Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  “How far upriver are these people?” I wanted to know.

  “Past Senggo.”

  Senggo? Where had I read about Senggo? I paged through the best and most recent guidebook I had been able to find, Irian Jaya, by Kal Muller (Periplus Editions, Berkeley, California). The book, published in 1990, said, “Some unacculturated ethnic groups live in the jungles upriver from Senggo.” Very good. However: “Cannibalism is frequently reported and surely practiced here.”

  “Who are these people you know upriver?” I asked William.

  He said, “Care-oh-eye.” Karowai.

  Muller’s book didn’t have a lot of encouraging things to say about Karowai hospitality. It said, in fact, that they were cannibals. The Dutch Reformed Church has been proselytizing among the estimated three thousand or so Karowai for ten years and has yet to celebrate a single baptism. One missionary, the Reverend Gert van Enk, calls Karowai country “the hell of the south.” Van Enk himself, according to Muller, “is not allowed into most of the tribal territory, and if caught there would be pin-cushioned with arrows.” Confirming other sources, van Enk says that cannibalism is still common among the Karowai. A death is believed to be caused by witchcraft, and a culprit (or scapegoat) must be found, killed, and eaten by the relatives in revenge. This leads to a never-ending cycle of cannibalism.

  “You sure this is, uh, safe?” I asked.

  William said, “Oh yes, very safe, no problems, don’t worry.” And then his body was shaken by a sneezelike convulsion followed by a series of helpless, high-pitched wails. It was, I understood after thirty seconds or so, the way William laughed.

  The rivers of the Asmat, seen from the air, are milky-brown, the color of café au lait, and they meander drunkenly through varying shades of green in great loops and horseshoes. The water comes from the central highlands of New Guinea. It flows from glacier-clad peaks fifteen thousand feet high, and plunges through great canyons into the flatland swamps, where it forms dozens of interconnected waterways that empty into the Arafura Sea.

  The Asuwetz River (also called the Baliem) is a mile wide near Agats, on the coast, and at low tide the banks are a sloping wall of slick brown mud twenty feet high. Mangrove trees, buttressed by high exposed roots, brace themselves against flood tide.

  Women in long, thin dugout canoes that were the same gray-brown color as the river stood to paddle against the flow of the river. Thirty years ago, the handle of a paddle would be carved in the visage of an ancestor’s face. That ancestor would have died in war and the paddle would have served to remind everyone of the necessity for revenge.

  None of the paddles I saw were carved in this way. Such artwork is now against the law, part of the Indonesian government’s push to finally end head-hunting.

  Upriver villages consisted of several poor huts set on stilts above the swampy ground. Some of the villages were arranged around rectangular houses 150 feet or more long, called yews. There were doors evenly spaced along the length of the yews, one for each family group, though only men are allowed inside. In past times, head-hunting raids were planned in the yews, and the Indonesian government sent soldiers in to burn most of them down years ago. The upriver longhouses, however, were too remote to attack and exist much as they must have centuries ago.

  At the Asmat village of Kaima, we pulled into the beach fronting the yew. Mean, slinking skinny little dogs battled pigs loudly for garbage under the yew. Women and children sat on the porch, weaving string bags made from orchid fibers.

  One of the men issued a sort of command, a grunting hiss. Instantly the women and children were gone, clambering six feet down notched poles to the ground. Suddenly there were several dozen men standing on the porch. They wore shorts in varying degrees of repair, and some of the men sported T-shirts with such cryptic messages as JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME—KARATE. A few of the men stood with their arms crossed over their chests, a defiant and aggressive stance in this culture.

  We stopped because the chief here was said to possess five human skulls. We wanted to talk with him about the skulls, about the old ways, about the time before the missionaries. The men of Kaima, for their part, saw three strange Papuans, expensively dressed (shoes!), and two white men. It was unlikely that much good could come of such a visit.

  There was an uncomfortable aura of suspicion and distrust. Conrados talked with the chief, a powerful-looking man of about thirty-five with fine, regular features and wary eyes. The chief was wearing yellow shorts and dried rattan strips around his considerable biceps.

  I hunkered down by one of the dozen hearths in the yew. There were beautifully carved spears against one wall, some polished black ironwood bows, a variety of arrows with different bone points for different prey, and at least one polished but uncarved drum near each fire. All the woodwork was finer by far than any of the carvings I had seen in the boardwalk shops of Agats.

  Conrados squatted by my side and explained that the chief might, in fact, have one skull. The chief didn’t know for sure. Because of the missionaries and the government, he didn’t know. For 20,000 rupiah (about $10) he could look.

  “Tell him it’s 20,000 rupes only if he finds the skulls.”

  The chief disappeared. The rest of the men stood around silently. They didn’t talk with Conrados. I glanced over at the finely carved weapons. It was all very uncomfortable. We seemed to frighten the men of Kaima just about as much as they frightened us.

  Presently, the chief returned with the improbable information that he couldn’t find his skulls. Misplaced the pesky buggers. There were, he told Conrados, too many people around for him to be able to find his skulls. The missionaries. The government.

  We had already seen an illegal Asmat skull outside of Agats, in the village of Syuru. It was a twenty-minute walk from town over a wide, well-maintained boardwalk set variously five and fifteen feet above the boggy ground. After about ten minutes, the wooden walkway began to deteriorate precipitously. There were missing planks, rotted planks, broken planks, and then no planks at all, only a few sticks. One of these broke under my weight, and I grabbed at something that held and then swung there for a moment, like a kid on the monkey bars.

  Syuru was a small, traditional village of thatched-roofed huts on stilts. There were no boardwalks in the village itself, only a series of half-submerged bark walkways. As I wobbled my way over narrow tree trunks—small children took my hand to steady me in this process—a humming, murmurous sound I had been hearing for some time began to separate itself into individual moans and wails.

  An important man had died the day before. Now the women had covered their bodies with ashes and soot. They would mourn in this fashion for seven days. The sounds were coming from several houses at once. Wailing and moaning would build to a crescendo and then subside for a moment. Suddenly a loud voice from one of the houses—sometimes it was a man’s voice; sometimes, a woman’s—would shout out a hoarse, anguished speech in Asmat. I had no translator, but I imagined the words were something like: “He was a good man; he worshipped his ancestors, he fed his family and now he’s gone.” And the moaning and wailing and shrieking would start all over again.

  In the swamplands of the Asmat, all the dead return as ghosts, but those improperly mourned can be malevolent. They can make a living relative’s life hell. A cranky ancestor strews banana peels across the path of life. Literally. People in the Asmat don’t fall down without a reason.

  When someone dies, a proper show of grief makes a favorable impression on the recently deceased, who can then protect his descendants from all those evil spirits that populate the netherworld.

  The yew at Syuru was separated from the village proper by the boardwalk. The night before, Conrados, a local Asmat, had spoken to the men of Syuru. Here the men were expecting us, and there were no women on the porch in front of the dozen doorways. It was 9:00 A.M. and most of the children were in school. It was a good time to talk heads with the guys.

  The yew was two hundred feet long, at a guess, with high
rafters, and there were at least fifteen fires, all set in a row, in the center of the structure and neatly spaced along the length of the floor. Only a few of the older men were present, and when a couple of schoolchildren stopped on the boardwalk to see what was going on, a thin muscular man in threadbare gray shorts ducked through the door. He stood on the porch and said “Scram” in Asmat. The sound, the same one I heard in Kaima, is a grunting hiss. The children hurried off down the boardwalk without looking back.

  The men squatting around the fires in the yew wore shorts, and they smoked clove-scented Indonesian cigarettes called kreteks. This smell mingled with the odor of woodsmoke and singed pig fat. No doubt human flesh—locally called “long pig”—had been cooked over these fires in past generations.

  An older man in faded beige shorts smeared his face and chest with white ashes. He put on a feathered headdress made of bird-of-paradise feathers and produced a fire-blackened human skull from the bag. It was all very surreptitious, and there was a good deal of looking around, because we were engaged in something everyone knew was illegal. The sounds of mourning, across the way in the small huts, rose to another tormented crescendo.

  I noticed that the skull lacked the lower jaw, which meant it was the trophy of a head-hunting raid. The skulls of powerful ancestors, sometimes kept as safeguards against evil spirits, are invariably intact, the lower jaw lashed to the skull with strands of rattan. Head-hunting trophies, on the other hand, are invariably missing the lower jaws, which are detached and worn on a necklace: a fearsome emblem of proficiency in war.

  The man with the skull—no names: the missionaries; the government—demonstrated the value of the powerful skull. He rolled out a palm mat and lay down with his head balanced atop the blackened skull. It did not look like a comfortable way to nap.

  During sleep, I had read, a man is most vulnerable to the evil influence of the spirit world. Therefore it is wise to keep a skull nearby during sleep. Men formerly slept in the yew using the powerful skulls of their ancestors, or their enemies, as pillows. Across the rotting boardwalk, a man’s rich baritone voice called out a long, sing-song lament. And then, from twenty houses, the sobs and shrieks and wails began anew.

  I stared at the man on the mat, whose eyes were closed and who might have actually been asleep. He seemed perfectly serene.

  We were well above Kaima and had been motoring against the current for ten hours. Here, about 250 miles upriver, the villages generally consisted of a yew and four or five huts. They were separated, one from the other, by twenty or thirty or fifty miles. There had been two short afternoon rainstorms, tropical downpours accompanied by rumbling, ominous thunder. The sky was all rainbows and bruised Wagnerian clouds. The forest overhung the river and it seemed to me, in my ignorance, all of a piece: unvariegated greenery.

  The river was flowing down to the now distant sea at about three or four miles an hour, but it looked sluggish, weighted down with brown silt, and its surface was a viscous brown mirror reflecting the overhanging greenery and the operatic sky. Yellow leaves, like flowers, floated among the reflected clouds. A swirling mass of neon-bright blue butterflies swept across our bow in a psychedelic haze. The world felt like the inside of a greenhouse, and the air was heavy with moisture and the fragrance of orchids.

  A snowy egret kept pace with the boat, and blue-gray herons, looking vaguely prehistoric, rose from the banks of the river in a series of horrid strangled croaks. In the forest, cockatoos screeched loudly enough to be heard over the laboring of our kerosene engine. The cockatoos bickered among themselves: ridiculous, self-important dandies with their white feathers and marching-band topknots.

  Chris and I bickered with a good deal more dignity, I thought. He likes to sing, and has a completely monotonous voice, which is entirely beside the point. The point is—and this can’t be stressed too strongly—Chris Ranier gets the words wrong.

  “Wooly wooly, bully bully …”

  “Chris.”

  “What?”

  “It’s ‘Wooly bully, wooly bully.’ ”

  “That’s what I was singing.”

  “You weren’t. You were singing, ‘Wooly wooly, bully bully.’ ”

  “ ‘Wooly wooly, bully bully’?”

  “Yeah. ‘Wooly wooly, bully bully.’ Not ‘Wooly bully, wooly bully.’ ”

  “ ‘Wooly bully, wooly bully’?”

  In the midst of this perfectly asinine conversation, William erupted in a convulsive sneezing snort, followed by a series of high-pitched wails. And then Stef and Conrados buried their heads in their hands and wailed, as if in helpless grief.

  “ ‘Bully bully,’ ” Chris sang,“ ‘wooly wooly.’ ”

  I moved to the bow of the boat and sat sulking about this insult to Sam the Sham when what appeared to be the soggy brown remnant of some flood-felled tree suddenly disappeared from the surface of the river with a faint splash and a swirl of bubbles.

  Crocodiles were once plentiful in these rivers, and local people considered them something of a bother. One famous beasty took up residence near the Asmat village of Piramat and killed fifty-five human beings before it, in turn, was killed in 1970. The animal was twenty-three feet long.

  These days, crocs are seldom seen in the larger rivers. They were hunted for their hides in the late 1970s, and now, William said, they are usually found only in narrow backwaters, deep in the swamp.

  Just before sunset we passed a village where a thin, attenuated man who might have been painted by El Greco paddled out to sell William some fish in exchange for a quarter-pound of tobacco. It cost another quarter-pound of the stuff to buy a large black bird with a blue mane like a stiff doily that ran from just above its eyes to the back of its neck. The bird was about the size of a large duck. It had bright red eyes with black pupils. William said that the bird was a mambruk and that it was going to be our dinner. I thought: I can’t eat this. It would be like chomping down on the goddamn Mona Lisa.

  The water took on the impressionistic pinks and yellows of a pastel sunset, so the reflected greenery on its surface was alive with color. Our wake, in the pink-yellow water, was for a moment blood-red.

  There was a half moon already rising in the pastel sky. A huge bat, the size of a goose, passed overhead and was silhouetted against the moon. These mammals, sometimes called flying foxes, are nothing like the horrors in Grandma’s attic. They’re actually kind of cute, with velvety foxlike faces, and they fly in straight lines or great curving swoops, beating their wings slowly, with eerie deliberation, like pelicans. I caught the acrid stench of ammonia—bat droppings—and guessed that the flying foxes probably roosted in some nearby trees. And then there were hundreds more of them, passing across the moon, in the final dying of the light.

  The river was milky in the moonlight, incredibly bright against the black forest that blotted out the sky to either side. Stef knelt in the bow of the boat, watching for floating logs and fallen trees. It seemed to me that some of the logs simply swam away, though the rippling lunar ribbon that stretched out ahead of us set the mind whirling through various fandangos of fancied dread.

  Senggo, the only upriver settlement marked on most maps, was a neatly arranged village of about twenty houses arranged face-to-face across a muddy raised-grass track flanked by irrigation ditches on both sides. The place was quite “modern” by William’s definition: clapboard houses; tin roofs; a two-story residence; two homes with glass windows; latrines built over deeply dug trenches; large, adequately drained agricultural projects; a resident missionary; and even a policeman available to stamp and sign our surat jalan (literally: travel letter) in exchange for only a very minor bribe.

  No one seemed particularly concerned when I told them we were going upriver to see the Karowai, though nuances of meaning were a bit difficult to discern with my Indonesian vocabulary of about a hundred words.

  “Karowai bagus orang-orang?”

  No, they’re not good.

  “Karowai tidak bagus orang-orang?”
r />   No, they’re not bad.

  “Apa?”

  They’re Karowai.

  The storekeeper—he stocked bottled water, Lux soap, canned corned beef, sardines, margarine, T-shirts, towels, and shorts—welcomed us into his home, where we slept, sweating, on rattan mats as clouds of mosquitoes had their bloody way with us.

  A goodly number of roosters spent the entire evening practicing for the dawn, so we were up before first light and back out onto the river at sunrise. A horde of schoolchildren stood on the dock and shouted good-byes. We had spent almost twelve hours in the company of dozens of people. The Stone Age was only a few more days upriver.

  William spent several hours teaching me to finally see the swamp. The tall trees? The ones over there that grow from a single white-barked trunk and have elephant-ear-size leaves? Those are called sukun, and the Karowai eat the fruit, which is a little like coconut.

  Stands of bamboo often grew on the banks of the river, in a green starburst pattern that arched out over the water. Banana trees also grew in a starburst pattern of wide flat leaves. They reached heights of seven or eight feet, and yielded small three- and four-inch-long bananas.

  Rattan, a long tough vine used to lash homes together, to string bows, or to tie off anything that needed tying—the local equivalent of duct tape—was identifiable as a slender leafless branch, generally towering up out of a mass of greenery like an antenna.

  Sago, the staple food, was a kind of palm tree that grew twenty to thirty feet high, in a series of multiple stems that erupted out of a central base in another starburst pattern. The leaves were shaped like the arching banana leaves but were arranged in fronds.