The helicopter circled our planned campsite, where I could see the four New Guineans waving below. The clearing proved to be a small steep-sided gully whose slopes had apparently collapsed in a landslide (probably triggered by one of the frequent earthquakes in that region), such that the floor of the gully was dirt bare of vegetation, perfect for landing a helicopter. Apart from that small landslide and the big distant landslide that had been our original target, everything else within sight was covered by forests. The pilot and I landed and unloaded our last cargo, then I went up in the helicopter again and asked the pilot to head for the nearby peak so that we could plan where to make a trail. From the head of our gully, we could see a ridge leading straight to the peak, but not so steeply as to present problems. The peak itself was very steep for its top 200 vertical feet and might be a difficult scramble to climb. But there were still absolutely no signs of people or huts or gardens. The helicopter then dropped me at our campsite and flew off, agreeing to pick us up again 19 days later.
That was an act of faith on our part: from what we saw of the terrain, it would have been utterly impossible to walk back to the airstrip 37 miles distant. While I had brought along a small radio, in that hilly terrain my radio could not receive or transmit messages from or to the helicopter base 150 miles away. Instead, as a precaution in case of an accident or illness requiring an emergency evacuation, I arranged for a small airplane whose scheduled flight path took it not too far from our campsite to deviate from its path and circle our camp every five days. We could try to talk with the pilot by radio to confirm that we were OK, and we agreed that we would place a bright red air mattress on the landslide if we did have an emergency.
We spent all of the second day constructing our camp. Our happiest discovery was that there were still no signs of people: if nomads had been alerted by our helicopter to try to track us down, it wasn’t happening yet. Large birds were flying in and out of the gully, undisturbed by our presence a few dozen yards away. That suggested that the birds were unafraid of people, and provided further evidence that nomads didn’t visit this area.
On the third day I was at last ready to climb to the peak, following my New Guinea friends Gumini and Paia, who were cutting trail. Initially, we climbed 500 feet up out of our landslide gully onto the ridge, which bore a small patch of grass and shrubs with low trees, I assumed because of an older landslide that was now becoming overgrown. Climbing along the ridge, we soon entered closed forest and worked our way upwards in an easy climb. Bird-watching was now exciting, as I began to see and hear montane species, including a couple of uncommon and little-known ones such as the Perplexing Scrub-Wren and the Obscure Honeyeater. When we finally reached the summit pyramid, it was indeed very steep, as it had appeared from the air. But we were able to pull ourselves up it by holding on to tree roots. On its top I spotted a White-breasted Fruit-Dove and a Hooded Pitohui, two montane species that were absent below. Apparently this peak was just high enough to support a few individuals of each species. But I hadn’t met some other montane species that are common and noisy at this elevation elsewhere in New Guinea: perhaps they really were absent because the area of this mountain was too small to support a viable population of them. I sent Paia back to camp, while Gumini and I walked slowly down our trail, birding as we went.
So far, I was delighted and relieved. Everything was going well. The problems that I had feared hadn’t materialized. We had succeeded in finding a landing place for our helicopter in the forest, made a comfortable camp, and cleared an easy short trail to the summit. Best of all, we had found no signs of visits by nomads. The 17 days remaining to us would be ample time to establish which montane bird species were present and which weren’t. Gumini and I descended our new trail in good spirits and emerged from the forest into the small open patch that I had taken to be an old landslide clearing on the ridge above our camp.
Suddenly, Gumini stopped, bent over, and stared closely at something on the ground. When I asked what he found so interesting, he just said, “Look,” and he pointed. What he was pointing to was nothing more than a small stalk or tree seedling a couple of feet high, with a few leaves on it. I told him, “That’s just a very young tree. See, there are lots of other young trees growing up here in this clearing. What’s so special about this one?”
Gumini answered, “No, it’s not a young tree. It’s a stick stuck in the ground.” I disagreed: “What makes you think so? It’s just a seedling growing up out of the ground.” In reply, Gumini grasped it and pulled. It lifted out easily, without the need for any effort to break or pull out roots. When he had lifted it out, we saw that there were no roots at the base of the stick, which was broken off cleanly. I thought that perhaps Gumini’s pulling had snapped its roots, but he dug down around the hole left by the stick and showed me that there weren’t any broken-off roots. It must instead be a broken-off small stick inserted into the ground, as he had insisted. How had it gotten there and become inserted?
We both looked overhead at the small trees 15 feet tall above us. I suggested, “A branch must have broken off that tree overhead, and fallen down and gotten stuck in the ground.” But Gumini objected, “If that branch broke and fell, it’s not likely to have landed with the broken-off end pointing exactly down and the leaves pointing up. And it’s a light branch, not heavy enough to drive itself several inches into the ground. It looks to me like some person broke it off and inserted it with the sharp broken end into the ground and the leaves upwards, as a sign.”
I felt a shiver and my skin flushing on the back of my neck, as I thought of Robinson Crusoe cast ashore on his supposedly uninhabited island, suddenly coming across a human footprint. Gumini and I sat down, picked up and held the stick, and looked around us. For an hour we sat there, talking to each other about the possibilities. If a person really did this, why isn’t there any other sign of human activity, just this broken stick? If a person did plant it, how recently was he here to do it? It wasn’t today, because the leaves are already slightly wilted. But it wasn’t a long time ago either, because the leaves are still green, not shriveled and dry. Is this open area really an overgrown landslide clearing as I had assumed? Maybe, instead, it’s an old garden that has become overgrown. I kept coming back to my belief that a nomad would not have walked in there a few days ago from a hut 27 miles away, broken and planted a stick, and walked off without leaving any other signs. Gumini kept insisting that a broken stick wasn’t likely to insert itself into the ground, so as to mimic what a person does.
We walked back the short distance into camp, where the other New Guineans were, and told them what we had found. Nobody else had seen any hint of human presence. Now that I had gotten into this paradise about which I had been dreaming for a year, I wasn’t going to put out the red mattress as an emergency sign for evacuation on the first overflight three days later, just because there was one unexplained stick in the ground. That would be carrying constructive paranoia too far. There was probably some natural explanation for that stick, I told myself. Maybe it really had happened to fall vertically with enough force to insert itself, or maybe we had overlooked its roots broken off when we pulled it out. But Gumini was an experienced woodsman, one of the very best whom I had met in New Guinea, and he wasn’t likely to misread signs.