Terry / A Tale of the Hill People

by Charles Goff Thomson

Terry flushed and went on. "I started through the brush to get to the doctor, but I must have been sicker than I thought, for I don't remember anything after entering the woods. It's all a dream to me. Something pulled me up this way—I've always hoped to be the one to open up the Hills—and I kept coming. I remember lying down at dusk and being picked up and carried through the night. I must have been delirious for about ten days, but had conscious periods every day. Every time I had a clear spell I swallowed several tablets of the quinine Sears gave me. I guess that quinine saved me—I would like to have Sears know about it.

"Those ten days are rather confused, of course, but I remember the care the women gave me and some of their rough remedies. I came out of the delirium two weeks ago but was pretty weak, so did not try to get up, but lay there listening to their talk. Their dialect is quite like the Bogobo—I think they're just a tribe of Bogobos separated from the others by those infernal woods. I soon learned that they had spared me and cared for me because they thought that I was daft. You know that these primitive tribes never molest lunatics—they think that they are possessed of devils which, if disturbed, will enter the heads of whoever harms their present host. Probably I raved a good bit on the way up, when they were following me.

"When they realized that I was sane the tribe split into two factions—one wanted to finish me but the other insisted that my coming was a good augury. It was rather queer to lie here and listen to the arguments pro and con—I pulled pretty hard for the negative contenders! The question was finally decided by the old chief, Ohto, who announced that my fate would be determined when next the limoçons sang. That settled the immediate question.

"The limoçon is a big species of pigeon that nests in the Hills. It seldom sings, and then only at nightfall. It is reverenced by these people, who believe that it sings prophecies of good or evil, the character of the omen being determined by the point of the compass in which it lights to offer its rare evening song. Direction is gauged from where the Tribal Agong hangs—I will show you that after supper. It is a queer superstition, Major: they think that a song in the west means greatest harm—death by famine or disease or intra-tribal wars, from the north the omen is ill but to a lesser degree, south is good, but a song from the east augurs greatest happiness to their people."

The Major was pulling on a dead pipe, absorbed in Terry's story but building into it all of the suffering and loneliness and suspense which the lad ignored in the telling.

"They say that the limoçon has sung in the east but once since it heralded the birth of Ohto, who is the greatest chief they ever had. But it has sung in the west eight times—and each time it was followed by the death of one of Ohto's family. Now the old man is the last of his line. These things may have been mere coincidences but you can see why they believe implicitly in their feathered oracles.

"A week ago, while I was still kept prisoned in this hut, the bird sang in the south, an omen of sufficient favor to cause my release. Since then I have been free to wander about—and if it had not sung, my influence would have amounted to nothing when I pled for you. And I might not have been here to plead.

"That's about all, Major, except as to what manner of folk these Hillmen are, and that you will learn better for yourself."

The Major rose and stepped to the door where they could survey the village, unseen by the brown people who now swarmed the hard-packed clearing. They were a squat race. The men, G-stringed, displayed the same powerful physique that had marked the warrior who had conducted the Major, the women were clad in a single width of homespun cotton which draped from waist to knee and passed up over breast and back to knot at the right shoulder. Men, women and children were all long haired, and marked alike with broad, high cheek-boned faces flattened across the bridge of the nose. Their slightly thickened lips and widened nostrils were offset by large, intelligent eyes. They were grouped about the fires which burned in the center of the village, the women tending the pots which steamed over the coals. The fresh hide of a buck lay in the center of the ring of fires amid heaps of yams and unthreshed rice.

"Community cooking," explained Terry. "The young men hunt, the older ones farm, the girls weave and the old women cook. The scheme works out well in such a simple manner of living. Such government as they have is a blending of a little democracy with strong patriarchism. The old chief, Ohto, lets them have their own way about the little things, but when he speaks it is the law."