Fear Drive My Feet (8 page)

‘We can cross here,' he said.‘You come with me now.'
And for what seemed the hundredth
time that day we were struggling through the water. Actually, I think we had crossed
the river fifteen times in all since leaving Kirkland's.

Once across, the luluai started to shout and wave his arms madly to the carriers,
who had arrived at the water's edge; and they, in turn, gesticulated and pointed
upstream. I could see that they too were shouting, but their voices were drowned
by the roar of the river. Then, suddenly making up their minds, carriers, women with
children, and the two police dashed into the water and struggled across to us.

They were just in time, for they had barely reached the bank when the level of the
water started to rise. Within two minutes we were deafened by the roar of the stream
and the rumble of the boulders. Nothing could have survived the boiling yellow swirl
of water that rushed away to join the Markham.

We were close to Bivoro village now. It came into sight on a small area of flat ground
near the junction of the Erap and one of its tributaries. I halted the carriers and
squatted in the kunai, searching the houses with my binoculars. The village had
all the appearances of a normal native settlement – a few men sitting smoking under
the raised grass-thatched houses, women attending to cooking-fires and the preparation
of food, and children running about playing among the banana-plants that encircled
the houses.

I asked whether Bivoro boasted a house-kiap, or rest-house. (The pidgin name for
the government patrol officer was kiap, and in peacetime it had been the custom for
most villages under government control to build a rest-house of native materials,
where the officer could spend the night.) The luluai indicated a large grass house
a little apart from the village, and Kari drew my attention to a fire burning in
front of it. I examined the house care
fully through the binoculars. It consisted
of two rooms with an open veranda between them. Hanging on the veranda, in full view,
was a strange-looking sub-machine-gun of a type I had never seen before.

This seemed conclusive evidence that the Japanese were in the place, so I called
to the carriers to remain hidden, and asked Kari and the luluai their opinion of
the situation.

The luluai was positive that there were no Japanese there.‘We have heard of the Japanese,
and are afraid of them. Long ago, we all agreed that if they came to our village
we would run away, but you can see for yourself that even the women and small children
are there. Would they be sitting round like that if the Japanese were in the village?'

While I admitted the force of his remarks, the machine-gun could not be explained.
Kari examined it with the glasses and agreed that it was very different from any
used by the Australians.

We moved back into the kunai a little, to consider the best thing to do. The luluai
offered to go in and investigate the situation himself, and bring us word. Although
he seemed a reliable old fellow, I decided against this. If he were, by some chance,
playing a smooth double game with us and the Japs, it would be better for us to surprise
them ourselves, rather than have them tipped off and prepared by the luluai.

Then again, there was no imperative reason for us to go in to Bivoro at all. We could
sleep in the bush and push on next morning, having skirted the place altogether.
I did not want to do this, however, because it would leave a grave uncertainty hanging
over us the whole time we were in the Wain. We would constantly be wondering whether
or not the Japanese were sitting near the end of our trail, waiting for us to come
out.

The only thing to do was to investigate for ourselves at once, and we hastily planned
our move.

Kari and I were to approach the house, while Achenmeri, concealed in the kunai,
was to cover us with his rifle. The backward glances Kari kept throwing over his
shoulder indicated that he felt the same misgivings as I did about Achenmeri's covering
fire. I hoped it would not result in an accidental bullet in the back for either
of us. We moved quietly down upon the rest-house, feeling confident that the owner
of the gun was unaware of our presence, and anyhow would be dead before he reached
it if he did realize we were coming. How we would deal with any other occupants of
the rest-house was not so certain, but in the absence of a sub-machine-gun I relied
on the hand-grenades, and both Kari and I had one ready.

We had almost reached the house when we heard a movement in one of the rooms. I raised
my revolver, and out of the corner of my eye saw Kari's rifle fly to his shoulder. Then
a fair curly head appeared in the doorway, and a voice shouted to a cook-boy to prepare
some hot water for a wash. To our intense relief the voice was unmistakably Australian,
and with a loud ‘Hullo!' we hurried across the open space to meet the stranger.

He was so surprised that he almost fell off the veranda, and his relief when he recognized
us as friends was almost as great as ours had been.

‘Well, I'll be buggered!' was all either of us could say at first as we shook hands
warmly and went inside the house to make introductions and explanations. Kari meanwhile
shouted to Achenmeri that all was well, and told him to bring the others into the
village.

The stranger sat down at once on the edge of his bed-sail, and I noticed that he
looked pale and sick.

‘Fever,' he explained briefly.‘I got here yesterday and
I've felt pretty crook since.
It'll pass, though,' he added. He had the philosophical attitude towards his sickness
that characterized most of the men who had had many attacks of malaria.

He told me his name was Les Williams, and that he was a member of a special party
sent up from Australia on a secret mission into the Huon Peninsula.

‘Do you know about Jock McLeod being in there?' I asked.

‘Sure. I've met up with him already, and I'm just on my way to rejoin him. My chief
is in there with Jock now.'

‘Who's in charge of your show?'

‘A bloke called Ian Downs. He's a lieutenant in the Navy now, but he was a New Guinea
patrol officer in peacetime.'

Stacked at one end of the rickety bamboo floor was Les's patrol gear. A couple of
the boxes looked as though they might contain a radio transmitter and receiver.

‘Can you tell me some more about your set-up?' I asked. ‘Or is there too much of
the cloak-and-dagger hush-hush?'

‘Seeing you're here, you might as well know. You'd pretty soon find out,' he added
with a grin. ‘Anyhow, I expect we'll all work in together, Jock and Ian have been
co-operating.'

He shivered, and lay back on the bed, pulling a blanket over him.

‘Before you go on,' I said, ‘tell me about that sub-machine-gun. It had me tricked.'

‘That's easy – it's only a Sten gun. They aren't on issue generally to Australian
troops yet, but some special parties like ours are being equipped with them.'

Outside there was laughter and chattering as Kari and Achenmeri got acquainted with
the natives of Les's
party, and the luluai and his men told the rest of the inhabitants
how astonished I'd been at finding another white man here. We stopped to listen for
a moment, and then Les went on to give me more details of his plans.

It appeared that Ian Downs had established a base camp south of the Markham, at the
native village of Tungu, on the Watut River. There he had a powerful radio set manned
by signallers. The boxes on the floor with Les's patrol gear contained, as I suspected,
a radio set, a small one intended for sending messages to Tungu, whence they could
be relayed to Port Moresby or to Australia, but unfortunately it was out of action.
Les had brought it to Tungu to see whether it could be repaired, but it needed some
new parts, and he had arranged to have these sent after him. Our only means of communication,
at present, therefore, was by runner, either to Bob's or to the Tungu base camp.

Ian Downs's party was collecting as much information about Japanese activities in
this area as possible, as a prelude to a projected full-scale attack on Lae later
in the year. Apparently Land Headquarters in Melbourne had had no idea of Jock McLeod's
movements, and Ian had been astonished to find him on the peninsula.

Les was now on his way to rejoin Jock and Ian, after bringing the radio to Tungu.
He had made his crossing of the Markham higher up than Kirkland's, moving across
country to Bivoro.

Since he had been to Jock's camp near Gain, and expected to find him still there,
we decided to make our way to Gain together.

Although next day Les felt better, he was still not well enough to travel, and we
spent the day reading, yarning, and smoking, and drinking innumerable pots of tea.
I took some pidgin English lessons from him, and
though I was at last beginning to
make some headway, I still found it hard to understand more than a fraction of what
the natives were saying, because they spoke pidgin so rapidly.

At nightfall Les announced that he felt quite fit again, so we summoned the luluai
and told him to have enough carriers ready in the morning to take our combined equipment
– about a dozen boy-loads in all.

Before eight next morning we had packed our gear and were on the road. It was necessary
to cross the Erap for the last time just opposite the village. The water was not
running as swiftly as it had been two days before, and we got over easily enough.
Once across, we found that the river swung away to the north-west, while our path
lay in a north-easterly direction. We caught only one glimpse of the Erap after that.

The track was good, though it climbed steadily and the kunai slopes gave way more
and more to areas of forest. The creeks were crystal clear and cold as they tumbled
through their rocky courses.

A couple of hours' steady walking brought us to Munkip, a tiny village on the way
to Gain. The ‘doctor-boy' greeted us and we sat down for a few minutes in the shade
of the house-kiap to catch our breath and glance at the remarks in the village book.

In peacetime, local government of the natives had been organized along the following
lines: Three natives in each community were appointed by the government officer to
be village officials. The luluai, or headman, was the senior, and would probably
have been a leader of his people in their primitive state. Being an older man, he
frequently had not learnt to speak pidgin English, the lingua franca of the Territory,
and so a somewhat younger assistant and interpreter was appointed, called a tultul. The
tultul had usually been away for a period of employment on a mine or plantation,
and so had some slight acquaintance with the ways of the white man. The third village
official was the doctor-boy, who had received elementary training in hygiene at one
of the native hospitals and who also knew some of the principles of first aid. The
official insignia of these three dignitaries was a peaked cap, sometimes of incredible
dilapidation. It bore one broad red band, like a staff officer's cap, for the luluai;
two narrow red bands for the tultul; and a white band with a red cross for the doctor-boy.
Wearing their caps, and a loincloth round their middles, it was the custom for them
to greet the kiap at the entrance to the village, each usually giving his own fantastic
version of the military salute.

The village book contained the names of all people of the village, arranged in families.
Births, deaths, marriages, and migrations were recorded by each officer who made
the yearly census of the village, and at the back of the book were entered his comments
and general remarks, and hints for the next visiting officer. It was to these remarks
that we now turned, in search of any chance information about the country through
which we were passing.

One interesting fact came to light: a company had sought the right to obtain kunai-grass
in the area for the purpose of manufacturing paper. It was news to Les and me that
the wretched stuff could be used for anything except thatching, but apparently it
can yield paper of a very good quality. However, no active steps had been taken to
put the project into operation.

We were thirsty after the long climb up from the bottom of the Erap Valley, and asked
the doctor-boy for a drink of water. He shouted to one of the women, who presently
hurried along with a length of green bamboo full of clean, cool water from a nearby
creek.

The use of these bamboos was another instance of
the extraordinarily clever way in
which these so-called primitive people had adapted themselves to their surroundings.
The bamboos were cut in lengths up to five feet, and three or four inches in diameter.
The interstices, or ‘joints', were then knocked out with a long pointed stick, and
the result was a clean, strong receptacle holding two or three gallons. It was a
common thing every morning to see the women come up from the creek bearing two or
three of them across their shoulders, the tops neatly stoppered with a wad of green
banana-leaf. Smaller lengths were used for cooking purposes. Food was packed tightly
into them, and they were placed on the fire for the contents to bake. When the food
was cooked, the charred bamboo was broken away from the outside. An even more ingenious
use of bamboo was in the irrigation conduits that were sometimes seen bringing water
round parched hillsides from a spring to a flourishing patch of taro, often over
distances of many hundreds of yards.

We drank and moved on, through the little rushing creek and out of the bush, to a
steep kunai spur. Native fashion, the track followed the crest of the ridge – the
shortest way, perhaps, but certainly the steepest – and led us to a forest-covered
mountain. It was hard going, and the sweat soaked our clothes and dripped off our
faces as we struggled uphill. But we did not mind, for the higher we went, the cooler
the air would become, and the fewer the mosquitoes.