. The last-named of these shortages was the most serious, for it represented our currency and was our means of buying vegetables, fowls, pigs and labour.
I decided to visit the dump we had left in the little huts near Bandong, and replenish our supplies. I would also try to go to Boana and find out whether the Japs had moved in yet. If they had not, there was a good chance of shooting another beast and so being able to issue another couple of meals of fresh meat all round. I would take Pato, Watute, and Dinkila with me, and a couple of the Kiakum men as guides. As it was unsafe to use the main tracks, because of the number of Japanese who seemed to be moving about, we would go over a little-known and little-used pad straight across the mountains, which came out near Kawalan, in the Wain country.
We set out on 30th May over what was assuredly one of the worst tracks in New Guinea. It was incredibly steep and rough, through moss forest all the way. We all, even the Kiakum men, suffered violent headaches which seemed to split our skulls in half. Probably they were caused by the very great altitude. To cap our miseries, leeches were swarming everywhere. The whole surface of the ground seemed to be covered with their tiny waving shapes, smelling blood and stretching out for it. We dared not sit down, but we halted every twenty minutes or so while I scraped them from under my gaiters and the boys picked them from between their toes. Despite our exertions in climbing we shivered all the way. When almost in sight of Kawalan, the first Wain village, we met with an obstacle that was almost enough to make us turn back. A landslide had carried away a large section of the hillside, where the track had once been, leaving a rock-face without a foothold of any description, a sheer drop of fifty feet or more. After half an hour’s search in the bush the boys found enough vines to fashion a rough rope ladder. We tied it to a tree and hoped for the best as we lowered ourselves into space bumping hard against the rock from time to time as the rope swung round, and scraping the skin off our knees and elbows. We left it hanging there, hoping that no one would come along and move it. If they did, the only way of getting back to Kiakum would be to make a two- or three-day journey through Wampangan and Bawan.
There were only two men in Kawalan village when we arrived, and not a sign of the women and children. I questioned the two men about this, but they declined to say where the others were, and both affirmed that there were no Japanese in Boana. I was not at all happy about this ‘ghost town’ of several dozen empty, s
ilent houses. After a while one becomes very sensitive to the ‘atmosphere’ of native villages – there is an air about them which tells you whether everything is as it should be. In this case I had the strongest possible premonition of something being wrong, and so as soon as it became dark we crept quietly out of the house we were occupying, and spent the night at the edge of the surrounding bush.
In the morning the tultul of Kawalan appeared mysteriously out of the blue, and he too assured us that there were no Japanese at Boana, nor would he give us any hint of where the rest of the Kawalan people were.
I still did not believe what these people had said about Boana, and decided to investigate. Telling Watute and Pato to approach it down the left side of the Bunzok Valley, I went off with Dinkila down the other side. We were to call at Bandong en route to prepare the cargo I wished to take back to Kiakum. If one of us were blocked the chances were that the others might get through and see what was happening.
Bandong I found almost as empty as Kawalan. In spite of the assurances of the few old natives who were there, the people were not merely away at work in their gardens, for every cultivated patch we passed was deserted. Something mysterious was happening. But what? In the hope of solving the mystery Dinkila and I set off for Sokulen after only a short pause to regain our wind.
We had covered about half the distance when a native lad about twelve years old came panting up behind us. He brought a message from Watute, saying that he and Pato had discovered that Boana was inhabited by a strong force of Japanese, and that almost every native in the Wain had gathered there at the summons of the enemy commander, who intended to announce the new Japanese government of the area. Watute and Pato were still investigating, and they suggested that I should wait for them in Kawalan, and not take the risk of proceeding to Sokulen.
Dinkila and I turned back towards Kawalan, but did not go into the village. Instead, we camped in the bush on the side of a small hill nearby, commanding a good view of the track along which Watute would come.
Late the following afternoon we saw him limping up the hill, and it was Dinkila who first spotted the fact that he seemed to have lost all his belongings except his rifle, bayonet, and ammunition. When he reached us, mud-caked, scratched, and weary, he had a grim story to tell.
Pato and he had decided to spend the previous night in a house at Wampangan, intending to go to Boana the next day disguised as bush kanakas, he told us in a bitter voice. Two natives who had come up from Lae with the Japs, heard of their presence and betrayed them to the enemy. A party of twenty Nips attempted to trap them in the house, but they heard them coming just in time, and managed to escape by tearing up part of the light bamboo floor and dropping down beneath the house. In the darkness, and with all the shooting and confusion, Watute became separated from Pato. He did not know where Pato was now – but feared he might have been killed or captured. The Japanese got onto Watute’s track and chased him up the valley. They had heard about my presence there, and were out for my scalp too. He thought they were still a few hours behind him, but whatever happened we should get out of the way quickly.
As there was not a kanaka to be seen anywhere we had to abandon all thought of taking extra stores back to Kiakum. Before darkness fell we had made a few miles along the road back, and when we could see to walk no farther lay down to sleep in the bush at the side of the track. It poured with rain all night, soaking us as we huddled together for warmth.
At dawn next day we moved on. We had no means of knowing whether the Japs would continue the pursuit past Kawalan when they found us gone, but after we had struggled up our vine-made Jacob’s ladder we cut it away behind us and felt reasonably safe. It was about three o’clock when the house at Kiakum came into view, and we hurried down the hill for the last few hundred yards, with only bad news for Les, and a bitter blow to give the rest of the boys, who had been very fond of Pato.
We drafted a radio message to headquarters, to give them our latest information on Japanese movements. According to Watute, the patrol now at Boana was surveying the overland route the enemy proposed to set up between Madang and Lae. They would shortly leave for Kaiapit, in the Upper Markham, travelling through Sedau, Sugu, and the Erap, by the same route as that taken by the party we had so narrowly missed last month. Their destination, Kaiapit Mission, was being watched by an old New Guinea resident, a gold-miner called Harry Lumb. He moved about the district in much the same way as Jock and I had patrolled the Wain, and knew the area and its natives intimately. I had last met him in Wau some weeks earlier, when he had just discovered a case of canned beer in somebody’s abandoned cache. We drank a few tins, and then buried the remainder at the foot of a tall dead pine-tree. ‘There it is now – a nice little drop for our next meeting,’ Harry had said with a grin of satisfaction as we piled earth on top of it. Then we parted, he bound for his post at Kaiapit, I on my way across the Markham.
I had thought of Harry as soon as Watute said the Japanese were bound for Kaiapit, and now mentioned it to Les.
‘Do you think Port Moresby will warn Harry Lumb?’ I asked. ‘He’s quite likely to be poking round that Kaiapit country now.’
‘Sure to, I should think, when they get our news that the Nips are bound that way. Why? Do you think we ought to suggest it?’
‘No. I suppose they would do it as a matter of course, and we have to keep our radio messages as short as possible.’
And so the message went without any suggested warning to Lumb. I wished later we had put it in.
While I removed my wet and stinking clothes, Tauhu cooked a meal and Les sat down at the radio and tapped out the message. I was so tired that I ate more or less mechanically, half asleep. I thought in an idle sort of way how pleasant it would be to return to the old humdrum life of the Wain of last December. It had seemed so dull then, but what a welcome change it would be now.
We spent most of the night trying to decide what to do. The position, as we saw it, was briefly this: The native situation was very bad. The kanakas had thrown in their lot with the Japanese, having apparently decided to regard them as the new rulers of the island. We could remain alive only by hiding in some quiet spot like Kiakum. But that would achieve nothing. The alternatives were to attempt to escape back across the Markham and admit failure, or to try to cross the Saruwaged Range and see what was happening on the north side. We had heard that two men, Lincoln Bell and Fairfax-Ross, were somewhere on the Rai coast, and we hoped we might be able to find them, and perhaps help them.
‘Anyhow, if you ask me,’ said Les, ‘getting back across the Markham just now is not only inglorious – it’s impossible!’
‘All right. That leaves the Saruwageds. What about it?’
‘Yes – let’s have a go at it.’
So it was decided that next day we should try to cross the range, and if we failed we would consider trying to get back to Wau. Following our usual plan of keeping the native members of the party well in the picture, we sent for Kari and asked what he thought of the idea. He said he was quite prepared for the crossing, and he was certain all the others would feel the same way.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Tell all the men to pack their gear at dawn tomorrow.’
We talked of our chances of making the crossing. I remembered how Jock had described the mountains, though the track he
had used was a different one and lay ten miles or so to the east. If anything, the range was a trifle higher where we were going to try. All day long the mountains were covered with clouds, but at dawn and sunset the summits were frequently clear. Often we had risen early at Kiakum to study the bare windswept rock-faces, the sheer precipices, and the yawning cavern-like valleys that scarred the sides of the range. Here and there, like white threads, streams coursed down. We knew our task would not be easy, but the valley of the Sanem River seemed to offer the best approach, and the Kiakum people said the range could be crossed from there, though none of them would admit to having made the crossing. Probably they feared we would ask them to come as guides.
In the morning, to the great grief of our friend the village idiot, the Kiakum people lifted our gear to take it to the village of Mogom, the most northerly habitation in the Sanem Valley shown on our map. North of that was unexplored, and we had no idea whether people lived there, or whether it was just a barren waste. Even if it were inhabited, it was likely that the people would be so wild and shy that we would be unable to establish contact with them, much less induce them to undertake the long and arduous carry across the range.
