by Tim Cahill
Against one wall was a war shield, four feet high, decorated in geometric designs, colored white and red. Next to the shield were several bows and several bunches of arrows, all of which were unnotched and unfeathered, so that when Romas allowed me to fire one off into the forest, it began to wobble after only fifty feet or so. The arrows do not fly true for very long, which is probably not much of a problem in the forest, where there are no long vistas.
Some of the arrows were tipped with cassowary bones. Cassowary are ostrichlike birds whose powerful legs end in claws that are capable of disemboweling a man. Next to the armaments were several seven-foot-long tubes of bamboo that contained drinking water.
The men in the tree house assured me that we were not disrupting them in the least and that they were doing what they ordinarily would be doing, which was precisely what everyone in Samu’s house was doing. Romas reached into the embers of his fire and pulled out a bug that looked a good deal like a large iridescent grasshopper. He stripped off the wings and popped it into his mouth, like a piece of candy.
I was given a wooden bowl of the blue-gray glue that is sago sap. Sago, in fact, was all I’d had to eat over the past twenty hours. It wasn’t unpleasant, just tasteless, and I fully understood why a man who had eaten nothing else in his life would burst into tears over a bowl of rice.
Romas said he hunted wild pig and cassowary. He also ate bananas, cassowary eggs, insects, and small lizards. The only sure thing to eat, however, the only dependable crop, was sago. Sago sap. Sago pulp. An endless diet of sago.
It rained three times that afternoon, and each downpour lasted about half an hour. In the forest there was usually a large-leafed banana tree with sheltering leaves where everyone could sit out the rain in bitter communion with the local mosquitoes.
Just at twilight, back in Samu’s house, where everyone was sitting around eating what everyone always ate, a strong breeze began to rattle the leaves of the larger trees. The wind came whistling through the house, and it brought more rain, cooling rain, so that, for the first time that day, I stopped sweating. My fingers looked pruney, as if I had been in the bath too long.
Samu squatted on his haunches, his testicles inches off the floor. The other man, Gehi, sat with his back to the wall, his gnarled callused feet almost in the fire. It was very pleasant, and no one had anything to say.
After the rain, as the setting sun colored the sky, I heard a gentle cooing from the forest: mambruk. The sky was still light, but the forest was already dark. Hundreds of fireflies were moving rapidly through the trees.
William rigged up a plastic tarp so the Karowai could have some privacy. Chris and I could hear him chatting with Samu and Gehi. They were talking about tobacco and salt, about steel axes and visitors.
Chris said, “I don’t want them to change.”
We watched the fireflies below. They were blinking in unison now, dozens of them on a single tree.
“Do you think that’s paternalistic?” he asked. “Some new politically correct form of imperialism?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
But I thought about it. I thought about it all night long. When you suspect that your hosts have eaten human flesh in the very recent past, sleep does not come easily. It seemed to me that I was out of the loop here, not a part of the cycle of war and revenge, which was all just as well. I had expected to meet self-sufficient hunter-gatherers, and the Karowai were all of that, but they wanted more. They wanted steel axes, for instance, and did not equate drudgery with any kind of nobility.
I tried to imagine myself in an analogous situation. What would I want?
What if some alien life force materialized on earth with a superior medical technology, for instance? They have the cure for AIDS, for cancer, but they feel it is best that we go on as we have. They admire the spiritual values we derive from our suffering; they are inspired by our courage, our primitive dignity. In such a case, I think I’d do everything in my power to obtain that technology—and the hell with my primitive dignity.
I thought about Asmat art and what is left in the world that is worth dying for. I thought about Agus, who wept over his first bowl of rice and whose first contact with the outside world set him up in the business of cutting down the forest that had fed him all of his life.
I thought about the butterfly I had caught when I was a child. My grandmother told me to never do it again. She said that butterflies have a kind of powder on their wings and that when you touch them, the powder comes off in your hand and the butterfly can’t fly anymore. She said that when you touch a butterfly, you kill it.
Butterfly; Karowai.
Sometime just before dawn, I heard a stirring from the Karowai side of the house. Samu moved out from behind the plastic tarp and blew on the embers of his fire. Gehi joined him. The two naked men squatted on their haunches, silent, warming themselves against the coolest part of the forest day. Presently, the stars faded and the eastern sky brightened with the ghostly light of false dawn.
A mist rose up off the forest floor, a riotous floral scent rising with it, so I had a sense that it was the fragrance itself that tinged this mist with the faint colors of forest flowers. The mist seemed the stuff of time itself, and time smelled of orchids.
As the first hints of yellow and pink touched the sky, I saw Samu and Gehi in silhouette: two men, squatting by their fire, waiting for the dawn.
ALSO BY TIM CAHILL
“Cahill can be a lot of fun to hang out with.… He is blessed with not only wit and style but feeling and compassion.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
JAGUARS RIPPED MY FLESH
Tim Cahill has scaled Mount Roraima in the Guiana highlands; dined on turtle lung at an aboriginal funeral in Australia; and harvested poisonous sea snakes in the Philippines. This classic collection of adventure travel writing is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride of a book.
Travel/Adventure/0-679-77079-8
PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS
From the wastes of Antarctica to the blazing oil fields of Kuwait, and from an evening of demonic possession in Bali to a session on Guatemala’s Throne of Terror, Pecked to Death by Ducks is a grand tour of the earth’s remote, exotic, and dismal places.
Travel/Adventure/0-679-74929-2
ROAD FEVER
Engine trouble in Patagonia. Sadistic troopers in Peru. Document hell in Colombia. These are just some of the perils that Cahill braved in the course of a 15,000-mile road trip from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay in a record-breaking twenty and a half days.
Travel/Adventure/0-394-75837-4
A WOLVERINE IS EATING MY LEG
Fearless and hell-bent on destroying all obstacles in his path, Cahill takes us to places rarely seen and barely endured. Not only has he survived fantastic journeys through the Himalayan rapids, the Grand Terror of Montana, and Dian Fossey’s forbidden zone, he dares us to follow him wherever danger and craziness lurk.
Travel/Adventure/0-679-72026-X
VINTAGE DEPARTURES
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