CHAPTER ELEVEN
Iwas awake before I opened my eyes, caught in that mystical space between consciousness and unconsciousness when you’re not sure what’s real or imagined. The churning from my stomach made one thing certain: I was hungry.
Finally giving in to what I knew was my new reality—stuck here with the Hundi tribe—I opened my eyes with an aggravated sigh. How long had I slept? I certainly felt better after being awake almost the entire night before. Another frustrated sigh at the thought of my failed escape.
I recoiled at the thought of Mimbeck’s sneering face and his disgusting hands on my body. As if this whole ordeal wasn’t traumatic enough already, now I’d been sexually assaulted and almost raped.
Raped. I poked at the word with my mind, mentally stepping a few feet away from it and observing it with a detached thoughtfulness.
I had rape victims come through the ER, too many for comfort, each case with different levels of trauma and each victim coping in their own unique way.
I wondered now what would’ve happened had Jahnu not come when he did.
Jahnu. The aggravating warden of my jungle prison had turned into a powerful protector and tender caregiver.
I could not get those soft, dark eyes full of concern out of my mind and felt betrayed by the way his look and touch made me feel.
Could it have just been a natural response brought on by the adrenaline of an attack of that nature?
Some kind of imprint that happens? The victim falls for the rescuer in the same way a baby bird, after hatching, attaches itself to the first moving thing they see.
Seemed logical, albeit not very scientific.
With a nod I decided that was it, before rising to a nagging pain at the back of my head. Oh, that again. I reached up and felt the same sticky substance Sali put on my wound the first time and wondered, idly, when I might stop getting hit in the head.
I climbed down from the treehouse, which, disturbingly, was beginning to feel more natural, when a boisterous herd of children thundered down the path in front of me. Village women also came running, excited expressions on their faces.
Upturned canoes advanced on the hill where the crowd was gathered. The carriers shouldered their boats, which were just hallowed tree trunks, in full clay body paint that left an ashy film over their dark skin.
“Papa! Papa!” Excited squeals rose from the children as they surrounded the warriors.
I stayed at a distance as they made their way up the hill.
Murmurs of admiration filled the yard as the men offloaded baskets full of fish and deposited the canoes near the communal house.
The procession dissipated as families found one another and bonded together in small groups throughout the yard.
I suddenly felt sheepish and vulnerable while I stood alone amid so much community and wrapped my arms around myself in an overt hug, feeling unexpectedly very lonely.
Then I saw him.
Jahnu was leaning against one of the posts that held up the porch of the house, alone as I was. He had been watching me, but when our eyes met, he quickly moved and began hauling the woven baskets and paddles the men had brought with them up into the hut.
He worked, head down, not meeting my eyes again. Several others joined him in the task and shortly, the entire group broke up and busied themselves with other work.
I walked through camp as small groups set themselves up for their tasks. Working—always working, the Hundi tribe—with an excited buzz fueling the labor.
I found Sali and a group of women preparing food in the communal kitchen. They moved rocks onto hot coals with long bamboo sticks split at the bottom to look like tongs.
“You slept gut?” Sali asked upon seeing me. The others only looked up from their work with wary eyes.
“Yes.”
“You hungry?”
“Very.”
Sali set me up with a banana leaf of assorted fare, mumbling something incoherent to the other ladies. They seemed to relax and the tension I felt from them before, disappeared. They observed at me as I ate, with expressions full of kindness and pity.
What had Sali told them? That I’d been attacked?
That I wasn’t a threat, but was brought here by mistake?
What must they think of me here—a stranger among an obscure tribe, obviously not used to outsiders?
But then I remembered that Sali’s husband was an outsider.
A mission man who’d come to help and had decided to stay.
What strange things one did for love.
“Can I help?” I asked Sali after finishing my meal, to which the old woman handed me a bamboo tong.
“The stones mun heat for the oven,” she gestured to the table, brim full of raw sweet potatoes, carrots, greens, and other unidentified root vegetables and raw fish. “Tonight is a feast!” Sali announced.
We worked the ground oven, layering large banana leaves on top of coals and hot rocks, first the vegetables so the heat would steam them.
Sali showed me how to squeeze fresh coconut milk from the shaved coconut fruit and wrap the vegetables in a pouch made completely of banana leaves and palm branches.
I marveled at the workmanship and lost myself in the dinner preparations, along with several other women, and helped carry loads of food to the communal hut where tonight’s feasting would take place.
I watched the wives of the Hundi men help them dress in their body decorations, called Balisk.
They pinned fine beaded work to their underclothes and fastened cowrie shell headdresses full of feathers and plumes of grass on their heads.
Sali told me the adornment represented the men’s position in the tribe, and the ornate necklaces and headdresses showed off a family’s wealth.
Not in a bragging way, I gathered, but in a sacred gratitude for all they had been given.
The growing crowd gathered themselves for the feast. Their interactions, while respectful, lacked a certain jovial spirit I had felt so palpably with Makia.
The children certainly brought energy to the space as they darted in and out of the large open canopy of the communal house, but I couldn’t help but feel a presence of restrained joy, as if the organism of the tribe nursed a wound, or walked with a limp.
I found Sali in the kitchen, waiting for the fish to finish steaming in the ground oven, called the mumu. The old woman sipped from a small clay cup, offering me the brown liquid. “No, thank you,” I declined, unsure what the contents of the cup held.
“I’m starting early,” the old woman said. “When you are my age, you do what you want!” She cackled at her own joke and we walked out to the porch that overlooked the growing crowd and final preparations for the feast.
Hundi women carried green banana-leaf bags on top of their heads and set them on a table.
A group of Hundi men carried in hollowed logs that stood on bamboo stands.
They tested their sticks on the logs with quick pulses, emanating a musical sound in different keys, depending on where they struck it.
The warrior-dancers were beginning to warm up, jumping and twirling, testing the security of their costumes made of leaves, moss, and intricate headdresses.
“Sali,” I began, unsure of what I wanted to ask. “Tell me about the Hundi.”
“Wat you want to know, pikinini?”
What did I want to know? Up until this point the Hundi were never real people in my mind. They were the savage enemy wreaking havoc on Makia and standing in the way of the tribe’s desire to progress. Seeing them now presented a paradigm shift that left my head hurting.
“Is this the entire tribe?” I asked, noting how sparse it felt.
“Oh, there are other Hundi all over the mountain. Many villages like dis one with their family leader…but here, there are few since de fire,” the old woman’s voice held sadness.
“The fire…was it recent?” I asked. “Did it happen not so long ago?”
“Six moons or so, now.” There was silence for a couple minutes until Sali offered more. “The fire burned quietly in de ground, in de roots. Trees crumbled. Houses fell down. Many died.”
I remembered now why the fighting between the tribes began in earnest. It was after a fire broke out from draining the peatlands. Greg had said the dried peat combusted and smoldered for months, moving undetected and underground throughout the forest.
The environmentalists had a field-day blaming the Papua New Guinean government for air pollution from the smoke, thanks to their wealthy clients who wanted to use the land for profit but never considered the lives and cultures they were putting at risk.
It had all been a distant story I’d read about in the report while preparing for the mission, not a real thing concerning real people—people I now could see and touch and experience.
“Is that why the warriors fight?” Coming back from my thoughts, I watched the clay men in their tribal costumes. Their appearance would’ve been foreboding except for the way they jested with each other like brothers.
“Why do all warriors fight? For family, for freedom, for home.”
We were quiet for a while. “Why do the men wear the clay?”
“It is their way—it is always de way of the Hundi. It is their armor and their surrender…” I looked at the old woman confused, but she continued. “Death is certain for us all, pikinini, but de men go to battle covered in earth because they are already half buried.”
The feast began with music and dancing. The hollowed logs the men brought in drummed a steady, musical beat throughout the assembly.
Families sat around the edge, clapping and cheering for the men who danced in the middle.
I had yet to see Jahnu, and in fact, had not seen him since earlier, but tried not to dwell on thoughts of the Hundi chief until the dancers and the drumming abruptly stopped.