Upon the following day we marched for this spot, and found the shelter, as described by the police, situated at the junction of the Buna and Wakioki Rivers. Here, by the size of the shelter and the number of footprints, we came to the conclusion that it had contained about thirty Doriri, who were probably attached to a much larger party. We discovered here a curious and most ingenious contrivance, in the shape of a litter, for conveying a sick or wounded man. It consisted of a pole about eight feet long, passed through three hoops or circles of rattan about two feet apart, the hoops being thus suspended from the pole when carried on men’s shoulders; round the inside of the circumference of the lower semi-diameter of the circles or hoops, longitudinal strips or battens of finely split palm were lashed, forming a soft and springy litter, upon which an injured man could suffer very little from jolting on the roughest track, or from out of which it was impossible to fall, or, with any precaution at all on the part of the bearers, sustain any injury; the central hoop was made to unfasten at the top, plainly as a means of placing a man inside with least effort to himself. I have made a rough sketch of the contrivance, which is decidedly superior to any form of hand ambulance I have ever read of.

AAA.Carrying pole.
BB.Lathes of split palm,
CCC.Coir rope interlaced through lathes made to untie at pole.

The Maisina now said that the Doriri had undoubtedly gone down to the extensive sago swamps surrounding the Collingwood Bay villages; but careful scouting, and full examination of the direction of the Doriri footprints, which we now found to be very numerous, all showed that they led up the Wakioki towards their own country. We were now of the opinion that possibly the Doriri had discovered our presence, and were retreating upon their own villages; in any case, they were moving in that direction. Pursuit, and that by forced marches, was now the order of the day. With far-flung scouts, endeavouring to locate the Doriri ahead, we began the chase, straining the endurance of the carriers to the last ounce; the rear-guard of six constabulary and four village constables mercilessly drove on the skulking Maisina, or helped the truly failing Kaili Kaili with his load.

The bed of the Wakioki, up which we were now proceeding, is of a most remarkable nature. It varies in width from 300 to 600 yards, the banks being difficult to define, owing to the dense overgrowth of young casuarina trees, through which many channels flow. Gaunt, dead and dying casuarinas of huge size reared their enormous bulk from the torn, boulder-strewn bed of the river; huge tree trunks and lumps of wood, the bark stripped from them, and polished by eternal friction, lay everywhere. In one place, where Mount MacGregor descends to the river, the foot of the mountain was cut sheer off, as though cleanly severed by the axe of some superhuman giant. It was evident that the floods, which overwhelmed the country, fell as rapidly as they rose, for light and heavy tree trunks were deposited at every point, from the highest to the lowest; the fall of the watercourse, where we first met it, was about one foot in two hundred, and it increased in steadily growing gradient as we ascended. We came to the conclusion (the right one, as I afterwards ascertained on the second Doriri Expedition) that the floods and inundations were due to enormous land-slips or avalanches, comprised of hundreds of thousands of tons of rock, earth, and timber, suddenly descending from Mount MacGregor into the narrow gorge of the Wakioki, which skirted its spurs, thus blocking and damming the river, until its growing weight and strength burst the barriers and swept in one devastating wave over the lower country. The colour and consistency of the river were due, I found out later, to a wide stream of clayey substance, flowing from Mount MacGregor, between rocky walls, into the river.

Early in the afternoon, we reached a point near the gorge from which the Wakioki emerged; and there the track scrambled up a loose boulder-strewn bank about thirty feet high, up which we likewise clawed. Here we found, that though young casuarinas were growing there, it yet bore signs, in the shape of boulders, drift-wood and tree trunks, of being the bed of the river. We found many Doriri shelters, that had only just been vacated, and still had the fires burning in them. Here we pitched camp, right under the magnificent Mount MacGregor, and gazed at the mountain pines on its spurs, towering high above the surrounding tall forest trees. Our day had been an interesting one: sometimes we were marching over huge loose boulders, sometimes wading through a wet cream-cheesy sort of pipe-clay, sometimes making our way over a hard-baked cement of the same stuff, full of cracks, and throwing off a dry and penetrating dust under our feet, which clogged our sweating skins and choked our panting lungs; over all of which came the distant angry voices of the likewise sweating rear-guard, as they “encouraged” the labouring carriers to keep up with the column.

Shortly after our pitching camp, a violent thunder-storm rolled down upon us from the mountains; streaks of vivid fork lightning being succeeded by instantaneous claps of thunder, the whole being followed by a torrential burst of rain; the river rose rapidly, and the grinding roar of the enormous rolling boulders, swept before its flood, made a din indescribable. The carriers whimpered with funk, and I called in the sentries, feeling that that awful storm and night were more than mortal man, standing at a solitary post, could be expected to endure. I was also firmly convinced that no human being, Doriri or otherwise, would be fool enough to be abroad on such a night. We struck camp very early the next morning, only too glad to get away from such a storm-torn, uncanny spot. After marching a few miles, we found a Doriri track leaving the Wakioki, and leading across the Didina ranges towards the Doriri country at the head of the Musa River. The Maisina were now blue with funk, and we greatly feared that they would bolt; but curses from us, threats from the constabulary, and jeers from the Kaili Kaili, who told them that if they left us, they (the Kaili Kaili) would make them the laughing-stock of the coast as a set of women and weaklings, made them pluck up their courage enough still to follow us. We found growing on this track an extraordinary tough climbing bamboo, of a vine-like nature, which, when cut with a knife, oozed from each joint about a wineglassful of clear sweet water.

A severe march went on all day. Barton, who had now added a very bad toothache to dysentery, was in command of the advance, and feeling hard with his scouts for touch with the Doriri party ahead; I was in charge of the rear-guard, and was severely driving the fearful Maisina carriers. Night was closing in, the head of the line had halted to camp, when back to me came an orderly, with a message from Barton. “Hurry up; we are within touch of the Doriri.” The Maisina, on hearing the magic word Doriri, rushed like scared rabbits for the camp. Upon the rear-guard coming up with me, Barton told me that the scouts ahead had seen a man up a tree, who was calling to a party of Doriri ahead of him. The Maisina now fairly collapsed with fright, and begged us to go back, saying that we should all be eaten if we stayed. Barton and I consulted as to what was to be done with them: to send them back was our best course, but then, if by any remote chance there happened to be any Doriri left in the country we had traversed, they would stand a good chance of being cut to pieces, as we could not weaken our force, on the eve of a fight, by detaching constabulary to escort them. They, however, settled the question for themselves. Fearful as they were of going on with us into the land of the dreaded Doriri, they were still more afraid of leaving us and having to follow a lonely road back; finding that we were determined to go on, and that the constabulary and Kaili Kaili apparently treated the Doriri with contempt, they quaveringly said they would follow.

We felled trees, and made our camp as strongly defensive as possible; needless to say, the Maisina required no pressing to do their share of this work, but toiled like veritable demons, clearing scrub and dragging trees into a stockade, long after the order had been given, “That will do the camp; post the night guard.” Everything now pointed to the one conclusion, and that was that if the party, on whose heels we had followed all the way from Collingwood Bay, did not include the actual murderers by whom the murders of six weeks ago had been committed, it undoubtedly consisted of the tribe by whom innumerable murders had been done previously, and who had kept a whole district in a state of tension and misery for years. We were now right on the borders of the Doriri country, for during the day we had ascended the summit of the Didina Range, which formed the watershed between the streams of Collingwood Bay and the Musa River. We had then crossed a fine plateau and descended a small stream flowing towards the Musa, which suddenly fell, by a series of cascades, over a precipice into a valley; the track made a difficult circuit round this cascade, and when we had descended into the valley we found the bottom covered with stagnant water, forming a veritable quagmire, impassable to our heavily laden men, although the Doriri had somehow or other gone through it. Round this, we found it necessary to cut a siding, which led us to the banks of the Ibinamu, the most eastern affluent of the Musa River, which rose in Mount MacGregor and was now seen by Europeans for the first time. The Maisina guides had long since left the country with which they were acquainted, and in any case would have been quite useless from fright.

While in camp that night, Barton and I consulted together. There appeared to us to be very little doubt, that the party just ahead of us must be now quite aware of our presence in their vicinity, and be laying their plans accordingly; as a matter of fact, we found out afterwards that they were in a state of blissful ignorance. It never for one moment entered the heads of the Doriri that any possible danger could come to them from the cowed people of Collingwood Bay, and Government or police they had merely heard of as a sort of vague fable; of the effect of rifle fire they knew nothing, and with spears they had never as yet met their match. “What are we going to do now?” said Barton. “Capture or entirely destroy the party ahead,” I replied. “I hate scientifically slaughtering unfortunate savages, who are quite ignorant of a sense of wrongdoing,” said Barton. “By every code in the world,” I said, “civilized or savage, the people who commit wanton and unprovoked murder can expect nothing else than to be killed themselves. Besides, our instructions are plain and our duty clear.” The Maisina spent the night in a miserable state of apprehension and fear, having quite made up their minds that the cooking pots of the Doriri would be the ultimate fate of the whole lot of us; the constabulary and Kaili Kaili were in a great state of joy at the prospect of a fight, and the scroop-scrape of stones on the edges of the Kaili Kaili tomahawks, the nervous chatter of the Maisina, and restless prowling of the constabulary went on all night. Poor Barton was writhing in agony from toothache, and begged me to keep my “infernal savages” quiet; but it was a hopeless task.