Fear Drive My Feet (26 page)

When the talk was over I wondered whether the natives were having a sly joke at our
expense when they asked us to see their tame cockatoos. The birds seemed to have a
large vocabulary of their own, but when I tried some pidgin on them I caused much
amusement. ‘Cocky savvy talk-place, master! No savvy talk pidgin!' the kanakas said,
laughing heartily.

Another pet in this village was a tame hornbill. He sat calmly in the branches of
a breadfruit-tree, catching with unfailing accuracy in his enormous beak the bits
of banana we threw up to him. He seemed to understand the local tongue, and would
fly down to be petted whenever they called him.

Fi showed no sign of enemy influence, and in the morning we walked eastward to Sugu,
across the steep valley of the Nambuk River. The Sugu people showed us to the rest-house,
and we stopped, astonished, when we saw it.

‘Hey, look at that!' exclaimed Les.

‘Brand new! Look – the grass thatching hasn't even dried out yet!'

‘I'd say it's only been finished a few days,' said Les, who had moved over closer.
‘Yes. Look here – there's still sap oozing from the ends of some of the logs.'

‘Now, why would they bother building a rest-house when there's nobody to use it?'

‘You'd think they'd be only too glad to get out of it. Let's talk to the tultul and
see what he's got to say.'

We summoned the tultul and asked him why the house had been built. He replied that
when he had heard of our arrival at Sintagora he expected us to pass through Sugu,
and had at once made arrangements for us to be properly accommodated.

‘Look,' he said to support his point, ‘the house is quite new.'

‘Why did you build it so big?' asked Les. ‘There's room enough for twenty men to
sleep in it!'

For just a second the tultul was stumped, but his recovery was magnificent. His eyes
fell upon our huge pile of stores and equipment.

‘I heard from the talk that you had a lot of cargo,' he said calmly, ‘and so I thought
I ought to see there was plenty of room for it.'

We looked at each other, and Les shrugged his shoulders in response to my raised
eyebrows.

‘All right, tultul, you can go. Tell some people to bring us food.'

He vanished at once, and we heard him shouting to the women to bring food.

‘What do you think?' I asked as soon as we were alone.

‘I think it stinks!' Les exclaimed. ‘But why has he built it? There isn't a single
sign of Japanese patrolling. I feel certain that if the Nips have been through here
we'd have heard at least a whisper of it. It's got me beat.'

Till late at night we puzzled over the building that sheltered us, and got nowhere.
We dropped off to sleep at last, still wondering.

Next morning we set out for Gain, which I had last visited on the way out of the
Wain country early in the year. If the large new rest-house at Sugu had been a mystery,
the condition of the track to Gain was an even greater enigma. Grass had been cut,
fallen trees removed, landslips cleared, and a serviceable bridge constructed over
each stream. Such diligence on the part of the kanakas and zeal on the part of the
village officials had been uncommon even in peacetime, when there had been regular
routine patrols to inspect such things. At a time when patrolling had ceased, it
was nothing short of extraordinary to see a
bridle-path so well tended, and we asked
the village officials to explain their new-found conscientiousness. But they would
say nothing. Apart from an occasional mumbled ‘Work belong me' from the tultul, they
maintained a stubborn, though embarrassed, silence.

This was only our first taste of an attitude which prevailed over almost the whole
of the Huon Peninsula. We were to encounter many such strange activities, and nowhere
would the people explain the motive for their unwonted energy. Model villages, well-tended
cemeteries, a high standard of cleanliness, especially in regard to latrines – in
fact, all the things that a hardworking administration had been trying for so long
to introduce to village life – seemed to have become a fait accompli overnight. All
our inquiries failed to breach the blank wall of silence that the natives had erected.
But it could not conceal the profound uneasiness which lay behind it. In the end,
our nerves began to be affected, for the continuous sense of being alone in the midst
of some vast but intangible force imposes a strain even on the most unimaginative
temperament. Not till the following year, and then only by piecing together many
shreds of evidence, was it possible to construct even a partial picture of the sinister
and, to a white man, almost incomprehensible forces then at work in the area.

At Gain everything seemed to be the same as when I had passed the previous January.
Dinkila, who was waiting for us at the entrance to the village, said there had been
no news of the enemy at his home village of Bivoro, and apparently no Japanese had
been near Gain either. Nevertheless, he said, something seemed to be happening here
at Gain which he could not quite fathom. The natives would tell him nothing.

The buildings of Boana Mission could be seen from Gain, and we studied them carefully
through binoculars.
There was no sign of smoke from cooking-fires, and it was too
far away to see whether there were any people about. The luluai and the tultul of
Gain declared that to their knowledge the enemy had never been in Boana. We felt
that if the Japs had visited there, the news would certainly have reached Gain. And
so we decided that we could safely go on to Boana the next day, by my usual route
through Kasin, Wasinim, and Dzendzen.

I ate tea in a cheerful mood that night.

‘I'm thinking of Jock McLeod,' I said to Les, who had looked up inquiringly at my
chuckle. ‘Wait till I tell him his pessimistic prophecies were all wrong! I felt
all along that the Nips wouldn't have found their way in here yet.'

Next morning we had our gear lined along the track and were about to order the carriers
to move off along the road to Boana when I noticed the tultul of Kasin, which was
the next village on the road, hovering at the edge of the clearing. He caught my
eye, blinked, and looked away. Then he cast another quick glance at me. He seemed
in two minds whether to approach me or run away. This was very strange behaviour,
for he had always been most friendly and helpful. I called him over.

‘Why didn't you come and talk to me?' I asked in an injured tone. ‘I thought we were
friends.'

‘Master, me like talk lik-lik long you,' he mumbled. ‘Me got talk.'

‘Well, what is the news?' I asked, as he stood there silent for some moments.

He stared at the ground and shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. Then, trembling
and swallowing, he told us in barely audible monosyllables that a Japanese patrol
had visited Boana. By painfully minute cross-examination we placed the date of the
visit as 17th April. It was now 1st May. He either could not or would not tell where
they
had come from, nor where they had gone. He knew only that they had been there
on the 17th and were now gone.

I retracted mentally the things I was going to say to Jock. An enemy patrol – almost
certainly much stronger than ours, if the Nips were following their usual practice
– had appeared out of the blue and then vanished just as mysteriously. Not the least
disquieting feature was that the natives were concealing what they knew: either lying
to us or keeping silent. For all we knew, the enemy might be making a systematic
tour of all the villages – might swoop down on Gain itself at any moment. As the
realization burst upon us we almost unconsciously cast a glance over our shoulders
at the high mountains behind. I called Kari, told him briefly what had happened,
and ordered him to post a policeman a few hundred yards along each track leading
into the village, so that we could not be surprised.

Using the map, and information supplied by kanakas, we found another route to my
old camp at Bawan, skirting Boana itself. It involved penetrating deeper into the
mountains, to a village called Sedau, and a long walk over what appeared to be rough
and difficult country. It would have been most foolish, however, to have risked contact
with the enemy at that stage.

‘If we get into a scrap now,' said Les, ‘the only thing that'll happen is that we'll
lose a good part of our supplies. I'm all in favour of keeping well clear of trouble
until we've got all this junk planted somewhere.'

‘Me, too. The longer we can keep out of strife the better.'

It was no part of our duty to seek combat. Our role was to see and not be seen: once
we clashed with the enemy they would become so wary that our chances of obtaining
worthwhile information would be much reduced.

We set out at once for Sedau, some four hours' climb into the mountains behind Gain,
where we felt it would be safe to spend the night. By the time we had been going
a couple of hours we were enveloped in dense fog which, though it had the advantage
of concealing us, prevented us from observing the surrounding country.

Through occasional breaches in the fog we watched Sedau from a hillside a few hundred
yards above it. Natives were moving about, and there seemed to be no sign of anything
unusual happening, so we marched into the village. The people received us without
enthusiasm or any other emotion, showed us to a house to sleep in, brought us a reasonable
quantity of food, and left us alone. They said they had never seen, and practically
never heard of, the Japanese.

Towards evening Kari and Watute, who had been poking about the village, asked us
to look at a large house in course of construction a little distance from the village,
and an enormous latrine nearby.

‘What do you suppose they are for?' Watute asked, after he and Kari had drawn our
attention to the unusual design of the house.

Les and I could not guess their purpose, and asked Kari and Watute what they thought.

‘I think these people have heard the Japanese are coming, and want to have houses
ready for them,' Kari said. ‘The natives here are much more frightened of the Japanese
than they are of us, you know. They have heard all these stories of the Japanese
cutting people's heads off.'

‘It is only a guess, master, but it is the only thing I can think of,' Watute put
in. ‘As if the Japanese would know what a latrine was for!' he added with a chuckle,
for he was familiar with the filthy habits of many of the enemy soldiers.

Les sent for some of the villagers again, and we questioned them closely, trying
to detect any inconsistency in their stories. They were unshakable: they knew nothing
whatever of the Japanese, and were building the house and the latrine for their own
use.

‘Do you use that latrine yourselves?' Watute shot in suddenly.

‘Yes,' said the tultul.

‘How long has it been finished?'

‘About two weeks.'

‘See, master!' Watute said triumphantly. ‘They are lying about something, for that
latrine has not been used at all.'

But even this could not shake the tultul's composure. He had his story, and he was
sticking to it.

In the morning we called for men to carry our gear to Sokulen, a small village in
the hills directly behind Boana. There was no dearth of men: willing carriers appeared
from all the houses, each man eager to be on the road. This anxiety to be rid of
us confirmed our suspicions that something was amiss.

Watute watched their hurried preparations with a sardonic grin.

‘Master lookim?' he asked. ‘Altogether man 'e hurry up too much long rausim you-me.' And
indeed their indecent haste to see us beyond their borders could not have escaped
even the most unpractised eye.

The track to Sokulen led up a tributary creek of the Kusip River, over a low divide,
and into a tributary of the Bunzok. Most of the way we walked knee-deep in icy water,
slithering and stumbling on the stony beds of the streams. The wear and tear on our
boots was very great, for at least half of each day's walking was along a watercourse,
and the boots were never dry from one day's end to another. They were soon reduced
to a sodden pulp, which fell to pieces. Already, only a week out from
the Markham,
our first pair were showing signs of disintegration, and it seemed that our five
spare pairs each would be none too many.

Where the track to Sokulen lay across the divide it seemed as though it had been
subjected to recent heavy traffic. The ground was muddy and churned up, and the track
was much wider than the usual native pad. Bamboos, which grew in thick clumps on
either side, had been slashed and cut – a thing no native, appreciating their value,
would ever do. It looked as though a Japanese patrol had passed that way, but heavy
rain had obscured all definite footprints, and we could not tell whether the travellers
had worn boots, or in what direction they had gone. The police, however, were of
the opinion that those who had passed before us were not natives, and that they had
travelled in the opposite direction to ours. They indicated the angle at which the
slashes had been made in the bamboos, and pointed out that if we, for instance, wished
to make such a cut we would have to stop and turn round, whereas a man travelling
the other way could do it as he walked.

‘I wonder if we would have thought that one out?' said Les.

He called the tultul of Sedau over and questioned him on the state of the track.
The tultul still insisted that he had never seen a Jap, but he was so ill at ease
that we did not believe him.

While we were talking to the tultul one of the police noticed two natives running
down the track from the direction of Sokulen. They made straight for Les and me and,
without waiting to get their breaths, told us excitedly that a large party of Japanese
had arrived at Bungalamba on their way to Lae, and that all the village officials
of the surrounding settlements had gone to meet them. The two boys did not know what
had happened then, because they had hurried to tell us about the arrival of the Japs.
We
pointed to the track, and asked what had caused it to get into such a condition.