In this chapter I shall describe three incidents that befell me in New Guinea, and that illustrate constructive paranoia or the lack of it. At the time of the first incident, I was too inexperienced even to recognize signs of mortal danger nearby: I was operating as a normal Westerner, but in a traditional world that required a different mind-set. In the next event, over a decade later—the one that finally taught me to embrace constructive paranoia—I was forced to acknowledge that I had made a mistake that nearly cost me my life, while another, more cautious man facing the same choice at the same time didn’t make my mistake and thus didn’t experience the trauma of coming close to death. In the remaining incident, yet another decade later, I was with a New Guinea friend who reacted with constructive paranoia to a seemingly inconsequential detail that I had overlooked. He and I were never able to decide whether the apparently innocent stick on the ground that my friend spotted really did mark the presence of hostile people (as my friend feared), but I was impressed by his cautious attention to minutiae. In the following chapter I’ll discuss the types of danger faced by traditional societies, and the ways in which people estimate, misestimate, and deal with danger.
A night visit
One morning, I set out from a large village with a group of 13 New Guinea Highlanders to reach an isolated small village several days’ walk away. The region was in the foothill altitudinal zone with New Guinea’s lowest population densities, below the elevation of the densely populated Highland valleys suitable for intensive cultivation of sweet potatoes and taro, above the lowland elevations where sago palms grow well and fresh-water fish are plentiful, and in the altitudinal range with the highest incidence of cerebral malaria. I was told before setting out that our journey would take about three days, and that we would be constantly in forests that were completely uninhabited. The whole region had a very sparse population and had come only a few years previously under government control. Warfare had been occurring until recently, and endocannibalism (eating of one’s dead relatives) was reported as still being practised. Some of my New Guinea companions were local, but most of them came from another district of the Highlands and knew nothing about this district.
The first day’s walk was not bad. Our route wound around the slopes of a mountain, gradually gained in elevation to cross a ridge, and then began to descend again along the course of the river. But the second day was one of the most grueling hikes of my career in New Guinea. It was already drizzling when we broke camp at 8:00 A.M. There was no traiclass="underline" instead, we waded along a mountain torrent, climbing up and down over huge slippery boulders. Even for my New Guinea friends, accustomed to rugged Highland terrain, the route was a nightmare. By 4:00 P.M. we had descended over 2,000 vertical feet along the river and were exhausted. We pitched camp in the rain, erected our tents, cooked our rice and tinned fish for dinner, and went to sleep while the rain continued.
The details of the layout of our two tents are relevant for understanding what happened during that night. My New Guinea friends slept under a large tarpaulin stretched over a central raised horizontal ridge-pole, and pulled down taut to the ground along both sides parallel to the ridge-pole, like an inverted V in cross-section. The tarpaulin’s two ends were open; one could walk into or out of the tarpaulin at its front and back ends, and the ridge-pole was high enough that one could stand up under the tarpaulin’s center. My own tent was a bright green Eureka pup-tent stretched over a light metal frame, and with a large front door flap and a small rear window flap both of which I zipped closed. My tent’s front door faced one of the two open ends (the “front”) of the New Guineans’ large tarpaulin, and was just a few yards away from it. Anyone walking out of the front of their tarpaulin would come first to the closed front door of my tent, then walk along the side of my tent, and finally pass my tent’s rear with its closed window flap. But to someone unfamiliar with Eureka pup-tents, it would have been unclear whether the actual entrance after unzipping a flap was the closed front door or the rear with a closed window. I slept with my head towards the rear and my feet towards the front door, but I would have been invisible from the outside of my tent because its walls were not transparent. The New Guineans kept a fire going inside their tarpaulin for warmth.
All of us quickly fell asleep, worn out from the long grueling day. I have no idea how much later it was that I became awakened by a soft sound of footsteps and a sense of the ground shaking from someone walking nearby. The sound and motion stopped, evidently because the unknown person was standing near the rear of my tent, near my head. I assumed that one of my 13 companions had just come out of the large tarpaulin shelter to urinate. It did seem strange that he had not gone out of the rear of the tarpaulin away from my tent for privacy, but had instead turned towards my tent, walked along its length, and was now standing at my tent’s rear and near my head. But I was sleepy, attributed no significance to where he had chosen to urinate, and dozed off. Within a short time I was awakened again, this time by voices from the shelter of the New Guineans who were talking, and by bright light from their fire, which they had stirred up. That wasn’t unusual; New Guineans often do wake up periodically during the night and talk. I called out asking them to be more quiet, and I went back to sleep. And that was the entirety of the apparently meaningless incident at night, as I experienced it.
When I woke up the next morning, I opened the front door flap of my tent and greeted the New Guineans under their tarpaulin a few yards away, starting to cook breakfast. They told me that their voices and their stirring up the fire at night had been caused by several of them being awakened by the presence of a strange man standing at the open front of their tarpaulin. When the stranger realized that he was being watched, he made a gesture, visible in the firelight, of stretching out one arm horizontally and letting its hand droop downwards at the wrist. At that gesture, some of the New Guineans called out in fear (for reasons that I shall mention in a moment). Their calling out was what I had sleepily mistaken as the noise of their talking during the night. At the sound of their calling, others of the New Guineans awoke and sat up. The strange man then ran off into the rainy night. My New Guinea friends pointed out some barefoot footprints in the wet mud where the man had stood. But I don’t recall my friends saying anything that alarmed me.
It was indeed unexpected to me that anyone would come at night in the rain to our camp in the middle of an uninhabited stretch of forest. However, I had become accustomed to the fact that things unexpected to me did often happen in New Guinea, and I had never felt that I was in any personal danger from any New Guinean. After we finished breakfast and folded up our tents, we resumed our journey, now on its third day. Our route climbed out of the awful river bed and followed a broad clear path through beautiful tall forests along the river bank. I felt as if I were walking in awe inside a high Gothic cathedral. I strolled on alone ahead of my New Guinea friends, in order to identify birds that hadn’t already been disturbed by them, and to enjoy in solitude the magical cathedral-like forests. It was only when I finally reached a larger river below the village that was our final destination that I sat down to wait for my friends to catch up. It turned out that I had walked a long distance ahead of them.
Our 10-day stay at the isolated small village was so interesting in its own way that I forgot about the incident of the prowler at night. When it finally became time to return to the large village from which we had set out, the local men among my 13 New Guinea friends proposed that we return by a completely different route, which they said bypassed the awful wading in a river. That new route proved to be a good dry trail going through forests. It took us only two days to get back to the large village, instead of the agonizing three days of our march out. I still have no idea why our local guides had inflicted the route with the grueling wading of the stream on themselves, as well as on the rest of us.