The boy explorers in darkest New Guinea

by Warren H. Miller

A distant roar of wind, and an angry cannonade of thunder came from the west, setting the jungle to rocking and tossing overhead, while birds flew wildly through the tree tops, croaking and screeching harshly. Dwight stopped and listened to it. He was trembling all over with the wet cold, and sharp chills were running through him. Now or never was the time for a signal, for no sound would carry far after the rain came. He raised his gun, fired both barrels, and listened with all his ears.

No answer, save the roar of the rain, sounding louder and louder and coming nearer and nearer. He looked about for the largest tree near him and ran for it. The branches of wind-lashed forest were now parting overhead, and out of the dark gray came vivid flashes of lightning which filled the jungle with winking light. The long ropes of creepers which climbed up to the branches of his tree from the jungle floor swung solemnly in the wind, and Dwight crept under them and huddled close against the trunk, cowering in the buttresses of the great roots.

Then came the rain, in furious white sheets that filled the forest with a flying haze. It soaked him instantly to the skin, while peal after peal of thunder went off like cannon shots. An ungovernable terror seized the boy—the fury of the wind-driven rain, the loneliness, the crashing and riving of limbs and branches—and he lifted up his voice in one last, despairing yell with every ounce of lung power that he possessed.

There was no answer—save a low, sibilant hiss, which sounded through the lowering gloom, close at hand, whispering sharp and clear in his ears above the noise of the storm! Dwight, startled with a shiver of fright, looked up, to perceive that one of the great vines overhead was not a creeper, but a huge python, lowering himself steadily, his neck crooked, and his head drawn back to strike at him! His gun flashed to shoulder, and both barrels went off blindly as the boy’s nerves collapsed with the shock of horror and he sank down in a shivering heap. He had a dim feeling of yards and yards of snake tumbling down through the vines beside him, but he seemed not to care about it at all, for it was comfortable down here between these roots ... if he could only find a place for his head....

When he came to it was pitch dark and the storm had gone on. A scampering of jungle rats made off through the black as Dwight moved his cramped limbs wearily, to find them aching all over and his face hot and flushed with fever, while violent chills kept running upward through his body.

He peered about him, bewildered; then conscious ideas began to pelt in upon him.

“F-f-fire! Quick-ick as I can m-make one!” he chattered to himself, fumbling for his pocket flasher. Its small but brilliant light lit up the jungle, causing many an outcry of night birds and a scurrying over the forest floor of land crabs and small marsupials. It also revealed the tumbled heap of the python lying beside him, its neck shot in two and parts of its reticulated length already gnawed by rodents. He glanced at it casually; to get wood that would burn was the real worry now! the jungle was black as a pocket, and a wan mist hung through it. After one flash of the light on those miasmas, drifting like pale death through the trees, Dwight hurriedly got out his medicine kit and swallowed some quinine. Then he sought kindlings in the underbrush, breaking twigs here and there, but they were all sodden and moldy. He felt sick all over and burning with fever, and he wanted to lie down again and sleep forever; but it was most imperative to stay alive, so he started off through the jungle in search of firewood, stumbling westward by compass, until a great tangle of vines ahead of him told of a prone dead tree.

His spirits rose as his eye lit on it, and he pushed his way under the great bole with ready shotgun, for he could not tell how many jungle dwellers might have camped under it during the storm. A grand scampering and creeping rustled the dry leaves under the trunk, but it soon stopped and the flashlight showed the cavelike space all clear. Dwight shouldered his way into it, and at once cleared a space for a fire and began peeling off strips of dry bark from the under side of the tree. Blessed, blessed fire! The one human thing in all this dark jungle! That was the turning point in his mental distress, for dejection gave way to cheerfulness, wandering homelessness to a hearth and a campfire. Soon the warmth of its small blaze penetrated even his chilled bones, and it and the quinine gradually drove off his fever. Dwight waited out the night under the trunk, trying the cave man’s posture of sleep, squatting on his hams with his head resting on arms crossed over his knees (still used by the hill men of India and by many tribes of the Malay Archipelago). He found it not so bad, even though irksome to a white man’s heel tendon. Keeping the fire going with bark and small branches broken from the tree trunk, he gradually dried out, and at length there came the dawn of another day and the jungle awoke to life.

Starting off by compass again, he steered due west, bound in time to strike the brook. It was not for an hour more of traveling that the jungle began to lighten on ahead, and bits of sky, glimpses of mountain side, and the tops of low trees told him he was coming to where the brook skirted the plateau. Dense, thorny underbrush began to block his way now, and beyond it came the rippling murmur of the stream. He shouted for the curator and his party, hoping that he was near enough to camp for his voice to be heard. No answer came, except the sough of the wind over the grasses and bushes of the plateau, so Dwight decided to get out into the open and study the mountains for something familiar. He forced his way to the stream-side and jumped across.

He discovered, from the familiar headlands of the mountain chain, that he was some distance above camp. It seemed well to fire another signal in the open, and he was about to do so when three large birds as big as ostriches jumped from the grass in the swales and began to run, making a scraping, cackling noise something like the wild brush turkey.