No one came down to greet us at the sound of the boat. Then I heard a call, not a drum, and there were flickers of quick movement, a child’s shriek, then nothing.
I had met a few Wokup. They were not ignorant of whites — no one on this part of the river was by now. Most tribes had a story of someone being put in jail or lured away by recruiters — blackbirders, they were called then — to the mines. I pulled the canoe up onto the shore and we sat in it, waiting, not wanting to cause more distress. A second call went up and a minute later three men came down to greet us. I could not see their backs, but the raised scars on their arms were longer, more like strands of hair or rays of the sun, than the crocodile hide designs of the Kiona. Save a few armbands, they were naked and took their positions in the sand. They knew, even if they had never seen it themselves, that whites had powers — steel blades, rifles, pistols, dynamite — that they did not possess. They knew this power could come on suddenly, with no warning. But we are not afraid, they said with their spread legs, arched backs, and hard gazes.
The one in the middle recognized me from trading at Timbunke and spoke to me in Kiona fragments. From what I could piece together, their village was expecting a raid from a swamp tribe. Swamp tribes were low in the pecking order of the Sepik, weak and impoverished, but they were unpredictable. I explained that my friends were interested in living with them and understanding their ways, that they had many gifts — but he waved me off before I could finish. It was a bad time, he said many times. There was the raid, and there was something else I couldn’t understand. A bad time. We were welcome to spend the night — he could not guarantee us a safe trip home in the dark if their enemies were en route — but we would have to leave in the morning.
‘I don’t know how much of this is true,’ I said to Nell and Fen after I translated everything the chief had said. ‘He could be waiting for some incentives.’
‘Tell him we can supply him with ten years’ worth of salt and matches for the whole tribe,’ Fen said.
‘We can’t lie.’
‘We still have loads of the stuff in Port Moresby.’
To verify this with Nell would insult him, yet it seemed impossible that after a year and a half they would still have that much to offer.
‘We are not light travelers,’ she said.
I began to communicate this to the chief but he raised his hand before I could finish, insulted. He explained that they lacked nothing and needed nothing from us, but for our safety and the safety of his people, he would let us stay the night.
We followed the three Wokup up to the village center. A boy was sent up the ladder of a house and within minutes a mother and five children climbed down. Without looking at us they made their way to a house three doors away. The children let out small yelps once they were inside. The adults hushed them angrily.
The chief indicated that we were to go up. Fen went first with our bag, then reached down to help me with the engine. It was a small house. I suspected that it must be the second or third wife of the chief, whose house next door was much larger. We watched him climb up his ladder and disappear.
We were in near darkness. All the openings were covered with bark cloth dyed black. The village was silent. We could nearly hear the sweat coming out of our pores.
‘Crikey. They could have bloody well offered us some food,’ Fen said.
Nell hushed him.
He fished around in his duffel. I thought he was going to produce some extra tins he’d stashed away, but he pulled out a revolver.
I felt my blood rushing, stinging.
‘Put it away, Fen,’ Nell said. ‘We won’t need it.’
‘They seem serious. Did you see all those spears?’
Nell didn’t say anything.
‘The spears leaning against the house on the other side of the chief. You didn’t see them?’ He seemed quite giddy with this fact. ‘Sharp. Maybe poisoned.”
‘Fen. Stop it.’ She was stern.
He slid the gun back in his bag. ‘They aren’t messing around.’ He moved low and fast to the doorway and peered sideways through a crack in the bark cloth. ‘I think we should sleep in rotations, Bankson.’
There wasn’t going to be much sleeping, anyway. The house caught no breeze and the bugs were awful. We ate from our provisions, played a few hands of dummy bridge by the light of a candle, then chose our beds. The Wokup slept in covered hammocks, not in bags like the Kiona or on mats like the Baining. I took the one in the far corner. It looked to be about a foot and a half shorter than what I could fit into, so I told Fen I’d take the first shift. He motioned to the gun, but I left it in his duffel.
I rolled up the bark cloth a bit and sat in the doorway against a beam. A mist, torn in places, lay across the river now. Behind me Nell and Fen tried to get comfortable in their hammocks. ‘It’s like sleeping inside a teabag,’ I heard him say. Nell laughed and said something I couldn’t hear that made him laugh. It was the first time I had felt alone with them, and it hit me hard and low in the gut. They were here but they belonged to each other and they would go off again and leave me behind.
Outside the sounds of the jungle rose up. Croaks, thrashes, screeches. Whining, growling, splashing. Hums, thrums, and whirs. Every creature seemed on the move. On bad nights in Nengai I’d imagined they were all coming slowly for me.
I tried to focus on the immediate future, tomorrow, and not the great swath of time that stretched out perilously after that. I’d have to take them to Lake Tam. Another three hours upriver. Seven hours away from me. My visits, if I made them, would be planned and certainly less frequent. I’d have to stay the night, disrupt their routines. I was ashamed to feel such bald need for these near strangers, and as I sat there in the dark I trained my mind back to my work, though if there was a quicker way back to suicidal thoughts, I did not know it. But earlier in the day, I’d had another conversation with Nell about the Wai, and as we talked I had the idea that perhaps through this ceremony I could tell the story of the Kiona. I had hundreds of pages of notes, but I wasn’t any closer to a full understanding of it. Once elaborate and in celebration of a boy’s first homicide, the Wai ceremony was performed infrequently now, no longer to recognize a killing but in honor of any sort of young male’s accomplishment: first fish caught, first boar speared, first canoe built. Many firsts in the past two years had passed unacknowledged, however, and though I was often promised another Wai soon, soon never seemed to come.
I shut my eyes and remembered the ceremony as I had witnessed it. It had been during my first month and I’d been sitting with the women — I was often put with the women in large gatherings, along with the children and the mentally ill. To my left was Tupani-Kwo, one of the oldest women of the village. I managed to ask her a few questions, but I hadn’t understood many of her answers. It was chaotic. The father and uncles of the boy being celebrated came out first, in dirty tattered skirts and strings around their bellies like pregnant women wore. They hobbled along together as if they were sick or dying. The women came next, wearing male headdresses and necklaces made of homicidal ornaments and large orange penis gourds strapped around their genitals. They carried the men’s lime boxes and pushed the notched lime sticks in and out to make a loud noise and to show off the swinging tassels which hung from the end of the sticks, each one representing a past murder. The women walked tall and proud, appearing to enjoy the role. The boy and a few of his friends ran to them with big walking sticks and the women put down their lime boxes, took the sticks, and beat the men until they ran away.
I crept quietly back to get my notebook and citronella candle. Fen and Nell were dark lumps, hanging in their hammocks. Back in my spot in the doorway, I wrote about my most recent conversation with Tupani-Kwo about that day. I was surprised by the energy I suddenly had for it. The thoughts came fast, and I caught them, stopping only once to sharpen my pencil with a penknife. I thought of Nell’s euphoria and nearly laughed out loud. This little rush of words was the closest I’d come to any sort of elation in the field.