The Airmen and the Headhunters Page 5

  When William started to protest about the risk to them all, Mama refused to be alarmed. Instead, having listened to his arguments without comment, she now urged William to rely on his own good sense in handling the Japanese. She knew he could do it. After all, he had been a senior administrative official of the region for more than four years and had shown a great ability to judge character, even in foreigners. She argued that in dealing with Dayaks, both animist and Christian, his instincts had proved sound in determining whom to trust, how people would behave. Now, despite his doubts, he was proving just as skillful with the Japanese. His new bosses, they were leaving him alone, weren't they, to administer his district?

  Makahanap took heart from Mama's remarks. He suddenly realized that he did, indeed, know precisely how to handle his Japanese supervisor at Malinau, whom he judged to be both cowardly and ambitious. When dealing with any supervisor, Makahanap had always found it advantageous to appear more stupid and less well informed than his boss. But especially this supervisor, the ken kanrikan, must get all the credit, whatever the circumstance. If Makahanap kept that in mind, he could manage the man perfectly.

  He had little time to plan. In all probability, the Japanese had already learned of the plane crash. Fortunately, it took three times longer to go upriver than downriver. That meant he could safely count on the Japanese not arriving in Long Berang for at least a few days more. The thing to do was to use that time wisely. He left Mama and went back to the office.

  Blinking his eyes against the shimmering brightness above, he stood on the office steps, a slight and slender light brown-skinned man whose coarse, curly hair, betraying his Celebes origins, was thinning. He was barefooted and dressed for everyday chores in a dingy white shirt threadbare from frequent washing and an old pair of wide-legged tan drill shorts. As he was well aware, he would not have cut an impressive figure in the Netherlands East Indies capital, Batavia. But he knew he was a person of great influence here among the Dayaks.

  Makahanap and his family had arrived in Long Berang in late 1937, charged with taking over the mission school. A year earlier, his predecessor had tried but failed to start a school there.

  In early January 1938, the Dutch D.O. once again sent out messages to the longhouse leaders ordering parents to send their children to the school. It was then that Makahanap gave proof that he had found his true calling. He convinced the D.O. to ask the parents to come along that first day of school, and to bring with them the tools to build a schoolroom and a small house for the new teacher, his wife and their little daughters Mientje and Rika to live in.

  Construction from local materials was one area where these Dayaks excelled, and they came from longhouses all along the various branches of the Mentarang, bringing twenty-five of their daughters, fifty-five of their sons and their machetes. They all worked together to build an open-sided schoolroom—with a pitched roof of woven leaves and mats, supported by wooden posts above a raised plank floor—and a little hutlike house next door, both buildings slightly raised aboveground, in case of floods. Within a couple of days, the buildings were ready for use and the parents left their children in the Makahanaps' care with mutual expressions of satisfaction. The Dayak pupils and their parents by then had begun to call William Makahanap Ama (Papa) and his wife, Theresia Manis, Mama. The names stuck.

  By September 1940, when the Netherlands East Indies (N.E.I.) government made Makahanap the D.O. for the Mentarang District, he had become so loved and respected that he could count on the local people to do virtually anything he asked. He felt that his primary responsibility was to keep the welfare of the people of his district always in mind, an enlightened attitude he had come to acquire under the guidance of the Kemah Injil missionaries, American and Canadian pastors of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, who had made clear to him that the Dayaks must be treated with genuine respect—an idea not current in the Dutch colonial schools in which the Makahanaps had been educated.

  The Dutch, though they had been the colonial masters of the southeastern two-thirds of Borneo for a hundred years, had paid almost no attention to this part of their tropical empire. Borneo was the third-biggest island in the world, bigger than England, Spain and Portugal put together, but it was sparsely populated and its interior lacked an obvious source of riches. To the best of Makahanap's knowledge, the Dutch had waited until at least the 1920s before assigning a handful of colonial administrators to Borneo, most of them scattered along the coast, where there was oil. They had left the interior uninterfered with, preferring to lavish their attention on more profitable islands. Proud as Makahanap was to have been one of the few "natives" to be named a district officer by the colonial government, he knew the Dutch would never have left a district in Java, Sumatra or the Moluccas in the hands of an East Indian like himself, no matter how Christian, conscientious or competent. And probably not even a district in Borneo, in peacetime.

  Long Berang's reason for being the district seat was that it was the authorized place for the Dayaks of two East Borneo districts—Mentarang and Krayan—to sell their forest products, under the direct supervision of the district officer. When the D.O. declared a market day, the sleepy little hamlet was transformed. Hundreds of people wearing tattoos, loincloths and little else would appear. They came with woven reed baskets hanging from rattan poles balanced across their backs. The baskets carried heavy loads of rattan, cakes of damar resin, balls of wild rubber sap, camphor, snake gall, various parts of monkeys and orangutans wanted by Chinese for use in their traditional medicine and, of course, surplus hill rice. Those nights, the usually empty Dayak rest house would pulsate with the sounds of Dayaks chattering, laughing, preparing dinner and occasionally dancing to the beat of drums and gongs.

  The next morning, Makahanap gave a Dayak messenger a brief, businesslike report of the plane crash. It included word of the appearance of some American airmen in his district. He told the messenger to deliver it to the ken kanrikan at Malinau Town.

  He then hastened upstream to Long Kasurun accompanied by Christiaan, Yakal, Busar and Busar's two companions. Despite his worries, Makahanap enjoyed being in a perahu on the wide Mentarang. Taking their cue from Christiaan, who was aware of his stepfather's preoccupation, the normally ebullient Dayaks soon gave up trying to point out sights to the D.O. and engage his attention the way they usually did.

  Makahanap appreciated the quiet. This stretch of the Mentarang was almost the only place in this part of East Borneo where the dense vegetation gave way for more than a few yards, allowing an uninterrupted view of the sky and a chance to appreciate how high the giant trees were. Makahanap could pick out the distinctive summits of various mountains, some marked with a square, empty space (tafa) where the Lun Dayeh had cut away all the brush to make a natural monument to a dead nobleman. He cared less for the nearer view. Looking at all these different shades of green around him, he could barely distinguish one plant from another. The Lun Dayeh, he knew, would be eager to point out which plants to use to make roofing, siding, fishnets or sleeping mats, which ferns were edible and which vines and pitcher plants held the most rainwater for drinking. Makahanap had no such knowledge. To Makahanap it was all just jungle.

  He could hear the sound of falling water from mountain streams and, beyond the shrill din of the insects, the calls of many kinds of birds, only a few of which he could identify. He could distinguish the sounds of the hooting gibbons and the chattering monkeys but they were hard to see, though they occasionally made the higher branches of the tall trees sway under their weight. Once in a while, a stretch of the river would be temporarily covered with brilliantly hued, velvety butterflies, but such bursts of color were rare.

  People traveling by perahu were advised to keep an eye out for crocodiles. There were fewer of these giant reptiles than in the old days, but sometimes you could see a few sunning on the mud banks. The problem came when someone mistook them for logs floating on the river. They were such impressive, powerful beasts that Makahanap found it unde
rstandable that some of the Dayaks who resisted conversion to Christianity still worshipped effigies of these reptiles.

  It was a pleasure to observe the paddlers' economy of motion as the river sped by. The water was low in places, obliging them to get out and carry the perahu on their shoulders through the shallows or where big rocks were too plentiful. The paddlers were able to keep such portaging to a minimum. They seemed to know how to avoid every submerged rock that could tip the narrow dugout over or damage its fragile keel. Still, someone drowned every few years on the river, and great care was always required. The biggest nuisance of wading through the high, wet grass was spending the next hours picking off leeches.

  After two days, Makahanap and his party, now on the Kinaye River, approached the Lun Dayeh longhouse at Long Gavit, Yakal and Busar's home and the last village downstream before Long Kasurun. It was an hour before sundown.

  The men of the village were mooring their dugouts nearby; they shouted a welcome to the newcomers. Coming back from a hunt, the villagers were in high spirits as they continued with their early evening routine of a quick bath in the river. It had been a good hunting day—a fact especially treasured because it might be their last before the rains made jungle travel nearly impossible for months. Now there would be plenty of meat—wild pig, monkey, deer and jungle fowl—for the longhouse and its honored visitors. After their bath, the villagers carried the game and forest products they had collected up the hill to the longhouse, all the while continuing to boast and laugh about the hunt. The dogs, near delirious with the scent of fresh meat, were barking, growling, snapping and swirling around the men, making it a minor miracle that neither man nor beast fell off the log ladder into the malodorous mud beneath.

  By the time Makahanap, Christiaan and their Dayak companions had bathed and climbed up to the veranda, the men of Long Gavit were already sitting cross-legged, ready to smoke, chat and exchange news with the newcomers while their women prepared dinner. Makahanap regretted that he had to worry these villagers, who had clearly been looking forward to a pleasant, boisterous evening. With his letter perhaps already in the ken kanrikan's hands, there was no time for idle chat, and the need for secrecy made a boisterous longhouse evening too risky. As soon as he had replied to the ritual greeting, he allowed the worry to show on his face while he asked the longhouse chief to send out runners to call the elders from the other longhouses along the Kinaye River to meet him there. Normally, the runners would have carried a knotted string made of vine tendrils, each knot representing a day until the rendezvous. This time the messengers were told to ask the headmen to come to Long Gavit right away.

  The strain visible on the D.O.'s face and his not volunteering the reason for the hasty meeting changed the atmosphere on the veranda. The longhouse men discarded their unfinished tobacco and went off to their separate fires to eat their dinners. Instead of the usual teasing questions and the booming laughter at the answers, conversation gradually came to a halt. This being a teetotal Christian longhouse, there was no borak, the Lun Dayeh homemade rice beer, to ease the atmosphere. After the children had been put to bed and a quick evening prayer said and hymn sung, the D.O. excused himself and wandered out to the veranda.

  There he lay, wrapped up in a reed mat for warmth, listening to the night sounds of the longhouse: the scraping noise made by the log ladders being pulled up onto the veranda for the night; the grunts of the pigs settling in below; the harsh, hacking cough of one of the old women; a sudden puff of soft laughter from the group of young men whispering before sleep in the bachelors' quarters on the veranda; the tittering of the teenage girls in the loft above; the occasional surreptitious sound of someone finding his way in the dark to the edge of the boardwalk to relieve himself. Eventually, Makahanap slept.

  Served breakfast the next morning by the headman's wife before she and the other women went off to weed their rice fields, Makahanap waited as patiently as he could for the men he had summoned to arrive. The able-bodied Lun Dayeh left to go fishing on the river, taking Christiaan, Busar and Busar's friends with them to help handle the big traps. In the now nearly empty longhouse, the district officer idly watched the little children totter about under the supervision of a bossy girl not old enough to help in the fields or go away to school.

  The children, accustomed to playing host to visitors during the daylight hours while their parents were away, came up to greet him and offered to include him in their play, but he did not respond. The only adults present were the headman and villagers too old or too ill to work. Makahanap sat quietly with the old men and looked forward with as much patience as he could muster to the arrival of the other headmen. He had learned that, although the position of longhouse headman among the Lun Dayeh was inherited, a headman had to keep proving his worth. He had to be the hardest worker, the best rice producer, the most successful hunter, the most farsighted trader of cattle, the bravest in battle and the most adept in dealing with emergencies, such as a fire in the longhouse.

  Until about fifteen years before, one way a leader could prove his worth was by how many heads he had taken. Makahanap had to concede that the best change the white man had brought to Borneo had been accomplished shortly before the missionaries had arrived: an end to headhunting. It had not been easy to do. The British and Dutch governments had conducted campaigns, using both force and diplomacy. The Dutch had declared headhunting illegal in their territory in the 1890s but it had taken decades to make the ban stick.

  Although no new heads had been taken since 1930, nobody was ready to declare this age-old Dayak practice entirely dead, given its intimate connection with the Dayaks' traditional animistic beliefs. As far as Makahanap understood those beliefs, they involved a bewildering variety of benign and malign spirits in the natural world who had to be propitiated, avoided or fooled.

  It was annoying enough when auguries and omens, believed to have come from these spirits, would sometimes interfere with hunting trips or harvesting crops. But what was most disturbing to the colonizers about the Dayaks' religion was the belief that ambushing and taking the head of someone from a rival group and bringing it back to one's own longhouse could turn the head into a spirit that conferred health and good crops on the people of its new home. The Dutch colonial service had encouraged Christian missionaries to come to Borneo, fearing that without wholesale conversion of the Dayaks to a different religion, headhunting might start up again.

  Sitting on the veranda at Long Gavit, Makahanap's patience was gradually rewarded. The headmen and a few elders from the Lun Dayeh longhouses at Long Bisai, Long Kiangen, Long Metuil and Long Kafun began to appear. Makahanap greeted them in the standard way.

  "You have come?" he asked Pangeran Lagan, the headman of Long Metuil, an animist longhouse. Lagan's title of pangeran meant he was the senior native official of Makahanap's district and, as such, the D.O.'s immediate subordinate. The D.O. felt pleasure and relief at seeing him come up the log ladder. Without him, no firm agreement among the elders would be possible.

  "I have come," the pangeran answered slowly, as he reached the veranda and shook Makahanap's hand. There was a special warmth between the two men.

  "You have come from where?" continued Makahanap, taking his time.

  "I have come from Long Metuil."

  "You are many?"

  "We are three."

  "All is well where you come from?"

  "All is well."

  "Good. All was well on the journey?"

  "All was very well on the journey."

  So it went with all the visitors.

  After there had been enough small talk to satisfy the Dayaks' sense of etiquette, Makahanap took the leaders aside, where they could not be overheard, and spoke to them about the American soldiers. He took pains to make clear the danger that these foreigners might pose to the longhouse communities once the Japanese learned of their presence. Looking at them one by one, he quietly asked the headmen what should be done.

  The lun mebala (aristocrats—
literally "good people") spoke among themselves quickly and in the local dialect, so that Makahanap could not really follow the conversation. Then, turning to him, Pangeran Lagan said that the longhouse leaders wanted to know who would win the war. Makahanap had expected the question, and answered it with another: "What if the white people win and we have not helped these Americans?"

  He knew that an important element in the elders' thinking—even among the animists—was their great respect for the North American missionaries who had behaved with such courtesy when they worked among the local people. The Lun Dayeh remembered when the Japanese had appeared at Long Nawang (farther to the south), where the Dutch, British and other Westerners had gone to hide from the Japanese. Within a few days, the heitais (Japanese soldiers) had killed forty of the men, including two Kemah Injil missionaries. They had taken the women and children prisoner and "visited" them often. A month later, they had quietly bayoneted the women and children.

  The Kemah Injil's John Willfinger, normally based at Long Berang, had been away up north, over the border in British Borneo, when the Japanese had killed the other missionary men and women. The Lun Dayeh and other Dayaks had all urged him to stay where he was. But Willfinger returned to Long Berang and gave himself up rather than have his flock try to hide him. He was beheaded on Christmas Eve of 1942. The Lun Dayeh had been greatly touched by the fact that this foreigner was willing to die for them.

  Makahanap discussed what to do about the American fugitives with the elders for the rest of the day and evening and the next day. Almost every time he thought he had gently but clearly delineated the problem, the question would be temporarily pushed aside by the elders as they pursued other topics. These men, who saw one another only a few times a year, had much to discuss and were prepared to take their time. They talked of old rivalries, new marriage negotiations and forthcoming funeral plans. Where would the new couple live? Which longhouse would become the home of the bride's wealthy uncle with the coveted dragon jar? When would one particular longhouse have enough borak prepared and pigs, chickens and buffalo assembled to properly celebrate an ailing nobleman's expected death? What hilltop would the hosts and guests cut a swathe through to honor him? Who would care for his crazy old wife when she became a widow?