WOMEN OF THE BIG NUMBERS
We slept little and were up before dawn, stiff from lying on the hard ground. We asked for water, and a native brought it in a bamboo bottle. There was about a pint of water for each of the five of us. The savage that brought it looked on astonished as we washed our hands and faces. It is not taboo for the Big Numbers men to bathe—but they rarely use their privilege, and they could not understand our reckless waste of water, which was carried by the women from a spring half a mile away.
After a breakfast of tinned beef, we set to work. But if it had been hard to get good pictures the day before, it was now almost impossible. The women had all left the village to get the day’s supply of water, fruits, and firewood. The men squatted in the center of the clearing, guns in hand. They were apparently waiting for something—for what?
We were uneasy. It may seem to the reader, in view of the fact that we escaped with whole skins, that we were absurdly uneasy. But I should like to see the man who could remain calm when surrounded as we were by savages, ugly and powerful, whose only pleasure was murder, and who, we were convinced, were eaters of human flesh. All day long our hosts squatted about the giant boo-boos, staring at us or at the ground or at the jungle or, sometimes, it seemed, at nothing at all. Now and then a single savage would come out of the jungle and join the group, and immediately one of the squatters would get up and go into the bush, taking the trail by which the newcomer had arrived. Even Paul was troubled, and confided to me, when the others were not about, “Me no like.”
The coming and going and interminable squatting and staring got on the nerves of all of us. Toward evening, we received an explanation of it from Atree, Nagapate’s “private secretary.” Atree had been “blackbirded” away from the island about twelve years previous to our arrival, in the days when natives were still carried off by force for servitude on the plantations of Queensland; and, by some miracle, when the all-white Australia law had gone into effect and the blacks had been “repatriated,” he had made his way back to his own island. He had managed, during his sojourn abroad, to pick up a little bêche-de-mer; so he acted as go-between and interpreter in all our dealings with Nagapate. He told us that a fight with a neighboring village was brewing. There had been a dispute over some pigs, in which somebody had got hurt. The relatives of the victim were preparing to attack our hosts. The men who had come and gone from the clearing were the lookouts who guarded the village against surprise.
A fight! My first thought was, “What a picture I’ll get!” But Osa, at my elbow, said miserably, “I wish we were back in the boat,” and my conscience began to hurt. To reassure her I told her that our force was a match for half a dozen native villages.
Before sunset there was great activity in the clearing. Men kept coming and going, and there was much grunted consultation in the shadow of the boo-boos. All that night an armed guard stood watch.
At sunrise, Nagapate came and asked if we would shoot off our guns to frighten the enemy. I did not like the idea. I thought it might be a ruse to get us to empty our guns and to give the natives a chance to rush on us before we could reload. However, since we did not wish to seem suspicious, we granted the request. But we fired in rotation, instead of in a volley, so that there would always be some among us with ready rifles. And I found that I was not the only one who had thought of the danger of empty cartridge-chambers: I have never seen such snappy reloading as that of our black boys!
After the volley, I gave Nagapate my rifle to shoot. He unloaded her as fast as he could pull the trigger, and begged for more, like an eager small boy. I was sorry to refuse him, but I did not care to waste many cartridges, so I explained through Atree that the gun had to cool off, and Nagapate, to my relief, seemed satisfied with the explanation.