The search for food furnishes occasionally some very curious scenes. One of the most remarkable occurs when the river in flood brings down a tree-trunk in a suitable stage of decay. A canoe is sent out with men to secure it and tow it to the bank. When it has been left stranded by the falling water, the people, men, women and children come out and swarm around it like bees about a honey-pot, and you wonder what they can be doing. When you go close you find that some are splitting up the log with their stone axes and others are cutting up the fragments with sharpened shells in the same way that their ancestors—and perhaps ours too—did centuries ago. The objects of their search are the large white larvæ of a beetle, about the size of a man’s thumb; I have seen natives eat them just as they cut them out of the wood, but usually they roast them in the fire and consider them a great delicacy.
Nothing that can by any means be considered eatable comes amiss to the Papuans; there are two kinds of water tortoises which they like to eat, and rats, lizards, frogs and snakes, and the eggs of crocodiles they devour greedily. A number of different kinds of fruits, most of them disagreeable to European tastes, are found growing in the jungle and form a welcome addition to their fare. Birds they get occasionally, but their skill with the bow and arrow is not remarkable.
Most of their meat is obtained by hunting with dogs the wild pig, the wallaby and the cassowary. The pig (Sus papuensis), though it is not really a native of New Guinea, was introduced into the island so long ago that it has become as well established as the rabbit has become in this country. In some places, particularly near the foot of the mountains, pigs are fairly numerous, and the natives kill a good many; they are very savage beasts, and I saw a native terribly gashed by a large boar, which was shortly afterwards shot by one of our Gurkhas.
The Wallaby (Dorcopsis lorentzii) is a small kangaroo, about two feet in height when it stands upright; it seems to be fairly evenly distributed all over the district. When the natives bestir themselves they seem to be able to catch the wallaby fairly easily; in four consecutive days we saw the remains of thirteen brought into the village of Parimau. The flesh is coarse and has a very strong musky flavour.
There are two kinds of Cassowary in the Mimika district, a small species new to science (Casuarius claudi), which was discovered in the mountains at an altitude of about 1500 feet, and a large species (Casuarius sclateri), which was fairly abundant everywhere. We frequently heard their curious booming cry at night and we often saw their tracks in the mud of the jungle or on the river bank, but they are very shy birds and are seldom seen.
Once I had the luck to see an old cassowary with two young birds walking about in a stony river bed, a place which they particularly affect, and it was a very pretty sight to see how the mother bird, after she had caught sight of me, drove away the chicks to a place of safety and all the time kept herself between them and me. The natives hunt and kill and eat a good many cassowaries; the feathers are used for ornamental head-dresses and belts and for decorating spears and clubs, and the claws are often used as the points of arrows.
THE NATIVE DOGS
The Papuan Dog, without whose help the native would seldom, if ever, be able to get any meat, is a sharp-nosed prick-eared creature about the size of a Welsh terrier. The colour is yellow, brown or black, and the tail, which is upstanding, is tipped with white. Usually the hair is short and smooth, but we saw one dog, brought down to Parimau by a party of pygmies, which had a thick furry coat like a chow dog, which it also resembled in the carriage of its tail. The dogs in the village of the pygmies which we visited, were smooth-coated like those of the Papuans, so it is possible that that thick-coated animal came from some remote district where the natives live at a higher altitude.
The Papuan dogs are very sociable creatures, and they like to accompany the natives on their journeys. They are particularly fond of going in canoes on the river, and two or three are seen in nearly every canoe even when the people are only out fishing. Their food is generally given to them by the women and it consists of raw meat, when there is any, and lumps of sago. A remarkable peculiarity about them is that they never bark, but they make up for this defect by their extraordinary power of howling. Sometimes in broad daylight, if there was no wind, but more often on still fine nights, a party of dogs would sit together, usually on the river bank, and utter a chorus of the most piteous and blood-curdling howls. No amount of stone-throwing or beating with sticks, freely administered by their masters, had the smallest effect on them; they would only move away a few yards and begin again, apparently carried away by an ecstasy of sorrow.