The Airmen and the Headhunters Read online

  Tom practiced keeping still, and the day came when Kibung took him hunting. They headed for higher ground, bringing a few of Kibung's dogs with them. Tom had had German shepherds as a boy, a compensation for having no siblings, but these dogs were much wilder. If Kibung put their noses in a puddle where a boar or a barking deer had been, the dogs could track the animal for miles. When the dogs located the prey, they would chase it tenaciously until the animal was exhausted or fell into a trap. Kibung showed Tom how to make a camouflaged pit with bamboo splinters hidden underneath and how to coil a tree limb like a spring that, when tripped by unsuspecting prey, would drive a bamboo spike through its body. They would sometimes have success by merely shaking a tree trunk long enough to dislodge smaller animals, usually a big-eyed slow loris or a small monkey. But often the best way to catch an animal was to stay perfectly still in a place where they knew an animal was in the habit of coming, such as one of the upriver salt springs. Kibung told Tom that if the hunter was in his hiding place by midafternoon, he could hope to see a whole parade of animals come to the salt spring before nightfall. First would be the birds, then the monkeys and gibbons coming down from the tall trees and, finally, the land animals: mouse deer, wild boar, barking deer and maybe a honey bear.

  When they set off to hunt together, Kibung strapped a machete onto a holster that hung from a woven beaded belt around Tom's hips. He said no Dayak man left home without his knife. He also instructed Tom in the use of a blowpipe (sempit). Seven feet long and made of ironwood with a quarter-inch-diameter hole hand drilled down its length, this blowpipe was a work of art. It had been made by a Punan, one of the small, pale-skinned nomads from the far interior jungle who slept in trees, had no houses and were known to have almost no material possessions but who, nonetheless, were the very best in Borneo for making fine blowpipes and beautiful woven-grass mats. As usual, the blowpipe that Kibung gave Tom had an iron spearhead lashed to the end of it. As Kibung would explain, a Dayak always carried a blowpipe with a spearhead when hunting animals, but he would carry a real spear if he were hunting for human heads.

  To complete Tom's hunting equipment, Kibung gave him a bamboo case to hook onto his loincloth. He opened the case to show Tom a handful of needlelike darts, each about ten inches long. Before Tom could reach for one of them, Kibung held up his hand and told him to hold the dart by its wood or cork end, and never to allow the dart's poisoned tip to touch his skin. With an almost silent puff of breath, a man could force one of these darts down the core of the blowpipe and as far as 150 feet. It did not matter where the dart hit the animal or how big the animal was. The poison, made in secret rites from herbs and the bark of a special tree, was so strong that the prey would almost immediately experience convulsions and paralysis. Death often came even before the hunter could make his way through the brush to the stricken animal. Using the blowpipe was a good way to kill game because the poison did not affect the meat—except in the area near where the dart entered, which was cut out during butchering. If Tom had remarked that it would make a good weapon of war, Kibung would have made clear that the blowpipe was used only on game, never on man.

  When Tom grew proficient at hiding in the forest and using the sempit, Kibung and a couple of his neighbors took Tom out with them to hunt wild boar. Using their dogs, they trapped a young boar and Kibung killed it. By late afternoon they made their triumphal way home. Meat was a special treat. Except for the chickens, the Dayaks never seemed to eat the meat animals they kept under the longhouse: the pigs and the goats, or their free-grazing water buffalo. Kibung explained that those animals were fattened up by the Dayaks and kept for a big party—a funeral, a child's naming day or, in the old days, when they brought back a head.

  Thanks to the successful hunt, several families would have boar meat at dinner that night. Tom looked forward to eating meat with his rice, but this was not the only reason for his sense of well-being.

  Looking back on the day, Tom experienced a moment of pure elation. Barefoot, loinclothed, moderately competent in the Lun Dayeh language, able to stay still enough so as not to scare away game and carrying deadly weapons he knew how to use, Tom had been able to act like a man again, in control of his own life. He had not felt like this since he had jumped out of the B-24 more than a month earlier.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Letter from the Japanese

  Makahanap rose well before dawn the morning after the prayer meeting by the river. Then he, Christiaan, Phil, Dan, Jim and Eddy and their Lun Dayeh boatmen hastened into his dugout canoe and glided downstream until they came to where the rushing water foamed past rocks so big and dangerous that even this proper longboat had to be portaged along the riverbank.

  Farther downstream, Makahanap could see the airmen enjoying themselves as the perahu picked up speed. Speed demons all, the young men smiled into the wind as it slapped their faces. Makahanap did not tell them how often boats were overturned or swamped on this stretch of the river.

  By midmorning, with the current running quickly, they were at Long Berang. Makahanap had been thinking throughout the trip about how to keep the Japanese and their spies from knowing of the airmen's presence. At this time of day, the waterfront was empty as usual. He took the men quickly to his house. Luckily, Binum, Yakal's wife, had arrived while Makahanap and the others were upriver meeting the Americans. Like Yakal, Binum was someone Ama could trust to be discreet and helpful.

  Binum, like Yakal, had been the Makahanaps' student. She had then gone to work in Malinau for some years for a Dutch family, a contact made through the Makahanaps, after it had become evident that she and Yakal were not going to have children. Ama and Mama had been glad to help Binum find such a good way to deal with the shame and sorrow of being barren. Also, she could earn money that her husband could use for the church once he became a pastor; each Kemah Injil church group was supposed to be self-financed. When her Dutch family left Malinau just before the Japanese came, Binum had gone to help her elderly parents. But now her husband had called her home to him and she came gladly.

  For Makahanap it was a pleasure to see Binum again. Among the inland hill people of Borneo, paleness of skin is admired, as is slimness and height. Binum was nearly five foot eight, with a light, Chineselike complexion. With her long blue-black hair neatly tied up in a chignon like a Javanese, she had the kind of looks that both the hill people and the Dutch of Malinau admired. But Makahanap was sure she was a good girl, and it was clear to all that she had stayed faithful to her beloved Yakal. She was too old at twenty-five to receive unwelcome advances from any Dayak man, and she was efficient at cooking and cleaning for Westerners. If she agreed, as Ama knew she would, she could be the go-between from his household to the police barrack where he planned to hide the airmen.

  Across the river and accessible by a swaying bamboo-and-vine footbridge secured to trees on the riverbanks, the police barrack had been empty for years. The "Malay" (the Borneo term for coastal Muslims and immigrant Javanese) police had run away when the Dutch left.

  Makahanap was relieved to see the airmen behave politely when he introduced them to his family and Binum. The airmen were clearly well brought up, and Makahanap saw no trouble ahead in letting Binum take care of them. Sitting in his dining room, they seemed to him less like soldiers than like children at a birthday party as Binum and Mama served them a meal at a proper table with a tablecloth. They seemed impressed by the finger bowls—something Mama always insisted on when chicken was served. Tensions all but disappeared as the airmen relaxed in the warmth of Mama's kindness and in the gracious courtesy of the beautiful Binum. The men scraped the plates with their forks until there was nothing left—a bit of bad manners in East Indies circles but, as Makahanap, his wife and Binum all knew, a sign of appreciation among white people. The soldiers held their forks and knives in the same odd way that Brother Willfinger had done, switching the fork from one hand to the other to cut something, but otherwise they ate like Dutchmen.

  As soon as the me
al was over, Makahanap took advantage of the quiet—the active adults of the longhouses had already gone to the rice fields, their vegetable gardens or the hunt, and the children were at school—to walk his charges across the swaying vine bridge and deposit them in the police barrack. This big, bare, wooden shed had been built by the Dutch administration. It had housed the police who had worked for the district officer. Makahanap gave the airmen the food Mama had assembled for them, together with some of his own old sarongs and undershirts.

  In a mixture of Dutch and hand gestures, Makahanap tried to convey to his guests that they must stay quiet and out of sight. He planned never to contact them in daylight or if anybody in the village was awake. The Japanese were just a few days downriver.

  Makahanap was no doubt glad that the soldiers had been too dazed to notice a dazzling white American-style clapboard house near the barrack that could have been at home in suburban Connecticut. The Presswood house had been built in the early 1930s by Ernest Presswood, the first North American Protestant evangelical missionary to live in Long Berang. Ernest Presswood had been one of a handful of missionaries from the U.S.-headquartered Christian and Missionary Alliance (known locally as the Gereja Kemah Injil, literally, Church of the Gospel Tent) who had introduced Christianity to this part of Borneo. Presswood and the other Kemah Injil pastors had quickly learned local languages and had converted nearly half of the longhouses in the Mentarang and Krayan districts in less than a decade before the Japanese had come upriver and taken the white foreigners away. The Presswood house, though empty now, had housed visiting North American missionaries in normal times, and it would have been a good place to lodge these Americans but it was too conspicuous to serve as a shelter for fugitives.

  Makahanap brought back the airmen's dirty uniforms for Binum to wash by the big flat rock in the river in front of the Presswood house. He told her to do it when no one was around and repeated what he had already told Yakal, that she should tell no one about the white men.

  Of course, someone did know about their presence in Borneo—the ken kanrikan, to whom the D.O. had sent his report before heading upriver to meet the airmen. Now the D.O. was pleased to learn that the ken kanrikan himself was on his way to Long Berang. It suggested that his boss had risen to the bait.

  If Makahanap had guessed right, the Japanese administrator would take his time getting to Long Berang. The ken kanrikan would hope that by the time he reached the district seat any shooting would have stopped, and the airmen would be all trussed up for him and ready to be brought down to Malinau. The timing of the Japanese official's travels suggested Makahanap's theory was correct, but he tried not to be overconfident. With the Japanese, he could never be certain.

  Three days later, Makahanap's informants told him that the Japanese administrator was less than a day away. This was closer than he had expected. The Americans had to be moved immediately, but where to?

  One factor weighed heavily in his decision: Thanks to the missionaries, the Christianized Dayaks were convinced that the road to hell was paved with lies; any lie, for any reason, was simply intolerable.

  An illustration of how absolute the ban on lying was involved the preacher Brother John Willfinger. When the Japanese had ordered Willfinger to come out of hiding and give himself up, the thirty-two-year-old American had done so, even though his friends had urged him not to. To explain his decision, Willfinger had sent an open letter saying that he had come to Borneo to bring the truth to the people there. If they had to tell lies to save his life, he would have failed them—"drag[ged] them into sin." Makahanap had held the very letter in his hands. He would never forget its message, nor would any of the Dayaks.

  Makahanap admired such honesty but he could not emulate it. Try as he might, it was not in his nature. Sometimes telling the truth did not get you what you wanted or needed. Had he not won Mama through an act of deception? A series of deceptions? No time to think of that now.

  But Makahanap knew he could not ask the people of the Christianized longhouses to be untruthful even for the best of reasons. If Japanese soldiers were to ask the Christian Dayaks about the airmen's whereabouts, they would get a truthful answer.

  Among the D.O.'s headmen, however, was Pangeran Lagan, the resourceful and reliable longhouse chief who was not yet a Christian. (Among the Lun Dayeh, social hierarchy counts for a great deal, and so no one in Lagan's two longhouses at Long Metuil would convert to Christianity until Lagan had done so.) Makahanap had just seen Lagan in Long Gavit, and the pagan headman had unhesitatingly licked the dog's blood. Makahanap could safely put the young Americans in Lagan's hands. The former mission employee had to smile at the irony of it.

  Around 3 A.M. on the fourth day of their confinement, the Yanks woke up in the Long Berang police barrack to see a group of armed Dayaks walk in noiselessly, accompanied by William Makahanap. The Dayaks had crept in as silently as if they were approaching a rival longhouse where they hoped to kill someone and take his head. This time, however, their aim was to escort the foreign soldiers to their longhouse village.

  The party's departure was nearly as silent as its arrival. The Americans, despite wearing boots, did their best to imitate the stealthy movements of their Dayak guides. Before they left, Makahanap managed to convey to Phil that the lead Dayak, a tough-faced man with a confident stride and a piece of cotton cloth bound around his head like a crown, was Pangeran Lagan and that he was a friend of the Allies. He presented the departing Yanks with a bottle of ketchup, some tea, coffee, sugar, salt, peanuts and raw rice—partly as a farewell gesture, partly as an effort to keep the soldiers from being too great a burden on the Long Metuil villagers.

  It was still pitch-black outside. In the dark, walking through the jungle was safer than traveling by canoe, but it was still a novelty for the Lun Dayeh.

  It was the time of night when the owls stopped sounding and the jungle grew almost silent. The badgers, civet cats, lemurs, tarsiers, great hill otters and the many kinds of bats had retired for the night; even such nocturnal birds as the nightjar and the frogmouth were quiet. The Dayaks' main concern in this unaccustomed nighttime walk was the danger of crashing into the den of a honey bear.

  The Americans were even less accustomed than the Dayaks to walking through a jungle in the dark. The pangeran, sensing everyone's unease, decided to wait for sunrise in a house belonging to a close friend of his, the Chinese trader Ah Tin. Ah Tin came to the door and let them in without waking his wife or children. As the dark grew more transparent, birds began calling and the party started on its way north.

  The Dayaks spotted a young barking deer across the river, on the good side of their path, fortunately, auguring well for their journey. Had it been on the wrong side, these Dayaks, being believers in the old religion, would have made a long detour around it or even returned to Long Berang to stay another day and night and avoid ill fortune for themselves and their longhouse.

  Dayak hunters often used their dogs to kill a deer, but that method is noisy. Sometimes a hunter presses his mouth against a leaf and imitates the deer's cry, luring the animal within reach of a blowpipe's poison-tipped dart. This time, seeking to move fast, with as little noise as possible, the pangeran's men quickly fashioned a trap from the underbrush along the path they expected the deer to take. The trap worked; they finished off the struggling creature with a blow from a machete. They butchered the deer quickly and roasted it on a fire. Eaten with the cold, sticky hill rice the Dayaks had brought with them, the grilled meat gave them all strength to continue their journey in the increasing heat of the morning. There were several hours of hard walking ahead of them through the mountains to Long Metuil.

  Back in Long Berang, Makahanap was relieved to have the Yanks gone so that he could concentrate on playing his big fish. Summoned by a message November 26 from the ken kanrikan to come downriver to Tamalang, the next village below Long Berang, the district officer replied in a deceptively truthful letter that he had moved the Americans from Long Berang to Long M
etuil. Choosing his words carefully, he wrote that Long Metuil would be a good place to ambush the airmen, and that Long Metuil's headman was under orders to keep a close eye on them.

  Makahanap hoped that the ken kanrikan would feel safe enough to come upriver when he read that the possibly armed Yanks were no longer in Long Berang. He was therefore pleased to see the ken kanrikan arrive by dugout canoe the next day, accompanied only by two local messengers. The Japanese administrator announced that they would be joined by the district officer of the neighboring Krayan District and the headmen from several nearby villages. Makahanap, who had already been in contact with his Krayan District counterpart—he was also a Christian from outside Borneo—managed to avoid serious conversation with his Japanese superior until his colleagues were present. When they were all finally assembled in Makahanap's Long Berang office, the ken kanrikan asked in Malay for ideas on how to capture the enemy airmen.

  The Krayan D.O., having been coached by Makahanap, took the floor to say that his colleague, the district officer for Mentarang, would surely be the best person to advise the ken kanrikan, would he not? Was it not Makahanap who had met the airmen, had brought them to Long Berang and had arranged for them to go on to Long Metuil? But Makahanap, bowing low, hands at his sides the way the Japanese had taught them, said he must defer to the ken kanrikan, whom he had kept informed of every step along the way. And now—Makahanap smiled at the company—the Japanese administrator was here "in our midst, to decide what to do."

  The ken kanrikan, seemingly torn between wanting to take any credit for success and to avoid blame if something went wrong, continued to insist that Makahanap tell him how to capture the airmen. But Makahanap kept shaking his head gently and saying that he, in his lowly position, could merely make suggestions. Ultimately, he said, it was the ken kanrikan who had to make the decisions and accept the responsibility.