A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

During our last day’s approach into this incredible Kuni country some of the trails were no more than wrinkles across mountain brows that were all but cliffs; the soil, where there was any on the surface, had a greasy texture in the wet, and the least slip might grow into a skid, then a giddy fall into the milky fog. The mountains had a way of breaking suddenly into gaping ravines, a thousand sheer feet down to the pouring river.

At last we saw Dilava mission station, like a collection of birdhouses nailed to the crags. It perched on a mat of ground which the priests had blasted off the peak. Away up there, when we had panted to the height and our sweating bearers had thrown themselves down beside their loads, we could look over range after range, up through thin air to Mount Yule and Mount St. Mary—maybe 100 miles away, looming 12,000 feet into calm evening like tall queens, with cloaks of mist that foamed from the cavernous valleys.

(Note from my diary: “If I stay here a week longer I’ll go stark mad and take to writing poetry.”)

Father Chabot had just come from the valley, where they were setting up a sawmill. He pointed down the slopes where small square gardens stuck like colored rags. Naked Kuni people, forgetful of the days when human flesh was their meat, worked like beavers among their growing vegetables. “It’s good for them to work,” Father Chabot said; an echo of the old monkish Laborare est orare.

It was time to gather them for the lecture, so Father Chabot sent messengers to various high points around the ravines. They yelled from cliff to cliff—high, echoing cries: “Come to the mission station! The Doctor is at the mission station!” Nature’s telephone, connected by the shortest way, took hours to bring the people in; they had to go roundabout, because the cliffs were too steep for even Kuni feet to climb.

Father Chabot said much the same thing that Father Rossier had said in the station below. “Before the mission came this district had dwindled to less than two thousand. The Kunis would have disappeared if we had not discouraged cannibalism, infanticide and abortion.” I wondered if the good priests were not fooling themselves. Abortion and infanticide may reduce a population, but cannibalism and continual tribal warfare may be blessings in hideous disguise. They keep the tribes apart. Warfare is a sort of rough quarantine. In times of peace strangers wander in and out, and bring infections with them. Native races die off not through their own suicidal customs, but through diseases introduced from the outside world.

Lecturing that night, my attention was caught by something that gave my audience a troll-like look: several little pigs followed the women with the affection of lap dogs. When the women sat down the pigs jumped in their laps. And what in the world was that one doing? I stopped talking to look again—one of the women had picked up her pig and was holding it to her breast, nursing it. There was a second woman doing the same thing, and a third. This might have taken a deal of explaining, but its reason was purely economic. A sow had died in pig-birth and left an orphan litter.

Taller, darker people who came in for the second lecture—we gave three that night—were as curious to me as the pig-nursing women. The young bucks were wearing corsets, tight-strapped arrangements of bark that squeezed them to the perfect hour-glass figure. I asked Father Chabot if these were effeminates and he chuckled, “The fellows in this tribe never do a lick of work—the women are the field hands. Well, if a woman sees a man with an especially small belly she says, ‘He doesn’t eat much. He ought to be easy to support.’ But he takes off his corset the day they’re married—and she goes on working.”

I had to change carriers again before we went on to Deva Deva. No use arguing; these fellows knew that there was very bad sorcery over the mountains. I paid them off with three sticks of trade tobacco per man. But the thirteen who had run away and been rounded up again stayed faithfully by me. They had to. Before Connelly pushed on he said, “Hang on to that bag of salt. From now on trade tobacco’s no good.” Everywhere I went I found the people stampeding for salt. They would put it in water, rank, and drink it as you would lemonade. When I doled out a spoonful in payment for something there were always children reaching up in hopes that I would spill some. The priests of Yule had warned me not to be too generous with the precious stuff. I might start a high-price epidemic. A Kuni or Mondo or Mafulu man who had his own bag of salt might retire on what we’d call a million dollars. They say that these mountain people drink themselves sick with sea water whenever they get to it. But the Government has forbidden the practice of recruiting them for labor; most of the few who ever reached the coast died of malaria.

The high-price epidemic had already struck Deva Deva. For an assortment of food which included sweet potatoes, yams, taro, pumpkins, bananas, sugar cane, pawpaws and two chickens they unreasonably asked two tablespoonfuls of salt. That wasn’t right. Last year the price had been one teaspoonful, and glad to take it. They were getting spoiled. But had they known it, I would have given bushels of solid brine for one of the delicious okari nuts which they usually threw in as a bonus. These things, in the husk, are as large as lemons; crack them open and you have something the size and shape of a cigar, with the flavor of an almond, only twice as good.