The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (48 page)

That was an act of faith on our part: from what we saw of the terrain, it would have been utterly impossible to walk back to the airstrip 37 miles distant. While I had brought along a small radio, in that hilly terrain my radio could not receive or transmit messages from or to the helicopter base 150 miles away. Instead, as a precaution in case of an accident or illness requiring an emergency evacuation, I arranged for a small airplane whose scheduled flight path took it not too far from our campsite to deviate from its path and circle our camp every five days. We could try to talk with the pilot by radio to confirm that we were OK, and we agreed that we would place a bright red air mattress on the landslide if we did have an emergency.

We spent all of the second day constructing our camp. Our happiest discovery was that there were still no signs of people: if nomads had been alerted by our helicopter to try to track us down, it wasn’t happening yet. Large birds were flying in and out of the gully, undisturbed by our presence a few dozen yards away. That suggested that the birds were unafraid of people, and provided further evidence that nomads didn’t visit this area.

On the third day I was at last ready to climb to the peak, following my New Guinea friends Gumini and Paia, who were cutting trail. Initially, we climbed 500 feet up out of our landslide gully onto the ridge, which bore a small patch of grass and shrubs with low trees, I assumed because of an older landslide that was now becoming overgrown. Climbing along the ridge, we soon entered closed forest and worked our way upwards in an easy climb. Bird-watching was now exciting, as I began to see and hear montane species, including a couple of uncommon and little-known ones such as the Perplexing Scrub-Wren and the Obscure Honeyeater. When we finally reached the summit pyramid, it was indeed very steep, as it had appeared from the air. But we were able to pull ourselves up it by holding on to tree roots. On its top I spotted a White-breasted Fruit-Dove and a
Hooded Pitohui, two montane species that were absent below. Apparently this peak was just high enough to support a few individuals of each species. But I hadn’t met some other montane species that are common and noisy at this elevation elsewhere in New Guinea: perhaps they really were absent because the area of this mountain was too small to support a viable population of them. I sent Paia back to camp, while Gumini and I walked slowly down our trail, birding as we went.

So far, I was delighted and relieved. Everything was going well. The problems that I had feared hadn’t materialized. We had succeeded in finding a landing place for our helicopter in the forest, made a comfortable camp, and cleared an easy short trail to the summit. Best of all, we had found no signs of visits by nomads. The 17 days remaining to us would be ample time to establish which montane bird species were present and which weren’t. Gumini and I descended our new trail in good spirits and emerged from the forest into the small open patch that I had taken to be an old landslide clearing on the ridge above our camp.

Suddenly, Gumini stopped, bent over, and stared closely at something on the ground. When I asked what he found so interesting, he just said, “Look,” and he pointed. What he was pointing to was nothing more than a small stalk or tree seedling a couple of feet high, with a few leaves on it. I told him, “That’s just a very young tree. See, there are lots of other young trees growing up here in this clearing. What’s so special about this one?”

Gumini answered, “No, it’s not a young tree. It’s a stick stuck in the ground.” I disagreed: “What makes you think so? It’s just a seedling growing up out of the ground.” In reply, Gumini grasped it and pulled. It lifted out easily, without the need for any effort to break or pull out roots. When he had lifted it out, we saw that there were no roots at the base of the stick, which was broken off cleanly. I thought that perhaps Gumini’s pulling had snapped its roots, but he dug down around the hole left by the stick and showed me that there weren’t any broken-off roots. It must instead be a broken-off small stick inserted into the ground, as he had insisted. How had it gotten there and become inserted?

We both looked overhead at the small trees 15 feet tall above us. I suggested, “A branch must have broken off that tree overhead, and fallen down and gotten stuck in the ground.” But Gumini objected, “If that branch broke and fell, it’s not likely to have landed with the broken-off end
pointing exactly down and the leaves pointing up. And it’s a light branch, not heavy enough to drive itself several inches into the ground. It looks to me like some person broke it off and inserted it with the sharp broken end into the ground and the leaves upwards, as a sign.”

I felt a shiver and my skin flushing on the back of my neck, as I thought of Robinson Crusoe cast ashore on his supposedly uninhabited island, suddenly coming across a human footprint. Gumini and I sat down, picked up and held the stick, and looked around us. For an hour we sat there, talking to each other about the possibilities. If a person really did this, why isn’t there any other sign of human activity, just this broken stick? If a person did plant it, how recently was he here to do it? It wasn’t today, because the leaves are already slightly wilted. But it wasn’t a long time ago either, because the leaves are still green, not shriveled and dry. Is this open area really an overgrown landslide clearing as I had assumed? Maybe, instead, it’s an old garden that has become overgrown. I kept coming back to my belief that a nomad would not have walked in there a few days ago from a hut 27 miles away, broken and planted a stick, and walked off without leaving any other signs. Gumini kept insisting that a broken stick wasn’t likely to insert itself into the ground, so as to mimic what a person does.

We walked back the short distance into camp, where the other New Guineans were, and told them what we had found. Nobody else had seen any hint of human presence. Now that I had gotten into this paradise about which I had been dreaming for a year, I wasn’t going to put out the red mattress as an emergency sign for evacuation on the first overflight three days later, just because there was one unexplained stick in the ground. That would be carrying constructive paranoia too far. There was probably some natural explanation for that stick, I told myself. Maybe it really had happened to fall vertically with enough force to insert itself, or maybe we had overlooked its roots broken off when we pulled it out. But Gumini was an experienced woodsman, one of the very best whom I had met in New Guinea, and he wasn’t likely to misread signs.

All that we could do was to be very careful, remain alert for other signs of people, and not do anything else to give away our presence to any nomads who might be lurking nearby. Our four noisy helicopter flights to establish our camp could be expected to have tipped off any nomad within
dozens of miles. We would probably soon know if there were any. As precautions, we didn’t yell to each other from a distance. I made a point of being especially quiet when I went below camp to bird-watch at low elevation where any nomads were most likely to be. So that our campfire smoke wouldn’t give away our presence from afar, we reserved making a big fire for our main cooking until after dark. Eventually, after we found some large monitor lizards prowling around our camp, I asked my New Guinea friends to make bows and arrows for defense. They complied, but only half-heartedly—perhaps because freshly cut green wood wouldn’t make a good bow and arrow, or because four green bows and arrows in the hands of just my four New Guineans wouldn’t be of much use if there really were a band of angry nomads around.

As the days went on, no more mysterious broken sticks turned up, and there were no suspicious signs of humans. Instead, we saw tree kangaroos during the day, unafraid and not running away at the sight of us. Tree kangaroos are New Guinea’s largest native mammals and the first target of native hunters, so in inhabited areas they quickly become shot out. Surviving individuals learn to be active only at night and are very shy and flee if seen. We also encountered unafraid cassowaries, New Guinea’s biggest flightless bird, which is also a prime target of hunters and also rare and very shy in areas with people. The big pigeons and parrots in the area were also unafraid. Everything pointed to this being a location whose animals had never experienced human hunters or visitors.

When our helicopter came back and evacuated us on schedule 19 days after we had arrived, the mystery of the broken stick was still unresolved. We had seen no other possible signs of humans than that one stick. In retrospect, I think it’s unlikely that nomads from the lowlands many miles away climbed up thousands of feet, made a garden, came back a year or two later, planted one stick by coincidence a couple of days before our arrival so that the leaves were still green, and left no other trace of themselves. While I can’t explain how that stick got there, my guess is that Gumini’s constructive paranoia was in this case unjustified.

But I can certainly understand how Gumini acquired his attitude. His area had come under government control recently. Until then, traditional fighting had been going on. Paia, 10 years older than Gumini, had grown up making stone tools. In Gumini’s and Paia’s society, people who weren’t
super-attentive to signs of strangers in the forest didn’t live long. It does no harm to be suspicious of sticks not readily explained naturally, to spend an hour examining and discussing each one, and then to remain alert for other sticks. Before my canoe accident, I would have dismissed Gumini’s reaction as exaggerated, just as I had dismissed as exaggerated the reactions of New Guineans to the dead tree under which I had camped earlier in my New Guinea career. But I had now spent enough time in New Guinea to understand Gumini’s reaction. It’s better to pay attention 1,000 times to sticks that turn out to have fallen naturally into an unnatural-looking position, than to make the fatal mistake of ignoring one stick that really did get placed by strange humans. Gumini’s constructive paranoia was an appropriate reaction of an experienced, cautious New Guinean.

While the underlying caution that I term constructive paranoia has struck me frequently among New Guineans, I don’t want to leave the misimpression that they are thereby paralyzed and hesitant to act. To begin with, there are cautious and incautious New Guineans, just as there are cautious and incautious Americans. Then, too, the cautious ones are perfectly able to weigh risks and to act. They do some things that they know are risky, but that they nevertheless choose to do repeatedly and with appropriate care. That’s because doing those things is essential for their obtaining food and succeeding in life, or because they place value on doing them. I’m reminded of a line attributed to the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky, about the risks of attempting difficult hockey shots that might miss the net: “100% of the shots you don’t take don’t go in!”

My New Guinea friends would understand Gretzky’s quip, and would add two footnotes to it. First, a closer analogy with traditional life would be if you were actually penalized for missing a shot—but you would still take shots, albeit more cautiously. Second, a hockey player can’t wait forever for the perfect opportunity to take a shot, because a hockey game has a time limit of one hour. Similarly, traditional lives include time limits: you’ll die of thirst within a few days if you don’t take risks in finding water,
you’ll starve within a few weeks if you don’t take risks in obtaining food, and you’ll die within less than a century no matter what you do. In fact, traditional lifespans are on the average considerably shorter than those of modern First World people, because of uncontrollable factors such as diseases, droughts, and enemy attacks. No matter how cautious a person in a traditional society is, he or she is likely to die before age 55 anyway, and that may mean having to tolerate higher risk levels than in First World societies with an average lifespan of 80—just as Wayne Gretzky would have to take more shots if a hockey game lasted only 30 minutes instead of one hour. Here are three examples of calculated risks that traditional people accept but that horrify us:

!Kung hunters, armed with nothing more than small bows and poisoned arrows, wave sticks and shout to drive groups of lions or hyenas off of animal carcasses. When a hunter succeeds in wounding an antelope, the small arrow does not kill by impact: instead, the prey runs off, the hunters track it, and by the time that the prey has collapsed from the slow-acting poison’s effect many hours or a day later, lions or hyenas are likely to have found the carcass first. Hunters who are not prepared to drive those predators off carcasses are guaranteed to starve. Few things impress me as more suicidal than the thought of walking up to a group of feasting lions while shaking a stick to intimidate them. Nevertheless, !Kung hunters do it dozens of times a year, for decades. They attempt to minimize their risks by challenging sated lions with visibly bulging bellies and likely to be ready to retreat, and by not challenging hungry or emaciated lions that evidently just discovered the carcass and are likely to stand their ground.

Women in the Fore area of New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands move from their natal village to their husband’s village at the time of marriage. When married women later go back to their natal village to visit their parents and other blood relatives, they may travel either with their husbands or else alone. In traditional times of chronic warfare, a woman’s traveling alone involved the risk of her being raped or killed while traversing enemy territory. Women attempted to minimize those risks by seeking protection from other relatives living in the territory traversed. However, the dangers and the protection were both difficult to predict. A woman might be attacked in revenge for a killing carried out a generation ago; or
her protectors might be outnumbered by those seeking revenge, or might acknowledge justice in the demand for revenge.

For instance, the anthropologist Ronald Berndt related the story of a young woman named Jumu, from Ofafina village, who went to marry a man at Jasuvi. For Jumu later to return with her child to visit her parents and brothers at Ofafina required traversing the Ora district, where a woman named Inusa had recently been killed by Ofafina men. Hence Jumu’s Jasuvi in-laws advised her to seek protection from an Ora male relative named Asiwa, who also happened to be a brother’s son of the dead Inusa. Unfortunately, after finding Asiwa in his garden, Jumu was detected by some Ora men, who tricked and pressured Asiwa into allowing one of them to rape Jumu in Asiwa’s presence, and then killed Jumu and her child. Asiwa was apparently only half-hearted in his efforts to protect Jumu, because he felt that the killing of Jumu and her child constituted legitimate revenge for Inusa’s killing. As for why Jumu made what proved to be the fatal mistake of entrusting herself to Asiwa’s protection, Berndt commented, “Fighting, revenge, and counter-revenge are so commonplace that people become accustomed to this state of affairs.” That is, Jumu was unwilling to abandon forever the hope of seeing her parents again, and she accepted and tried to minimize the risks involved.