by Tim Flannery
Eventually he decided to take mercy upon her pitiful state, but still felt the need to teach people a lesson. He pushed his shotgun out of his bedroom window, closed his eyes and, without taking particular aim, let fly from a great distance with both barrels. To his horror, both pigs dropped, stone dead.
On every public occasion since, the widow had taken to reminding the priest of his heartless act. But as sorry as he was for his miscarriage of justice, he felt he couldn't offer the compensation she demanded, for fear of releasing an avalanche of similar claims.
By the time I knew him, arthritis prevented Father Michaellod from cranking up the generator which lighted the mission by night, and I soon took over this duty. He still managed to work the churn, but appreciated help in making the soft and hard cheeses which he traded with his compatriots at nearby missions for rough red wine.
This simple priest, who was raised in the rural Europe of the early twentieth century, was much happier among New Guinea villagers than among modern westerners like myself. He would be lost and saddened if he were ever forced to return to modern Switzerland.
As we were busy cheese-making the morning after Christmas Mass, I asked Michaellod how he assessed his achievements. He looked remarkably calm as he explained to me that it had taken a thousand years to Christianise Europe. The Catholic Church was in no hurry at Kosipe.
THREE
Out of the ether
Everything was ready for the final goal of our expedition—the ascent of Mt Albert Edward. Early on the appointed morning, Geoff Hope, Bren Wetherstone, Ken Aplin and myself, accompanied by over a dozen Goilala, set off across the valley in drizzling rain. After about two hours’ walk, much of it through the fabulous Kosipe swamp, we came to the southern face of the mountain and began a punishing ascent.
By the late afternoon, both altitude sickness and exhaustion began to tell on us. Geoff had vomited up his lunch on the trail some time before, and I was reduced, through sheer exhaustion, to crawling up some impossibly steep mossy slopes. Finally, I lay on the side of the trail, defeated. My pounding head felt as if it would split, my trembling legs would not respond to my commands.
Geoff stopped beside me and opened a can of Ox & Palm bully beef. Desperately in need of energy, I ate it directly from the tin—skin, fat, the lot—remembering all the while hearing as a child that it was made of beef scraps, mostly lips, ears, scrotums. Revitalised nonetheless, I managed to move forward—and a few metres later the narrow ridge I was struggling up opened onto a broad valley.
A greater contrast with the confining moss forest could hardly be imagined. We had reached the Neon Basin at 3,000 metres elevation, a beautiful, wide, grassy valley perched high on the upper slope of the mountain. Ten thousand years ago it had been a lake, dammed by a glacial tongue coming from the mountain. On this afternoon the clouds lay far below, while above my head soared the vast glacier-carved crags of the summit itself.
On every rise stood clusters of New Guinea's fabulous Alpine Treefern (Cyathea tomentosissima), their trunks festooned with brilliant orange dendrobium orchids. The ground was covered with tussock grasses, while every now and then a rhododendron bush stood above the tussocks. The entire scene glowed bronze and orange in the afternoon light.
To this day the Neon Basin of December 1981 remains my enchanted place—the refuge I imagine myself in as a means of escape from the interminable boredom of committee meetings.
As I stood contemplating this wonderful landscape, the vision was suddenly snatched from me by a dense fog which came sweeping up the valley faster than I could walk. Soon I could barely see my hand in front of me. I felt the chill of water vapour on my skin and the silence of the enveloping cloud.
Losing all bearings in the mist, I knew the Goilala were right in believing that masalai (spirits) inhabited this place.
Lost and alone, and fearing heaven as Michaellod's sermon penetrated deep into that part of me where the lessons of my Catholic childhood were stored, I vomited Ox & Palm onto the alpine tussocks.
The sound of an axe biting into dry wood came, and guided me.
Our shelter, when I reached it, turned out to be a fine hunting lodge, constructed with treefern trunks, roofed with the leaves of the mountain pandanus and lined with the soft fronds of the Alpine Treefern. Around the walls hung the trophy bones of animals caught during previous hunts.
It was in this magical place that the unmistakable, slightly acrid smoky smell of a New Guinea hunting lodge first permeated my being. Even now I sometimes pull on a jumper in which the scent lingers, and am instantly transported to New Guinea.
In the middle of the hut lay a long fireplace, now blazing. Filled with smoke and decorated with animal bones and the sleeping brown bodies of our Goilala guides, the hut did somewhat resemble hell as I'd imagined it as a child. I lay down by the fire, and slept off my deep exhaustion.
The fire had died down before dawn, and I awoke shivering with cold, awaiting the sun. Our Goilala hunters and their dogs were also up. After eating a few baked kaukau (sweet potatoes), they headed out across the wet grass to the forest edge. I sat admiring the piccaninny dawn. White clouds lay evenly spaced, like ripples on a beach, against a pink sky. A bright moon still shone out over the Neon, frosting the grass with silver.
My first day on the job as a real field biologist in New Guinea was rather deflating. While Geoff and Bren sounded the old lake-fill, Ken Aplin and I had a very large basin to reconnoitre, and several hundred rat-traps to bait. We set out.
Our traps were aluminium box traps, which catch animals without harming them. They are, however, cumbersome and heavy. In our rat-trapping we were accompanied by Victor, a ten-year-old Goilala boy who had instantly adopted us. As I was still suffering from altitude sickness, any physical exertion left me quickly exhausted, and it was tiny Victor who, after a time, took up my heavy trap box, and to my amazement carried it effortlessly along. As I set the traps in promising places off the track, Victor would follow behind, whispering spells into the open trapdoors to enhance our success.
At the end of our line, when the trap box was empty, Victor shouldered a huge lump of timber and lugged it back to camp. I experimented furtively with the lump, and was embarrassed that in my reduced state I was barely able to lift it.
By afternoon, the camp had been put in order, the traps were in place, and we finally had time to explore our surrounds. In the middle of the basin we found a rock overhang which had been used as a shelter by human hunters and grass owls for generations. Its soft dirt floor was littered with small bones, giving us a good idea of the kinds of animals that inhabited the valley. Further afield we found the remains of a great grass nest made by a farrowing sow, while everywhere lay the droppings of wallabies and New Guinea wild dogs. The place was indeed rich in wildlife.
That evening the hunters returned loaded with possums. They were anxious to eat, so Ken and I had to work fast extracting samples and labelling specimens. One of the possums, a Coppery Ringtail, was brought in alive. We had never killed an animal before and wanted to dispatch it humanely. Fortunately, Ken and I, anticipating such occasions, had brought a bottle of ether along with us.
After allowing the possum to inhale what I thought was enough ether to fell an ox, Ken and I set to work. There were testicles to be cut out for chromosome studies and liver and kidney samples to be taken. To my horror, when we were nearly finished, our possum began to show signs of life. Quickly I fastened the ether-soaked rag to its muzzle and held it there until I was sure it was well and truly defunct.
As the hunters began their evening meal, excited chatter broke out among them. Finally, Andrew Keno (a Goilala who spoke a little English) came up to me and explained that the hunters had misidentified one of the possums. It was not the common Kovilap (Coppery Ringtail), but another, very rare kind. Indeed it was one of the very rarest and most delicious possums of all. They brought me a piece of the meat of this marvellous animal, which I tentatively bit into.
Imm
ediately my tongue was afflicted with an appalling dead palsy.
Ether fumes assaulted my nose and stung my eyes. The gas had travelled throughout the body of the massively overdosed possum, and a brief roasting had done little to abate its potency.
Horrified by the thought of what the ether might do to the Goilala, I spent a largely sleepless night. As the hours passed, I monitored the snorts and groans of my companions. Finally, to my enormous relief, they all awoke fit and well in the morning.
After this, I learned to kill the larger marsupials with a sharp blow to the back of the neck. It brought virtually instantaneous death if done correctly and I was certain that the animal felt very little pain. It also ensured that the meat eaten by my friends was untainted.
I have often mused upon the differing concepts of animal cruelty possessed by tribal people and westerners. New Guinea villagers seem not to have our concept of animal cruelty. During my years of fieldwork I have been brought possums and wallabies with all limbs broken, with intestines and eyes hanging out. When I requested a hunter to put the suffering animal out of its misery, I was often told that it was already dead! In truth, the longer an animal lived the better it was for the hunter, for the meat did not then rot in the tropical climate.
I vividly remember one early morning at Telefomin, high in the mountains of western Papua New Guinea. I had gone to check a mist-net for bats which may have been caught during the night. Much to the disgust of my Telefol helpers—who accused me of wasting precious food—I released the bats not needed for research. But my helpers absolutely refused to allow me to free a small honeyeater that had got caught in the net.
One Telefol man took it back to camp, cradled gently in his palm. On arriving, he began casually to pluck it. Alive. I protested, but the man did not seem to understand. When all of the feathers had been removed, the naked atom of flesh looked quite ridiculous: a pink blob sitting in the hand of its plucker. The man picked up a tin with the lid partly open, placed a little cold water in it, dropped the bird inside, closed the lid and put it on the fire.
The chirping of the bird was almost unbearable. Finally, the tiny, naked body forced its way out of the tin and ran around the hut, much to the mirth of the Telefol. When it was recaptured I begged the fellow to kill it, but was told, as he replaced it in the tin, No ken wari, masta, em bai dai (Don't worry, it will die soon). I listened with dismay as the chirps became weaker and weaker, until they were overtaken by the sound of boiling water.
The morsel of protein hardly seemed worth the effort—it was eaten in one bite.
These cruelties, as we think of them, were countless. Pigs were castrated with slivers of bamboo in operations that took ages, the testicles being removed piecemeal and the remains used as bracelets. These same pigs were then blinded with lime rubbed into their eyes so that they would not wander. Some months later they would be killed by being stunned, then thrown live into a fire. Their charred yet still breathing bodies would be loaded onto canoes for the long journey home to the feast.
But the very people who did this could be highly solicitous of the health of their fellow humans. Nothing was too much trouble to help relieve the suffering of another person, even a stranger like myself. At times, they risked their lives to protect me from injury.
Just as challenging are some Melanesian ideas relating to environmental conservation. One morning I went to set up a camp at the edge of the forest about an hour's walk from Kosipe so that I could trap in the primary forest nearby. A few Goilala youths accompanied me and, as I set about straightening my camp, they began chopping at an enormous old Libocedrus, a native pine tree. This ancient relative of the cedars was a true patriarch of the forest, and was at least two metres thick at its base. After an age spent hacking away at it, the giant finally fell to earth with a deafening roar, preceded by the excited whoops of my Goilala companions.
To my amazement, they casually stripped a piece of bark from one side of the prostrate trunk with which to roof their makeshift shelter, then left the rest of the majestic tree to rot.
There were five hundred growth rings on the severed stump. The tree was at least half a millennium old.
Such behaviour made sense to the Goilala. For them, the forest was endless. This was simply a good opportunity to make a garden where none had been before.
As I sat counting the rings, my companions continued to fell the trees around me, expanding their new garden. My nervousness that a tree might fall on me became the basis of a great joke among these expert axemen. As a tree began to creak and groan, they would scream out to me to run to avoid being crushed.
First left!—no, right!—no no no, left, left!!!
As I dashed back and forth while the tree fell harmlessly away from me, they would all collapse screaming with laughter. Soon they had exhausted the local supply of standing timber and moved to a more distant place, but all afternoon the sound of falling trees reverberated through the forest.
FOUR
Life above the forest
As the days wore on atop Mt Albert Edward, our hut on the edge of the treefern-studded basin gradually filled with specimens, and we began to understand a little of the environment which surrounded us.
During our first excursions into the nearby forest we found the decaying trunks of the Alpine Treefern just inside the margin. This beautiful and distinctive species of treefern, with its finely divided leaves, can grow only in grassland, for it soon becomes overshadowed in forest.
Here, then, was clear evidence that the forest was advancing, smothering the tussocks and treeferns as it went. In places, the margin had all the appearance of a battle zone. Fires, lit by hunters, were slowing the advance of the alpine scrub, giving the tussock grassland a respite, or even winning back a few metres from the forest. On the whole, however, the forest seemed to have the upper hand.
Was this evidence of the greenhouse effect, I wondered, or just less use of the basin (and thus less burning) by people? Certainly, the last time the earth had warmed markedly (following the last ice age), the tree-line advanced from 2,100 metres to about 3,900 metres elevation. It remains lower, of course, in frost-hollows like the Neon.
We found that the innumerable tiny trackways running through the tussocks were made by two species of small rat. The more common was a drab little thing with a distinctive mousy odour. Known as the Moss-forest Rat (Stenomys niobe), it takes its scientific name from Niobe, a tragic figure from Greek mythology who lost her six sons and six daughters. It was perhaps the dense, blackish fur of this small rat that reminded some nineteenth-century naturalist of formal Victorian mourning dress, and prompted him to associate it forever with this figure of sorrow.
The other rat was beautiful, an inoffensive little red creature known as the Mountain Melomys (Melomys rubex). I became very fond of these mice as the days wore on. It was always a pleasure to feel their soft red fur, and to smell their pleasant scent after opening a trap, when the ten before had held only the more olfactorally challenging Moss-forest Rat. We would measure and weigh the animals, killing a couple to be kept as museum specimens, and release the rest.
Our hunters and their five dogs returned early one day, carrying a heavy sack. The highlight of our expedition had come.
They emptied the sack and I saw before me for the first time a living Long-beaked Echidna (Zaglossus bruijnii).
Long-beaks differ from the smaller Australian echidna in their denser fur (which can be so long as to obscure their spines), and their extended, down-curved bills. Long-beaked
Echidnas can weigh seventeen kilograms, and measure almost a metre from beak to tail tip. They are the very largest of the egg-laying mammals. Little did I realise then that this would be the first and last time I would see these majestic creatures in the wild.
We built a sturdy corral for our lovely female echidna—of palings two metres high. I hoped to deliver her alive to Baiyer River Sanctuary (near Mount Hagen) so that she might help found a breeding colony of this highly enda
ngered animal. She, though, had other ideas. I was amazed, passing the corral a few hours after we had placed her inside, to find our echidna balancing precariously on top of the paling fence. These wonderful animals possess almost unbelievable strength and agility.
Our echidna did eventually reach the sanctuary—by way of Father Michaellod's toilet (it had a cement floor through which the animal could not burrow) and then a temporary cage in Port Moresby.
Several years later, while working on a wildlife documentary, I visited Baiyer River Sanctuary and became re-acquainted with my old friend. During filming, I had to enter the echidna enclosure at night. The echidnas remained immobile as long as the lights were on. But, when the lights were turned off to save power, things changed.
The first I knew of my old friend's approach was a wet, worm-like thing entering my boot. Then I felt a great, curved beak plunge down almost to my sole, so that the extraordinarily long pink tongue could tickle my toes.
The echidna and I were soon on terms of considerable intimacy, a state doubtless precluded during our earlier association by her fright on being captured. Long-beaked Echidnas really are the most remarkably intelligent and affectionate animals. Their bird-like faces allow no show of emotion. But they can show their feelings in other ways.
For many years Taronga Zoo in Sydney had a huge old male which was on very good terms with his keepers. Whenever he heard the lock turn in the enclosure door, he would trundle towards the entrance, then lie on his back like a wombat, waiting for his stomach to be scratched.
When a sprinkler system was installed in the enclosure, he would lie belly-up, ecstatic under the misty spray, his four-pronged erection startling passersby. Although already adult when captured, he had survived nearly thirty years in various zoos before his untimely death—from pneumonia brought on by his beloved sprinkler.