The Airmen and the Headhunters Read online

  In addition to firewood, the Dayaks would bring whatever they could find that the Yanks might like: rice, pork rind, fat, tobacco, salt, pepper, sugarcane and (in season) corn on the cob. They made special trips into the jungle at lower elevations for bananas, knowing how fond the Yanks were of them.

  Despite the Dayaks' best efforts, the airmen continued to lose weight. In the six weeks they were in Polecat Gulch, they each lost close to thirty pounds. Dizzy with hunger, they would sometimes faint if they stood up quickly.

  It was also a difficult time for the Japanese who had been sent upriver to find them. These six weeks had gone by with no results. As the four Japanese officials and thirteen heitais at Long Berang grew more frustrated, they became ruder and more demanding, slapping people in the face without warning, hitting villagers with their rattan sticks and becoming a nearly intolerable burden on the Makahanaps and the Dayaks. Sometimes when the Japanese soldiers were bored, they would pick at random a couple of Dayaks from one of the longhouses and tie them both to the same length of rope, making them fight each other with their bare fists. If one of them fell over, the heitais would beat him with a stick to make him stand up and continue fighting. When there was a clear winner, the loser would be flogged. In such conditions, the question was, Whose patience would snap first?

  Finally, the senior Japanese military officer, the taicho, said that the Americans were never going to be caught this way, that the Dayaks must be playing a game. The Americans had been sent to Long Metuil first, so he would go there himself to pick up their trail. He would bring the interpreter, Sakata, and three heitais with him, and they would make that disloyal Pangeran Lagan help them. By the time the taicho arrived at Long Metuil, though, Lagan had prudently disappeared, perhaps warned by Makahanap.

  Before the taicho left Long Berang, Makahanap heard him order the two ken kanrikans to take five soldiers and go to the Krayan District, to the village of Long Sempayang, where there was a Christian mission school and a big Lun Dayeh longhouse. The other five heitais were to stay at Long Berang, and they should not just sit there, the chief officer shouted, but must go hunting for the fugitive white soldiers with the Dayaks.

  It was easy for the local Dayaks, following the secret orders of the D.O., to lead the five Japanese soldiers still in Long Berang on a merry chase, strewn with false clues, across the nearby hills and back home again when the Japanese grew tired. It was certainly better at Long Berang with only the five Japanese there than it had been with all seventeen. But the word Makahanap was receiving from Long Metuil and Long Sempayang was that the Japanese were behaving badly. If things were not done precisely the way they wished, or sometimes for no reason at all, they would order some of the Dayaks to beat other Dayaks and then they would beat the beaters.

  One day, a messenger from Japanese administrative headquarters in Tarakan delivered sealed letters to Makahanap with instructions that they be passed on, still sealed, to the taicho and the two ken kanrikans.

  Makahanap felt he had to learn what was in those letters before sending them forward, but who could read Japanese? He worried about the sealed letters all that evening. The next morning, as he said his usual prayers next to Mama, a verse from the book of Jeremiah came back to him:

  Call unto me, and I will answer thee

  And show thee great and mighty things

  Which thou knowest not.

  Suddenly, he knew what to do.

  Along the village's only street were a few narrow, shuttered, two-story shop-houses, where Chinese traders (known in pidgin as towkays) had set up businesses in Long Berang early in the century. The towkays bought the Dayaks' produce and sold them a motley collection of inexpensive imported goods. They stocked cotton shirts, lengths of colorful cotton sarong cloth, kerosene pressure lamps, buttons, pencils, paper, cooking pots, sandals, tiny colored glass beads for ornamenting Dayak ladies' skullcaps and other odds and ends—though not many goods were available now, with maritime shipping disrupted by the war.

  Right after breakfast, Makahanap went to two of the Chinese towkays, Ah Piauw and Ah Kun, who were the most literate people in the area. Chinese and non-Chinese were rarely on friendly terms downriver but happily that was not the case upriver, in Makahanap's district. The Dayak children who came from distant longhouses to attend school at Long Berang often lodged with one or another of Long Berang's three Chinese families, in return for which the students would help load and transport trade goods up- and downriver or help in the vegetable gardens. The children of the Chinese and the Dayaks, as well as the Makahanap children, all played together and remained friends for life.

  The district officer appreciated that the Chinese were deeply conscious of their delicate position in relation to the Japanese occupiers. Any and all Borneo Chinese could be regarded as enemy aliens whenever the Japanese chose to do so. On the coast, the Japanese had seized Chinese property using that excuse. Furthermore, a Chinese-led anti-Japanese uprising in the state of North Borneo in October 1943 had not only ended disastrously for the rebels, hundreds of whom had been tortured and executed, but also left a residue of suspicion in Japanese minds about all Borneo Chinese. The Chinese were understandably careful to avoid being implicated in the effort to hide the fugitives.

  But with no other options, Makahanap brought his Chinese friends the letters from Tarakan. He watched while Ah Kun steamed the letters open. Because the Chinese written language shares many characters with written Japanese, Ah Piauw and Ah Kun were able to more or less decipher the letters' contents.

  It was just as Makahanap had feared. The Japanese headquarters in Tarakan had understood what the taicho and ken kanrikan had not: that Makahanap had fooled them. The letters, after scolding the addressees for their stupidity, instructed them to bring the Mentarang district officer and his entire family to Tarakan. As Makahanap knew, that was another way of saying that he and his family would be executed. (A favorite way to deal with disloyal subordinates was to throw them into a pit filled with sharpened stakes.) Trying not to show how unnerved he was, Makahanap burned the letters and his two Chinese friends promised to keep quiet.

  Makahanap went back to the messenger from Tarakan and told him he had arranged to have the letters delivered. In his haughtiest voice, he ordered the messenger to return to Tarakan with the news that the Americans were almost in his grasp, that the region where they were hiding had been located and that "the master in Tarakan had to be patient."

  The next day, after the Tarakan messenger had headed downstream in his long canoe, Makahanap got word to Pangeran Lagan in his hiding place. The headman arrived secretly at Long Berang late the next night and made no attempt to hide his feelings. He had heard from his longhouse people that the Japanese were showing no respect, not even to people of rank. He said that the Japanese had threatened to take as hostages eight men from Long Metuil until Pangeran Lagan gave himself up and led them to the Americans.

  They were also threatening to interfere with the women. As Makahanap knew, unmarried women in an animist longhouse were free to sleep with any unmarried men they liked, but no one could force them; that was unacceptable.

  Moreover, Lagan continued, the Japanese were treating the longhouse people as one would a dog—actually worse, because hunters loved their dogs. It could not be borne any longer. The D.O. sympathized and told his friend of the letters he had intercepted.

  Early the next morning, when the pangeran left to return to Long Metuil, the two men were in tacit agreement that the present situation could not be allowed to continue. As these two old colleagues exchanged their ritual phrases of farewell, they did not need to say more.

  The same day, January 18, the taicho came back to Long Berang, bringing with him, as his aide, one of the Japanese soldiers who had been with him at Long Metuil. The chief officer asked to see a letter from headquarters in Tarakan that he had been told would be waiting for him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Pangeran Forces the Pace

  By the morni
ng of January 18, despite rain so heavy that it threw a thick curtain across his path, Pangeran Lagan was back in Long Metuil. He learned quickly that the Japanese visitors had gotten very drunk on borak the previous evening. Made indiscreet by the alcohol, they had let slip the fact that they planned to take eight hostages, some of them the pangeran's nephews, to Long Berang within the next day or two. The previous night, Lagan had reached a tacit agreement with the D.O. on what had to be done. And now he knew when he had to do it.

  He called his best men together. He said that they could not tolerate their Japanese visitors' behavior any longer. It was time to take heads. There was no time to consult the omens the way they had done in the time of Lagan's youth. Nor was there time for erecting a sacred shrine, where permission could be asked of the protecting spirits by the village shaman. This time they would have to act immediately, in stealth, without even consulting the longhouse elders. Lagan and his warriors paused only to put on cloth sarongs over their loincloths to hide their knives underneath.

  The Japanese/Malay interpreter Sakata and the two remaining heitais were moving slowly that morning, thanks to the effects of the borak. They were cooking a late breakfast when Lagan and his longhouse warriors rushed into their hut with a whoop, swinging their machetes. The heads of the two heitais fell to the ground by the fire. Blood spurted out of their necks. Sakata was wounded but leaped from the hut into the river. He did not get far. Wading close behind, one of the Dayaks stabbed him from the rear while another lopped off his head, and the river turned dark with blood.

  With those few sword strokes, the Long Metuil animists had revived the sacred rite of headhunting after a gap of more than a decade. Or had they? As Pangeran Lagan and his men were anxiously aware, this morning's head-taking, though providing a welcome supply of fresh heads, which had long been missing from important feasts, was not according to customary law.

  In the earlier days of headhunting, the object had been (according to a leading ethnographer) "to hunt, get and bring back one or more heads; normally one per operation." But the purpose had never been to decapitate a specific person. The idea had been simply to take a head from a rival group or one that had caused trouble to one's own longhouse, and use its spiritual powers for the good of the longhouse.

  But, in the final decades before headhunting was effectively banned, the rivalry and revenge motives faded; by the 1920s, obtaining a head for an occasion that demanded it, such as the funeral rites of an aristocrat, had become an end in itself. Any head would do, from any other longhouse not closely tied to one's own or not on the same river branch.

  But today, it had been done simply to kill enemies. This was not really headhunting, and some of the longhouse elders expressed their concern that the appropriate rites had not been carried out beforehand. Might not these heads, obtained without the correct ceremonial preparations, bring misfortune to the longhouse?

  Lagan agreed that all they could do now was see that the rites for bringing a head back to the longhouse were observed. Such rites were protective measures, meant to ensure that a head's powers did not cause trouble in its new home.

  So, in conformance with the old rituals, the heads were washed and wiped dry on the ground near the river. In former days, the longhouse girls would form a circle around an earthen, crocodile-shaped mound and pass the severed head from one dancer to the next. Normally, the head would then be stuck on a pole and smoked, a process that might take a week. This time, Lagan insisted that the head feast take place sooner, before the Japanese had time to learn of the deaths and mount a reconnaissance party from Long Berang.

  Without enough time to smoke the heads properly, the Dayaks peeled them to keep down the odor and make the heads ready to be carried about in the festive procession that would follow in the next few days, after the guests arrived.

  As usual after a head-taking, the elders of Long Metuil sent out word by runners to all the surrounding villages to come to a head feast. Normally, the runners would have brought knotted strings made of vines to the guest longhouse headmen, with a knot to be untied each night, the last knot to be opened the night before the feast should begin, perhaps five or ten days hence. This time, the Long Metuil hosts asked their guests to come the following day.

  This shortening of the interval between head-taking and feast brought problems for the women of the longhouse. Even before the runners had left, the women had started preparing vast amounts of borak. Soon, the longhouse was filled with the sour stench of rice that was first half burned and then spread out on mats to cool. When the rice mash was cool enough, the women sprinkled a powdery, ginger-root yeast on it and put the mixture in giant, high-shouldered Chinese or Thai dragon jars made of porcelain or earthenware.

  While making the borak, the other women followed the lead of Lagan's wife. She was, both by protocol and in fact, the best borak maker in Long Metuil. This time, though, she was under more pressure than usual to produce adequate amounts of the brew. She had been more than willing to cook secret meals to be delivered to the airmen in their hiding place, and she was in full agreement with her husband on the need to rid the village of the Japanese. But with guests coming so soon to the head feast, there would not be enough time for the borak to brew. Fermentation normally took four or five days; this brew could not possibly be ready to drink in one day. She asked the other women to check out the longhouse's current supplies. If there was not enough borak, the longhouse would be disgraced. Perhaps they could get additional stocks from longhouses nearby, though it would be hard for anyone to carry a lot of it. The borak itself was heavy, not to mention the great jars, many of which weighed more than seventy-five pounds empty. Besides, people often used their best jars to make the borak, and nobody would be willing to bring them to another longhouse. Such jars were the wealth of a longhouse, worth a fortune in trade, or used to settle scores if members of one longhouse had caused the death of someone from another village. One could just hope that there was enough brew on hand until the new borak was ready to drink. A good party ought to last at least four or five days.

  Normally, the last day of the party was the proper time for a favored guest—often the chief of another longhouse—to be invited to kill the biggest water buffalo available. The hosts thereby paid off a previous debt of hospitality or obliged the honored guest to reciprocate soon. Lagan's wife looked around at the full jars. The new borak would be ready for the slaughter of the buffalo.

  On the morning of January 19, more than two months after their unceremonious landing in Borneo, the Yanks in Polecat Gulch were awakened by the youth they called Herman and another young man. Their visitors managed to explain to Phil and the others that they had killed three Japanese and it was now safe to return to Long Metuil. That day, Phil recorded in his diary: "We ate a hearty breakfast of rice, root, bananas and sugarcane, packed our belongings and said goodbye to 'Polecat Gulch' and 'Club Borneo.' It was breathtaking to reach the top of the first ridge where we could see for a great distance, without having to look straight up."

  It was a hard walk, uphill and down. As Phil and the other flyers had long noticed, the Lun Dayeh never went around a mountain if they could go up it and down the other side. Going through tall brush, the Lun Dayeh wanted to see as far ahead in all directions as they could. But if they had been up on a plateau where they could see far, they would still have wanted, whenever possible, to arrange their route so that they could climb to the top of any ridge that had a tafa (memorial swathe) cut through it. This square of space, cut into the profile of a hilltop or mountain peak, was a favorite Lun Dayeh way of honoring their noble dead. It was cut by machetes wielded by the fittest (and often the drunkest) of the longhouse men after they rushed up to the top of the peak on the last day of a funeral feast. To walk through it was to honor the dead nobleman and also the longhouse that had hosted the sumptuous feast that had preceded the making of the tafa.

  The Yanks were so weak they could barely walk, but they could hear drums and gongs and voice
s shouting long before they reached Long Metuil. Some of the Lun Dayeh from longhouses miles away were there to greet them, and the Yanks had to shake hands for what seemed like at least ten minutes. The neighbors had all bathed in the river and changed into fresh clothes after arriving, and they were in a festive mood.

  The airmen were first shown where the three Japanese had been attacked, where two of them had lost their heads. The blood was still fresh on the hut's floor and the fire was still smoldering down by the river, where the Dayaks had burned the bodies. The airmen had never been that close to enemy dead before. The smell of the burned flesh almost made them ill. After smelling that, bathing in the river did not seem to get them really clean, but it refreshed and cooled their bruised, leech-covered bodies and aching leg muscles.

  The Americans were then invited up the notched ladder to the main longhouse floor where they were presented with their best meal in weeks: rice, sugarcane, bananas, pork and what Phil described as "some kind of fruit [a yellowish squashlike vegetable known as a timun dayak, or Dayak cucumber] which tasted like a cross between a cucumber and a watermelon." Four chairs (no doubt made for the use of prewar Dutch colonial officials) were found for the Yanks and, once seated, the airmen were shown the Japanese souvenirs their hosts had acquired along with the heads: pistols, rifles, bayonets, money, gold teeth, cartridge boxes, pencils and clothing.

  The airmen, dazzled by the noise and the presence of so many people, sat and watched while the celebration preparations continued. From the veranda, they saw a pig being slaughtered below. This was done without any ceremony, except for each man's dipping his finger in the blood and touching his chest, seemingly a gesture of courtesy to the dead animal. A few days later, they may have witnessed the ceremonial sacrifice of a water buffalo. The slaughter of such a beast by the highest-ranking guest would take place out of doors, in an amphitheater with elegantly carved wooden seats circling the post to which the beast was tied.