Fear Drive My Feet (19 page)

He held out several Japanese newspapers, and a bottle with a Japanese label, half
full of kerosene.

‘Where did you get those, luluai, if you haven't been dealing with the Japanese?'

The old rascal squirmed and wriggled, but stuck to his story that he and his people
had had nothing to do with the Japs. It was obviously untrue, but he was unshakable,
so I fell back on more idle threats, to prevent him
rushing straight to Lae to tell
the Japs what had happened.

‘We'll be round here for a day or two, luluai, so don't tell the Japanese. Remember
– no matter whose fault it is, if any harm comes to us in your country the aeroplanes
will come and bomb you.'

He gave me an ugly glare – he was quite shrewd enough to guess that the whole business
might be a bluff, but was too terrified of the bombs to gamble on his luck.

Watute drove the point home: ‘You see, luluai? If you want to save your own skin,
you'd better look after us, and do everything you can to make sure we leave here
safe and sound.'

We munched a few bits of biscuit and had a drink of water. Then, with a final warning
to the luluai not to try any funny business, we hurried along the track towards Gawan,
a large village one stage nearer the Chinese camp.

We reached Gawan by mid-afternoon, and though the people were anything but pleased
to see us they concealed their feelings and showed at least formal politeness. The
local luluai and tultul wore their hats and made some gestures of cordiality, giving
us a house and a supply of food.

‘Have you been dealing with the Japanese?' I asked the tultul.

‘Certainly not – we wouldn't dream of such a thing.'

‘What about the people of Musom?'

‘Yes, they have been down to Lae. But not the Gawan people.'

Watute and I grinned at each other. They didn't mind telling tales on other villages,
while protesting their own innocence.

‘Tultul, do you know the camp down the river where the Chinese are living?' I asked.

He was silent, licking his lips and swallowing, and curling his toes in the dust.

‘Do you hear the master asking you a question? Speak up!' snapped Watute.

‘Yes, me savvy,' he whispered.

‘We want to go there tomorrow, and we would like you to guide us.'

He looked piteously from Watute to me, and back again, hoping that we might be joking.
Oh no! his expression seemed to say. No – anything but that!

‘Come on – you heard,' Watute prodded him.

‘No – it's not safe!' he blurted out. ‘What if the Japanese shoot you? Then I'll
be in trouble with the Australians.'

‘You'll be in trouble with the Japanese if they find out we got even this far, and
you'll be in trouble with me if you don't do what you're told. You're in plenty of
trouble, tultul.'

‘Please don't go!' he implored, groaning and almost weeping. ‘It's not that I won't
take you, but it's too dangerous.'

After pleading unsuccessfully for half an hour, he finally gave in, and with a terrified
expression muttered ‘Yessir' to Watute's order to be ready at three o'clock in the
morning. Then he went off, shaking his head and trembling, to his own house across
the village.

The sun set brassily behind the timbered line of black hills as Dinkila prepared
my tea. It was dark when I finished eating, and I lit the little lamp while Watute
and Dinkila squatted on the floor to eat their meal of boiled sweet potatoes. We sat
there, talking and smoking for some time, and then, leaving the lamp burning low
where it stood, we took our rifles and dropped quietly out the back of the house
and into the edge of the bush. If the tultul should fetch a Japanese patrol to surround
the house, we could now easily escape to the river and make our way upstream to safety
in the Wain country.

All night we sat huddled together in the bushes. Time stretched out unmercifully,
and I remember trying not to look at my watch, and being disappointed, whenever I
did steal a glance, to find how slowly the night was passing.

The village was fairly quiet. Sometimes a glowing cigar-end betrayed a figure moving,
and in a nearby house an old man coughed and spat. Shortly before midnight, as the
moon rose, we were surprised to see the women and children, with large bundles on
their backs, slip out of the houses and glide like shadows along the track that led
north to the hills.

‘What does it mean?' I whispered to Watute. ‘Do you think they're expecting a Japanese
raid?'

The moonlight showed his old face creased with thought. ‘It could mean that,' he
said at last. ‘But probably they're just playing safe. If they were sure a raid was
coming, the men would have gone too.'

We sat on in silence, letting the mosquitoes bite us as they would. The minutes ticked
painfully by, gradually adding themselves together to make slow, reluctant hours.

‘I'm hungry,' I complained. ‘And all the food's up in the house.'

Watute chuckled softly, and fumbled in his haversack, bringing out a strange black
object with little bits of dust and tobacco adhering to it.

‘What's this?'

‘Pig. Master kai-kai,' he replied, offering it to me.

It was a knuckle of camp-cured ham from the boys' Christmas pig. I hacked off a piece
with my sheath-knife and nibbled it gingerly, more with the idea of not offending
Watute than of enjoying it. It tasted surprisingly good, and I soon asked for another
bit.

Three o'clock came at last, and while I covered him with my rifle Watute went across
the village to wake the
tultul. He emerged yawning and stretching from his house,
accompanied by a friend, and as soon as he saw me he began to make excuses and fresh
protestations against going with us.

‘It's no good, tultul,' I said. ‘We're going, so that's the end of it.'

He looked as if he might burst into tears, so we gave him and his friend a packet
of biscuits and tried to cheer them up. The tultul wasn't a bad sort really, but
circumstances had put him into the damnable position of having to placate the implacable
and somehow help each side in turn without being caught by the other.

Watute took off his uniform and borrowed an old black loincloth from Dinkila. Then
he ruffled up his hair and rubbed his face and body with ashes from the fire, till
he looked like any grubby kanaka from the bush. I told him to leave his rifle behind,
and gave him two hand-grenades, which he put in a little string dilly-bag with his
tobacco and matches.

We followed the tultul and his friend down the winding track. For the first couple
of hours the bright moonlight enabled us to walk swiftly, but by five o'clock we
were so deep into the valley, and in such thick jungle, that we had to sit down and
wait for dawn. The soles of my feet were stinging, for though I had patched the cuts
up with sticking-plaster it had been washed off by the wet grass and the many small
streams we had crossed. Leeches worried us too, swarming up our legs and fastening
onto the skin till they dropped off, gorged to bursting.

At first grey light we hurried on, and sunrise found us halted on a cliff above the
river outside a village called Gwabandik. Watute went ahead to reconnoitre alone in
his guise of kanaka, while the rest of us waited in the jungle just off the track.
He was back in five minutes with the news
that there were no Japanese about, and
that the Gwabandik people, while surprised at our visit, were quite friendly.

The tultul and his friend and Watute and I perched on the edge of a house and ate
a couple of tins of bully beef, while the Gwabandik people gathered round curiously
to hear what was going on in other parts of the island. They were so near to Lae that
they had a good idea of the devastation our bombing had caused.

I asked them about the Chinese camp. Yes, they knew it well. It was quite close –
in fact some of them were going there that morning with a supply of vegetables. Yes,
they would take me down with them, provided I was careful and first let them make
sure there were no Japanese about. I told them I was in a hurry, and they obligingly
rushed about, getting their loads ready.

In the middle of these preparations Watute suddenly leapt to the ground and raced
to the end of the village, where he intercepted an aged native he had caught slipping
into the bush. In true police-boy style Watute grabbed his arm and propelled him
up to me.

‘Master, this-fella man, 'em 'e tultul belong Tali!' he said excitedly.

Tali was a village near Lae known to be under Jap control.

‘Is that true? Are you the tultul of Tali?' I asked.

He was a tall, thin grey-haired man, and he drew himself erect and said in a dignified
voice that Watute had made a mistake.

Watute was scornful. ‘I don't make mistakes like that,' he said. ‘This man gave the
kiap trouble in peacetime, and I've seen him both in Tali and in Lae.'

The old man denied it, saying that he belonged to another village nearby. Though
he remained calm, I could see that Watute's certainty worried him.

I asked the Gwabandik natives about him, but they were evasive. ‘Just an old man,'
was the gist of their replies.

I felt that Watute was probably right. Even if he had made a mistake, there was something
suspicious about the old man – the evasions of the Gwabandik boys seemed to point
to that. At all events, it would be dangerous to let the old native go, so I told
him he would be kept under guard until we left the area, and motioned him to get
in the line in front of me. He began to protest, but thought better of it, shrugged,
and moved into line. We started off downstream, led by about a dozen Gwabandik natives
carrying bundles of vegetables and fruit.

Most of the time Watute walked at the head of the line. He appeared indistinguishable
from the kanakas, and no one would have guessed that he was usually a trim, clean,
uniformed police-boy. Neither would anyone have suspected that his innocent-looking
little dilly-bag held two deadly ‘hand-bombs', as he called the grenades, with which
his aim was unerring.

Once he dropped back beside me to mutter about a theory he had worked out regarding
the tultul of Tali, if such were really the identity of our prisoner. For some weeks
we had been hearing stories which suggested that white missionaries were still living
near the coast and carrying on under Japanese auspices. The reports, which came
from natives in widely separated villages, agreed in substance, and seemed authentic. Watute
had a theory that one of these missionaries had sent the tultul, a strong mission
supporter, to see whether it was safe to resume missionary activity in this area.

I put this to the old native, but he only mumbled unintelligibly in reply. However,
I noticed that he no longer denied that he was the tultul of Tali, nor that some
Europeans were working near Lae with Japanese approval.

On its far side the river was joined by a large tributary and became a huge torrent,
its tawny surface broken and foam-flecked.

‘Which side of the river is the Chinese camp on?' I asked the tultul of Gawan.

‘Place belong Kong-Kong 'e stop long other fella half.'

‘Well, how do we get there? Look at that river!'

‘Bridge 'e buggerup finish, me-fella savvy brokim water.'

‘Yes, you can get across, I dare say. But what about me?'

‘Master, more better you stop. Now me-fella bringim number one belong Kong-Kong,
name belong 'en Peter, now you-fella talk-talk along this-fella half.'

In other words, I should stop on this side of the stream, and they would fetch the
unofficial leader and spokesman for the Chinese – a man named Peter Ah Tun, whose
name I had heard from Jock.

Watute and I weighed this suggestion and decided in favour of it. It had the advantage
of keeping the river between us and the Japanese and also of cutting out the dangerous
crossing.

We were soon led on to a flat, open stony beach, and the Gwabandik natives announced
that they would make the crossing here. They would ask Peter Ah Tun to come back
with them at once. Three of them were needed to get over safely, they said. If I
watched them I would see what method was used to pass these flooded streams. They
grabbed a dry log of driftwood from the beach – a sizeable tree about fifteen feet
long – and tucked it under their left arms, with one man at each end and one in the
middle. Then they plunged straight in. The current caught them, and they would have
been swept rapidly downstream, but, as they bobbed about, they struck out strongly
with their right arms, and each time their feet touched bottom they
kicked powerfully
forward. In this way the three natives reached the other side in a few minutes. They
pulled their log up clear of the water, took off their loincloths and wrung them
dry, and set off at a run down the far bank.

I followed their movements through the glasses, and as soon as they had disappeared
round a small bluff Watute and I withdrew the rest of the natives about a hundred
yards upstream, where we crouched in the cane-grass out of sight.

Watute and I kept looking at each other, he with his funny little half-grin flickering
about his face. Unspoken, the same question was buzzing in both our heads: Would
the Gwabandik natives return with Peter alone, or would they bring a Japanese patrol?
We had our answer in less than five minutes, for the three natives, still running
hard, reappeared round the bluff, followed by a single flying figure in white athletic
singlet and white shorts.

While I kept the binoculars fastened on the bluff, straining my eyes to detect any
sign of Japanese coming round the corner, Watute gave me a ball-to-ball description
of the movements of Peter and the three natives: ‘Four-fella 'e go down long water. All
'e brokim water now. Altogether man 'e come up long this-fella half. All 'e look-look
nabout, now all 'e no lookim you-me,' ran his commentary.