Subsequently, I recounted our adventures to a missionary who had been living in the area for several years, and who had also visited the isolated small village. In the following years I came to know better two of the local men who had been our guides on that trek. From the accounts of the missionary and of the two New Guineans, I learned that the prowler at night was well known in that district—as a crazy, dangerous, powerful sorcerer. He once threatened to kill the missionary with his bow and arrow, and once actually tried to do so with a spear at the same isolated village that I had visited, laughing as he jabbed his spear in earnest. He was reported to have killed numerous local people, including two of his wives, and also his eight-year-old son just because the boy ate a banana without his father’s permission. He behaved like a true paranoid, unable to distinguish reality from his imagination. Sometimes he lived in a village with other people, but at other times he lived alone in the area of forest where we had camped on that night, and where he had killed women who made the mistake of going there.
Despite the man being so obviously crazy and dangerous, local people didn’t dare interfere with him, because they feared him as a great sorcerer. The gesture that he made at night when detected by my New Guinea friends—outstretched arm with drooping wrist—conventionally symbolizes to New Guineans in that area the cassowary, New Guinea’s largest bird, which is believed to be actually a powerful magician who can turn himself into a bird. The cassowary is flightless, a distant relative of ostriches and emus, weighs 50 to 100 pounds, and terrifies New Guineans because it has stout legs with razor-sharp claws that it uses to disembowel dogs or people when attacked. That extended-arm, drooping-wrist gesture made by the sorcerer at night is believed to work powerful magic, and it mimics the shape of the neck and head of the cassowary held in the position when the bird is about to attack.
What was that sorcerer intending to do when he came into our camp that night? While your guess is as good as mine, his aims were probably not friendly. He knew or could infer that the green pup-tent would have a European inside it. As for why he came to the back rather than to the front door of my tent, I guess that that was either because he wanted not to be detected by the New Guineans in their shelter facing my tent’s front door as he tried to get into my tent, or because he was confused by my tent’s structure and mistook the back (with its small window flap zipped closed) for the front with its large door. If I had had the experience of New Guinea then that I do now, I would have practised constructive paranoia and screamed to my nearby New Guinea friends as soon as I heard and felt footsteps near the rear of my tent. I certainly wouldn’t have walked alone, far ahead of my New Guinea friends, on the next day. In retrospect, my behavior was stupid and put me in danger. But I didn’t know enough then to read the warning signs and to exercise constructive paranoia.
A boat accident
In the second incident, my New Guinea friend Malik and I were on an island off Indonesian New Guinea and wanted to get ourselves and our gear to the New Guinea mainland, separated from the island by a strait a dozen miles wide. Around 4:00 P.M. on a clear afternoon, slightly more than two hours before sunset, we joined four other passengers in a wooden canoe about 30 feet long, driven by two outboard motors mounted on the stern and with a crew of three young men. The four other passengers were not New Guineans: instead, they were a Chinese fisherman working on the New Guinea mainland, plus three men from the Indonesian islands of Ambon, Ceram, and Java respectively. The canoe’s cargo and passenger space was covered by a plastic awning about four feet high, stretched over a framework, loosely attached to each side of the canoe, and extending from about 4 feet in front of the stern forward to 10 feet behind the canoe’s prow. The three crew sat in the stern at the motors, and Malik and I sat just in front of them, facing the rear. With the awning over us and at our sides, there was little outside that we could see. The four other passengers sat at our backs, towards the canoe’s prow.
The canoe set off, and the crew soon had the engines up to full speed, through waves several feet high. A little water splashed into the canoe under the awning, then a little more, and the other passengers began groaning good-naturedly. As some more large quantities of water splashed in, one of the crew began bailing water immediately in front of me out the loose sides of the awning. More large quantities of water came in, soaking the luggage stored towards the front of the canoe. I put my binoculars for protection inside the small yellow knapsack that I was holding in my lap, and that contained my passport, money, and all of my field notes wrapped inside a plastic bag. Over the roar of the engines and the crashing of the waves, Malik and the other passengers began to shout loudly, now no longer good-naturedly, at the driver, telling him to slow down or turn back. (This and all the rest of the conversations during this whole incident were in the Indonesian language, the official language and the lingua franca of Indonesian New Guinea.) But he didn’t slow down, and more water splashed in. The accumulated weight of water was now causing the canoe to ride so low that water began pouring in over the sides.
The next few seconds, as the canoe settled lower into the ocean, were a blur that I can’t reconstruct in detail. I was now scared that I would be trapped under the canoe’s plastic awning as it sank. Somehow, I and everyone else managed to get out of the canoe into the ocean; I don’t know whether some of us towards the rear jumped out of the open rear space not covered by the awning, or whether we instead crawled out under the awning’s sides, and whether the passengers in front of us crawled out under the awning or scrambled to the open space in front or to the rear of the awning. Malik told me afterwards that the crew got out of the canoe first, then I got out, then Malik.
The next minute was even more of a panicked blur for me. I was wearing heavy hiking boots, a long-sleeved shirt, and shorts, and found myself in the water several yards from the canoe, which had capsized and was now bottom up. The weight of my hiking boots was dragging me underwater. My initial thought was a vivid, frightened “what is there that I can hold on to to keep myself afloat?” Near me, someone was clinging to a yellow life preserver, which I tried to grab in my panic, but the other person pushed me away. From my position now floating in the water, the waves seemed high. I had swallowed some water. While I can swim for short distances in a calm swimming pool, I wouldn’t have been able to swim or float for many minutes through waves. I felt overwhelmed by fear that there was nothing to keep me afloat: our luggage and the canoe’s gas tank floating nearby weren’t buoyant enough to support my weight, the inverted canoe hull was now low in the water, and I feared that even it would sink. The island from which we had set out appeared to be several miles distant, another island seemed equally distant, and no other boat was in sight.
Malik swam over to me, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and pulled me back to the canoe. For the next half-hour he stood on the submerged upside-down engine and clung to the canoe’s stern, while I clung nearby to the rear of the canoe’s left side, with Malik keeping a grip on my neck. I stretched my arms out over the hull’s round smooth underside, merely to steady myself, because the hull offered nothing for my hands to grasp. Occasionally I reached out my right hand to grip a submerged part of the engine, but that kept my head low above the water, which splashed into my face. Instead, for most of the time, my only grip holding me to the canoe was with my feet, which were somehow inserted in or hooked onto the left side’s sunken gunwale. Now that the canoe was upside down and my feet were on the gunwale, the gunwale’s depth below the water was such that my head was not far above the surface of the water, and occasionally a wave washed over me. Some piece of wood or awning was loose on the gunwale and rubbed and hurt my knee with each wave. I asked Malik to hold me while I untied my boot laces with one hand and then took off and threw away the heavy boots that were dragging me down.