A TYPICAL PAPUAN HUT.
From a Photograph.
The village policeman went out to capture the miscreants, and was successful in bringing one to punishment. The crime, it was discovered, had been committed for a very simple reason. The dead man had been visiting a sick friend, who was the murderer’s brother. The invalid received every kindness from his friend, but eventually, in the course of nature, died. Therefore, argued the murderer, it was clear that the visitor had bewitched the sick man and caused his death, and his own life must necessarily be forfeited.
The hill-folk generally only came into prominence through committing murders or other crimes. Being removed from the coast, and able to hide in many obscure caves and lurking-places, they naturally stood less in awe of the power of Government than the coastal tribes.
One day we were visited by two hill-women who had run away from their husbands. Their bodies were covered with hideous raised scars, the result, they assured us, of spear-thrusts inflicted on them by their inhuman partners. They were in much fear of being pursued, but were given shelter for the night at Dogura, the head station on the hill behind Wedau, where I was living.
That same evening I was startled by cries from the village. The natives called to me to bring my lantern, and I ran down to find the place in an uproar. The men were rushing about, searching and looking up in the trees, while the women were huddled together, talking excitedly. I managed to make out that the husbands of the two fugitives had traced them as far as Wedau. One of the men had lurked outside a house in the village, and, so a woman averred, would have speared her as she came out, thinking her to be his missing wife. Fortunately for herself, however, she spoke, and he, knowing her by her voice to be a Wedauan, ran off in the darkness.
The villagers searched in vain, and the tumult subsided, but rumours soon reached us that the baffled husbands were collecting a force and intended to visit the head station at night and carry off the recalcitrant wives by force.
It was not thought safe for me to sleep alone in the village, so I went up the hill to add one more to the crowded house. Our girl boarders were packed in dozens into the different bedrooms, having forsaken their native dormitories for the night, and I was accommodated with a cane lounge. It was not furnished with mosquito curtains, and I decided by morning that even the hill men’s spears could scarcely be sharper than the bites of the vicious insects. No invaders arrived, however, so we put the story of their intended raid down as an idle rumour. The women stayed with us for some weeks and then slipped away. Some months later a policeman from up the coast told me that the brothers of one of the injured wives had taken summary vengeance on her husband, who paid for his cruelty with his life.
We got excellent drinking water from a little stream, though care was necessary in selecting the place from which to draw it, as the village pigs were only too apt to bathe indiscriminately. The natives used water-bottles made from hollowed coco-nut shells, fitted with a stopper of twisted leaves, and carried six or seven at a time in a netted bag suspended from the head. One of my girls, with a fine disregard for proportion, styled them “New Guinea tanks.”
