Fear Drive My Feet (29 page)

‘Tell you what. The tultuls of Orin and two other villages are coming up tomorrow.
Suppose we go for a walk round this mountain with them and look for a better camp?
They ought to know of a decent spot.'

I agreed that we should do this, and to the sound of constant coughing we fell asleep,
rain still falling about us and plopping in big drops from time to time upon our
beds.

Next morning the tultuls came as expected. We set off at once with them on our quest
for a drier and warmer camp. While we were winding our way round a steep, grassy section
of the hill overlooking Orin, two of the tultuls gave sudden startled cries and vanished
into the bush. We looked at our one remaining tultul, the one from Orin, in astonishment,
but he was just as amazed as we were. The mystery was soon solved. From the road below
came a rapid succession of rifle-shots, and buzzing bullets seemed to fill the air
round us, clipping through the grass and ricocheting. The three of us hurled ourselves
into a narrow watercourse out of sight, and the firing ceased. We sorted ourselves
out, and helped the tultul out of the mud. He had been first in, and Les and I had
landed on top of him.

‘That was a surprise!'

‘To us, but not to those other two black swine!' Les snarled. ‘They've been as nervous
as a couple of cats all morning. They were waiting for it to happen.'

We crept to the edge of the gully and carefully parted the fringe of long kunai-grass
which grew on its lip. Down on the track we counted seventeen Japanese, most of them
with rifles held ready to let us have it again if we showed ourselves.

‘Oh for a Bren gun!' Les wailed. ‘We'd get the lot – we couldn't miss them!'

‘That one with the white topee on must be the officer,' I said. ‘You couldn't miss
him.'

But our only weapons were Owen guns, and for them the range was so great as to make
a hit the merest fluke.

We remained there for some minutes, noting with satisfaction that none of the Japanese
made any attempt to
come up the hill after us. The tultul drew our attention to a
great crowd of native carriers, and a pile of boxes which had been left farther down
the road. Apparently this was no shoe-string expedition, but was travelling well
equipped. It was clear, too, that the Japanese were having no trouble in getting
native carriers.

After perhaps ten minutes the leader put his pistol back in its holster, and we heard
him shouting to the natives to pick up their loads. A few moments later the whole
procession moved off towards Gewak.

‘Well, they seem to have given us away.'

‘Let's hope they aren't going to try and sneak up again tonight. We'd better get
back to the camp and see what's going on there.'

We set off as fast as we could, through the bush and round the steep hillsides, still
accompanied by the loyal tultul of Orin.

At the camp we found that Watute and Pato had heard of the enemy's arrival and had
hurried back to warn us. By the time they reached the camp, however, we had gone.

Kari had taken charge of the situation in our absence. The radio had been dismantled
and packed into its box, and all our stores hidden in scattered spots in the bush.
Each boy was standing to with a rifle or sub-machine-gun, and hand-grenades had been
issued all round. We complimented Kari on his efficiency, and then called a council
of war with him, Watute, and Pato.

‘Do you think we ought to shift?' I asked Les.

‘It depends what the Nips are likely to do. We don't want to credit them with over-confidence. They're
new to these mountains and they won't feel sure that there are only two of us. The
natives will tell them, but they'll still be pretty suspicious.'

‘They seemed to lose interest in us as soon as we ran
away. Do you think you could
find out anything about them, Pato, if you went down to the villages? Do you think
it would be safe?'

Pato grinned. It would be safe enough for him, he said. He thought if he went down
about evening he might even be able to find the Japs himself.

We decided to let Pato go, and that for the present we would stay where we were.

Towards evening we said goodbye to him and wished him luck. After we had radioed
our headquarters to tell them what had happened we sat down, with what patience we
could, to wait for his return. We dared not light a fire, so we boiled up some coffee
on a little tin of solid fuel, and huddled round in blankets, trying to keep warm. We
could hear the roar of the waterfall below us, and soon the rain started again. Every
hour we changed the sentries, one near the camp at the edge of the cliff, and another
about ten minutes' climb down the hill. As time went on we became more and more nervous.
Perhaps Pato had been captured and the Japanese would try to surprise us?

I saw Les peering at the luminous dial of his watch.

‘Two o'clock,' he muttered. ‘Time drags, doesn't it?'

‘I can't stand much more of this,' I murmured. ‘I almost wish the Nips would show
up, to put an end to the waiting.'

I had hardly finished speaking when a grunted challenge from the sentry nearby caught
our ear:

‘Who's 'at 'e walkabout?'

‘Me Pato! You no can shoot!' came the hurried response. Pato, realizing that the
suspense would make us all a bit trigger-happy, was taking no risk of getting bullet
by mistake.

We hurried him into the house, wet through, covered with mud, and panting from his
rapid climb up
the hill, and Dinkila at once prepared a mug of steaming beef-tea
for him.

Meanwhile, the whole party of natives crowded into the little hut to hear Pato's
story, muttering excitedly beneath their breaths. It was so dark that as we looked
around we could not distinguish any of the boys: only their whispers or movements
told us of their presence. We made notes by the faint light of a lantern while Pato
talked, and all we could see of him was the flashing whites of his eyes behind a
cloud of vapour rising from his mug.

Pato had gone right up to the Japanese patrol, he told us. They were camped in my
old house at Bawan, and had a wireless set, a lot of rice, tinned meat, and fish. They
also had about ten wooden cases whose contents he could not ascertain or guess at;
but when he showed interest in them he thought the officer in charge of the patrol
looked at him suspiciously, so he wandered off.

Les and I glanced at each other as Pato calmly related all this. If only that Jap
officer had known!

‘Did you find out where they were going?' I asked.

‘Yes. My cousin in Bawan says they are going to Boana tomorrow, and the next day
they will go on the way to Lae.'

‘Do they know anything else about us?'

‘They know it's your house they are camping in, but they keep asking whether there
are only two of you. They don't seem to believe it.'

‘Thank God for that! I hope they think there's a hundred of us!' Les said fervently.

We thanked Pato warmly for his good work, and lay down to sleep for the remaining
two or three hours of darkness.

Early next morning we radioed Moresby, asking whether planes could be sent to strafe
Boana next day, and
suggesting dawn as the best time, in order to catch the enemy
party before they set out on the next stage of their journey to Lae. We were told
that this would be considered. The following day we would have to move on, in case
a special party of Japs should be sent out to hunt us down.

About ten o'clock Watute and I walked back to Bawan, approaching cautiously through
the bush for fear the enemy were still about. They had gone, but so had our camp.
The house had been burnt, the vegetables dug up, and the whole area fouled.

‘Look at it!' Watute said disgustedly. ‘The dirtiest kanaka out of the bush isn't
as filthy as that!'

We retraced our steps to Orin and found that Les had already decided upon a place
to move to – a village called Kiakum, higher in the mountains of the Naba country.

We went there next day, not following the tolerable track that wound round the edge
of the valley, but moving along obscure hunting-trails which ran across the mountains,
used by the natives when they hunted possums in the forest. The path was rough and
steep, and not a little dangerous in some places.

Nearing Kiakum we passed several independent homesteads standing alone in little
clearings among the tall cane-grass. It was a sign that the people had not acquired
the village habit encouraged by the government, but still preferred their own way
of life. Obviously these families had never been seen by the patrol officer in peacetime.
It was a reflection on the superficial patrolling of the peacetime administration,
but not really to be blamed on the officers themselves, who had to work so hard,
and cover such enormous distances, that they could not possibly do more than pay
fleeting visits to each village. Quite often one would see entered in the village
book a remark by a patrol officer to the effect that the
people lived in their village
only at census-time, and spent the rest of the year in their real homes among the
gardens. There was something to be said in favour of the more scattered dwellings:
during epidemics infection was not likely to spread so rapidly as when the people
lived all crowded together.

The inhabitants of the homesteads that we passed near Kiakum must have thought we
would be angry with them for living in this way, for upon our approach they fled
into the bush with startled cries. This, again, seemed to be a sign that the administration
had not really enjoyed the confidence of the population. How could the natives have
much affection for people who came to see them only to inspect things, and probably
to complain, or to make investigations when there had been trouble? To them the patrol
officer was at best a nuisance who, once or twice a year, stirred up a lot of trouble,
had to be carried for, and then disappeared. The system made it humanly impossible
for most of the officers to establish any solidly based relationships of real understanding
and affection with the remoter settlements. Perhaps the blame, in the final analysis,
should be placed on the Australian governments, of whatever political colour, which,
before the war, had consistently starved the Territory of funds and forced district
administrators to manage on shoe-string budgets. It was the legacy of that sort of
patrolling which was now making it difficult for us to have any influence, in any
real sense, on the people, though my stay at Bawan had convinced me how ready they
were to be friends once an interest was taken in them as individuals and not just
as entries in the village book, to be censused and, probably, censured.

At Kiakum we found that the natives knew very little about the war. They had never
even seen a Japanese,
and had met so few white men that Les and I were regarded
as curiosities. It was a relief to find that the mission had no hold up here – we
would certainly find the people much easier to get on with. Only one man spoke pidgin,
and though he offered to clear out his house for us to sleep in, we declined the
offer and slept beneath the house. On the following day we asked the natives to build
two thatched houses in a secluded spot about half a mile up the hill from the village
proper.

For the next ten days we remained at Kiakum, receiving many visitors from the remote
mountain villages, all eager for definite news of the war, of which, up to that time,
they had heard only the wildest rumours. We would go down from our house each morning
at about ten o'clock and remain in the village till the afternoon, receiving all
our visitors there: only Kiakum people were allowed to approach the house. We got
on famously with the natives, relations being as cordial as they had been with the
Bawan people in 1942. Each day I took the medical kit with me to the village and
gave injections, dressed wounds and ulcers, and dosed colds and malaria. Once we
had to cut the tips off two toes of a boy who had kicked a stone and developed such
a bad infection that the toes were just rotting away. The job was done neatly and
successfully with a pair of sterilized wire clippers and a local anaesthetic, and
the patient was walking round again the following week.

While I did medical work Les talked to the people, losing no chance for pushing our
cause, and noting every scrap of information they brought. Pato unearthed one story
which, whether true or not, amused us. He was told that when the Japanese heard of
my visit to the Chinese camp they were so enraged that they put a price on my head
– two cases of meat and £5 (in Australian money) to any native who brought me in,
dead or alive.

Les laughed. ‘Two cases of meat and a fiver! I didn't realize anyone valued you as
highly as all that!'

One constant visitor to the camp was the village idiot, a powerful man clad only
in a strip of bark. Unlike most natives – whose skins are usually very clean – he
had a heavy beard, and a moderate growth of curly hair all over his body. He was
extremely dirty, and one could smell him from a distance. Our introduction to this
man was startling. We were bending over the wireless one night deciphering a message,
when there was a loud thump behind us, and there he was. He had leapt from the doorway
right to the centre of the floor. In his hand we could see an enormous savage-looking
bush-knife glittering in the lamplight. Les and I looked at each other nervously,
uncertain whether to dive out the side of the house or to tackle him and risk having
a limb severed by the knife. Our dilemma was solved when we saw the agitated countenance
of the pidgin speaker from the village appear round the doorway.

‘Long-long man, master,' he said. ‘Master sit down, now 'e all right.'