Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  Everything we knew about the hunter’s personality, and the behavior of the elk he was tracking, suggested that the topography of the land would funnel him into an area several miles away, at the top of an old logging road, somewhere near eight thousand feet. That’s where we’d set up our base camp. We called in the county snowplow to clear the road. I saw it lumbering by the outfitter’s cabin, its yellow revolving light casting eerie stroboscopie shadows on the snow. At dawn, we’d dispatch half a dozen teams of two each to search the area on foot. That’s what I’d volunteered to do. I’m what they call a ground pounder.

  At four that morning, I laid out my sleeping bag in a back room and tried to get a few hours of sleep.

  We live in a world in which nothing that happens is our own fault. Slapstick has outlived its day. A slip on a banana peel isn’t funny anymore—it’s a lawsuit. Take Chiquita Banana to court on that one. We have all become victims.

  Which, I think, is why some of us venture into the wilderness. We do so because it’s not safe, and there’s no one to blame but ourselves. You can get hurt out there, which is precisely the point. Wilderness is a way of taking back control of our lives.

  When I first moved to the mountains almost twenty years ago, I lived on a remote ranch along a body of water called Poison Creek. The previous owner, an old-time cattle rancher named Don Hindman, had kept a thirty-acre portion of the land where he built a house in the shadow of the Crazy Mountains. Don was my mentor, and I used to walk the mile or so to his house every few days to visit and listen to stories.

  One warm October day, I walked up to Don’s house in my shirtsleeves. He asked if I’d considered the weather. Mountain weather, he pointed out, is frenetically variable. Temperatures can change 50, 70, even 100 degrees in twenty-four hours.

  So, my mentor told me, even if you’re only walking a mile on a sunny fall day, it’s worth your life to be prepared. “Wear a coat,” Don advised, adding, in his kindly avuncular way, “you imbecile.” During my first years in the mountains, I did a lot of these imbecilic things. Obviously, I survived. That’s why it’s called dumb luck. I figure I owe something to the wilderness, and that something is called Search and Rescue.

  Tom Miner Basin, in south-central Montana, is just north of the 45th parallel, about halfway between the equator and the North Pole. The mountains that rise on all sides reach altitudes of eleven and twelve thousand feet. To the west are the Gallatin Mountains; to the east, the Absarokas; to the north, the Crazy Mountains and the Bridgers.

  For the most part, these mountain ranges are either managed wild lands or designated wilderness areas. They stretch into the adjoining states of Wyoming and Idaho and comprise the largest essentially intact ecosystem in the “temperate zone” of the Northern Hemisphere. Called the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, the rugged glaciated mountains, high benches, and rolling prairies encompass millions of acres of state forest, national forest, and national parks, including Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and the 900,000-acre Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.

  If I walked up into the mountains I can see from the front door of my house in town, I could hike seventy very rough miles until I even crossed a road. It ain’t Disneyland out here, and the wilderness is not tolerant of mistakes.

  There was, for instance, a young man who took a fatal fall near the summit of a mountain in the Beartooth Wilderness. In his tent, we found a bag of psychedelic mushrooms and a notebook full of swirling spiral designs, which contained this terrifying note: “I think I can fly.”

  One year, two eighteen-year-old college coeds set out on a day trip to a lake at nine thousand feet. They were novice backpackers, and it was only five miles from the trailhead to the lake. They assumed they could walk ten miles in five hours, easy, but they hadn’t calibrated three thousand feet of elevation into their plan. When it got dark, they stayed where they were, as they had been taught to do in a backpacking course. (Lost hunters, by contrast, usually strike out cross-country, and tracking them sometimes turns into a foot race.) We found the young women and got them down to the trailhead before dawn. Two sets of very happy parents were waiting there, and I felt about as good as I ever have in my life. The two girls were young enough to be my own daughters.

  It doesn’t always work out that well. A few years earlier, I was called out to search for two elk hunters in the Pine Creek Drainage. The men were friends, recent arrivals from Oregon, and not used to Rocky Mountain weather. They were hardworking fellows, barely scraping by on low-paying jobs, and both had families to feed. An elk—or two—would get them through the winter. They were meat hunters and honorable men.

  The November day they set off dawned bright and clear. It was about 28 degrees above zero that morning. The men were dressed in cotton: denim jackets; denim pants. One of them had thought to wear a hat.

  By sundown that evening, the temperature had dropped fifty degrees. A blinding snowstorm had closed down the entire county.

  Why hadn’t the men come out ahead of the snow? We tracked them for the better part of a day. The going was slow at first. Tom Murphy, our best man tracker, started from the trailhead, where the men had parked their vehicle. They had walked uphill, through wet snow that was now covered over with the light airy snow that fell during the storm. It was necessary to crawl along the men’s direction of travel, blowing powder—blue smoke, we call it—out of the tracks in the older hard-packed snow.

  Early the first afternoon, the tracks said, the men had shot an elk. Apparently they tried to drag the 600- or 700-pound animal toward their vehicle. It would have been sweaty work, even in the cold. Their cotton clothes were likely soaked.

  Sometime late that afternoon, as the temperature dropped, they must have realized they were in trouble. They left the elk and tried to walk out. But the blizzard was on them, and they appeared to be disoriented. Their tracks, easier to follow now in the deep newly fallen snow, veered off from the place where their vehicle was parked. They began moving downhill, but the heavily wooded slope steepened precipitously. The forest was dense with trees, thick with down timber.

  It must have seemed hopeless in that storm, in the dark, with no lights. The snow was knee- and thigh-deep, and the men left tracks like post holes. Twice they stopped and tried to light a fire. Both times they failed. It was 25 degrees below zero that night.

  We stood looking at the burned matches and the green living boughs the men had tried to ignite. The down trees on either side would have provided plenty of tinder, but the men tried to burn green pine boughs instead. They were experienced woodsmen—former loggers—and knew how to build a fire. While they had been working with the elk, hypothermia had ambushed them. We could see it in their tracks—in their lack of coordination and their confusion, in their stumbling pace, in the bad decisions they made, in the few cold ashes of their failed fires.

  One set of tracks led over a fallen tree and stopped. The man had fallen backward, and was caught in a sitting position, with his arm entangled in the branches of a living tree. He died there, in that place, and his sweat-soaked clothes were frozen stiff on his body.

  Another set of tracks approached the fatal tree, and there was an indentation in the snow where the second man had sat down. The two must have talked there, in the dark, with the snow falling all around them. They must have known they were dying.

  We found the second man half a mile away. The tracks in the snow said that he sat down, smoked one last cigarette, then pitched over and died.

  To this day, I’m haunted by those tracks. Several times over the past few years I’ve dreamed of those men and of that last conversation.

  I was trying to sleep in the outfitter’s cabin when I saw the yellow light on the snowplow moving back down the gravel road leading to town. In another few hours, I’d be out pounding the ground, looking for the lost security guard. I needed to sleep, and just as I was dozing off, some bozo started hammering on the front door. I heard someone mutter and stir. There was the sound of a d
oor opening.

  A sheriff’s deputy said, “Oh man, are we glad to see you.”

  And a man’s voice—raspy, exhausted—replied, “You think you’re glad?”

  We kind of like it when the lost hunters find us.

  I stoked up the woodstove, and our man sat in front of it for fifteen minutes before we could get the frozen boots off his feet. There were no signs of frostbite. The guy would keep all his fingers and his toes. He’d built a few fires, he said, but they hadn’t kept him very warm. He’d been working on a new plan—two fires: one at his back; one at his front—when he saw the strange yellow light flashing on the snow far below. He’d run, stumbling, down the steep snow-slope, but the plow was gone long before he got there. He’d followed its track down the logging road and knocked on the door of the first cabin he saw. Which was where we were.

  The man called his wife. I had the feeling, from listening to his end of the conversation, that she was crying. His partner walked around shaking our hands. He kept saying, “I can’t believe you sent the plow right to him.” We were sort of proud of that ourselves.

  Later, just at dawn, I took a short walk in the snow and stood overlooking the Yellowstone Valley. Our lost hunter had been pretty good out there, and I tried to see the sunrise through his eyes. Far below, I could mark the course of the river by the fog rising off fast-moving water. The air glittered with tiny floating crystals of ice, called diamond dust, and when I looked into the sun, it was haloed in rainbows. The last few days had been a matter of life or death for our guy—for all of us—and that, I thought, is both the secret and the terrible beauty of wilderness. It was going to be an absolutely splendid day, and we had no one to blame for that but ourselves.

  Among the Karowai: A Stone Age Idyll

  It was, I suppose, a single piece of ineptly executed and cynically fashioned art that sent me fleeing five hundred miles upriver, back into time, and deep into the malarial heart of the swamp. The people I wanted to meet—it was only later that I would come to know them as Karowai—lived a Stone Age life and knew almost nothing of the outside world. They were, some said, headhunters, cannibals, savages. If so, they still owned their own lives.

  Which didn’t seem to be the case with the people who lived in the administrative center located at the mouth of the great river that drained the swamp. It was only my second night in the town of Agats, and it was raining, again, here on the southern coast of Indonesian Irian Jaya, the western half of the island of New Guinea. Torrential rain hissed into the Arafura Sea, and it pounded down onto the slick brown tidal mudflats. This area, known as the Asmat, is named after the region’s most famous inhabitants and is the world’s largest swampland.

  The electricity in the town dimmed, sputtered, and died. It was 100 degrees at eight in the evening, and the wooden boardwalk, set fifteen feet above the mudflats, was slick and treacherous as I followed a man who called himself Rudy past darkened and shuttered clapboard buildings. There were fine things Rudy thought I needed to see. Artifacts I should buy.

  Rudy’s aboriginal art shop was another clapboard affair, and rain thundered down on the galvanized-tin roof of the place. The electricity in the town blinked on for a second—a flash of sickly orange—then coughed piteously and died for the night.

  This was not unexpected, and Rudy carried a flashlight. He was an Indonesian but not a native inhabitant of Agats. Rudy came from Java, the capital island of the Indonesian archipelago, a short slender man with burnished golden skin and straight black hair. He wore a lime-green polo shirt with an alligator over the place where his heart might have been, and his shirt was open to display a small gold Playboy bunny hanging from a thin chain around his neck.

  Rudy was in the business of selling native Asmat art. The Asmat are Papuans, sturdy black people related to Australian aboriginals and thought to be linked to the “Java Man” who lived over half a million years ago. The word Papuan derives from a Malay word, papuwah, meaning “frizzy-haired.”

  Throughout the whole of recorded time—and as recently as the 1960s—the Asmat people were the most feared cannibals in the southern swamps. Head-hunting formed the core of a complex system of survival designed to appease various malevolent spirits. Art was essential to that life, and the Asmat were master carvers. Their ancestral columns—which look a bit like totem poles as envisioned by Giacometti—were delicate, flowing poems of war and revenge. Asmat carvings, coveted by collectors, are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Primitive Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

  By the 1990s, tribal warfare was very nearly a thing of the past, and the spiritual impetus that fashioned Asmat art had been degraded. Javanese sharpies like Rudy hired villagers to hack out sad, uninspired pieces that could be sold to unwary visitors, most of whom came off adventure cruise ships.

  Rudy’s darkened shop was filled with carvings piled one atop the other and marked with tags that read SHIP, PRICE, CABIN NUMBER. Broken pieces lay in a pile and occupied a corner of the shop. The replications of ancestral carvings, the bis poles, had been fashioned quickly, out of soft wood—not the traditional iron-wood—and the spirits did not dwell in them.

  Rudy sensed my growing irritation and turned the yellowing beam of his flashlight onto a squat wooden carving he imagined I might be inclined to purchase. I stared at a blocky chunk of wood, coarsely chiseled to represent a man and a woman locked in a carnal embrace. The soulless figure was as crude as something scrawled on a bathroom wall and had nothing to do with the delicacy of traditional carving that did, indeed, sometimes encompass copulatory scenes. Rudy’s dying light illuminated the clunky travesty and lingered on splotches of black paint meant to represent pubic hair.

  “Sexy,” he whispered.

  I thought for a moment of Michael Rockefeller, who had visited the Asmat in 1961 as part of a Harvard Peabody expedition, and returned soon after to purchase art for an exhibition in the United States. Rockefeller planned to visit some of the more remote villages near Agats, but his boat capsized in a fierce tide and was driven out into the Arafura Sea. His two Asmat guides swam to shore, where they summoned help. Rockefeller and a Dutch art expert, René Wassing, stayed with the overturned boat. The next morning, Rockefeller, tired of waiting, left Wassing with the boat and began to swim toward shore, which was four to seven miles away. He was never seen again.

  Rockefeller was a good swimmer, and he had rigged up a flotation device out of two empty jerricans. There are sharks in those waters, as well as man-eating crocodiles. The tide was also very heavy.

  Nevertheless, at least one local missionary believes Rockefeller was a victim of ritual cannibalism. Had he made it to shore, Rockefeller would have washed up near the village of Otsjanep. At the time Irian Jaya was a Dutch colony, and some years earlier Dutch police investigating a head-hunting incident at Otsjanep had killed the local chief and four others. The Asmat believe that a man killed in war will not rest until avenged by the death of an enemy. Rockefeller, naked and defenseless, would have been seen as a representative of the “white tribe.”

  Whatever the truth of the matter, it can be argued that Michael Rockefeller died for art.

  Rudy moved in close to the sad, sorry copulation figure, trained his light on the genitals, and said again, “Sexy.”

  It was not a piece to die for.

  “Rudy,” I said. “I gotta get out of here.”

  I wanted to go upriver. Back in time.

  The boat was a forty-foot-long dugout, no more than three feet wide, and powered by a 40-horsepower kerosene Yamaha engine. My traveling companion, photographer Chris Ranier, had wanted to get out of Agats very badly. He is best known for his documentation of endangered and disappearing cultures, and Agats was a town where you went to the Asmat museum because traditional culture was, as they say, history.

  We had no radio in the big dugout, only a bit of rice, one spare propeller, and two burlap bags full of trade goods. Our guide, William Rumbarar, was a Papuan from the nearb
y island of Biak, and it was William who hired two local Asmat boatmen to accompany us: Conrados Kamau was a slender clever man, good with engines, and Stef Metemeo was a short muscular gentleman with an infectious smile, who functioned as the Minister of Morale for our trip back in time.

  There were plenty of Javanese guides available in Agats, but the native Papuans seemed to distrust all Javanese out of hand, reason enough to choose a Papuan guide. And William, for his part, knew his stuff. One recent book on the Asmat, for instance, suggested that there were neolithic peoples living in tree houses only a few hundred miles upriver and that these Stone Age tribes were friendly and welcomed visitors. William had been there.

  “Gone,” he told us. “All modern now.” By which he meant that the people had come down out of the trees and that they now lived in clapboard houses with tin roofs. The children all went to school, the adults went to church, and everyone wore missionary-clothing-drive T-shirts and shorts. It wasn’t that my book was incorrect: All this had happened in the five years since it was published. “Change is very fast now,” William said.

  That change—the homogenization of humanity—seems to be the direction of history. There is a certain sad inevitability about it all. For the upriver people in the Asmat, it happens like this: Missionaries come, followed by the government in the form of soldiers and policemen and bureaucrats. And then the multinational developers arrive, hard on the heels of the government, and they promise a better life to anyone who wants to log the forest and farm the waste. Perhaps the development would involve mining or petrochemical exploration, but the result has always been the same. Everywhere. The living culture is entombed within museums.

  Still, William explained, if we wanted to go farther upriver, deeper into the swamp, he knew of some people who still lived in the trees, people who used stone tools and were largely ignorant of the outside world. If this was, in fact, the case—the irony wasn’t lost on me—I would be an agent of the changes that offended my romantic notions of human diversity. I would personally entomb some of the living culture in prose, and Chris would document it on film. Perhaps, several generations down the line, young people in the Asmat would study his photographs in an attempt to understand what had happened to them.