The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  If you are required to kill an enemy your most earnest hope is that you will take him by surprise with a clean shot so that he’s dead before he can react to the threat. That’s the way I’d like to meet death, dished out to me quickly and impersonally, one moment here and half a breath later, gone. But I have to say, it is important to me that I see my enemy face to face. In the split second before I die I’d like to see the face of the bloke who pulls the trigger. For me it is a matter of mutual respect. To creep up behind a bloke and shoot him in the back, while required in war, is slaughter at other times.

  There had been some suggestion at Fraser Island that I might like to leave Naval Intelligence to train as a sniper. While it was considered a compliment to my ability with a rifle, I was secretly aghast at the idea. A sniper fires in cold blood and should never get close enough to face the enemy. In retrospect, the thought of my being trained to be a killing machine horrifies me. I had never thought of myself as belonging to those men who have a naturally aggressive attitude. Always a loner, I wished nobody harm and at school and elsewhere would go to considerable pains to avoid a fight. I am by nature a poor hater, reasoning that a mean spirit only injures itself. I considered myself a reasonable and reasoning bloke. I recall Sergeant Major Wainwright, a soft-spoken, calm and reasoning man if ever there was one, saying, ‘Nick, hotheads, haters and trigger-happy morons can’t be relied on to do this job. It takes calmness and reasoning, aptitude and some real intelligence. Hate clouds judgment and stupidity confuses the issues involved. We only kill because we are forced under the prevailing circumstances to do so.’

  Nonetheless while I would never again experience it, I cannot deny that I’d felt a real sense of exhilaration when I’d killed the seven men coming at me on Bloody Ridge and during the fight that had followed beside the marines. I deeply regret that this innate ability to kill is contained within me. The affinity with killing is a primordial force you hope will never surface. When I eventually heard Anna’s story, I could feel a deep, dark stirring of the force within me, but thankfully this was drowned in the tears I shed at her suffering.

  I eventually found the Japanese sniper behind an outcrop of rock on the edge of a jungle clearing and initially he was unaware of my presence. There is an unwritten code all fighting men obey — that a sniper is never captured alive. My orders from Lieutenant Colonel Carlson were ‘to eliminate this present danger’. That’s Geneva Convention language, but as an order, it’s specific enough. So I stepped into the small area so that he could see my face and he was dead before he could even register a look of surprise. When I set about searching the poor bastard to verify his identity, he was virtually reduced to skin and bone. If he was any indication, the Japanese on the mountain were doing it really tough.

  This episode in hunting the Japanese sniper gave me a little added confidence for finding ‘Goat’ on my own. It also, incidentally, earned the respect of J.V. Mather, who thereafter refrained from referring to me as ‘Lieutenant Butterfly’ — a little joke that had earned him a chuckle each time and one he’d felt he could get away with in company, as I was a fellow Australian.

  He wasn’t a bad bloke and was damned good at his job. I guess he didn’t want it to look as if he was favouring a countryman. When I was ready to leave the battalion to hunt for ‘Goat’ he came up and patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘I’ve bet Lieutenant Colonel Carlson a pound you’ll find the Japanese radio operator, Nick. Go to it, son, don’t let me down.’ He’d grinned. ‘A quid, especially if it comes out of my pocket, is a bloody fortune.’

  ‘Thanks, sir,’ I’d replied, also grinning. ‘I would have hoped I was worth at least a fiver!’

  You will recall how I described the island of Guadalcanal as being like a piece of fabric that had been picked up at the centre and dropped to the floor, to leave ridges and valleys and a more or less flat coastline. Mount Austen was typical of this formation and we had arrived at a point later described by Lieutenant Colonel Carlson as ‘the hub of a spiderweb of ridges’. This was an ideal place for the enemy to mount their artillery and it was while we were approaching it that we were met by a strong Japanese combat patrol.

  The fierce fight that ensued lasted just over two hours, both sides using automatic weapons and mortars. The enemy attempted to surround us by executing a double envelopment but we fought them off, then through the quick thinking of Lieutenant Colonel Carlson we managed to surround them and the fight was eventually won. We had killed twenty-five of the enemy while we suffered four marines wounded. I would later hear that one of them died the following day.

  The time had come to venture alone into the jungle, then scour the limestone crags in search of ‘Goat’. I had decided that as a fellow radio intelligence operator, albeit on the other side, I didn’t want to kill him unless my own life was threatened. Mather had urged me to take along an American Springfield rifle but I was reluctant to do so — it’s a very good rifle, but I reckoned the terrain would ensure any confrontation would be at short range, and I’d have a good chance of taking him prisoner.

  I packed a week’s rations, although if I was successful I could be off the mountain in two days or, depending on the weather and avoiding any stray Japanese patrols, three days at the most. But if I was fortunate in my search and took ‘Goat’ prisoner, he would also need to eat. I wondered how he’d go with GI rations after subsisting on a handful of rice and anything else he might have scavenged in the jungle. If you knew what you were doing you could always find a meal of sorts, sometimes quite a good one — worms, grubs and insects were excellent protein, and several types of edible mushroom grew in the boles of giant trees. Often, where a large tree had fallen and created a clearing for the sun to get through, the almost instant undergrowth this created was the home of several edible plants.

  I had been taught all this by my childhood native companions or by experimenting while chasing butterflies in New Britain and New Guinea. A single fallen tree that is rotting can often render a more than adequate meal from those things that live under the bark or grow in the clearing that it creates. Now I wondered if the Japanese had received any instruction on how to forage for a meal in the jungle. From the emaciated condition of the sniper I very much doubted it. I didn’t mind going it alone, in fact I was secretly glad since guiding a bunch of marines (who had not received specialist training and were therefore ‘clumsy in the jungle’) silently to the whereabouts of ‘Goat’ would have been virtually impossible.

  I set out at daybreak, knowing the Japanese radio operator would be transmitting the information about the early fighter and bomber flights as they left Henderson before the cloud came up and obscured his view of the airfield. By midmorning I’d gone about two hundred yards, travelling up steeply through the jungle. It has always astonished me that trees two hundred feet high, veritable forest giants, can tenaciously dig their roots into the limestone cracks and fissures so they anchor themselves on such precipitous slopes.

  Two hundred yards in five hours when you’re stalking isn’t too bad as I wanted to arrive at the base of the limestone cliffs that rose out of the jungle well before nightfall. I could then attempt to climb the cliffs the following day while ‘Goat’ was busy transmitting the information about the morning flights from Henderson. I stopped for breakfast (a Hershey bar and water from a mountain stream) and stopped again for lunch (this time a cold can of pork ’n’ beans, as there was no question of lighting a fire). It rained early and midmorning and again in the afternoon. This was good; although the rain reduced my vision down to a few yards, the tremendous noise as the virtual curtains of water hit the canopy allowed me to move a little faster, despite the slippery conditions. Also, it meant it wasn’t necessary to cover my footprints as the rain washed them away almost immediately.

  I’d reached the base of the cliff face by midafternoon and moved to the edge of the jungle where I could see the surface of the whole of the north-facing cliff. I settled dow
n to watch and to study it closely. Men always choose the easiest way to climb up any object. Using my binoculars I soon spotted a likely way up the face though it meant passing dozens of fairly large fissures, each of which could have housed a cave. So I looked for fissures that had some sort of rock platform directly outside, as it would be patently impossible to step out of a cave into thin air. Twenty or so appeared to be candidates, but there were only two that appeared to have a ledge leading to a rudimentary pathway, often no more than eight inches wide. The path ran more or less diagonally down the face of the cliff into the jungle canopy that grew right up to the edge of the cliff. This meant the caves were about two hundred and seventy-five feet above ground level, an impressive eyrie or eagle’s nest and an ideal place from which to transmit a radio signal.

  Studying this rough path, which was virtually a crack in the surface of the limestone that had occurred possibly at some Pre-Cambrian time, I observed that small parts of the face had been recently broken away to slightly widen it almost directly in front of one of the caves, the work of army sappers or someone with a rock chisel and a heavy blunt-nosed hammer.

  I knew immediately I had found a habitable cave, though not necessarily the one that housed ‘Goat’ — or anyone else for that matter. Like many of the artillery positions we’d found, it might have been vacated. We’d killed over a hundred Japanese since coming onto the mountain. This would have been sufficient to man the light artillery the Japs had installed on the slopes. The Japanese command, because of the shortage of fit troops, would have left the barest minimum number of combat soldiers on the mountain. The difficulty of supplying a large body of men in such terrain, coupled with the unlikely event of an American assault, would have meant their officers would see this as a logical decision. A small force, sufficient to stave off American patrols, would be enough, just sufficient to man the artillery and supply ‘Goat’s’ need for batteries to run his transceiver and to bring him food.

  We hadn’t been harassed in the gorges and had only been attacked by a not very large patrol. This suggested that the mountain summit was relatively free of enemy troops and that we’d accounted for most of them. When all of these factors were taken into consideration, this particular cave, seventy-five feet above the canopy, appeared to be my best bet for finding ‘Goat’, who would almost certainly be left behind in any retreat the Japs made from the mountain. His messages to Japanese ships out to sea would be deemed too important.

  I settled down for a cold, wet wait until morning, in the process enduring a five o’clock downpour. Walking in a jungle rainstorm is never pleasant, and sitting through one is bloody miserable. But just before nightfall, when the rain had stopped and the last of the sun broke through the clouds, I was unexpectedly rewarded. A Japanese soldier came out of the mouth of the cave and stood on the edge of the small platform and prepared to urinate. I watched as the bright stream of urine caught the last rays of sunshine as it arched into the canopy below. I was glad I hadn’t brought a Springfield as I might have been tempted to make an easy rifle shot, almost certainly killing him. No man deserves to die when taking a wonderful piss like that.

  It became quite clear to me that I couldn’t go up the cliff to get him out. In the process I would make far too much noise and, if he had an automatic weapon, he had merely to stand within the cave and when I appeared at the entrance blast me to kingdom come. I would have to wait until he came down into the jungle. Sooner or later he would have to do so, to forage for food, take a crap or simply to stretch his legs.

  If he was indeed the ‘Goat’ then I knew his broadcast routine. He would work the dawn schedule, when visibility for aircraft was better and the flying conditions were more favourable and most of the offensive operations were mounted out of Henderson. The dawn flights went looking for Japanese food and supply dumps that had been landed on the beaches by enemy destroyers overnight. Then he’d watch for the second morning flights that were going out to seek and destroy enemy shipping. The cloud cover started to thicken over the land by late morning and as the day progressed afternoon rain squalls sweeping over the island would cause visibility to decline. That was when I expected he’d come down.

  No night spent in the jungle is ever pleasant — everything with a mouth that creeps and crawls seems to find you — but, thank God, near the summit I was above the mosquito line and so by morning, nursing a bite or two, I remained relatively unscathed. I endured yet another cold breakfast and a long wait, my only pleasure being to watch the butterflies in the clearing. They were plentiful and of several different varieties; all, with the exception of one, contained within my collection at the mission. That is, of course, in the unlikely event that it still existed intact.

  The one exception, a large butterfly that alighted near me, made my heart skip a beat. I knew it from pictures in a book — John McGillivray, a British naturalist who visited the island in 1885, had discovered it. It was peculiar to Guadalcanal and adjacent islands, and its generic name was Aetheoptera victoriae. If I’d had a net with me, I’m sure I would have been quite unable to resist giving chase, abandoning my hunt for ‘Goat’, not even caring if the entire Japanese army heard me as I blundered through the jungle after this magnificent specimen. With the rare species you often only get one chance in a lifetime — it might take months, even years, to come across one this size again. I’d known of its existence since a child and now, for the first time, I’d seen a perfectly splendid male alight on a shrub no more than three feet from where I sat and I couldn’t move a finger to catch him.

  On the dot of eleven when the cloud cover began, the soldier appeared, urinated in the same spectacular and satisfying way and returned to the interior of the cave, then twenty minutes later he reappeared. I watched him through the binoculars and saw that he carried what appeared to be a flat, medium-sized book under his arm together with a bamboo rod, although I couldn’t be sure. He made his way down the narrow path and while it was obviously dangerous he seemed to traverse it with a sure-footed nimbleness. If he was indeed ‘Goat’, then we’d named him well. He was a small, very slight man, and to my astonishment he evidently carried no weapon.

  I moved silently to the point where I calculated the natural progression of the diagonal path on the cliff face would reach the floor of the jungle and waited. Ten, then fifteen minutes passed, but he didn’t appear, nor could I hear any sound of his progress. I felt sure as he drew closer I would hear the clatter of a small rock falling or the crunch of his footsteps on the narrow path or, if he’d come to its end and entered the jungle, the snap of a twig — something that would give him away. Unless you are prepared to move no more than fifty yards in an hour, planting each footprint with infinite care, the jungle will reward a pair of alert ears to another’s presence within thirty or forty yards almost every time.

  I studied the cliff carefully once again, focusing my glasses at the point where the so-called path entered the canopy. I decided the path must suddenly run parallel once it entered the trees, gradually descending to the very end of the cliff face, possibly a hundred yards from where I stood. So I made my way carefully to where I could see a part of the cliff wall existing below the line made by the canopy. No path continued in an area that fell some seventy yards short of the end of the huge rocky outcrop that formed the summit.

  ‘Goat’ — or whoever it was — had simply disappeared, vanished into the dark green canopy. Once again I focused on the point where the path entered the trees abutting the cliff. My father had once told me, ‘Nicholas, there are no mysteries to a patient man.’ The tree line beneath the cliff was almost straight but then I noticed that, at the point where the diagonal cliff path entered the canopy, a forest giant rose perhaps eight feet above the rest of the trees. Holy shit, it’s the tree! He’s come down the tree!

  It took me nearly an hour, hugging the cliff face, to traverse the sixty yards to where I thought the tree might be and then, quite suddenly, I came upon it. Me
tal spikes had been driven into the trunk; they protruded about nine inches, making it relatively easy to climb or ascend. The giant tree had become a ladder growing up against the face of the cliff to the point where the path virtually petered out.

  The Japanese soldier hadn’t made any attempt to conceal his footsteps and the first thing I noticed was the smell of faeces where he’d defecated and covered the result with a pile of dead leaves. Using a twig I scraped them clear and examined what was a very small bowel movement. He’d been eating insects and perhaps a little rice and some forest greens. It was at best a subsistence diet, but not an entirely unintelligent one. I pushed the leaves back in place and then proceeded to pick up his trail, not a difficult task, although I continued to move very quietly.

  I finally reached a clearing beside a small stream, the babble of water running over limestone caused sufficient noise to cover any tiny sound I might have made with my approach. I stood about ten feet behind him and slightly to his left and watched. A large tree had fallen to create the clearing, allowing the sunlight to penetrate. It must have come down fairly recently, for the bark showed no decay and the undergrowth, feeding on the sun, had not yet overwhelmed the area to form a wildness of scrubs scrapping for the available space.

  The Japanese soldier was seated on a wide branch of the fallen tree. Resting on his knees was a small sketchbook and beside him on the branch, a box of watercolours and a tin mug containing water. I noticed with detached interest that the squares of colour within the box were all but used up. On the ground in front of him was a large green leaf and on the leaf, with its wings arranged in the open position, was a butterfly.