The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  In late summer 1989 he hiked a week, alone, to Batu Lawi, a pair of giant limestone pinnacles rising like rock smokestacks out of the endless and still roadless green. The higher one was nearly seven thousand feet tall, and it had only been summited successfully in 1986, by a joint British-Australian expedition. But, alone, with no technical gear, no ropes, no harness, Bruno free-climbed it. It was a crazy thing to do, utterly heedless. Three-quarters of the way up he got stuck, couldn’t find a way higher, and as dusk came on and the sun dropped and night came, he settled in and turned on his tape recorder. The hourlong tape he sent to Georges Rüegg begins with twelve minutes of singing, his voice a deep, haunting lullaby over the symphonic din of cicadas and frogs. “Look around you / Listen to your heart / Go your way / Go on your path.”

  “That was Bruno,” Georges Rüegg said. “He looked around. He listened to himself, to his heart—that’s important—and then he went on his way. That was his belief. You can’t find a sentence that explains Bruno more. He had an idea and then he found people who could help him realize it. And he got into situations and wanted to share those situations.”

  The tape wound on for an hour, a running commentary made at intervals over three weeks. Bruno said he would find a new handhold in the morning, had spread some branches in a crook, had to be careful, and sang again, wishing all the people everywhere good night. When dawn broke he turned the recorder on again. “Good morning. The sun is down there; I can see the trees and fog is rolling. Gibbons are calling and the fog is moving through the trees. It’s been a cool night and I’ve been asleep in the branches with my feet out in the air and they’re asleep and my knees are cold and I still want to climb up and I hope I can find the way up to the top—it’s not far now and if I can’t make it I’ll turn around and come near to the big river. Yes! How are you? I wish you a good day tomorrow!” Without mentioning whether or not he made it to the top, the tape wound on as Bruno described how he’d found the river and spent two days building a raft with his machete. The raft, however, was soon destroyed in huge rapids, forcing him to swim and climb out of a gorge. He became lost, was supposed to be back for a meeting, but was enjoying himself so much he decided to blow off the meeting. He found a twenty-foot python and pulled it out from the river and fought with it, and he held the huge head and shot pictures of himself with it, but the film roll was finished, so he had to change the film with one hand while the other held the thrashing giant snake. He then lost his knife and almost starved, before finding his way back to a band of Penan three weeks later. “The Penan always told him never go alone in the jungle and they told him that over and over and he always ignored them,” said Georges. “He had no food or water and that shows how he functioned. I was supposed to share that tape with his family, but when I listened to it I thought, ‘How can he send that to his mother?’ But Bruno wanted everything. He wanted adventure. He wanted to help the Penan. He wasn’t crazy. But he once said to me ‘What’s life if you’re not close to death? Life means to find out where the borders are.’ It was always the same with him. He always wanted to know and to find out and that was his ego.”

  Then, in September 1989, it happened at last. As he slashed through the undergrowth at the bank of a river with his machete, he felt a sharp pain in his leg. One moment he was a healthy, preternaturally strong young man and the next he’d been bitten by a red-tailed pit viper. The snake was small, a thin green animal barely a few feet long. This one he hadn’t even tried to catch. Alone, he sat down, tied a tourniquet above the tooth marks, and drove his knife into the wound to bleed out the toxin.

  “I need to get to our hut as soon as possible before I can’t walk anymore, and I limp hurriedly homewards. The pain in my leg increases rapidly and sharply and soon I can no longer put any weight on my foot. I carry on as best I can . . . groaning.” His companion Jémalang appeared and Bruno urged him to dig farther into the bite marks with his knife. Afraid, Jémalang couldn’t bring himself to do it, only making “numerous tiny slits in the skin around the wound. I push on towards home.” With the venom coursing through him, he was as far from hospitals and antivenom as it was possible for a man to be.

  Bruno Manser wrestling a python; his fascination with snakes almost killed him when he was bitten by a pit viper in 1989. (Erich and Aga Manser)

  Eleven

  Pit vipers are not the world’s deadliest snakes, but they inject hemotoxins that destroy red blood cells and surrounding muscle tissue, and prevent clotting, not to mention induce vomiting, dizziness, and splitting headaches. In extreme cases they can cause kidney failure and death. To read the Merck Manual about treating the victim of a pit viper bite is a like a cruel joke, a description of everything Bruno didn’t have and did wrong. “In the field, patients should . . . avoid exertion and be reassured, kept warm, and transported rapidly to the nearest medical facility. Pressure immobilization to delay systemic absorption of venom . . . is not recommended . . . and may cause arterial insufficiency and necrosis. First responders should support airway and breathing, administer O2, and establish IV access in an unaffected extremity while transporting patients. All other out-of-hospital interventions (e.g., tourniquets, topical preparations, any form of wound suction with or without incision . . .) are of no proven benefit, may be harmful.”

  Bruno’s bite was a nightmare, the worst-case scenario. He wasn’t even with a regular band of Penan, but with a young couple in the remotest forest. He was soon delirious, burning with a high fever, racked with intense, throbbing pain. The tissue around the bite withered and died, even as the toxin interfered with his blood’s coagulation and his leg ballooned. His heartbeat slowed, his blood pressure sank, his breathing became labored, as flies swarmed during the day and tried to lay eggs in his wound and the no-see-ums attacked at night and the rain poured down in floods. He lay on a floor of branches without blankets, clean bandages, or comforts of any kind, surrounded by a vision of deep green, the smell of moss and decay and earth.

  Three weeks after the bite he was still alive, the wound a swollen, festering mass of dead tissue. He couldn’t walk. While he was trying to massage his leg and squeeze the pus out one day, “a piece of flesh suddenly balloons out of the wound—as large as a squirrel’s head. I can see the skin that surrounds the muscle and thickens in the middle to form tendons as shiny as silk. I am scared”—the only time he would ever use the word in thousands of pages of journals and letters. “The muscle, three fingers thick, protrudes farther every day and suddenly exits the wound, as long as a banana, together with pus. Then it becomes clear: the muscle between calf and shin has detached itself below the knee and is now hanging like a long horn out of my leg. The next day, the muscle feels cold. I pinch it with my fingernails—it is completely numb. Has a part of me really died? Quite possibly, after what I have been through in the past few weeks. The pressure of the heavy protrusion on the wound causes further pain. I decide to remove it. If only a doctor could visit me in this isolated place. . . . Fed up with the prolonged suffering, I am ready to do the operation myself and take potluck. Reluctantly, Nalin sharpens my knife and I carefully cut into my own flesh. I feel no pain and there is no blood. I sever the protruding mass of muscle piece by piece, cutting three more times; the parts of me lying on a leaf could be bits of fresh stewing meat, ready for the pan—just like those pieces of meat the butcher offers the housewife. My amazement continues. The pieces of meat do not rot; even five days later they look the same. Flies do not dwell on it and it doesn’t smell foul. This shows the unimaginable power contained in two drops of yellowish clear venom. How many times have I caught pit vipers and spit cobras just because I was curious?”

  More muscle remained, however, and he wanted to extract it. He tried using a fishhook, but that failed and the hook kept hitting a piece of exposed bone. “What a weird sound and feeling!” But pus continued flowing out of the wound like spilled milk and he took that as a good sign. “The healing power of the Creator within each of us will do its best—
and I look forward with confidence.”

  After a month, Mutang reached him, bringing antibiotics, which he declined. “He said,” Mutang recalled, “that it was so painful, that he’d wanted to die, that he’d been hallucinating and praying to die and his head felt like it was going to explode.” Mutang left a week later, carrying Bruno’s first letters to friends and family about the bite. “As for me,” he wrote laconically, “I was bitten by a poisonous snake four weeks ago and the wound is now healing slowly and the pain receding. But I still can’t walk.”

  Everything was getting complicated in paradise. Unraveling. After seven weeks he still couldn’t walk. He could neither put any weight on the one leg nor fully stretch it out. He felt depressed. “I can only dream of climbing on steep rock faces and in cave labyrinths.”

  At three months he could barely walk with a pair of crude wooden crutches. Bruno was handicapped in the worst place on earth to be an invalid. He could barely move through the wet, roadless wilderness of steep mountains and numerous rivers. He couldn’t feed himself, much less carry his own pack. A fugitive, he had nowhere to go, there was no place safe for him. His photo had been plastered on all the newspapers in Malaysia. Every police official, immigration official, and taxi driver knew his face as surely as that of the prime minister himself.

  Meanwhile, new blockades had broken out in September, just as he’d been bitten, but the authorities reacted swiftly, arresting 117 Penan and locking them up in the coastal city of Miri for two weeks. The blockades weren’t enough; something else was needed. But what could he do? A big meeting of the International Tropical Timber Organization would be taking place in Miri soon and Bruno became obsessed with turning himself in. The idea, he wrote, wasn’t to “rot passively on ice in a Malay prison—but an immediate and total hunger strike until I’m let free. . . . One has to risk something, otherwise one will not achieve anything. I think the Sarawakian government under pressure of publicity would not dare to end the fast. I have never told you [Georges and Roger] about this plan frankly, . . . but I thought that I had to now.”

  Then in mid-December Bruno wrote again. His parents were getting older; he hadn’t seen them in almost six years. His father and mother were both hospitalized, and he had received tape recordings of them. “To hear the voice of my old parents dreaming . . . after all of this has hit me and gives me another nudge to decide upon the near future.” Again, he mentioned his idea to give himself up. “An arrest would be answered with an immediate hunger strike to the last.” The government, he thought, would either let him starve to death or free him after “worldwide protest.”

  Back home in Switzerland, Bruno’s family and friends were becoming increasingly alarmed. Georges Rüegg and Roger Graf were adamantly against his surrender. The Malaysian government, too, had heard about the snakebite, and its secret service had informed the Swiss embassy, whose foreign affairs officer sent a letter to Georges, who felt Bruno was being selfish. “I couldn’t believe he was sending these notes to his parents about getting bitten by the snake or being arrested; it was like he was totally clueless about their welfare. We were all helpless. We didn’t know what to do. Some people said we should send a helicopter in to get him out, but of course that was impossible.”

  In February 1990 some twenty of Bruno’s closest friends and family convened at his parents’ apartment in Basel: his brothers Erich and Peter, their wives, his sister Monika, his parents, now out of the hospital, Georges and his wife, a few others. “We tried to figure out what we could do,” said Georges. “We talked all day and finally got to the point where we decided someone had to go bring him home.” But who? One of his caving friends owned a drugstore and so had enough time and money to go. “But he didn’t think it was a good idea,” Georges said, “because he couldn’t control Bruno. He wasn’t strong enough to confront him.” Which left Georges himself. “But I’d never been to Asia before. I knew nothing about the situation in Malaysia. Finally I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go, but only to talk to him. To let him do what he wants to do.’”

  Georges’s wife, Fabiola, argued against it. It was way too dangerous, she said. And she was right. Bruno was public enemy number one in Malaysia. Police, soldiers, special forces, the security services—all were looking for him. To meet him deep in the forest was one thing. To extract him from it across international borders was another. Who knew what might happen? How long a prison sentence might Georges face if he and Bruno were caught? And for what? Georges had a wife and son, a life he loved in Switzerland. “I thought and I thought. And I thought that as a friend it was necessary to do the right thing, even though I knew it would be complicated.” But a kernel of resentment had been planted and was growing inside of him. “We were all Bruno’s victims,” Georges said. “Bruno did what he wanted to do and he depended on his friends and supporters. But he was our victim too. The films and tapes brought sounds and pictures back and we pushed those pictures. Action gets reaction. What we created—sometimes I had the feeling that he tried to fulfill the pictures. He would say, ‘I don’t want to be the hero of the Penan or the environment,’ but he was pulled and pushed. His image was growing in the public and we were pushing it and we were growing it, too, in certain directions. And I never had the feeling that he was a peaceful man like Gandhi. Bruno was a fighter. Inside himself. The picture that we all created was of a peaceful man, but that is just a picture. Why did he always have to be on top of the mountain? He was very competitive. Always seeking the border of everything. That’s the key to understanding Bruno.”

  The group pooled their resources. The clock was ticking. It was now early March 1990, the ITTO meeting was fast approaching, and Georges had to get there before Bruno might turn himself in. Georges Rüegg was a middle-aged shepherd and carpenter, about as far from an international covert operator as someone could be. But what he did next is the stuff of legend. He moved with speed, sureness, and authority, not to mention with nerves of titanium.

  Just before departing, he received a fax that an Australian woman, Anja Licht, who had been in and out of Sarawak and had met Bruno there, would be in Singapore. The two linked up and Georges explained his plan. He went to a series of travel agents and booked twenty-seven different flights in and out of various cities in Sarawak. To Singapore. To Brunei. Kuching. Miri. Every possible permutation of travel. Bruno’s most distinctive feature was his round John Lennon glasses; with a copy of his prescription Georges had a new pair made: giant, 1980s-style. He went to a separate optometrist and bought a set of blue-tinted contact lenses. Anja purchased a packet of blond hair dye. Georges flew to Kuching. Anja flew separately and met him there. Together, posing as a couple, they flew on to Miri. In Miri, Georges tried to reach Mutang, who knew he was coming, but Mutang was nowhere to be found. On the fourth day he appeared. Georges and Anja flew on to Limbang; Mutang drove and picked them up at the airport, took them to someone’s house, and said he’d return the next day. He arrived with a pickup truck, buried Georges in the back under a tarp, and, leaving Anja behind, they drove for hours on logging roads, past timber camps. Finally they parked the truck and Mutang said, “Okay, now we’re going into the forest.” They walked for three or four hours and came to a hut with a corrugated tin roof the size of a one-car garage. “I put up my hammock and all of a sudden in walked Bruno.”

  They hadn’t seen each other in six years. “It was good, but also strange. He had a Penan haircut. Like forty bracelets on his left arm. Was thin, not an ounce of fat on him. We talked. I told him about his parents, that his father had cancer and his mother had been in the hospital. I told him that Roger and I were completely overwhelmed—that we could barely keep up with our own jobs and what we were doing for the Penan. It was clear to him that the situation was not easy. He listened and looked into my eyes and said, ‘I’m coming out.’

  “It was too easy, too fast. I didn’t like it. I thought, ‘You must think about it, this decision is not to be made so fast; why don’t you think it over?’

&
nbsp; “‘No, I don’t have to take my time,’ he said. ‘I’m coming out.’

  “And then suddenly I thought, ‘How am I going to organize this?’ I said, ‘How do you want to do it?’ And he said, ‘I’m the baby now.’ And at that moment I knew it was completely someone else’s responsibility to organize it. Not him. He left the responsibility to others, to me. I said, ‘You have to change your looks.’”

  The next morning Georges cut Bruno’s hair. Kneeling by a stream, Bruno dyed it; he soon had short, auburn-brown hair. “He had no emotional attachment,” said Georges. “None. He did what was necessary.” He put on a blue polo shirt. The big new glasses. For six years he’d been a wild man of Borneo, a nomad, a Penan tribesman, Penan Man, had dressed in a loincloth with bare buttocks and bare feet and long hair, Tarzan of the jungle. Now, just like that, he looked like anyman, anyone from anywhere, a tourist on a two-week holiday from an office in Switzerland, utterly indistinct. Georges snapped his picture, close-up headshots to be used as passport photos. Bruno said he had to go back into the forest for a few days, wanted his drawings and some bear claws and the skull of a bear. He said, “Come with me. It’s wonderful.” He was standing on the edge of the fields we know, the border between two worlds. Strange how easy it was to take off one costume, put on another. He could do it; the Penan could not. But he wasn’t ready to leave yet, not fully. No, Georges said, I have no time. Bruno also had a detailed report he’d written in longhand to the ITTO; he’d missed the meeting, but he asked Georges to take it out with him and get it to London.