Fear Drive My Feet (14 page)

We did not wait for the canoe to touch, but splashed out through the shallows to
meet it. As we sprang on board with an enthusiasm that almost sank the little craft,
I ordered the boss-boy to push off at once for the south bank, and we manoeuvred
from island to island in the same zig-zag fashion as we had crossed in the other
direction a fortnight earlier.

Tom Lega was waiting as the canoe scraped ashore. He grinned in casual greeting as
I dashed the sweat from my eyes and shook his hand. ‘Come up to the hut,' he said.
‘The others'll want to hear all the good guts from the other side.'

We crowded into the little wire cage, and I told them first of Ian's betrayal and
escape at Hopoi. They had never seen Ian, but Jock was an old friend, and they bent
closer, silent, to hear of his decision to cross the range to the north coast.

They whistled quietly, looking sideways from one to another.

‘Over those mountains! Jesus!' one exclaimed.

‘Hell, I didn't think they could be crossed!' another muttered.

Tom laughed. ‘In peacetime they used to say Jock was a tough guy, even among all
the tough guys on this island. If he wants to get there he will, even if he has to
crawl every bloody inch of the way on his hands and knees.'

The others shook their heads doubtfully. Once or twice, for a few fleeting minutes
at dawn or dusk, these men had seen the clouds roll clear from the Saruwageds. A
couple of bets were made, and the odds all favoured the mountains.

While a billy of tea was prepared, Tom rang through to the orderly-room at Bob's.
I heard him shouting with all his lung-power to Bill Chaffey through the faint and
feeble field telephone. ‘That's right – he's here now! What? What? Yes, he's O.K., What?
What the hell was that? Jock? He's gone over the range! Range! R-A-N-G-E! Listen,
Bill, ask him yourself when he gets up there. So long!'

Tom came back from the phone groaning in mock despair. ‘What a phone! I'd rather use
smoke-signals or native drums, I reckon. Bill wants all the news, but you can tell
him yourself. You'll be up there in a couple of hours.'

I laughed, downed the remaining black tea in my pannikin, and called to my boys to
follow as I struck off up the grassy hill towards Bob's.

IV

IN MARI
village, half-way to Bob's, I paused to drink the cool effervescent milk
of a green coconut and swap a little gossip with the people. Mari was almost a model
village: it was well laid out, and the houses were large and solidly built, many
of them with carefully carved wooden ornaments in the shapes of lizards, fish, and
turtles. The bare ground between the houses was swept clean, and a rough fence of
bamboos kept the pigs away. However, there was a curious tension in the atmosphere,
as if many strange things were happening beneath the surface, unsuspected by the
casual observer.

The village was under the domination of a native of strong personality and character
called Kwila. Some of the men at Bob's suspected him of giving the Japs in Lae information
about our movements in the Markham Valley. This was never proved, and in fact he
was eventually awarded the Loyal Service Medal. But even if he had been playing ball
with the Japanese, who could blame him? The
war was not of his making. If, for some
reason unknown to him, white men and yellow men wanted to fight like animals in his
country, what was more natural than for him to work for the safety of his own people?
Until it became clear who was going to win the war, a sensible politician would speak
softly to both sides. At that time, however, with our lives at stake, it was hard
for us to take this detached and reasonable view, and we treated as traitors all
natives who associated with the enemy, no matter what the circumstances.

I talked to Kwila as I squatted to drink the coconut milk. He was tall, broad-shouldered,
and impassive of face. His dark eyes flickered – now narrowed to slits, now wide
open. The answers to my questions came volubly, and seemed phrased to please rather
than simply to tell the truth. He could speak English well, but was careful to use
only pidgin, for painful experience among the whites in Lae had taught him that a
‘coon' who spoke English was ‘cheeky', and liable to be put ‘in his place'. I finished
the coconut milk, and he walked with me to the edge of the village, where we parted
with mutual assurances of esteem; but I had learnt nothing, absolutely nothing, from
our twenty minutes' conversation.

The fading light was already shutting us in in an ever-narrowing circle when we reached
Bob's. With its haze of blue smoke hanging in the trees, the camp appeared before
us out of the jungle just as mysteriously as it had a couple of weeks earlier. Clammy
sweat glued the green shirt to my back, and the mosquitoes hummed and bit. I thought
rather wistfully of the Wain country, cool and high, across the river. And yet it
was pleasant to be back, to taste the illusion of security produced by the presence
of numbers of other white men. Here, too, was a sense of contact with a world outside
the swamps, moun
tains, and jungles of New Guinea, for the wireless picked up the
Australian news bulletins, and sometimes letters were delivered. Compared with grey
Kasenobe on its fog-smothered mountain-side, the rough camp at Bob's was civilization.

In the sergeants' mess they were waiting for tea. The same bearded men sat rolling
their own cigars while they cursed the mosquitoes. The gramophone was still playing,
in spite of the fact that the only needle had been lost. In its place they were using
thorns from a lemon-tree which grew in a native village a few miles away.

The first person to see me as I approached was Bill Chaffey, who was in the act of
pruning his red beard. He sprang to his feet. ‘Ha! How was my map? It couldn't have
been too bad, seeing you got back here O.K.'

‘It was all right as far as it stretched,' I told him, ‘but that wasn't far enough.
I walked right off the edge of it. I've just come back for a day or two, to get more
stores. What's the set-up now? Is there plenty of food?'

Bill fixed me with that firm, half-humorous look which must have been such an asset
to him in Parliament. Before he could speak, the shattering racket of the beaten
kerosene-tin announced tea.

‘That saves me the trouble of answering your question,' he said. ‘You just come
and see for yourself.'

We sat down at the rickety table. Bully beef, pumpkin, papaw, black tea without
sugar.

‘There you are, my boy!' Bill said. ‘More eloquently than words could express, you
have before you the whole stores position of Bob's!'

‘When are you expecting more?'

‘They're overdue already, but I hear there's a big carrier-line from Wau likely to
reach here today or tomorrow. I hope they do. We're out of tobacco, and we've
bought
so much brus from the local kanakas that even that's getting scarce.'

Two days later the new rations arrived on the sweating shoulders of a long line
of carriers. I persuaded Major John Taylor, the officer commanding Bob's, to give
me a month's stores for one man. It was a generous gift, for his own men had long
been on short rations, and it was not his responsibility to provide for those across
the river. The people who should have supplied us apparently thought we could live
on grass or air, for they never once sent us so much as a single tin of bully beef.
Even the special Christmas parcels provided for each soldier were not sent on to
Jock or me, or kept for our return. Somehow they just vanished mysteriously.

Bill Chaffey and John Clarke helped me again with trade goods and other valuable
stores. There were two large drums of salt and a good supply of stick tobacco and
newspapers, all of which would buy more local produce and thus help to spin out the
rations. Bill supplied me with a couple of gallons of kerosene, a case of hand-grenades,
and some gelignite with fuse and detonators. The gelignite would be useful for setting
booby-traps, to protect us against enemy patrols which might try to surprise us
in camp.

As soon as all this gear was put together and made up into fifty-pound boy-loads
I sent Achenmeri to Mari village to ask Kwila to send up twenty men to carry it
as far as Kirkland's. From Kirkland's, Buka crossed the Markham alone, to bring boys
from Bivoro to continue the carry for me, because the Mari natives were too afraid
and suspicious to go farther, and I, in turn, was suspicious of them.

Tom Lega gave me a spot for the night in one of the crowded little sleeping-huts.
I expected Buka back next morning with the carriers, but it was not until after
midday
two days later that the sentry on the canoe landing reported a group of natives across
the river, and we heard the three shots from Buka's rifle. They had been two anxious
days, for we were afraid Buka had been captured, and perhaps forced to reveal the
movements of Jock and Ian. However, the delay had been caused by difficulty in locating
the natives' houses, which were scattered among the gardens on the hillsides.

Only two canoes were serviceable, one having been dismantled for repairs. Two trips
were needed to ferry over our gear, and it was nearly four o'clock before it was
all piled among the cane grass on the north bank.

Making so late a start, we could not reach Bivoro that night, so we camped in the
hunting shelters halfway up the Erap, where I had met the luluai on my first trip.
They were dirty, ramshackle affairs, but we were glad to be out of the light rain
which fell during the night. So far there had been no sign of enemy activity, and
we left before dawn next morning, to get away from the flat country. In the mountains
one felt reasonably safe, but here the line of heavily laden carriers would be visible
for miles as it snaked slowly across the grassy plain.

We stayed in Bivoro only long enough to pick up the gear I had hidden on the way
down. Dinkila, the boy who had carried the bed-roll, said goodbye here, because he
wished to remain in his village.

By nightfall we were in Gain, where we slept, and the following day moved to Boana,
where I took up my quarters in the smaller of the two iron-roofed houses. I did not
know where Ian was camping, for when we parted he had not decided on a place. It
was arranged merely that I should meet him ‘somewhere in the Wain'. I had thought
Boana, in the heart of the Wain country, would be the best place to pick up news
of him.

My night at the mission was restless. Full of wreckage and smelling of decay, the
house creaked and groaned rheumatically. The unaccustomed softness of a proper bed
drove sleep away from me rather than induced it. There was a cuckoo clock in the room,
which I had wound up for fun and then forgotten. When its sudden sharp note struck
in the darkness I jumped to the floor and grabbed my revolver, ready to blaze away
at the first thing that moved.

Next day was cold and dreary, and when the chill wind blew aside the veil of mist
I saw the silent, watchful mountains staring balefully at us all around. I went into
the big house and gathered up a bundle of papers from the piles which littered the
floor. There was also a copy of the German-language edition of Hitler's
Mein Kampf
which I took with the papers over to my ‘bedroom' in the other house. I intended
to pass the time reading as much of them as I could with my scanty knowledge of German.
My room had two windows: one was shattered and the other one was jammed open, and
I was soon shivering. As I already had my warmest clothes on, I could only pull my
blankets round me as I settled down to read.

Almost all the magazines were filled, from cover to cover, with Nazi propaganda articles,
and elaborate gravure pictures of Nazi rallies featuring Hitler, Goering and Goebbels.
None of the publications seemed to deal with missionary activities. I mumbled aloud
as I read, skipping the most difficult passages, but I got the gist of things. Some
of the papers and circulars were easier to read than others, for they had been typed
on a machine with ordinary roman letters, unlike the difficult German black-letter
of the printed books.

There were several letters referring to the establishment of a branch of the Nazi
Party in New Guinea, and in one of them the writer warned that the activities of
the party should be carried on with discretion, ‘lest we should
lose the great freedom
of action which the Australian government has so far permitted us'. In case I had
misunderstood these letters, I took some of them back to Bob's on my next visit,
where Jim Hamilton, who worked in the cipher office, and who spoke German well, confirmed
and amplified my rough and incomplete translation. I was glad that I had shown them
to him, for I then sent them, with a report, to the district office in Wau, but a
year or so later, when I tried to follow the matter up, nobody seemed to have seen
either the documents or the report, and I could never find out what had happened
to them.

The wind dropped, and the mist, which had been rushing past in little clouds, turned
to a slow, steady rain. I huddled gloomily in the blankets, looking across over my
drawn-up knees at the larger house. On its veranda, Buka and Achenmeri were staring
just as despondently back. It was plain that the queer atmosphere of the mission
was getting on their nerves too, so I decided that we would move to Wampangan or
Karau, or some handy village, to spend the night. Why one should have felt more comfortable
in a smelly native village than in a proper European-style house I did not stop to
think. One thing was certain – we would not sleep again at Boana.

Just as the boys started to get their gear ready a Wampangan kanaka came panting
up the hill carrying a crumpled piece of paper. It was from Ian, who had heard of
my arrival at Boana. He said that he had established himself at Bawan, about four
hours' walk away, and would we join him in the morning.