Fear Drive My Feet

by Peter Ryan

  I felt sorry for them as I looked at their strained and pallid faces.

  ‘Remember how we used to play the old gramophone at night, and gather round the signal hut to listen to the news?’ they asked, and we talked a while of the old days, when Bob’s was, in a sense, ‘home’ to us all, and its fires and bustling activity made it a place of comfort and refuge in the hostile jungles that surrounded us.

  Kirkland’s was unchanged, except that Tom Lega had obtained leave to go to Australia, and the place was in charge of another corporal, Curly Lee. I had met Curly the previous year, on a brief visit to the Salamaua front. He had been camped at Skindiwai, a wet, cold little group of bark shanties almost buried in the dark, mountainous rainforest.

  ‘Fair dinkum, it’s enough to give you the horrors!’ exclaimed Curly. ‘We used to huddle round the fires at Skindiwai and say we’d give anything to get warm. Down here in the flamin’ Markham we’d give anything to get bloody well cold again!’

  ‘And the mossies!’

  ‘I don’t mind mosquitoes biting at night,’ chipped in one of the other men. ‘I’ve been on this ruddy island now for so long that the mossies are just part of life – we’d miss them if there weren’t any. But when the bastards go all day and all night, like they do down here, it’s a bit over the odds.’

  We sat and yarned in the mosquito-proof room for the rest of the afternoon, but the conversation continually came round to guesses at how much longer the war would last, and how much longer it would be necessary to go on living in this dreadful spot.

  ‘When I stop to think about it,’ said Curly, ‘it beats me why this rotten, lousy hole hasn’t sent us all off our heads!’

  About five o’clock, when the last of the Mari boys had gone and I had checked over all the cargo, Curly and I walked up to the kunai-covered hill at the back of the camp to watch the cook-boy and his mate catch flying-foxes, or black bokis as they were called in pidgin. These passed over in a cloud every night, and the method of snaring the creatures showed once again how intelligent these ‘savages’ were. They took the long, light, spear-like midribs of coconut-fronds and covered one end of them with an entanglement of thorny vines. These missiles would be hurled among the flying-foxes as they made their way overhead, the thorns would catch in their wings, and the weight of the midribs would bring the creatures tumbling to earth. Their smell was repulsive, and they were infested with vermin, but when skinned and cooked they were tasty enough.

  Kari put my bed-sail up alongside Curly’s, and we talked till quite late that night. Curly told me there were no canoes or boats’ crews at Kirkland’s now, because no patrols went over to the north bank of the Markham. The Chivasing natives had dismantled all their canoes because they were frightened to be on the river in case they were shot at by aircraft.

  Early next morning the Mari carriers returned to bring our gear up to Naraguma, an hour or so farther up the Markham. Naraguma was really a dependent hamlet of Mari itself, but had been abandoned by order of the district officer. He did not want natives moving about near the Markham, for they might be spying for the Japanese. For this reason, it was felt that the whole south bank of the Markham between the Watut and the Wampit rivers should be kept uninhabited.

  The Mari boys would leave us at Naraguma, and carriers would be brought down from Chivasing for the remainder of the trip. Curly walked up to Naraguma to keep me company, and we made our way together through the thick jungle that fringed the river. When we reached the little village the carriers dumped their loads and at once set off back to Kirkland’s for their second lot. Curly helped me stow the loads beneath the houses. We noticed that though the buildings were in good repair the jungle was already starting to creep in upon the settlement. A few months more, I thought, and it will be a hard job to find Naraguma.

  Curly waited while I sat on my patrol-box to scrawl a brief note home – the last I would have an opportunity to send for several months. He wrapped it in the oilskin folder we all carried to prevent our papers becoming soaked with sweat, and buttoned it into his shirt pocket.

  We shook hands.

  ‘So long – see you in Sydney or Melbourne,’ was all he said. With a quick glance at his tommy-gun to make sure it could be brought instantly into action, he disappeared into the surrounding jungle.

  By three in the afternoon the boys were coming in by ones and twos with their second loads. As each man stacked his cargo beneath the houses I paid him off – a shilling and a stick of tobacco for his day’s work.

  Les arrived at four, behind the last load of cargo. He had made sure that nothing was left behind. As soon as he came into sight I called out to Dinkila:

  ‘Cookim hot water long wash-wash belong master!’

  ‘All right, master, me lookim,’ he replied as he ran down to the river to fill a bucket.

  As soon as Les had bathed and changed his clothes we set Dinkila and Les’s cook to prepare a meal while we sat down to learn our list of code words.

  ‘This is the list,’ Les said, pulling a paper from his pocket. ‘These are the keys to the code we will use, and we must memorize them in that order. We don’t want to carry any papers of that sort on us, in case we are captured.’

  The words – there were about a dozen – were ordinary enough. ‘Attractive’ and ‘evidently’ were two I can recall, but it took us a little time to learn them in the right order. Then we dropped the paper in the cooking-fire and watched it blacken, curl up, and slowly burn. Somehow it seemed symbolic. I felt a link had been severed, and Les must have thought the same.

  ‘It’s almost like burning our bridges, isn’t it?’ he asked with a smile.

  As we lay beneath our mosquito-nets that night we speculated on how we should fare when we had really crossed our Rubicon, and how the natives of the north side would receive us.

  Early next morning we sent Kari to Chivasing, several miles upstream on the other side of the river. He had often been there when he was in charge of the police at Bob’s, under John Clarke, and he knew some of the villagers. We expected him back the next day, but he did not turn up. The morning of the following day advanced and there was still no sign of him. We became more and more anxious.

  We discussed possible reasons for Kari’s non-appearance. Like all the Manus people he was a powerful swimmer, so there seemed little likelihood of his having been drowned when crossing the river.

  ‘There’s only two things could have gone wrong, Les,’ I said as we squatted at the water’s edge. ‘He may have been taken by a crocodile, or the Nips may have grabbed him.’

  ‘Pretty crook alternatives for Kari,’ Les replied grimly. ‘We’d better watch out, in case he has been captured – the bastards might have forced him to give us away. You know their form with prisoners.’

  I called for Watute, who was second in command of the police.

  ‘Tell the boys not to move away from the camp without their arms, and post two sentries on the track and on the riverbank instead of one,’ I told him.

  ‘Yes, sir – me talkim all boy look-out good long Japan,’ he replied with impassive face, and a few moments later his voice came across the clearing as he called his orders to the others.

  About midday there was a loud shout from the rive
rbank, and we hurried down to the spot where Watute had posted a man in a tree so as to command a better view of the surrounding country.

  ‘What is it? What’s happening?’ we asked.

  ‘You hearim master ’e talk!’ Watute snapped to the boy above. ‘You lookim wonem something?’

  ‘Master, plenty man ’e come. All ’e come long water.’ Les scrambled up the tree beside him and pulled out his binoculars.

  ‘There’s a hell of a lot of people drifting down the river hanging onto logs,’ he announced after a few moments. ‘As far as I can see they are all natives.’

  We ordered the boys to stand to. Not only the police, but the cooks and every other native member of the party were armed, so we had in all quite a respectable little force. Nevertheless, five minutes later we breathed a sigh of relief when Kari stepped ashore, wringing the water from his loincloth, to tell us that seventy natives from Chivasing and the nearby village of Teraran were accompanying him, and that the luluai of Chivasing had come to ‘boss’ the men. Though the danger from crocodiles was great, they had made the journey downstream in the usual Markham way – gripping a log or plank and floating with the current.

  Kari tossed his rifle to one of the police to clean the muddy Markham water out of it. He then explained the reason for the delay. It had taken him some time to assemble the men, he told us, for in these troubled times most of them were living in houses widely scattered among the gardens. He had found that there were not enough natives to cope with all our gear, and there were further delays while he sent a message to Teraran asking for extra assistance.

  We interrupted the luluai to give him a couple of dozen sticks of tobacco and some newspaper to distribute, so that each man received a smoke for the road. Then he told us how he proposed to transfer our party and gear across the river. We were to move that afternoon to a little group of rough shelters a few miles upstream, and spend the night there. In the morning he would arrange for the construction of rafts to take us over the river. We felt that to have to spend another night on the south bank of the river was not only irritating but dangerous: we were most anxious to get out of the flat country, where we might at any time encounter a Japanese patrol from Madang or Lae. But there was nothing we could do but accept the luluai’s suggestion.

  We asked Kari what he thought of the general attitude of the people. Could they be trusted? He replied that they had probably been telling the truth when they said there were no enemy patrols in the vicinity, but he thought we should take no risks.

  The walk to the shelters took till almost sunset. There was no track, and we had to crash through kunai and jungle, from time to time splashing through the shallow water at the edge of the stream. We passed many gardens and many clumps of bananas. Several rough houses belonged to the Chivasing people, we were told. They spent a good deal of their time on the south bank of the river, we were surprised to hear. This would be unwelcome news for the district officer, who had planned to keep the area between the Watut and Wampit rivers an uninhabited no-man’s land.

  The huts where we were to spend the night were just rough thatch-covered platforms, dirty and rather smelly, standing a couple of hundred yards from one arm of the Markham on a low-lying piece of ground which looked as though it would be inundated during the wet season.

  Upon our arrival the luluai announced that he and his people would go back across the river to Chivasing for the night and return in the morning. Les and I discussed this with Kari and Watute, and finally agreed to let them go provided a couple of his men remained with us. The word ‘hostage’ was not actually mentioned, but the old man knew well enough what we were getting at, and selected two men to stay. They were so ready to remain in our camp that we felt sure the natives were not contemplating any treachery. They seemed pleased at their luck – looking forward, no doubt, to a good feed of tinned meat and plenty of smokes at our expense. When the luluai started off home with the rest of his people Kari and Constable Witolo were sent with them, to sleep in the village and keep an eye on things generally, and to make sure that they really did return.

  The only water came from the Markham, and when dipped from the river in a billy it was so charged with silt that it resembled porridge. The natives drank it unconcernedly, though they admitted that it sometimes made their throats sore. In spite of our raging thirst Les and I waited for about an hour while half an inch of mud settled on the bottom of the billy, and then we carefully transferred the somewhat clearer water to another billy, to be boiled for tea.

  There was a steady breeze, and the night was cool and almost free from mosquitoes. We sat for a couple of hours round the fire, smoking our pipes and yarning to the police, who kept us in gales of laughter with Rabelaisian tales of their experiences. These were mostly lies, no doubt, but it was all good fun, and each strained his imagination to outdo the others. By eleven o’clock a faint silvery light reflected from the few scattered clouds indicated that the moon would soon rise, and Les and I turned in. But the story-telling went on, in a lower tone – and probably continued most of the night, but we were not awake to hear it.

  It was midday before the luluai returned, accompanied by about thirty men carrying great lengths of vine which they had cut in the bush earlier that day. Under the luluai’s supervision, they started making four rafts, which he said would carry all our gear. They cut down banana-plants for the job. No doubt the cellular inside of the banana-palm makes it very buoyant, but to us it seemed a waste, for the hard cooking banana is one of the staple foods of these people.

  Eight or ten banana-plants, laid side by side and lashed with vine, formed the main body of the raft. Several short, very thick logs were then laid crosswise over it, and a rough platform of smaller poles was built on top of them. The solid lower part, made of banana-palms, would be under water, while the platform of poles would keep our gear high and dry. Such at least was the theory of it, but when the cargo was piled aboard, all the lowest things were awash. It was just as well they were all more or less impervious to water – our iron patrol-boxes and cases of meat – not the radio set or our blankets.

  Four of our boys could not swim at all, so we ordered one to board each raft. This extra load settled the rafts even deeper into the water, and we asked the luluai anxiously whether they were safe. He dismissed our foolish fears with an airy wave of the hand. Hadn’t he been arranging this sort of thing for years and years? That was true, but we felt far from happy about those four extraordinary craft moored to the bank by vines and stakes. This was only a minor channel of the mighty Markham, yet even here the current was plucking at them as though eager to hurl them away to destruction.

  By the time loading was complete the sun was getting low and the luluai wished to start. However, there had recently been great activity by a slow, old-fashioned Japanese observation-plane known to the troops as Photo Joe, and so we waited till almost dusk, when there would be less chance of being spotted if Photo Joe happened to be on the prowl.

  Finally, about five o’clock, we pushed off. The four boys on the rafts had Owen sub-machine-guns across their knees, for they would be the only ones able to shoot if there were trouble. The strong swimmers of the party plunged gaily in, each pushing a log in front of him for support. Those of us whose swimming was nothing to boast of – this included Les and myself – clung to the sides of the rafts, to be carried along as the C
hivasing boys pushed and hauled and strained. All the hazards of a sea voyage were to be had in a trip across this incredible stream – reefs, islands, currents, waves, and sand-banks – any one of which might have wrecked us. Our method of progress was much the same as that used by the canoe-boys at Kirkland’s – across to the first island, haul the raft upstream to the top of the island, then off into the current of the second channel. After three such operations we were into the last and largest stream, and the real north bank of the Markham came into view.

  ‘Master, me lookim Kari now Witolo!’ called one of the boys from his raft.

  ‘True! Two-fella ’e wait long you me!’ another cried from his vantage-point on top of the cargo. They waved and called to Kari and Witolo, who were waiting at the water’s edge about three hundred yards downstream.

  The bank seemed to be flying past at a terrific rate, and the boys grunted and panted as, pushing with one arm and swimming with the other, they strove to force their reluctant craft across into slacker water. Les and I, no longer merely passengers, threw our weight into the struggle. Inch by inch we drew nearer to the shore, until the men who were standing with Kari and Witolo were able to throw out long vine ropes and haul us to dry land.

  Stepping ashore, we found our pockets, socks, and boots full of silt and gravel drifted in by the river, and our tempers were not improved by the sight of several tall canoe masts showing above the kunai. It seemed that these people had canoes after all! We called upon the luluai to explain.

  ‘Ah, they are very old canoes!’ he said glibly. ‘They could not possibly be used to make a crossing of the river.’

  But Watute, sent to investigate, reported that the canoes were in perfect condition, some of them new. They were partly concealed in a small backwater, and this had caused the illusion that their masts were rising out of the kunai.