And God Gave Man Dominion

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4820, 7 August 1939, Page 3

And God Gave Man Dominion

(Copyright.)

A true story of the head-hunters of the mighty waters of the Sepik River, Mandated Territory of New Guinea. Description and locality true to life. On this day, Bth September, 1906, word has just been radioed through of Recruiter Gough, and four of his native carriers being killed by the tribesmen close by here.

sun was sinking; the communal house, though built high on piles, was already half-cloaked in gloom. The people, squatting in family groups on the limbon floor, still gobbled their food. From outside came a weird droning which would soon fill the barn-like building. Even so the smoking fires on the clay hearths would hold the mosquitoes in check until night enveloped all.

Lying upon the floor were long, caterpillar-like things, resembling pythons of the mammoth age—sleeping baskets of finely woven cane; most of them were fashioned long enough to shelter a family with each person lying head to feet. Leering from the shadowed masks were mansized masks of terrifying aspect. Horrid weapons were stacked everywhere.

Men, women, and children—all were listening, as they ever do. They listen subconsciously, as we breathe. They listen for news!

It is always coming to them, though a white man often would not recognise it. It comes, faint sometimes as a sigh in the wind, from all directions, day and night, moaning over vast areas of water and grass; it throbs; comes as a tremor diminishing into distance; comes from the invisible mountains, from the unmeasured swamps. At other times its reverberations, harsh and sinister, boom out their message over village after village.

The garramuts speak—the giant garramuts of the Middle Sepik. By. the tone these people know from which \fillage a garramut booms; they read its message of fighting, of dancing, of initiation rites or festal ceremonies—of matters which interest the tens of thousands of savage men who listen day and night on the Middle and Upper Sepik, waters of mys-' tery. Even that hated, dreaded supernatural creature, the white man; that curse which with ever increasing authority is endeavouring to stop head-hunting, cannot creep up the great brown river without every stone-age village receiving a warning. And from the river villages the news is passed across the swamps to those villages lying out amongst the grass that the white man has never seen.

Suddenly, with one accord, these in their communal house rushed to the platform beyond the entrance. Kumanga leapt there first, his eyes shining, his mouth drining in the news. For this that they heard now was the news that the Sepik loves, tis news that came in deep, sinister tone. It was the knell of death; it told of the taking of heads. At Parambei, only eight miles away, their warriors had just brought in five heads.

As Kumunga listened, his broad, savage face was transformed, his habitual scowl vanished. He listened breathlessly, with a child-like eagerness lighting his face. A strong man this, young Kumunga, but not blooded yet. In tremulous sympathy his big chest rose to each roll of the garramut. His arms, big with their swelling shoulder muscles, hung to his flanks, where the big-palmed hands clenched and relaxed to the rhythm of the garramut. His body was strength personified enlivened now by the blood-lust gleaming from his eyes. He looked what he was, a wild man of the swamps, scenting blood. As the village listened clouds of mosquitoes rose from the grass and mud-pools beneath the houses. Many of the villagers, desirous of the last throb of the news, clung to the platform, thrashing their bodies with their millet-like reed whisks. A young girl peered covertly, reading Kumunga’s face. She measured his proportions. She gloried in his strength but she breathed deeper yet to the fierce lust in his eyes. Soon he would wear the flying-fox skin! With a wild beating at her heart she gloated on her hope. The crowd crept back into the house. Kumunga only remained staring into the night. The mosquitoes had come, had taken over the whole earth. The families made wild rushes in the dark. Fathers called to laggard mothers, for it is the mother

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with her suckling babe who crawls into the sleeping-basket first. She creeps right to the end, closely followed by the man, who butts her with his head if she be unduly slow. After the man his eldest son. The last to crawl in is responsible for folding the end under; and the spirits help him should the father wake in the night to the torture of being eaten alive!

Kumunga could not bear the pests a moment longer. On noiseless feet he padded across to Warminga’s cubicle. Hanging up here was a loin-covering, a flying-fox skin. Kumunga stroked it with tingling fingers. For this was the emblem of a head-hunter, the sign for all to see that he who wore it had taken the head of a man.

An altercation arose from Kumusa’s sleeping-basket. Growling as he brushed his pest-bitten body, Kumunga gave the night entirely to the mosquitoes, and groped through the darkness to his own sleeping-basket. For each young man possesses a basket of his own.

Furious grew the row from Kumusa’s corner, where the man’s angry growlings were over-ridden by the screaming vituperetion of Shabungun, his ten-year-old daughter. Eager to be the first into the family shelter her brothers had pulled her out by the legs and left to her the responsibility of closing the basket; and before she had recoverd her balance the family pig had rushed in. Shabungun was now struggling to pull him out by the hind legs while he kicked and squealed his protests. Her brothers and sisters meanwhile were kicking down the length of the basket as their father was kicking at his family from its higher reaches, and roaring because the hungry mosquitoes were swarming in upon him.

The frenzied child had the pig almost out of the basket when with a practised kick it sent her flying amongst the cooking-pots whilst it scrambled up the baskets over the bodies of the younger boys until it shoved its snout hard up against the eldest brother.

With a scream of anger Shabungun picked herself up and writhed her skinny body far up the basket. The cunning pig, lying snug, had hunched his legs tightly under his body. The girl did not attempt to grip them within those tight-packed quarters. She clawed over her struggling brothers and howled as she wormed her head underneath the beast; then turaing up her mouth she fastened her terrible teeth into his groin. Immediately the house rang to a crescendo of piercing squeals. The girl held on despite the family' kicks until the pig, feeling that no relief would come by staying there, began to back out, his squeals made more piercing as the child quickened his decision with vicious bites and tugs. Men snarled through their baskets, demanding peace; youths howled advice to Shabungun’s brothers to kick her out; above all, Kumusa the father roared the unmentionable things he would do to his daughter should she cripple his pig.

The long sleeping-basket convulsed itself to the centre of the floor like a gigantic serpent in travail; it collided with the family-basket of Kambam, and then bedlam broke loose.

But Shabungun ejected her pig and, giving it a parting bite, dived into the end of the basket and drew the opening close. Making a ball of her body she took in silence the kicks coming to her from the brothers, who were receiving theirs from the brothers higher up, who collected theirs from the father, who was receiving share in abuse from all quarters ofthe great barn. Then vigorously the family set to work at killing the mosquitoes that had swarmed into the basket during the brawl. Until that was accomplished there could be no sleep. Of course, the fault was with Kumusa’s wife. She would have babies. Other families had room enough for their pigs to sleep with them. But Kumusas basket was not made to hold the world!

At last sleep won, even the grunts of a disconsolate pig died down as it smuggled in between two baskets for warmth.

But Kumunga lay awake. His mind saw only the flying-fox skin. What honour must be the portion of a man who earned the right to wear the skin! He stretched his great arms against the basket in an agony of self-pity that he who was so strong had not yet been given the chance to kill a man.

With the morning' came the exhilaration of a new day, bringing with it a mystic breath that was the sighing of breezes over many miles of water-grown grasses. After all the families had eaten, the women trooped away in laughing gossip to the fishing-nets, while the men strolled with guffaw and mimic spearthrowing to the gardens, as is the custom on the Middle Sepik. But Kumunga’s garden-plot was well tended, and being free of ceremonial duties he idled out past the gardens, glorying animal-like in the sunshine among the betel-nut palms, his feet warming to the ground, his eyes gazing across the golden grass that rippled into distance. At the swamp edge he untethered his canoe, thrust with the paddle and shot away through the grass-choked water. The impatience of youth, the urge to prove himself a man, filled him with a passion to measure his strength against anything! ,

He put his weignt on the paddle, making the tiny vessel cut through the grass and shoot out on to open water speckled dull green with lilyleaves. Grassy islets floated there, some with trees growing from their silt-covered mass of matted roots and decaying vegetation. Twice he jabbed savagely at the rough-tipped snout of a crocodile as it rose from the lily-leaves. He lived so close to the animal kingdom • that he knew just where to strike to hurt. He jabbed again and laughed as a tail thrashed up from the water while he shot his canoe well out of the way of vengeance. From distant Parambei came the boom of garramuts; Kumunga listened with envy and desire. The village was calling its people to the ceremonial dances accorded the victors in yesterday’s hunt. Kumunga dared not venture near that'village of more cultured people —they would have his head in a twinkling. With sulky lip he poled his canoe slowly forward. He could not understand what was amiss. He felt man enough to hug the world. Yet it had no place for him. Miserably he poled on, his prow rasping gently over the broad lily-leaves. Gliding around a root-girded islet, his eyes fell on a slab of grey in the sunlight. Now, crocodiles swarm in those mighty waterways. They are as familiar as pigs and babies to the swamp men who trap them, kill and eat them—hnd, occasionally, are eaten by them. Kumunga dragged on his pole, snaking the canoe behind the sleeping creature. Kumunga measured its length, his heart quickening. Was he man enough to tackle the thing, alone; with his hands?

The crocodile was seven feet long. Kumunga looked at the ridged back, the serrated tail, the short stubby legs, the long tapering snout. Drawing a great breath he shot the canoe forward, then with a flying leap he straddled the beast and gripped its pointed snout, wrenching the upper jaw with a sideways twist that locked the snout under his left armpit, while his left arm arm strained to dislocate the lower jaw. His legs were dug deep in the mud under the beast’s belly, his knees drawn hard in behind its forelegs. , For a moment the saurian lay motionless, its eyes creased; then as its back collapsed its tail was thrown up in shocked agony. Frantically it scratched mud, struggling to gain leverage, frantically it lashed with its tail to smash this thing that was breaking it. .• But as Kumunga wrenched the snout backwards the tail vainly thrashed the mud while its forepaws harmlessly clawed mid-air. Kumunga thrilled to the struggle as the coarse body strained between his gripping knees. Bunching his great muscles, he thrust and heaved, mingling his breath with the steaming breath of the beast. Its belly rumbled to Kumunga’s ecstasy as he forced wide open the slobbering throat that all the sky might fall in. Mud spattered the grass and mingled with the water as the crocodile writhed to turn and rush into the stream. But the man-animal pressing down its back pulled against its jaws all the harder while its forepaws and hind legs and tail vainly clawed and thrashed for leverage; it roared like a stricken bull as its lower jaw was wrenched from its socket.

Then Kumunga sprang clear, laughing as the thing writhed towards the water and a lingering death. Leaping to the canoe he seized his lirnbon spear and rammed it down the gaping throat Filled with a singing pride such as but few civilised men may experience, he raced to collect the tribe that they should witness this sign of his manhood.