One morning in April, in the year when the old history of the Kurelu came to an end, a man named Weaklekek started down the mountain from the hill village of Lokoparek. He did not go by the straight path, which descends through a tangle of pandanus and bamboo onto the open hillsides, but instead went west, through the forest beneath the cliff. The cliff was a sheer face of yellow limestone black-smeared with green algae, and the tree line of its crest wavered in mist. With the sun rising behind it, the mist appeared illumined from within.

The rains of April had been heavy, and the path was a glutinous mire pocked by the hooves of pigs; he walked it swiftly, his bare feet feeling cleverly for the root or rock that would give them purchase, and at the stream he ran across the log. The path climbed steeply to a grove of tropical chestnuts, tall, with small leaves of green-bronze, and there he paused a moment to peer out through the forest shades. Though he could not see it, the sun had mounted from behind the cliff. Below, the valley floor and its far wall steamed in an early light, but the forest would stay dank and somber until the cloud above his head had burned away.

Weaklekek moved on to a point where the wood ended in a clearing between great boulders; the wood edge leapt with plants of light and shade, the most striking of which was a great rhododendron, its white blossoms broader than his hand. In the shadows and clefts of the boulders, wood ferns in wild variety uncurled from among the liverworts and lichens, the mosses and silver fungi. The ferns were the triumphant plant of the high forest, with species numbering in the hundreds, but Weaklekek was oblivious of the ferns, of all the details of his world which could not immediately be put to use. The ferns, like the mist hung on the cliffs, the squall of parrots echoing on the walls, the sun, the distant river, were part of him as he was part of them: they were inside him, behind the shadows of his brown eyes, and not before him. He would see a certain fern when he needed it for dressing pig, and another from which pith was taken to roll thread, but the rest withdrew into the landscape.

The experience of his eye was not his own. It was thousands of years old, immutable, passed along as certainly and inevitably as his dark skin, the cast of his quick face. These characters were more variable than experience, for experience was static in the valley; it was older than time itself, for time was a thing of but two generations, dated by moons and ending with the day in which he found himself. Before the father of Weaklekek’s father was the ancestor of the people: his name was Nopu, and he came from the high mountains with a wife and a great bundle of living things. Nopu’s children were the founders of the clans, with names like Haiman, Alua, Kosi, Wilil, and they had opened the life bundle against Nopu’s will, releasing the mosquitoes and the snakes upon all the people, the akuni, who came after.

Nopu was the common ancestor, but perhaps he was also that first Papuan who, one hour in the long infinity of days, from the forest of the mountain passes, saw the green valley of the Baliem River far below him in the sunny haze. How many years, or centuries of years, this man had wandered out of Africa and Asia may never be known, for he traveled lightly, and he left no trail.

Before the coming of Nopu, in the millenniums of silence, the greatest of the valley’s creatures was a bird, the cassowary. Birds of paradise, red, emerald, golden, and night-blue, fluttered, huffed, and screeched among the fern and orchid gardens of the higher limbs. Hawks and swiftlets coursed the torpid airs, and the common sandpiper of Africa and Eurasia flew south like a messenger from another earth to teeter on the margins of its streams. In stands of great evergreen araucaria, in oak-chestnut forest and river jungle, a primitive fauna of small marsupials, with a few bats and rodents, prospered in habitats long since pre-empted, elsewhere on the earth, by the cats and weasels, dogs, bears, hoofed animals, and apes: the marsupials, stranded on these mountain outposts of the Australian continental shelf by the wax and wane of ice-age seas, became carnivores and insectivores and, in the wallabies and kangaroos, strange herbivores of the high grasslands.

Then that first man—perhaps Nopu, perhaps another—reached the coast, and eventually the inner mountains; he occupied the valley, with his women and children, his bow, bamboo knife, and stone adze. Like the mountain wallaby, the cuscus, and the phalanger, he had cut himself off from a world which rolled on without him. The food in the valley forests was plentiful, and he had brought with him—or there came soon after—the sweet potato, dog, and pig. The jungle and mountain, the wall of clouds, the centuries, secured him from the navigators and explorers who touched the coasts and went away again; he remained in his stone culture. In the last corners of the valley, he remains there still, under the mountain wall. His name is not Nopu, for he is the son of Nopu’s son, but he is the same man.

So now he paused to take in his surroundings, standing gracefully, his weight balanced on his right leg and upright spear. His right hand, holding the spear, was at the level of his chin, and the spear itself, sixteen feet long, rose to a point which drew taut, as he stood there, the stillness of the forest. The spear was carved from the red wood of the yoli myrtle, and a pale yoli, its smooth bark scaling like reptilian skin, stood like the leg of a great dinosaur behind him.

Weaklekek was darker than most Dani, a dark brown which looked black, and the blackness of his naked body was set off by the white symmetries of his snail-shell bib. He looked taller than his five feet and a half, lean and cat-muscled, with narrow shoulders and flat narrow hips. At rest on the long spear, he gave an impression of indolent grace, a grace by no means gentle but rather a kind of coiling which permitted him to move quickly from a still position.

He stood there watching, watching. The landscape as it was, had always been, his eye shut out. The stir of change, the detail out of place, was what he hunted: a distant movement, a stray smoke, a silence where a honey eater sang, a whoop of warning. Across the valley other men stood watching at this moment, under the long spear, for today there would be war.

From where he stood, still as a snake, the southern territories of Kurelu’s Land spread before him. The narrow gully of the upper Aike dropped away on his left hand, the hill brush of its edges giving way as the land leveled to a riverain forest ruled by casuarina. Before him rose the smoke of morning fires, though the villages themselves—Abukumo, Homaklep, and Wuperainma—were not visible. On his right hand the cliff curved outward from the valley rim; it declined rapidly to a rocky hill, and finally a steep grassy slope, which plummeted for several hundred feet into a stand of giant araucarias at its foot. The three villages lay in a kind of pocket in the mountain flank, between the steep hill and the Aike River.

The araucarias were straight and tall, well over one hundred feet, with tiers of branches curving upward, and needles clustered in great balls, like ornaments. The araucaria was an ancient tree, disappearing from the valley, from the world; each needle of this tree grew very old, refracting the sparkle of the dew for forty years and more.

Directly below Wuperainma a small wood surrounded lowland brooks. The far part of the wood could be seen from where he stood, and beyond it a fringe of long-grass savanna, scattered with bushes, sloped to the bottom lands and drainage ditches of the sweet-potato fields. The bed of purple, veined by silver water, spread unbroken for a mile, ending at a far line of trees. Beyond the trees a marshy swale marked the frontier; it continued into no man’s land, surrounding a low rocky rise, the Waraba, and the near face of a pyramidal hill, the Siobara. The Siobara stood in Wittaia territory, and Wittaia fields and villages lay to both sides of it. Behind the Siobara a hairy spine of casuarina marked the course of the Baliem along the valley floor, and beyond the river a subsidiary valley mounted steeply to the cloud forest beneath the western walls.

The trail wound down the slopes toward Wuperainma, passing alternately through low woodland and open brush; the bare feet of many years had beaten away the grass and the thin topsoil, laying bare the chalky white of a fine quartzitic sand. When dry, this sand was as soft as powder, but in the rain it glazed to a smooth hardness. The white sand erupted in great spots across the valley, and from where Weaklekek walked three patches of it could be seen, like snowfields, at the base of the Siobara and on the farther hills to the southwest.

The limestone soil supported many plants in various stages of new flowering. Flowering and fading occurred in the same plant at once, the blossoms and burning leaves, for there was no autumn in the valley. The leaves died one by one and were replaced, so that the foliage of each plant was brilliant red and green against the hillside. The equatorial monsoons which brought a rainy season to the coasts had small effect here in the highlands; from moon to moon, the rainfall varied little. Winter, summer, autumn, spring were involuted, turning in upon themselves, a slow circling of time.

Weaklekek moved swiftly down the mountain. At a certain point he paused and called out toward the cliff—We-AK-le-kek! And when the voice returned to him, AK-le-kek,-le-kek, he grinned uneasily, for this was the voice of his own spirit. On the lower slopes the pigeon, yoroick, called its own name dolefully, and from far below, where the sun was shining, the bird was answered by the high voice of a boy.

At dawn that morning the enemy began chanting, and the chant, hoo, hoo, hoo, ua, ua, rolled across the fields toward the mountains. The fields were tattered still with mist, and a cloud hung on the valley floor, submerging the line of trees at the frontier. A man ran past the wood of araucaria, called Homuak after the spring which, rising silently from among the bony roots, flows out and dies in the savanna; Homuak lies at the foot of the steep hill near Wuperainma. He cried out urgently, his voice a solitary echo of the wail from behind the mist. The call was taken up on the far side of the hill and trailed off northward to the villages of Kurelu.

The wood of Homuak was strangely empty. The black robin chat and a yellow whistler sang in the evergreens, in the rich voice of new nesting, and the night’s rain fell in soft drops from the needles. High behind the still village of Wuperainma the sun rolled up onto the rim, and the mists creeping on the fields slowly dispersed. Still the Wittaia chanted, and the answer grew in all the villages.

A puna lizard, two feet long, with dinosaur spines and heavy head, crept out along a branch of araucaria, seeking the sun; its long whip tail, trailing behind, slid silently on the rough bark.

Small bands of warriors were moving out toward the frontier. The men carried their spears and bows and arrows, and the boys ran behind them. A figure climbed slowly to the top of a kaio, one of the many lookout towers visible from the wood; the kaio is built of tall young saplings bound into a column by liana thongs, and rises to a stick platform some twenty-five feet above the ground. The kaios, erected in defense against raids upon the gardens, march across the distances like black lonely trees. At the base of each kaio is a thatched shelter, and here the warriors assembled, leaning their spears against the roof.

Beyond the kaios and gardens lies a thin woodland, then a swale of cane and sedge, and at the far edge of the swale a solitary conifer. The tree marks the edge of the Tokolik, a grassy fairway nearly two miles long, paralleling the frontier. The Tokolik is the high ground of the swamp of no man’s land; on its far side a brushy bog occurs, scattered with dark tannin pools and reeds and sphagnum. The bog extends to the base of a low ridge, the Waraba, and beyond the ridge is the sudden pyramid, the Siobara, like a great fore bulwark of the enemy. In the middle of the Tokolik, just southward of the tree, lies a shallow grassy pool. Small streams have been diked to form the several pools on the frontier; black ducks with striped cinnamon heads frequent the pools, and the people know that the clamor of their flight might betray a raiding party of the enemy.

From the foothills at the south end of the fairway the smoke of a Wittaia fire curled, to lose itself at last against the roll of cloud which cut the valley floor from the dark rim. Near the fire Wittaia warriors were ranked, their spear tips clean as lances on the sky. A larger group, convening on the Tokolik itself, raised a new howling, broken by rhythmic barks. Before the sun had warmed the air, three hundred or more Wittaia had appeared.

At the north end of the Tokolik there is an open meadow. Here the main body of the Kurelu were gathering. Over one hundred had now appeared, and at a signal a group of these ran down the field to the reedy pool. On the far bank a party of Wittaia danced and called. The enemies shouted insults at each other and brandished spears, but no arrows flew, and shortly both sides retired to their rear positions. Because the war was to be fought on their common frontier, the majority of the Kurelu were Kosi-Alua and Wilihiman-Walalua—the southern Kurelu. The northern warriors were not obliged to fight, but the best men of even the most distant villages would appear.

The sun had climbed over the valley, and its light flashed on breastplates of white shells, on white headdresses, on ivory boars’ tusks inserted through nostrils, on wands of white egret feathers twirled like batons. The alarums and excursions fluttered and died while warriors came in across the fields. The shouted war was increasing in ferocity, and several men from each side would dance out and feign attacks, whirling and prancing to display their splendor. They were jeered and admired by both sides and were not shot at, for display and panoply were part of war, which was less war than ceremonial sport, a wild, fierce festival. Territorial conquest was unknown to the akuni; there was land enough for all, and at the end of the day the warriors would go home across the fields to supper. Should rain come to chill them, spoil their feathers, both sides would retire. A day of war was dangerous and splendid, regardless of its outcome; it was a war of individuals and gallantry, quite innocent of tactics and cold slaughter. A single death on either side would mean victory or defeat And yet that death—or two or three—was the end purpose of the war, and the Kurelu, in April, were enraged. Two moons before, three wives of the Haiman kain Maitmo, with another woman and a man, had gone off to a pig feast held by clansmen in a nearby tribe; on their way they had been killed by the Wittaia, and though the Kurelu had come off best in the wars since, the score was not yet evened.

Toward midmorning a flurry of arrows was exchanged, and the armies, each three or four hundred strong, withdrew once more. But soon a great shout rose up out of the distance, and the Kurelu answered it exultantly, hoo-ah-h, hoo-ah-h, hua, hua, hua, like a pack cry of wild dogs. From the base of the tree the advance parties ran to the hillock at the edge of the reed pool, mustered so close that the spears clashed. More companies came swiftly from the rear positions, bare feet drumming on the grass. Here and there flashed egret wands, or a ceremonial whisk; the whisk was made of the great airy feathers of the cassowary bound tight by yellow fiber of an orchid. The wands and whisks were waved in the left hand, while the spears were borne at shoulder level in the right. Four men had black plumes of the saber-tailed bird-of-paradise curling two feet or more above their heads; at the bases of these plumes shone feathers of parrots and other brilliant birds, carmine and emerald and yellow-gold, fixed to a high crown of fur and fiber.

All wore headdresses of war. There were thin white fiber bands, and broad pandanus bands with the brown, gray, or yellow fur of cuscus, opossum, and tree kangaroo. There were crowns of flowers and crowns of feathers, hawk, egret, parrot, parakeet, and lory. Feather bands were stuck upon the forehead, black and shiny with smoke and grease, and matched pairs of large black or white feathers shot straight forward above the ears. Most common of all was a white solitary plume, bound to the forehead by its quill.

On the black breasts lay bibs made up of the white faces of minute snail shells: the largest bibs contained hundreds of snails. Most of these were fastened to the throat by a collar of white cowrie shells, and some of the men wore, in addition, a section of the huge baler shell, called mikak; this spoon-shaped piece, eight inches long or more, was worn with its white concave surface upward, just beneath the chin. Over the centuries, the shells had come up from the coast on the obscure mountain trade routes; they were the prevailing currency of the valley, and a single mikak would purchase a large pig.

Few of the men were entirely without decoration. Even the youngest warriors, the long-legged elege of fourteen to eighteen, wore strings of snails, or a lone feather in the dense wool of their hair. But here and there were naked men—naked, that is, but for the basic dress of every day, worn by all warriors in addition to the shells and fur and feathers: the tight armlets of the pith of bracken fern, braided beautifully upon the wrist or just above the elbow; black fiber strings, one or more, worn at the throat; and the horim, an elongated gourd worn by all but the smallest boys upon the penis. The horim is tied in an erect position by a fine thread of twig fiber secured around the chest; a second thread is looped through a small hole in the horim and down around the scrotum. The horim is often long enough to extend past its owner’s nipples, and is sometimes curled smartly at the tip; many are decorated with a dangling hank of fur.

The advance warriors swept forward past the pool, reflections writhing on the windless water. The clamor increased as the Wittaia came on to meet them, led by a figure whose paradise plumes swayed violently above a head from which white feathers sprayed; he wore a boar’s tusk through his nostrils, hanging down like a white mustache. Both mikak and shell bib gleamed upon his breast, and staring white circles were painted around his eyes.

Two armies of four to five hundred each were now opposed, most of the advance warriors armed with bows, a few with spears. They crouched and feinted, and the first arrows sailed high and lazily against the sky, increasing in speed as they whistled down and spiked the earth. Shrieks burst from the Wittaia, and a wounded Kurelu was carried back, an arrow through his thigh; he stared fearfully, both hands clenched upon a sapling, as two older men worked at the arrow and cut it out. Soon a second man returned, astride the shoulders of a comrade, for this is the way those wounded badly are taken from the field. The battle waned, renewed, and waned again; the fighting was desultory. The day was hot and humid, and as war demands a great amount of heroic leaping and running the warriors very much dislike the heat. But soon the Wittaia began a chanting, heightened by shrill special wails used little by the Kurelu—

dtchyuh, dtchyuh, dtchyuh—woo-ap, woo-ap

woo-r-d-a, woo-r-d-a—

and the Kurelu ran down the Tokolik to battle, in a flying avalanche of feet, spears balanced at the right shoulder, tips angled down. Fighting broke out in the swampy brush toward the Waraba, and, as the line swayed back and forth, the bush fighters remained where they were, crouched down in ambush. A Wittaia low behind a bush, thinking himself unseen, leapt high with a screech as a long spear arched through the bush and caromed off him; he darted away, too shaken to retrieve it, for it had nearly run him through.

Now a shout of derision burst from the Kurelu. On the crest of the Waraba, two hundred yards away, above the battle ground, thirty-odd warriors stood in silhouette. These were men of the Huwikiak clans, from a country two hours distant, on the far side of the Baliem. The territory of the Wittaia borders on the river, and the Huwikiak are Wittaia allies. These men had walked far for the fighting. They streamed down the bank into the swamp to join the battle.

In the early afternoon there came a prolonged lull. The number of warriors was still increasing on both sides, and massed legions were spaced back along the Tokolik for nearly a mile in both directions. Rainstorms, like dirty smoke, filled the high mountain passes, but the clouds hung back along the walls. At the edge of the field a young warrior sighed in agony as an arrow with a long, toothed tip was worked from his forearm with a bamboo sliver.

A wind sprang forward from the east, and the sky darkened. As if caught by the suspense before a rain, the warriors by the pool grew tense, and a Wittaia whoop, breaking the silence, was hurled back on waves of sound. A harrier hawk with a black head, coursing the battleground, flared off and away.

The men assembled in their war parties, and the rear groups closed behind them. A warrior passing the wounded boy seized the bloody arrow as it was twisted free and ran with it toward the front: ordinarily the arrow is kept by the wounded man, and the old man who had removed it shook his head, as if shocked by this breach of custom, moving off toward the rear. The boy, deserted, stood up shakily, staring at the blood running away between his fingers. At the same time, he was proud, and the pride showed.

A man without valor is kepu—a worthless man, a man-who-has-not-killed. The kepu men go to the war field with the rest, but they remain well to the rear. Some howl insults and brandish weapons from afar, but most are quiet and in-obtrusive, content to lend the deadwood of their weapons to the ranks. The kepu men are never jeered or driven into battle—no one must fight who does not choose to—but their position in the tribe may be determined by their comportment on the field. Unless they have strong friends or family, any wives or pigs they may obtain will be taken from them by other men, in the confidence that they will not resist; few kepu men have more than a single wife, and many of them have none.

A kain with long hair in twisted cordy strings stalked forward, followed by another whose shoulders were daubed with yellow clay. U-mue came, in his huge mikak and tall paradise headdress, black grease gleaming in the hollows of his collarbones: the miraculous pig grease, blackened by the ash of grasses, is applied by all warriors whenever it is available, for it is sanctified by ceremony and contributes to morale and health as well as good appearance. It is worn by most men in their hair and on their foreheads, and sometimes in a broad bold band across the cheekbones and the nose, but U-mue smears it all over his head and shoulders, producing a black demonic sheen. He moved separately from the rest, for he claims to be a solitary fighter, with a taste for the treacherous warfare of the underbrush. In truth, he is rarely seen in action, and his claim to five kills is treated with more courtesy than respect. Among the warriors the numbers of kills are well established and are an important measure of degree of kainship.

Despite his claims, U-mue is not thought of as a war kain: he is the village kain of Wuperainma and the political kain of the clan Wilil in the southern Kurelu. The positions of war, village, and political kain are quite separate, though all may be combined in the same man: Wereklowe, the village kain of Abulopak, is also political and war kain of the clan Alua, and one of the most powerful men in all the tribe. Above the kains of all the clans is the great kain Kurelu, and below them are the lesser and younger men with varying degrees of kainship, based on property as well as valor, family as well as worth. U-mue, with four wives and eleven pigs, is a rich man, and his wealth, in company with his ambition and a rare gift for intrigue, has brought him power.

The fighting was closer and more vicious than that of the early skirmishes. More than a hundred men were actually in combat, as opposed to the twenty or thirty who had previously run out in the brief forays: the cries resounded to a strange, monotonous rhythm of twanged rattan bowstrings. The lines remained some fifty feet apart, but a few warriors moved out on the middle ground, crouched low, or down into the brushy swamp, stalking with spears. This is the dangerous fighting, for few men are killed by the thin bamboo arrows. Some may die afterward, but it is the spear which usually accounts for the rare kills made on the battlefield itself. The spear fighters in the brush beneath the Waraba kept low, for an arrow sailed at every upraised head. On the Tokolik, the battle line wavered back and forth, and at one point the Kurelu were swept back to the pool. Kurelu himself came forward then, and his men rallied. When the former line had been restored, the old man returned to the rear companies.

Seated among the taller kains, Kurelu looks shrunken and obscure. The scars of an ancient fire burn have pinched his chest, and his dress is old and brown and simple. His face is intelligent and reflective, almost shy, and its power is not readily perceived. But Kurelu’s gentle smile is private, and his eyes are cold and deep, like small holes leading to infinity.

Each little while a wounded man was carried back. One of these was Ekitamalek of the Kosi-Alua, with an arrow in the breast. Ekitamalek would die. The battle flew back and forth until, toward midafternoon, another long lull occurred. An hour passed, and the warriors of the far villages started off in single file for home. But on an instant fighting broke out again. It was led this time by Weaklekek, who was a war kain of the clan Alua and one of the great warriors: Weaklekek, with his broad brow and mighty grin, was presently in mild disgrace, having missed a fine chance in the last war to kill a Wittaia with his spear. As it was, he had found himself cut off and was saved at the last moment only by a wild foray and flurry of arrows shot by two of his men.

A number of warriors had now been wounded, but no one had been killed on either side, and the fighting continued until dusk. The warriors whooped and ducked and came up grinning in an access of nervous ferocity, much like the boys with their grass spears on the homeward paths of twilight.

The four wives owned by U-mue do not all live in Wuperainma, partly because one or more must tend his pigs up on the mountain, and partly because Hugunaro and Ekapuwe fill the village with their fighting. In consequence, Ekapuwe, who is pregnant, has been sent to the pig village of Lokoparek, while the other three work in their husband’s fields.

U-mue’s wives and their small children share two conical huts called ebeais. The ebeai, or woman’s round house, is perhaps ten feet in diameter and eight feet high. The lower floor is built a foot or so above the ground, and the sleeping loft about four feet above that: the loft is entered through a square hole in the ceiling. Both floors are carpeted with grass straw but are otherwise unfurnished. In the center of the ground floor is a hearth, which is delimited by four wood uprights at its corners. The uprights, which help support the ceiling, also prevent people from rolling into the fire: this a common accident among small children, and many akuni bear the scars of it, including Kurelu himself. The smoke of the fire must escape through a small doorway giving on the yard; outside the doorway, under the hanging fringe of the thatch roof, is a small area where two people, one on each side, may squat out of the rain.

The ebeais of U-mue’s wives are two of five in the long yard: two others belong to Loliluk, and one to Ekali. Across from the row of ebeais is the communal cooking house, an airy rectangular shed with a peaked roof of thatch and several doorways; though only six feet wide, it is over sixty feet in length, with three supporting posts from ground to ridgepole. The smoke escapes it through doorways, walls, and roof, rising with the steam of the wet thatch to mingle with the ground clouds of early morning.

Hugunaro crossed from her hut at daylight to prepare her fires. Morning hiperi—hiperi, or sweet potato, is the basic food, so much so that hiperi nan, the “hiperi-eating,” is synonymous with “meal”—are roasted at the fire’s edge, and the children are sent with them eventually to the men’s pilai, a communal hut like a very large ebeai which stands at the head of the yard, opposite the entrance: the men ordinarily rise later than the women and remain in the pilai by the hearth until the sun is well up from behind the cliff and the dank morning chill abated.

Their meal finished, Hugunaro sent her daughter with the other children to tend the pigs, which dwell in low sheds divided into separate stalls: the pig sheds may open into the rear wall of an ebeai, with the nearest stall reserved for piglets or sick animals in need of special care, but in U-mue’s yard the two sheds are separate structures in protected corners, with one end of each facing directly on the yard. Each yard normally contains one pilai and one cooking shed, five or six ebeais, and one or more pig sheds, depending on the prosperity of the inhabitants, all of these facing on a common ground and surrounded by a fence of palings; the village fences, as well as those surrounding outer gardens, are crested invariably with straw, designed to protect the raw fence wood from rot. Small plots or borders of tobacco, sugar cane, gourds, ginger, and other special plants are kept within the fence, where they may be guarded.

The entire enclosure, with its own entrance from outside, is called a sili. Sometimes an entrance is boarded up and the fencing between two silis taken down, establishing a common yard; in this case there are usually two pilais and two cooking sheds, with a corresponding increase in the dwellings of pigs and women. A village may be composed of one or more silis, depending on its age and its importance, though there are rarely more than three. Wuperainma, an important village, can boast four, but one of these is presently abandoned. As is often the case, the fence of the abandoned sili has been maintained, and the grounds have been turned to small garden plots as well as a grove of banana trees. Bananas are also grown, sometimes in company with pandanus, in weedy corners between silis, which tend to be erratic in their alignment. The warm green of the great banana fronds, wavering on the colder greens of the mid-mountain landscape, may signal the presence of a village even when the gold thatching of the roofs is quite obscured.

The sun had burned away the mists, and the men had left for the lookout towers to mount guard; Hugunaro, with the other women living in the sili, went out into the fields. Aneake, the birdy old mother of U-mue and Yeke Asuk, usually goes also, but today she remained about the cooking shed, tending the piglets and the smallest children. Frequently these children accompany their mothers: they sit astride the women’s shoulders, clinging to their hair. Infants are always borne this way, while new babies are carried in the bottoms of the nets extending down the mothers’ backs: here in the dark folds, except when taken to the breast, they ruminate all day.

The nets are a series of overlapping bags, woven from brown fiber of an aquilaria bush, and decorated usually, though not always, with V patterns of dark red and purple dyes. They are attached by a headband at the forehead, and swing freely down the back, over the hips; a full load may and often does include a cargo of vegetables at the shoulder blades, a small pig upside down toward the middle of the back, and a small baby in the deepest net, jouncing along on the behind.

Empty or full, the nets are worn at all times by the women, though they are not an article of dress. The women’s clothing is a sort of skirt of fiber coils which circles the body well below the waist; it passes under the bare buttocks, sweeps upward to cross the hipbones, and dips down again under the belly in a kind of scanty pelvic apron. The coils are slung loosely except at the hipbones, where they are tightly bound together; it is the pressure here which just maintains an otherwise precarious arrangement. The new coils may be very pretty, for a gray base of palm fiber is overlaid with the hard shiny inner bark of two woody ground orchids, one with red blossoms and red fiber and the other with purple blossoms and a fiber of bright yellow. The women’s skirts are woven by the men, who are the artisans of the akuni.

In the morning the nets are empty, swaying gracefully on the women’s backs.

Hugunaro and the others walked in single file down through a wood of small trees and across the brook and out through the savanna to the ditches and the sweet-potato fields. A fairy-wren, a tiny scrap of black with bright white shoulders, chased another through yellow pastels of rhododendron. Each woman carried her digging stick across her shoulders and behind her neck, both hands raised to clutch it. The digging stick—the large oarlike stick used by the men and the smaller pointed one used by the women—is the only garden tool of the akuni.

U-mue’s fields are far away toward the Tokolik, and the file of women angled back and forth along the path, which zigzags out among the ditches; the drainage ditches, which are crossed by bridges in the form of slim poles, serve also to deter the pigs from ravaging the gardens. Hugunaro carried a tight bundle of grass thatch containing fire: the fires are used throughout the day to burn dried garden trash. Arriving, she laid this on the ground and built it up with dry weeds and vegetable detritus. Each woman then took fire to the area which she was working.

Hugunaro began immediately, using her digging stick with sharp backhand strokes, like paddling, to slash the weeds; later she would break the ground in the same way. Her digging stick is about five feet long, pointed sharply at both ends; it is known as the hiperi spear, for it must serve also as a weapon in the event that the women are attacked. Though their spears would be no match for those of Wittaia raiders, the women in concert might defend themselves just long enough for help to reach them from the kaios.

The smoke rose slowly from the fires, and all across the gardens, on both sides, small white plumes broke the dark patterns of the fields. It was midmorning. In midafternoon the men would take up their spears and move back toward the villages, and the women would go too. There were only two meals in the day, in the morning and the evening, and the hiperi must now be cooked, for dark would come in a few hours. The women would take the vegetables harvested that day and load them into their nets, so that, trudging homeward, they looked twice the bulk of the skinny creatures who had gone out in the morning.

Hugunaro’s figure is typical of the women, who, except when pregnant, are little fatter than the men. She is perhaps five feet tall, with small shoulders and full breasts, small hips, and short, thin, childish legs: these legs, which are characteristic, seem curiously out of place on female bodies otherwise well made. She is a pretty woman, with bright brown eyes and a quick mouth and a wry, strident manner; in her stridence and quick temper she resembles the pregnant wife, Ekapuwe, which accounts in part for their mutual ill feeling.

Koalaro is older than the other wives and without fire: she is of the mood and color of bare earth. The young wife, Yuli, has no child as yet, though she looks strong and willing. She is taller than the rest, high in the breasts and heavy in the legs and hips, for her labors have not shrunk her to muscle. Yuli has tight little eyes in a large and stupid face, and her loose smile is playful. She looks as if she had a secret, and indeed she may: not long ago she was seized while in the fields and taken away to their own village by some men of the Kosi-Alua. After three days she came back of her own accord, and while it is assumed that she was not raped, and even that no intercourse took place, U-mue is nonetheless very angry with the Kosi-Alua and plans revenge.

In the evening fields below the grove of araucaria, a man with a black dog was hunting a tiny quail. The dog, sharp-eared and bushy-tailed, was quick and small; it came with the akuni long ago and is peculiar to the highlands.

The man, carrying a throwing stick, followed the dog. His arm was cocked. There were four boys with him, the fleet yegerek of seven to fourteen, not yet warriors and no longer children, the scouts and messengers, the swineherds and the carriers of weapons; the yegerek were armed with short sticks of their own. The dog pounced, and a quail flew. The place was surrounded, and two more quail flew out, the low sun gleaming through their wings as they whirred down the savanna. None were struck down, and the group trotted onward.

The boys soon tired of the hunt. They broke off small spears of a firm grass and staged a war, dancing and feinting with the spears, and whooping, before darting forward to throw, wrists quick as snakes. In the dusk their thin bodies were no more than silhouettes, outlined against the distant hill called Siobara.

The warrior Yeke Asuk of Wuperainma got his name when still a boy. Yeke Asuk means “Dog Ear” and refers to a gift for overhearing word of any activity which might lead to trouble, such as raid or pig-theft, and tagging along behind. Yeke Asuk, volatile and hot-tempered and a sulker, has not lost his taste for trouble and is often, these days, at the root of it. But, as U-mue’s younger brother, he has influence, and he is brave.

Two days before, on the Tokolik, Yeke Asuk had received a scalp wound from an arrow. The wound was superficial and no longer bothered him, and he sat with the other men around the hearth in U-mue’s pilai until the sun was high over the cliff behind the village. U-mue himself had been absent since the night before, on a visit to his pregnant wife up in the mountains.

Each morning, when their sweet potatoes had been eaten, the men smoked and talked in the dense warmth of the hut, and performed slow, peaceful work of manufacture and repair. Several worked together in repairing a shell bib: the shell strings lay coiled on a large leaf, and next to the leaf lay a supply of fiber from the spiny bamboo as well as some soft aquilaria. The aquilaria was woven across strands of bamboo to make the tough bands on which the rows of snail shells would be sewn.

In the sleeping loft above, Ekali turned softly. The ceiling of thin bamboo shafts supported by crossbeams of wood creaked vaguely with his movements. Soon a leg appeared out of the ceiling hole; it probed blindly for the wooden step which, polished with long use of callused feet, gleamed in the pale light through the doorway.

Ekali took a place behind the other men, who squatted near the door to use the light. At the hearth, as well as in the loft above, one is closer to the front according to one’s status—in a crowded hut, the kepu men and younger boys move to the rear. A tall, smiling man with a confident air, Ekali is kepu, but the others greeted him politely, their soft voices passing around the circle. Ekali, narak-a-laok, they said, taking his hand. Narak, narak. From the shed adjoining came the bumping of U-mue’s pigs, the consternation of each morning’s meeting with the children.

Yonokma is an older boy, an elege, sixteen or seventeen; he took from the wall an arrow shaft of cane and fitted it with a long tip, but the binding of vine needed repair, and Yonokma, with the shiftlessness of his age, replaced the arrow without really working on it. As the young brother of U-mue’s wife Koalaro, Yonokma stays frequently in this pilai. Because his movements are indefinite—he stays as often at his father’s pilai in Abulopak—his name signifies “the Wanderer.”

Yonokma’s friend Siloba began to sing. Siloba comes from the village of Mapiatma, on the far side of the wood, but he usually sleeps in Wuperainma, for U-mue is his nami. All akuni have namis, or men favorably disposed toward them in a protective and generous way; the nami is most often the child’s maternal uncle, though the relationship is not automatic, and a boy may have more namis than one. The nami relationship is the warmest of all family ties. A child will also have ceremonial fathers—the brothers, often, of his real father. Such a father would claim Siloba—An-meke, he would say, Mine, grasping his horim—with as much authority as Siloba’s own parent, and, in fact, the distinction between true and ceremonial is thought quite unimportant—in a sense, the head of the clan is the father of all in it. The ceremonial father, like the real one, is apt to be remote and strict, while the nami is indulgent.

As a house of warriors—in addition to Yeke Asuk, there are Hanumoak and Loliluk, and the boy Yonokma is already a fierce fighter—the pilai is stocked heavily with arrows and bows, with an arsenal of spare bowstrings, bindings, and new arrow points. The latter objects are wrapped in neat packets of straw or banana leaves and stored in the rafters or hung along the walls. Bundles of feathers, packets of fibers, a gourd calabash containing small fetish objects, a net bag of tobacco, some stone adzes, a bird-of-paradise headdress belonging to Hanumoak, some spare horims, and a men’s digging stick are stacked or hung against the walls toward the rear. Attached to the fire frame, near the ceiling, are a set of boar’s tusks for the nostrils, a boar’s-tusk knife, a cane mouth harp, and Yeke Asuk’s armlets of brown dog fur. By the side of the fire, which was now reduced to embers, lay long bamboo holders for the tobacco, and a small wooden tongs. The tobacco, wrapped and smoked in a coarse leaf, is called hanum; Hanumoak, “Tobacco Bone,” is named after the holder.

The sun had pierced the mist at last and gleamed in the puddles in the yard. One by one, the men left the dense warmth of the hut. Taking their spears—the spears are too long to be brought into the pilai, and are kept outside—they wandered toward the entrance of the sili.

U-mue’s wife Hugunaro, squatting in a doorway of the cooking shed, watched the departure without interest, for she watched it every morning of her life. As Siloba slipped past her, Hugunaro hissed at him. Siloba, she said softly. She beckoned him with the characteristic gesture, arm extended, palm down, folding her fingers down and back, down and back. E-me, eme. Come. She handed him a blackened hiperi. Siloba smiled, a quick, shy smile of thanks.

The warriors went down through the wood and out across the fields toward U-mue’s kaio. The path angled back and forth among the dark green leaves and violet trumpet flowers of the sweet potatoes. Every little while it crossed one of the drainage ditches, from which a coarse calla lily erected its large stalks; the corm of this lily supplies the vegetable of Oceania known as taro. Beside the taro plant floated leaves of its wild relative, a small water lily. Orange dragonflies zipped up and down the ditches, clashing in mid-air with a small dry, harsh electric sound, or poising suddenly on a leaf, their long transparent wings cocked forward. Like the drab mountain swiftlet which coursed the air above them, they were hunting insects.

U-mue had come down from the mountains and was already at the kaio. He wore a new crown of white feathers, taken from the wing linings of the black duck; the quills had been punched through a strip of papery pandanus bark to form a crown. Ordinarily the men do not wear such decorations to the kaio, but the crown was a new one and U-mue is vain. To go with the crown, he wore his large mikak and fine shell bib, with a string of cowries hanging down his back. A fresh band of black grease was drawn across his face, and his brow was also greased and shiny. Otherwise his dark skin was clean; he habitually looks cleaner than the other men, who do not always remove the fine gray scale of their own grime, nor the mud flecks on their lower legs. With U-mue was Apeore of Lokoparek, a taut-faced warrior with cold browless eyes.

The men crept beneath the shelter and hunched around the fire. On most days they would have rested here all morning, but today there was men’s garden work: though the women tend the gardens, the men do all the heavy work of creating and rebuilding fields and ditches.

Soon all but U-mue left the shelter. They had on the short horims worn at work, and the few wearing shell bibs turned these around so that they hung down behind. In a ditch a hundred yards away other men had already collected, standing in water over their knees. They reached down and dug double handfuls of mud and threw these up upon the banks, where older men packed the mud around each hiperi plant. Soon nearly twenty were splashing in the ditch, heaving and sweating. Hanumoak, who is quick-witted and handsome, paused for a while to daub some gray clay on his shoulders; he craned his head around, taking pleasure in his own appearance. The lame man Aloro came along after a while: he planted his spear butt in the earth and, sidling clumsily, joined the others in the ditch. Aloro was greeted with deference, for despite his twisted leg he is a fanatic warrior; it was Aloro who, with Yeke Asuk, saved the life of the war kain Weaklekek when the latter was cut off by the enemy. Though both Aloro and Yeke Asuk are young warriors, they have each killed two.

Beyond the men rose a pall of women’s fires. This morning the women had avoided the garden where the men labored, for though a man works sometimes with his wives, the two sexes never mix in larger groups. Once in a while the women, in apparent approval of the spectacle in the ditch, would laugh loudly among themselves, for in their cheerful way they are in league against the men.

U-mue climbed slowly and sedately to the top of the kaio tower and sat himself upon the platform, his feathers gleaming as he turned his head against the sky. U-mue was worried about his new crown, for though many of the people broke the taboo, the use of the wild duck in any way was considered wisa. Certain plants, animals, acts, localities, and other phenomena were wisa—invested, that is, with supernatural power. A wisa thing was not necessarily good or bad, but neither was it to be trifled with without due ceremony.

U-mue knew that the great kain Wereklowe, for one, had been angered by his use of duck feathers. A man who touched this bird, according to Wereklowe, lost much of the keenness of his sight and would thus be unable to spy out a raiding party of the enemy.

Just south of the village of Homaklep a small spur of the mountain, in the form of a low wooded ridge, slides out onto the valley floor and disappears. The village of Abukumo, half deserted now, lies on this ridge, and below Abukumo is a small wood. The wood gives on a grassy knoll, with a small grove of trees shading gray boulders; the knoll is called Anelarok. Below the south flank of Anelarok flows a small brushy stream, the Tabara, and to the west lie the open grasslands and the gardens.

Anelarok lies at a crossing of the paths, and because it commands a fine view of the valley there are often people, and a fire. The paths lead from the villages to the Aike, and from the fields into the mountains; the least-used is the one which plunges down into the undergrowth of the Tabara, crosses the stream on large flat stones, and climbs again on a steep slope toward the land of the Siep-Kosi. This path was used one afternoon to take a wounded Siep-Kosi home to his own country.

In former times the Siep peoples fought separately with both Wittaia and Kurelu, and though this practice proved too costly, their warriors still wished to go to war. The tribe divided into factions, one of which—the Siep-Elortak—fought henceforth at the side of the Wittaia, and the other—the Siep-Kosi—at the side of the Kurelu. This warrior had been wounded in the upper chest, fighting on the Tokolik. Too seriously hurt to be carried across the hills, he had lain for many days in Mapiatma. Then one day his people came for him and took him home.

Two poles were lashed parallel with vines, and the man was slung between them, supported under the arms and knees. His body was swathed in leaves and lashed securely; even his head was covered, leaving him just air enough to breathe. He was borne by seven men across the fields in front of Homuak, down through the woods, and up over the knoll of Anelarok. The journey homeward was a long one, but the men did not pause at Anelarok to smoke. Some Kurelu were there, and a fire burning, but the Siep-Kosi passed through quickly. The Kurelu and the Siep-Kosi, enemies in the past, could readily become enemies again.

The stretcher jolted down across the Tabara and climbed again on the far side. The paths were steep and rocky and slippery with the rains, and the seven bearers struggled with their load. The man sat still as a green mummy, as if he were long dead. Only once, when the caravan faltered, high on the far slope, did a slow hand rise toward the green head, hover a moment, and drop away again. The bearers moved onward, picking their way toward a sky gray with coming rain, until the figures were as small as ants hauling a dead cricket.

The journey was watched from the kaios of the Kurelu. The men at the kaios knew about the journey, as the akuni know of all things in their world. An event in the lives of the Kurelu is known as fast as a boy can run the ditch logs with the news, but no boy is ever sent. The word bounds straight across the fields like the flight of the brown finches, from village to path to garden—the men’s heads turn in the shadow of the shelters, the women straighten to rest a moment on their sticks—in a series of small whoops as pure and unmistakable as the flight signals of the birds. The people know the course of things, for the course of things may be thousands of years old, and all they really need to hear is the one word which changes; the event does not. The man’s name is called, with the high whoop which relays it onward.

The wounded man had come of his own accord because he wished to fight, and he was wounded because he was too brave or too careless, or because the power held in the holy stones of his people had not worked for him. This too was in the course of things. The Kurelu would be sorry if he died, and they would weep because weeping was expected, but a large part of the sorrow would be brought about by the satisfaction given the Wittaia. The Wittaia knew about this warrior, in the same way that they knew about each enemy struck in the body: they knew his name and village and his clan, and they hoped that he would die. But it now seemed that he was going to live, and in a short time they would know this too.

In the morning, when the sun appeared over the valley, the warriors trotted along beneath the mountain, bound for the northern wars. Among those who did not go was Yeke Asuk. He was not quite recovered from the head wound suffered on the Tokolik, and he had private business to attend to.

Some time ago a man from a village in the northern Kurelu had trespassed in his gardens. This is a most serious offense, and Yeke Asuk had stolen three of the man’s pigs in compensation. Two of the pigs had been speedily consumed, but recently the third had been restolen by its owner.

To redress this outrage, Yeke Asuk traveled to the village to demand the pig’s return. He was accompanied by his friend Tegearek, a violent man who shares with the lame man Aloro the war leadership of the clan Wilil. The color of both Yeke Asuk and Tegearek is golden-brown, markedly lighter than the average though by no means unique, and as both are also very short and powerful, they made, as they set off, a distinctive pair.

Yeke Asuk, less than five feet, is probably the shortest of male akuni. Limo, a kain man of the Kosi-Alua, is among the tallest. Limo is probably five feet nine, but his small shoulders and lithe body, more typical than the stumpy shape of Yeke Asuk and Tegearek, make him appear well over six feet tall. Many other warriors seem taller than their height: this is especially true when they are holding, as they often are, spears three times their own length.

The pig was not returned to Yeke Asuk, and, as circumstances did not encourage either seizure or re-theft, he and Tegearek went home. The complaint had been registered, to justify in advance any action that might be taken afterward. There was, in the valley, all the world and time.

Uwar and Aku came down along the wooded ridges, carrying on their heads bundles of fagots for the sili fires. When the steep slope fell away toward Wuperainma, they rolled the fagots down the hill, and the bundles leapt and sprang through the green hill shrub, starting the yellow white-eyes and quick wrens from their low shade.

The children, black motes on the white cumulus, strayed on the afternoon’s high horizon, sad to descend out of the sky. From where they stood their whole world and their whole life lay before them, all the northeast corner of the valley. The Elokera slid away beneath their feet, forsaking the mountain near the village of Takulovok, which lay invisible under the crest. The river entered a woodland of albizzia and emerged a slow brown grassland stream, unwinding along the mountain wall. Then it curled off westward, through the Kosi-Alua and the Wittaia, to come to an end in the smoke-misted distance, the Baliem.

The Baliem lay in the countries of the enemy, and though it was less than four miles distant, at the far end of the Siobara, the children would never know more of it than the fringe of casuarina which hid its waters from their sight.

Above the children’s heads three brown hawks circled, shrieking in tight, ratchety vexation in the high blue day. Other birds came rarely to the crest, which was no more than a jagged outcropping of limestone karst, heaved up out of the sea in other ages. Lichen and bracken ferns clung to sparse soil, with dwarf shrubbery in the niches, but songbirds rarely paused there; the insects were scarce, and the dry lizards stayed away. Only the hawks came, riding the updrafts from the valley warmth, and the fierce blue-gray hunter of all continents, the peregrine: the falcon dove down the steep hill like a shard of falling sky, its passage booming a half-mile away.

Below the hill, on the south side, was their own village of Wuperainma: Uwar is the son of Loliluk and Aku the daughter of U-mue. The children could spy down on the silis and watch Aku’s grandmother, Aneake, pick her way along the cooking shed. This was the still time of the afternoon, when all the people were in the fields; Aneake was too old to work steadily in the fields and rarely left the village now except to hunch in the near weeds or gather twigs.

They came down slowly, caught in the grave immobility of time, the sun and grass; the crests of the araucarias which shaded the spring of Homuak were still far beneath their feet. Now they could see Abulopak, the bare yards gleaming through the pale green of banana trees, backed up against the hill’s northwestern flank. Between the children and the villages, the slope was broken by round limestone sinkholes, and in one of the holes the wall sheltered a grotto; there was a fireplace, and long ago, before the children had first gone there, akuni had drawn pictures on the wall. Almost everywhere that people had sheltered beneath a rock and built a fire, such drawings had been made. They were made still, with charcoal sticks, for no other purpose than the amusement of the artist, for there was no language of symbol. There were men and women on the soft, pale stone, and a large crayfish, and some lizards.

The children sprang down the grassy hillside, quick as black dancers. Their voices called out to the people passing on the trails below, but the voices came from another world and went unanswered. Uwar sang vaguely, sadly, without sadness, and the song wandered on the airs of afternoon.

Early in the morning, when the pigs of U-mue’s sili are herded out into the fields, they are apt to consort briefly with a herd from the sili adjoining. The animals of U-mue’s sili are tended in rotation by the numerous children, while those of the sili of Asok-meke are tended invariably by Asok-meke’s stepson, Tukum.

Like all the swineherds in the Kurelu, Tukum conducts his pigs each morning to a predetermined pasture, usually a sweet-potato field gone fallow. Here the pigs eat greens and the stray vegetables which have escaped the harvest, and root for grubs and mice and frogs and the small skinks along old ditches. In the afternoon he escorts them back to village pens, where they are fed hiperi skins and other offal from the fires. Each pig is marked almost from birth for a certain fate—a ceremony, a marriage gift, the payment of a debt—but until the day of its demise it leads an orderly and pleasant life, prized and honored on all sides.

Despite the great worth of the pigs and the prestige they bear, little husbandry is practiced, though piglets, very small or ailing, are usually carried in the women’s nets and receive special attention. Should a sow reach breeding age, she may be escorted to a noted boar, lest one of her own scraggy kin should work his way with her. The daytime haunts of these illustrious boars, like the haunts of every animal in the villages, are common knowledge, and, while permission may sometimes be asked of the boar’s owner, the decision is more often left to the stern animal itself.

As Tukum is thought of as incompetent, even for a child of seven, such a delicate matter as sow-breeding would probably be left to his mother. Tukum’s mother is a shrill, cheerful woman, the gap-toothed bane of her young son’s existence, who, with her infernal pigs and her incessant shouting, reduces Tukum almost daily to bitter tears. Not only is Tukum smaller than the children of U-mue’s sili but his pigs are larger. The pigs take advantage of Tukum’s forgetful nature by losing themselves in the low wood or barging into gardens where they do not belong, and as they are far stronger, better coordinated, more numerous, and more intent than he, they make of his days a series of small emergencies. His only weapon is an extraordinary voice, both loud and gruff, and hoarse with use, which signals the presence of Tukum and his charges from great distances away.

Ekapuwe lives presently in the hill village of Lokoparek because she cannot abide Hugunaro. According to Ekapuwe, her rivalry with and dislike for Hugunaro was born of U-mue’s insane love for Ekapuwe, on the one hand, and Hugunaro’s disgusting jealousy on the other.

Ekapuwe is a Wittaia woman, married formerly to a Wittaia. In those days, perhaps seven years ago, the Kurelu were at war not only with the Wittaia but with those Siep-Kosi who are their neighbors to the southeast; the region of the upper slopes where Lokoparek now lies was then wild forest, a part of the frontier no man’s land.

One day Ekapuwe and her husband came to the forest to gather fiber, and there the beautiful Ekapuwe was spied by U-mue. It came to U-mue on that instant that he must have this woman above all things in life; at the same time, he was not prepared to attack her husband single-handed. The love-stricken man ran down the mountain to summon reinforcements, and returned not long thereafter with a well-armed band. Ekapuwe’s husband was driven off, and Ekapuwe herself became the prize of U-mue.

The romantic tale of Ekapuwe and U-mue is anathema to Hugunaro. Her terrible jealousy, in Ekapuwe’s opinion, makes the idea that U-mue should sleep with other women unbearable to Hugunaro, and it is for this reason that she resorts to an abortionist, for otherwise U-mue might neglect her in time of pregnancy. Hugunaro has made a habit of having herself aborted, four or five times, it is said. The abortion is effected by certain skillful women using techniques of pummeling and massage; the fetus is dropped in a special pool in the small stream called Tabara. Among noted abortionists is Asok-meke’s wife, mother of Tukum the swineherd. While abortion is more or less accepted among unmarried girls—as most girls are wed within a year or so of puberty, the event is rare—it is frowned upon when practiced by married women, and the likelihood is that U-mue and Hugunaro have quarreled on this account. On the other hand, the husbands are rather ignorant about abortions; there is a song of the akuni in which the women gloat over their husbands’ innocence,—but we, the women, know the truth! Many women dislike having children, and abortion is quite common.

It was the passionate Hugunaro who gave her husband the mildly derisive name that he now bears—the name U-mue means “the Anxious One.” With his intrigues and maneuverings, U-mue has every reason to be anxious, and a group of wives which includes, besides the rivals, a big, sleepy girl like Yuli cannot add very much to the Anxious One’s peace of mind.

When a man enters a sili which is not his own, his spear is left against a tree outside; otherwise, he rarely goes without it. The cheerfulness, even gaiety, of the people is the more remarkable for the fact that never in the whole course of their lives can they be certain that death does not await them down the path; after each peril, like the small mice which dart or flatten in the grass at a hawk’s passage, they continue as though nothing had occurred. Nevertheless, a man travels armed, not only in the vicinity of the frontiers but on his home trails; quite apart from the enemy, he may need his spear in the disputes which occur constantly within the tribe itself.

One fine day, down by the river, a man of the Kosi-Alua was badly injured, in part because he had left his spear at home. The wife of this man had left him for a man of the Siep-Kosi, and he had reason to believe that her flight had been assisted by Tegearek of Wuperainma. He came to question Tegearek, who denied all part in it, and when he came several times again, suggesting by his insistence that Tegearek had not told him the truth, the latter became woefully annoyed: whether or not the man’s suspicion was well founded, Tegearek felt himself insulted.

One morning the man came to the Aike, accompanied by several tribesmen; they were bound not for Wuperainma but for the lands of the Siep-Kosi, to inquire after the missing wife. The husband, foolishly unarmed, had wandered from his friends, and near the river he encountered Tegearek.

Tegearek is the young war kain of the Wilil, an innocent man of violence: his name derives from tege warek, or “Spear Death.” He is strong and stocky, with two black front teeth and the wistful expression of a man easily confused. He is hot-tempered in the way confused people often are, and he had with him Yeke Asuk, whose hot temper is more complex. These factors, in combination with the fact that his tormentor was alone and unarmed, persuaded Tegearek that an attack was timely and, after a brief and violent exchange, he launched it. No cowardice on Tegearek’s part was involved in this, for according to Dani codes a man who so forgets himself as to run afoul of an antagonist while unarmed and alone deserves no mercy and receives none.

Tegearek did not intend to kill the man but simply to punish him a little. To this end he jabbed him twice, once in the thigh and a second time in the head. His victim seized hold of the spear and tried to wrest it from Tegearek; when he managed to turn it in Tegearek’s direction, he was speared in the stomach by Yeke Asuk. Yeke Asuk did not wish to kill him either, and the spear was withdrawn after having penetrated two or three inches. The two friends left the man where he lay, not knowing how many Kosi-Alua might be along, or when they might appear.

The group of Kosi-Alua appeared soon after. They carried their friend home across the open fields, avoiding the brushy trails under the mountain. The wounded man sat astride the shoulders of each friend in turn, supported by two others at the arms. He was slumped, head hanging, and his head had been bandaged in vegetable leaves; in the sun, his back glistened with heavy sweat. The women straightened, watching in silence as the group made its way across the fields; it entered the brushland west of the dancing-field called Liberek and disappeared.

Since this episode Tegearek and Yeke Asuk have moved with caution, for they expect reprisal.

One morning on the way to his kaio, Weaklekek, the great warrior of the clan Alua, startled a large bird from the base of a rhododendron. The bird flew to the low limb of a chestnut tree overlooking the lower Tabara. Weaklekek took a hunting arrow from the bundle he carried with him and laid the rest in the grass; he ran silently down a slope on the far side of the tree, beyond the bird, and crept up on it through the bushes. The bird sat uneasily on the limb, a soft, rufous brown bird with a very long, wide tail. It was a mountain pigeon, the call of which, hoo-oik, hoo-oik, hollow and mournful, is imitated by the warriors in time of war. Weaklekek crept up too close, as he did not wish to waste his arrow. The bird flew as he raised his bow, and the arrow skittered across the empty branch.

A man’s voice called to him, We-AK-le-kek, a-oo.

Weaklekek went on down toward the Aike, stepping over a tribe of biting ants which, oblivious of his feet, dragged a dazed grasshopper across his path and into the grass jungle. He was the first man at the kaio. Other men, bearing their spears, arrived in a few minutes, and Weaklekek left his kaio and went down into the gardens. His wife Lakaloklek and their daughter Eken were breaking up stale earth, turning and splitting the old lumps with hiperi spears. Weaklekek had the men’s digging stick, and he set rapidly to work, panting rhythmically and hoarsely from the start. Behind him the girl, whose name means “Seed” or “Flower,” burned the dried weeds, and a light air out of the east carried the smoke toward Weaklekek and shrouded him. With Lakaloklek, he surged and vanished in the fumes. Feet planted in the black-brown earth, the man and woman were the exact color of the soil, as if they had sprung out of the smoke and earth, like trolls. Weaklekek’s great strength and energy were of the earth, infusing him, as if one day he might leap free and climb the sky.

Except when in the act of love, in wayside grass or the night darkness of an ebeai, a man and wife are entirely undemonstrative; this is prudishness, not lack of warmth. Weaklekek and Lakaloklek are no exception. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that Weaklekek has other wives, he is plainly closest to Lakaloklek. Lakaloklek herself, a slim, spirited woman with a pretty, elfin face, took upon herself the disapproval of the community by rushing to Weaklekek immediately after the death of her first husband: her name means “She Who Would Not Wait.” More than any other man and wife in the southern Kurelu, they seem a pair. There is an air of strong communion when they are together, of wild and unarticulated tenderness.

Weaklekek worked relentlessly, his dark body gleaming in the pall. The dirt flew, tumbling in clods. From one clod wriggled a bronze ground lizard; it writhed down to the water of the ditch.

Weaklekek cried gleefully at the sight of it, for the fact of it. Some water spiders flew before the falling clods, and he called out softly, Pilili, pilili—Be quick, be quick. Behind him, Lakaloklek laughed, as affectionately as wives of the akuni ever laugh, but she did not cease working. She turned the earth slowly and steadily, bent over her stick, breasts swaying.

When Weaklekek first came to live in the southern Kurelu, he was called simply We-AK, which means “the Bad One.” He brought this name with him from the northern countries, where he had had a wife. One day, not long before he came to Homaklep, this wife told him that she had been raped by men of a near village, and Weaklekek went immediately to confront them. The men were absent, and Weaklekek, as was his right, seized a number of their pigs and took them back to his own sili.

The next day his wife confessed to him that she had not been raped at all; apparently she had lied to him in the simple hope of making trouble. Weaklekek has a dark temper, and he became enraged. Nevertheless, he retired into his pilai, attempting to control himself. Some hours later he emerged and, finding his wife before him in the yard, struck her a terrible blow along the jaw. She dropped senseless to the ground, and before the next morning she was dead.

Weaklekek was grief-stricken, for he had loved this wife; certainly he had not meant to kill her. He could not forgive himself for what he had done, and meanwhile his own life was in danger. Custom demanded that she be cremated, but her kinsmen were infuriated by her death and swore that they would kill Weaklekek; he could scarcely invite them to the funeral. Furthermore, he had no support from his own people, who were shocked by his act and would not go near him; they referred to him from that time forward as the Bad One.

It was characteristic of Weaklekek that he made no attempt to excuse himself, to mollify the akuni by inviting them to feed upon his pigs. On the morning following the death, when the funeral would ordinarily have occurred, Weaklekek went out into his yard. In a passion of grief and anger and remorse, he tore down the fences of his sili. All alone he hurled the laths together in a mighty pyre, and all alone he carried forward the body of his wife and laid it on the flames.

When this stark funeral was finished, Weaklekek left his village and walked off to the southward. There was no life left for him where he had lived, and he knew that sooner or later the kinsmen of his wife would try to kill him. He went to the village of Homaklep, on the far southern frontier, bringing with him a heavy heart and a bad name. Homaklep lay in the shadow of the enemy, and its people were glad to have a man such as Weaklekek, even though he was an outcast.

Not long thereafter his wife’s kinsmen ambushed Weaklekek along a trail. He killed one of her brothers with an arrow, fighting furiously—so furiously that the attack was never again repeated—but in doing so he worsened his own reputation. Nevertheless, in his new village he worked hard, earning respect, and became one of the great warriors of the region. Over the years, the name We-ak was lengthened to Weaklekek, to wipe away the sense of it, though the killing of his wife and her brother have maintained his reputation for violence.

The akuni still fear Weaklekek on those rare occasions when he loses his temper, and Weaklekek himself, despite his generosity and kindness, gives frequent sign that he is a burdened man. Always solitary, he retreats at times into a somber silence, as if in dread of his own strength. His broad back to the world, he hunches over a long shell belt, weaving, weaving.

Not long ago both wives of a man named Werene were raped in the fields by men of the Kosi-Alua. Werene stole two of their pigs, the normal compensation, and gave them to Weaklekek for safe keeping. But the Kosi men did not recognize his right, having small respect for Werene. They came to Homaklep and, failing to find the two animals in question, made off with Werene’s entire herd.

A man suffers offenses according to his inability to defend himself, and Werene suffered both of the most common ones, which are pig-theft and wife-rape. In principle the offender is paid back in kind. Should he be found out—and as these acts are usually an expression of power, he is almost invariably found out—and should he accept the theft of his own pigs or the rape of his own wife, the matter is then closed. But more often the victim of the offense is chosen in advance for qualities of cowardice or impotence and suffers his injury to go unpunished.

The great kains, though wealthy in both pigs and women, are not often sinned against, for it is one of their prerogatives to kill a man, or his subordinates or children, when he has done them harm; indeed, the demonstrated willingness, and even eagerness, to take life is an important asset in establishing a great kainship in the first place. But a man who is totally kepu soon loses to stronger men any pigs he may have acquired, and his wives, when not raped, are taken outright. This is the law, and, should he resist it, he may die or be cast out.

Werene’s main asset was his friendship with Weaklekek, who is kain of Werene’s village. Weaklekek is a loyal and generous man, and he heeded Werene’s request that he intercede. It was arranged that the two original pigs be returned to their first owners, whereupon the pigs of Werene would be returned to him. This much was accomplished, but Werene, in the end, had two raped wives without a compensating increase in the number of his pigs, while Weaklekek was much resented by the Kosi-Alua.

One night in late April the young warrior Ekitamalek of the Kosi-Alua died of a wound from a Wittaia arrow; this wound had been suffered in the recent war on the Tokolik. Ekitamalek had not been a very good warrior, spending most of his time in the second line, and he had been in the second line when the arrow struck him. The arrow entered his breast on the left side, and the shaft broke off. The old men could not locate the tip and assumed that only a small piece was still inside, and within a few days Ekitamalek was walking around in the village of Kibitsilimo, where his father, Yoroick, lived. He did not feel well enough to work, but he was not in pain. One morning two weeks later he felt strange. He went to his mother’s ebeai, complaining of his wound, and was helped into the sleeping quarters in the loft. He started to cry, and the men came to see him. Within three hours he was dead.

The village of Kibitsilimo lies southwest of Homuak, across a savanna of abandoned fields and weedy ditches. On the morning after the death the women on their way to mourn Ekitamalek stopped on the banks of a stream just south of Kibitsilimo and daubed their faces and bodies with ocher clay. In single file they then resumed their way, yellow and leprous, bent beneath brown nets of hiperi. From the river the moaning in the village could be heard, rising and falling like a dull wind.

Near the outer fences of the village the women paused in silence while a group of men passed ahead of them. The women’s faces were set and cold, and in the yellow clay they looked possessed. When the men had gone they moved onward again, into a little grove on the south side of the village. Arriving, they climbed slowly, one by one, through the narrow entrance stile. Seated facing them, on a high chair in the hot sun, was Ekitamalek.

The sili is a large one, laid out in an L, with the entrance at the top of the letter: the chair stood in the long part of the L, not quite at the angle, looking toward the mountains. On the right hand of the women entering stood a long cooking shed, and by its wall the women laid their nets and offerings of sweet potato. Then they went forward to sink among the massed brown female backs hunched on the earth before the chair.

The women rocked and groaned, hands to their faces or forearms across their brows; some scrambled awkwardly to touch the dead man’s feet and rub his legs. Two women stood before the chair with leafy branches, brushing the black flies from the dead man’s face and wounds. All the women cried, and at the same time they moaned in rhythmic response to the litany of the dead man’s father, who stood behind the chair. Yoroick’s voice quavered with grief as he called out his elegy of his son, in phrases.

The only woman behind the chair was the dead man’s mother. She clung to the chair post, hands clasped around its top, and sometimes she sank down at its foot, boneless with grief.

A pathway was kept clear among the ranks of women, and the incoming men passed through in single file. Kains from the nearer villages had brought pigs; those from farther off had with them ornamented belts of cowries. The animals were not brought in, but were left in the pig stalls of adjoining silis; the cowrie belts were taken into the men’s pilai, which occupied the corner of the L, beyond the chair.

The visitors were important warriors and men of property; the few young men were relatives, or of the sili. None of the men had brought their spears or bows, and none wore ornaments; they were dressed as simply as the dead man himself. Because of an old quarrel, neither Werene nor Hanumoak, younger brothers of Yoroick and uncles of the dead boy, had felt welcome. Among the kains were Nilik of the Walilo, Polik of the Halluk, and U-mue of the Wilil. Weaklekek was also there, but he was received coldly by the Kosi-Alua, owing to his intercession on behalf of Werene, and left the village before the funeral had begun.

The men paused a few minutes before the body, standing in the pathway among the women: they joined in the lament, rubbing their right thighs with their right hands and wiping their eyes with their left. They sniffed and grunted dutifully, and most, after a few minutes, were able to summon tears: the tears flowed down their faces and mixed with long strings of untended effluvia from the nostrils. Egh! Egh! Egh! Egh! After a time this was given up, and the men moved to a second position, behind the chair. There they stood quietly, under the harsh gaze of the female body. Most bent their heads, an appropriate expression on the face, and one or both arms folded behind the back. The hand behind Polik’s back held the tight brown roll of his tobacco. Then they retreated from the vicinity of the chair, to join the other men seated on leaves and ferns in the yard before the pilai.

The newcomers passed among the rest, taking and squeezing each hand in turn, with quiet greetings—Narak-a-la-ok  . . . Narak . . . Ny-ke. Narak-a-la-ok, the basic form, means “I eat your feces,” but it is said in vainglory rather than deference, as if the speaker, in accomplishing such an act, could only be quite a fellow.

Close friends and relatives embraced without kissing, patting each other on the back and murmuring, Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, in a kind of rapid panting. The old men, who are treated generally with great affection, are embraced more often than other people and at greater length. The greetings done, the men sat and talked and smoked, joking quietly and answering casually the cries of Yoroick.

Yoroick is very tall, and he had a small amount of yellow clay stuck on his shoulders. Hands folded across his lower stomach, he recounted imaginary deeds of the mute presence in the chair in front of him, in short ascending phrases: the response of the women began on the high note and descended softly, like a sigh.

The warriors went to the Tokolik

Ai-i-e-eo

And moved slowly past the ponds.

Ai-i-e-eo

He, all alone, went forward.

Ai-i-e-eo

Now he is gone

E-eo

Our child is dead

And this is very sad.

Our land can be here no more

We will go far away.

Shall we go northward, to the spring of Elesi?

Or south into the Southern Valley?

Shall we go to the peoples in the west,

Or shall we start a new life, far away?

From behind, the chair looked ponderous and out of place. The chair had been built especially for the funeral and while it stood was the only piece of furniture in the village. Straight-backed as a throne, its seat high off the ground, it was a makeshift of split laths and saplings lashed together with lianas. The back and seat were lined with fronds, and Ekitamalek’s body sat in a semi-fetal posture, legs folded over a lath secured across the front of the rough chair arms beneath the knees; his knees were at the level of his chin. His lower legs were bound together with strips of fiber, and his head was secured to the back of the chair by another strip passed under the jaw. His hands rested palms downward on the chair seat.

In a humid heat the dead man sat, attended by the flies and sun. There grew from him, as the day passed, that infinite silence which, despite its mourners, surrounds a dead body like a great drop of dew. Strands of his wild crest of curly hair caught glints of morning light, outlining the head against the pale straw thatching of the huts. His body was naked save for its horim, still tied erect, and the black fibers at the throat, worn by all warriors for good luck in war. His head was inclined softly to the right and, as the day went on, appeared to sink gradually toward his breast. His face looked less martyred than pensive and sad; his mouth, hung slightly open, was still firm and strong. He looked mortally tired, and at the same time relieved that he had sunk into sleep at last. Like most of the men of the Kurelu, he had been given a second name when his life was well started, in recognition of a characteristic quality or act or manner. The name Ekitamalek meant “Empty Fist.”

The war kain Husuk, who is the owner of the sili, moved quietly among the mourners. Black-skinned and straight-backed, with a small step almost delicate and a gently sardonic smile, Husuk attended quietly to the progress of the ritual. Like most akuni men, he wears a short neat beard the whole length of his jaw. In the middle of the day he brought from the pilai the long shell belts: these are woven belts, five or six feet in length, to which are sewn large cowries. The shells are spaced an inch or so apart, and between each pair is a cross band of bright red or yellow fiber; sometimes the belt is edged with tiny snails or tufts of fur. The cowrie belts are a form of currency; as ornament, they are worn only at birth, at the time of initiation, and in death.

The kains came forward and draped the belts around the forehead and down across the shoulders of Ekitamalek. A fine fur headpiece of tree kangaroo was hung on the chair post above one shoulder, and a mikak shell was fastened at his throat. On the arms of the chair, as the only offering they could make, the women draped new nets.

Three young pigs were brought into the sili. Each was hoisted by two warriors, one holding it by the ears and the other by the haunches. The pig was held at chest height, and Yoli, village kain of Hulibara and Yoroick’s kinsman, took up a bow and arrow. The arrow’s tip was a half-shaft of sharp bamboo, sharpened at both edges to the tip; this is the bleeding arrow, used invariably for killing pigs and as an auxiliary weapon in the wars. Arm shaking, Yoli hauled upon the bowstring. From a distance of a few inches, he drove the arrow into the pig’s lungs. The pig writhed, squealing, to the ground and trotted around the sili, pumping blood. When it had weakened, it was caught once more, and a man worked the blood from it with his foot as it gasped upon the ground. This process was repeated twice.

Banana fronds were brought and stretched on the ground before the pilai. The three dead pigs were laid there on their bellies, legs extended forward and back, in a neat row. Their tails and ears were lopped, to be put aside as ornaments and fetishes, and leaves were heaped on their hindquarters. Other men, off to one side, were digging a cooking pit with the long digging sticks. The pit, when finished, was three feet deep, and narrow at the bottom, an inverted cone, and the black mud of its sides and edges was stamped smooth.

Husuk appeared, bearing a large charred log. Another log was brought, and a fire built between them. The pigs were singed upon the flames; they turned a blotchy black and white as the mud and bristles were scraped free. They were then returned to the banana fronds, the seared lips sucked back upon their teeth in a taut snarl. The bright leaves of a blue-flowered spiderwort had been heaped upon the fronds, and eight of the elder men, using stone adzes and bamboo knives, dressed out the pigs and cut them to small sections.

The fire was enlarged. A man with a heavy ax, more like a club, from which the stone protruded like a nose, split long laths; the laths were placed across the two original logs, and others were tiered above them. Stones were piled into the fire, and damp leaves heaped upon the flames to hold the heat. The heavy smoke poured out across the sili, filming the crouched bodies of the women.

All morning the chanting had continued, but it was gentle now, like the breathing of small waves on a quiet shore: the old man’s scratchy voice was the water sucking back among the pebbles, and the response was the soft falling forward of the wave. Tik, tik, tik, tik, tik, tik—aie-ee-o-o. De-e-o. The dead boy’s mother still clung to the chair, draped down its back like an old net, as if her wrists had been lashed to the rude post. For the moment she was quiet. The sun was bright and the air windless; the southeast trades have not yet come, and in this season the corner of the valley is all but windless, strangely so, except just before a rain. Dragonflies and small gaunt wasps and a solitary butterfly, coal black with white spots on its wings, hovered at the sunshined mud where the night’s rain was fading. High above, a wind of the upper atmosphere moved clouds out of the east, and dark small swiftlets hurtled down the sky. Then a vague breeze turned the air, rattling the fronds of the banana trees which stood in ranks around the village.

A line of men came across the fields, framed by the tattered fronds. At the fences of the sili they passed to the older men lashed bundles of fresh leaves and ferns, which were banked into the cooking pit. The hot stones were carried from the fire, one by one, in tongs made from split staves, as hiperi and pig meat were brought forward. Bound in a grass cone by a coil of rattan, the leaves and ferns were piled above the surface of the ground. Vegetables, stones, and ferns were placed in layers.

Some of the pig meat had been hung on a crossbar between two huts, and more had been stored in the pilai; this part of the sacramental pig, wam wisa, would be saved for the next day. The rest was placed in the cooking pit with the vegetables. A small smiling girl stood near the women, looking on. In her hand she held a gleaming strip of tripes, like a toy necklace.

The great war kain Wereklowe came to the funeral late; he stayed out of sight in a hut near the entrance. Kurelu himself was there but took no part in the ceremony. For a while he remained outside the fence entirely, looking obscure and humble in an old brown head net. Later he entered, crossing a back fence, but he sat quietly with some lesser kains around the corner from and out of sight of the ominous ranks of women. Sometimes the women much resent the men who call for war and have been known to rush upon them and beat them severely about the head and shoulders.

The food baked slowly in the rock fire, and big drops of rain fell through the sunlight. Small children, bored, rubbed flies from the damp of their eyes and nostrils, using fat spread fingers; they stood framed in the doorways of the huts, and when they cried were withdrawn into the shadows. Through big chinks in the back walls of the cooking shed the hiperi fields were visible, rolling away toward the Baliem River and the valleys which climbed beyond. An old man tottered about, crying out empty instructions in a thin, long-range voice; he was gazed at briefly, without rancor, and then disregarded. Other old men, in a file of eight, appeared belatedly at the entrance. They came to stand among the women, as the others had, and paid their respects to the dead man. Though they wore no decoration, one old man had dried pig testicles tied above his elbows as an evidence of wealth. In their honor, the chanting strengthened briefly, and the new mourners sniffed and quavered fulsomely in unison.

In the silence of his chair, Ekitamalek became more and more a presence. While his people, awaiting the cooking food, sank into a kind of torpor in the rain, he himself appeared to vibrate with a special life, as if the spirit which possesses all akuni in their lifetimes was only now attempting to escape. Littered though he was with ornament, he maintained an invincible dignity; with his dark face framed by the rich belts, he looked more regal and far wiser than he ever had in his timeless days as boy and man in this same sili.

Below him the rain and sun gleamed on bare backs and large mute haunches, which seemed to grow from the earth on which they crouched. Even his mother, behind the chair, had sunk away in resignation. One woman still stood before him, crying soundlessly, with open, untwisted face. This was the sister of his nami. The nami himself lived far away, but the sister lived among the Kurelu and represented the nami at the funeral. While other women came and went, clutching at him, scarcely looking, she had stood there all that day, gazing straight into his face. The leafy fly switch in her hand was long since bedraggled, but still she moved it aimlessly, as if transfixed.

In midafternoon the leaves were taken from the rock fire, and people stirred. A very old woman in yellow clay picked her way along the fence as careful as the thin-shanked heron picking its way along a ditch. With her small back and tiny breasts, she looked curiously childlike, shy and knock-kneed as a little girl. Younger women came and went, fetching the food; these were big-breasted, with a heavy stride and a determined air, and many carried babies on their shoulders, in their bellies, or invisible at the bottoms of their nets. The women would content themselves with tubers, for all the pig was taken by the men.

Steadily and softly, like a breathing in deep sleep, the chanting continued while the people ate. As afternoon waned, the light rain ceased. The chanting grew once more, and Yoroick led it, on his knees, tears pouring from his eyes; his grief, like that of the woman before the chair, was deep and clear as water of a spring. Yoroick had moved some years ago from his home village of Abukumo, after a dispute with his brother Werene; he had taken his three sons with him, but two of them had now been killed in war. The third, a young boy, watched him unhappily from the doorway of a hut. Ekitamalek’s young sisters were also in the sili, in their little girls’ rush skirts: their part in the funeral would be played the following morning, in the ritual mutilation.

While Yoroick grieved, the kains went forward and stripped the body of its ornaments, and women came to take away the nets. The offerings, like the grief itself, had been part ritual; a funeral was an occasion of exchange, and those who had brought offerings expected something in return. The cowrie belts were stretched on the banana fronds, and the men gazed upon them avidly, oblivious of the denuded corpse in the chair a few feet away. The Walilo kain Nilik, hawk-faced and ambitious, held up the shell strands one by one and announced who would receive them; the strands were awarded according to the size of the pig brought to Kibitsilimo that morning, and the former owner of the strand received that pig. A strand given to old Asisal was seized violently by another claimant, and Asisal struggled for it, screeching in dismay. Asisal, a greedy, troublesome old man, was formerly called Hup, after a bird, because of a nervous habit of peering about in time of war in search of a safer position. When at last he was too old to go to war, his name was changed to Asisal, which means “Extruded Rectum.” All the akuni laugh over this name, even chagrined Siloba, his son, who lives with his nami U-mue in Wuperainma.

But Asisal was in the right and got the belt: the women, who took the funeral more seriously than the men, groaned loudly in disapproval at the disturbance. One woman received a strand in the name of the absent nami; this was she who had stood with the dead man all day, under the sun.

From Ekitamalek’s nose black blood began to drip, more and more rapidly, flowing over his lips and down his side. Soon men came forward and cut the body free, and a loud wail arose, the loudest of the day—o-woo-oo—and the panting egh! egh! egh! of pain. O—woo—oo. The body was supported from behind as the chair was dismantled around it; the grieving mother got to her feet to assist in the dismantling.

The body was carried back to the fronds before the pilai. It had stiffened in its seated position, paper-skinned from the heat of the sun. The swelling of the wound had spread all over the left side. A warrior held Ekitamalek from behind, while two old men kneeled at his side; the mother clambered forward, on her knees also, and bent over to embrace his feet, which were pointed in toward each other; for one instant, in the dramatic light of a sinking sun, she completed stark harmony.

On the site of the dismantled chair a pyre was being built, a wide, strong tier, left hollow in the middle.

An old man, holding a bamboo sliver, attempted to cut the arrow tip from the body. Though the arrow had entered the left side, it had apparently worked upward and cut the lung; he widened a large incision already made on the upper breast. The arrow was deep and he could not exract it. Another old man cut farther and at last, by inserting his fingers into the body, was able to wrench free the wood; it was a large piece, the length of his hand. This enemy arrow would be placed with other fetish objects in the recesses of the pilai.

The withdrawal of the arrow had brought with it a strong rush of dark dead blood, and with it a stink of putrefaction; the blood drew a cry of anguish from the mother. She remained kneeling, back to the pyre, as the body was lifted once again and borne toward the flames. There an old man held high a banana trunk wrapped in straw; as the body was carried under it, a warrior shot an arrow into the bundle. The arrow released the living spirit, which now became the ghost; the ghost would go off into the enemy countries, where, by causing trouble and dissension, it would abet the cause of its former comrades in the wars to come. The bundle would be stored with other bundles in a small shelter in the woods.

Ekitamalek was lowered, face upward, onto the flames. The fire was very hot, and his bearers were forced to bend his legs in hastily; even so, one of the legs, from the bent knee to the foot, protruded from the pyre throughout the cremation, turning the same blotchy black and white as had the pig. Other logs were laid on top of him, and a woman stoked the fire with a pole when the flames lessened. Smoke carried the smell of the scorched flesh throughout the sili, but the chanting had died quickly as the first flames sank, and the men were talking once again; already women were leaving the sili, filing out into the twilight fields.

The mother crouched close at the fronds, by the puddles of mixed pig and human blood. Yoroick had disappeared into the pilai. After a time, all but unnoticed, she crawled painfully on all fours across the yard toward her ebeai. There an ancient crone, shrunk up in a tiny bundle like a dead spider, reached out a feathery hand to her and drew her in.

In the gathering darkness, the few yegerek who had come to the funeral fled homeward, darting and flitting down the paths and across the precarious log bridges at the sinkholes and weedy ditches. Pilili, pilili—they called and regrouped like swift, late-flying birds—selimeke. Hurry, hurry—the enemy. In a fit of nerves, Tukum the swineherd stopped to urinate, leaping off into the savanna grass to do so; he crouched modestly in the grass as the yegerek always do, even among themselves. The others cried to him, and he ran after them again, jerking and twisting through the dark bushes, like a bat.

On the morning after the funeral the men of Kibitsilimo, arriving at their kaio, called out to the enemy. They called the dead man’s name, adding a long whoop at the end so that the name would carry—Ekitamalek, a-oo. The whooping was answered by the Wittaia passing the news back through their villages, and the voices rolled across the valley, hu-a, hu-a, hu—a-oo.

The dead man’s ghost, hearing this sound, would stay in the Wittaia land and work its harm. After a season there, it would return to the village of the dead man. Ekitamalek’s water calabash would be wrapped in a wisa bundle; the ghost would remain in the vicinity of the calabash, which was the last vestige of the dead man.

To lay the ghost, a pig would then be killed and a piece given to his young brother. The boy would take both calabash and meat to a place near the frontier. There he would eat the meat and, leaving the calabash under a tree, return. The ghost, unwilling to leave the calabash, would remain at this place forever.

The Wittaia knew about the coming of the ghost, but their joy was stronger than their dread, and they whooped all that day. In the afternoon several hundred warriors appeared on the Waraba, where their celebration might best be observed by the Kurelu. Two large groups danced and stamped upon the ridge, howling and waving spears, while before them young warriors whirled and pranced with the white egret wands, erratic as butterflies in the distance. Soon the Wittaia streamed down the slope onto the Tokolik, where the performance was repeated. A huge fire had been built on a ridge in their own lands, and they moved toward it; there they danced again. The next day they would stage the formal victory celebration, called etai.

The skull and large bones of Ekitamalek had not been consumed in the fire. They lay in the yard where relatives and friends arriving late from distant villages could mourn over them. The following day the bones were gathered and carried outside the village. There they were buried, and a stick shelter constructed around the place to keep away the pigs and rats and dogs. On this day too there took place a mutilation. Though a few older men cut fingers in time of grief, it is usually the smallest girls who are selected for this ceremony, and a woman in the valley whose left hand is not a stump is very rare. On this same day the first two joints of the two outside fingers were hacked from the left hands of Ekitamalek’s small sisters, in sign of mourning.

Yeke Asuk and Hanumoak, with their friends Asukwan of Homaklep and Walimo of Hulibara, are wild young warriors of the southern villages, moving restlessly from place to place, seeking diversion and avoiding work whenever possible. They are irreverent and obscene, though of the four only Yeke Asuk is noisy. Yeke Asuk, who has been married more than once, each time quite briefly, is older than the others and their leader, a squat, powerful, bandy-legged warrior and hoarse comic whose voice is recognizable at any distance. Yeke Asuk is a malcontent, whereas the other three are only mischievous.

Walimo, Asukwan, and Hanumoak are all three handsome—Asukwan, with a huge head of hair and a bold black band of charcoal across his face, and Walimo, languid and feckless, with faun eyes and the sudden smile of a small child, and Hanumoak, supercilious as a hawk. Asukwan is a cautious fighter, though he lingers at war’s outskirts, and Walimo fights erratically, in gallant fits and starts, but Hanumoak, in his casual way, is one of the first warriors of the Kurelu.

Hanumoak is mercurial, as prone to affectionate silliness as he is to bored disdain. Hanumoak’s face is a series of masks—love, terror, outrage, idiocy, grief—through which his cool eyes shine. The roles are played in comic exaggeration, and he is truly funny, miming everything taken too seriously by others; only his sudden moodiness seems real. At these times he is deep-eyed and silent. But in a moment his face will begin to twitch as if he were about to throw a fit, and he will squeal with infectious laughter. The akuni laugh with him in bewilderment, for they are never sure that he will not stop laughing suddenly and stare at them.

On the day after the funeral, at the fire site above the spring at Homuak, Yeke Asuk pretended terror of the dead man’s ghost. An nai-UK, he squealed, biting his knuckle—I am afraid. The others laughed, but Hanumoak slipped quietly into an impersonation of the dead man in his chair, then of the ghost itself. Pressing his palms to the sides of his face, he cocked his ears forward with his thumbs. With his little fingers he flared his nostrils wide. His eyes he squinched to wrinkled slits, sewn up by death, and, rolling his tongue, he pinched its protruding tip between his teeth, at the same time forcing his head back on his upraised shoulders, like a man stabbed in the neck. Thus prepared, he tottered forward, blind, on tiptoe, and despite themselves the akuni drew away from him in alarm. The men grinned nervously at one another, pointing their fingers at the distorted figure that had been Hanumoak as if to assure themselves that they were not alone with this hallucination; a few, despite themselves, tapped their horims with their fingertips in awe. Tukum the swineherd stared wide-eyed from one face to another, and the older boys howled out their fear and laughter.

Hanumoak, who as Yoroick’s younger brother is an uncle of the dead boy, forsook his role as suddenly as he had begun it and contemplated their simplicity, unsmiling.

Weaklekek of Homaklep had gone to honor Ekitamalek at his funeral. But Weaklekek felt uncomfortable at Kibitsilimo and left the sili after midday, traveling homeward over the fields alone. Like all the other men, he had gone to the funeral unarmed.

Weaklekek’s plan was to go to his kaio, on the knoll above the Aike River known as Puakaloba. But when nearly there he changed his mind, deciding to pass by way of Homuak. This decision probably saved his life. The story, as he pieced it together from signs and footprints the following morning, was approximately the following.

A band of Wittaia, observing from the ridge called Turaba that the kaio was deserted, staged an ambush raid into the territory of the Kurelu. Unlike the wars, with their fanfare and heroics, the raid has as its sole purpose the stalking and killing of any smaller party or unwary individual. No distinction is made between man, woman, or child: the spearing of a little girl or an old woman is ample reason for a victory singing. The kaios are the consequence of such raids, for without these sentry towers and the squads of armed men which, during the day, are always in the thatched shelters below, the women working in the fields would be defenseless.

But today the women were in mourning, and the kaio at Puakaloba was deserted. The Wittaia descended from the ridge and crossed the Aike upstream from the kaio, where the river plunges under a wide bridge of rock. They came downstream again, to the path which comes to the river from the villages, and here, in the undergrowth and cane, they lay in hiding. They could not go farther for fear of being surprised and surrounded; the ambush of a raiding party is almost as common as the raid itself.

They waited all that day, but no one came. The Aike frontier is a favorite raiding place of the Wittaia, and the people, knowing this, take care to avoid it, especially when there is no guard at Puakaloba. In the late afternoon, for want of a better plan, the Wittaia attacked the empty sentry post, putting the shelter to the torch and toppling the watch-tower itself. It lay there the next morning, broken in a tangle of lianas, like a dropped bundle of giant twigs.

Weaklekek, inspecting the ruin of his kaio, knew very well that, had he come there in the middle of the day before, he would now be sitting in his own yard at Homaklep, in a wooden chair.

Puakaloba is spoken of as the kaio of Weaklekek, but in fact it is the common property and responsibility of those men living in Homaklep and Wuperainma whose fields and women it helps to guard. Nevertheless, Weaklekek is the chief warrior of the kaio and had to see to it that the kaio was restored as rapidly as possible.

Work on the kaio began almost immediately. Asukwan, who lives in Weaklekek’s pilai, went down to the Aike River, fifty yards away. He entered the river and angled across the swollen current which seeped over the banks, shoulder high out of the water in the stiff sidestroke of the akuni. On the far side was a place in the riverain forest where he could find the long liana used to bind the thin poles of the tower.

In the wood south of Puakaloba, Tegearek and Asok-meke cut the new poles. Asok-meke is head of the warriors’ sili—Tegearek, Siba, Tuesike, Tekman Bio—which adjoins the sili of U-mue in Wuperainma; it was U-mue who gave him his strange name, which means “Outsider.” For some reason Asok-meke had not bothered to attend a pig feast given by U-mue, who dismissed him in anger, saying, He is not one of us—he is asok-meke. Since then the men of the two silis have been distant with one another. Asok-meke, a reflective man of middle years, is the stepfather of the boy Tukum; at the tip of his horim he wears invariably the great spiny cocoon of a drab woodland moth.

The hollow tock of the stone adze echoed along the silent river like the call of a lost bird. On the rise itself, Siba and Weaklekek dug a new foundation. Aloro the lame man sat in the shelter, observing: this was not his kaio, and he took no part in the work.

The spears were leaned against the sides of the shelter, sharp and clean against a bright blue sky. Some of these, of a light white wood, were imported from the Yali River tribes four days to the eastward, but most were of a heavy reddish myrtle wood, from the eucalyptus-like yoli. Some spears were eighteen feet in length, with an ornamental sleeve below the flat, sharpened blade; they were tapered to a dull point at the butt so that the spear might be stuck into the ground.

In the corner of the shelter lay the bows and arrows. The bows are small, about four feet long, scarcely longer than the arrows, and cut usually from a woodland rhododendron or from laurel. The bowstring is not a string at all but a flat, hard strip of rattan. It is perhaps a quarter-inch in width, too wide to permit the use of arrow notches, and this factor, in combination with the fact that the arrows are unfeathered, makes the accuracy of men like Aloro the more remarkable.

The arrows themselves are thin spears of hard cane and differ chiefly in their heads. For war, the preferred head is a myrtle shaft, unbarbed, about a foot in length: most of this length is inserted in the cane, and it is bound at the junction by fine strands of ground vine. Another arrowhead of war is notched with one to three files of jagged teeth; its advantage is that it must be cut out from the flesh. Sometimes the notches are reversed close to the shaft, so that the arrow cannot be drawn on through an arm or leg. Both of these arrows are weakened at the base of the point, to insure that they will snap off inside the wound, and both are wrapped, more often than not, with a loose strand of sharp fiber from the woody ground orchid; when the arrow is withdrawn, the orchid fiber slides off and remains inside. It is believed to cause unusual pain and inflammation.

There is also the bleeding arrow, and varieties of hunting arrows, with heavy heads knobbed with two to five sharp prongs; these are designed for birds and the small mammals. A few of the cane arrow shafts bear decorative scratchings, and the wooden points may be engraved with crude designs cut into them with a mouse tooth: the marks on certain arrows represent the sole decoration practiced by the Kurelu.

Asukwan returned from across the river, dragging a long coil of liana. He had lost his horim in the Aike and for the rest of the morning kept his back and side to all the others. Asukwan, who is much admired by the women, is very conscious of his appearance: without his horim he felt himself indecent and was very upset and embarrassed.

New poles had been brought and were inserted in the hole; the poles were lashed together at intervals of five feet, or wherever a man standing on the fresh band of liana could comfortably start the next binding above. Where the poles began to taper, smaller sticks were inserted down between them, to build the kaio at a uniform diameter. Moving slowly up the tower, Tegearek and Weaklekek and Siba, all powerful men, worked in sure harmony, with neither haste nor rest; they braced their feet and hauled on the lianas, leaning out against the dark horizon of the mountain rim, the hard muscles of their arms and buttocks corded with effort.

The binding finished, short lengths of stone-hewn board were passed to Siba, whose husky form, with its tattered crown of soiled green parrot feathers, gleamed black on the hard sky of noon. Above his head a goshawk, its reddish breast washed to pale pink by the sunlight burning through its wings, circled in tight-brained curiosity.

Siba bound the boards into a sturdy platform, two or three feet below the sapling tips. White puffs of cumulus, sailing south on the high winds above the valley, seemed frozen in the air, while Siba, grinning wildly on his flying platform, rode northward against the sky.

In the shelter, Aloro played on a small mouth harp. This sole musical instrument of the akuni is made in two different keys, one high, one low. A half-section of cane is scraped out with chips of flint, then polished smooth with a fibrous grass used as a sandpaper. A reed is cut free down the center of the section, and a fiber thread attached at the base end. The mouth harp is vibrated with short tugs of the thread, the cavern of the player’s mouth giving it resonance.

The lame man, playing, stared abstractedly at the fields. There was no melody, but only a series of rhythmic notes up and down a foreshortened scale. The frail sound he produced was eerie, scarcely audible in the bright noise of daylight, like an ominous echo from remote regions of his mind.

A few feet behind Aloro, outside the shelter, stood a small arbor of the horim gourd; stone weights had been attached to the gourds so that this vegetable, shaped naturally like a water drop or tear, would assume the fine elongate shape required by the warriors. Beside the frame a boy built a fire. Into this fire, tied in a small bundle, he placed stalks of a heavy grass. When this had scorched a little, it was taken from the fire, and the leaves were strewn in a small circle on the raw earth around the kaio. This grass is a symbolic offering to the great company of friendly ghosts who would keep watch with the kaio’s men, as sentinels.

Weaklekek now fashioned a toy bow and three arrows of twigs and sticks. These he inserted among the kaio poles, about two feet from the ground. The bow and arrows symbolize the area’s defense, insuring that any enemy who ventures within sight of the kaio will be struck down.

Finally, all the men who had participated in the rebuilding of the tower underwent a purification ritual. The new materials of the kaio were considered wisa, and, until the wisa ban had been removed, the men involved could not indulge in food or drink, tobacco, or copulation. Near the center pole of the shelter a tuft of red parrot feather affixed to a small straw had been stuck into the ground. The feather was presently taken by Weaklekek and passed back and forth an inch or so above the hands that had done the work.

The kaio ceremony is wisa because of the importance of these towers in the life of the akuni. The kaios must guard a frontier with the enemy which extends several miles; there are twelve of them in the southern fields alone, and each of these may post a guard of four to ten warriors at a time. Visiting warriors come and go, and the kaio, the great part of the time, is little more than a kind of outdoor pilai. Here the men gather to talk and smoke, to weave shell belts and mend arrows, while around them the women labor in the fields. High on the tower at Puakaloba, one of their number watches for movement in the river forest.

Weaklekek’s kaio must guard against any approach by way of the Turaba; it guards as well a segment of the main frontier just off to the westward. It is well situated on a high grassy bank, commanding a view not only of the gardens but of the low river woods.

At Puakaloba, a few years ago, there took place a great victory of the Kurelu. From the top of the tower a raiding party of Wittaia had been observed; the enemy were sneaking through the river woods, intent on a surprise attack against the outnumbered guard. The men signaled the next kaio for assistance, and the word was passed along, while the Wittaia completed a roundabout maneuver. The Wittaia crept stealthily into the trap, and before they could extricate themselves five of their warriors had been killed.

Across the Aike is the steep ridge, Turaba, which rises abruptly just behind the wall of the river forest; the foot of the Turaba is scarcely two hundred yards from the kaio itself. The ridge is an inhospitable array of limestone, jagged and tumbled, haired over with low scrub. Because it is uninhabitable, and because of its location, it serves as a natural barrier in a corner of the valley where lands of the Kurelu, the Siep peoples, and the Wittaia come together. It is also a natural path of ambush and surveillance, and, as such, is generally avoided. On one occasion Weaklekek and a companion went up onto the Turaba to scout, and the other man, ahead of Weaklekek, was waylaid by hiding enemy. They killed the man and very nearly caught Weaklekek, who managed to escape across the river.

Like the hill above Homuak, the Turaba is a salient of the mountain wall, though it begins but halfway up the wall rather than at the crest, and extends much farther outward, dying at last in forsaken country now thought of as no man’s land. The Turaba, like all the no man’s land of the frontiers, is known as Place of Fear.

Today the Wittaia women could be seen dancing on a hillcrest to the westward. In the morning the men of Kibitsilimo, going to their kaio, had chanted of the death of Ekitamalek, and the men at the Wittaia kaios had raised a whoop of triumph. The afternoon the Wittaia came in war regalia to the Waraba, dancing and singing.

The men in the new kaio watched the enemy without comment. Ekitamalek was the first man they had lost since the last full moon, while the Wittaia had lost four; the Kurelu had learned this from a Siep man who was friendly with both factions of his tribe and had spread the news. The Wittaia had not announced the names, and, until they did, no etai could take place. But sooner or later the names would come, and the Kurelu would hold an etai of their own.

In late April the rains had come each afternoon. The Aike was very high, and the sandpipers which, a few short weeks before, were common on the river logs and mud-banks, had disappeared.

The Aike in its upper reaches is the southern frontier of the Kurelu. It slides down off the mountain wall in a steep narrow rush, only to plunge beneath the rock once more at the head of the riverain forest. Fifty yards below it bursts forth once again, forming a pool already as wide as the river will become. Less than a quarter-mile beyond, it passes the kaio at Puakaloba, and a mile below this point disappears into the lands of the Wittaia.

Unlike the Wittaia, who build villages on the Aike, and who have spanned it with rickety pole bridges, the Kurelu go near the river seldom. They can swim the Aike if they have to, but their solitary bridge, built downriver close to the frontier, is sagging with disuse. No native boats are known in the Baliem, and the Kurelu lack even the crude rafts used by most other tribes; they cannot travel safely on the river and have nothing on the farther side but the Place of Fear.

Nor does the river bring them food. The Baliem system, if and when it formed a lake, lacked native fishes, and its present gorge at the south end of the valley has prevented the passage into the mountains of fish from the southern marshes. The valley is without fish of any kind, and the one valuable creature found in all its waters can be taken more easily and safely in the streams. This is a fresh-water crayfish, which in the small streams attains a length of four or five inches: the boys feel for it with their toes, walking the mud.

Of the three terrains open to the akuni—the valley plain which they have farmed, the cloud forest rising behind them, and the river forests on their southern border—it is the latter where they feel least at home. Sometimes they go down to the Aike for a drink, or to gather lianas and certain woods, but otherwise the river is avoided. It lies too near the Turaba, and the natural bridge where the river roars underground, overhung by jungle trees and dark, dripping limestone grottoes, is considered a place of ghosts. This is a dank world of air plants, crowding for space on every limb, of myrmecodias with their colonies of ants, of fleshy orchids and pale-bellied ferns. Below, in the clefts and shadows, the fungi thrive in the slow seepings, clematis trails across the rocks, and miniature begonias, white and pink, flower in secret in the rotting shades. In the motionless air, only the silent woodland butterfly takes wing, skipping its delicate trail of filtered sunspots. The insects of the rain forest gnaw stealthily under leaves and behind wood, the huge horned beetles and great papery cicadas, the armored millipedes and dusty moths, and the spined crab spiders. In the earth beneath the insects and the spiders, its soft body protected by the detritus of the forest floor, there stirs an earthworm four feet long. The skinks, so common in the sun, are missing in the shadows. In the crevice of the grotto rock is wedged the skeleton of a dead dog.

This forest is not silent. Honey eaters come and go with chortlings and shrieks, and a flock of parrots, gold and red and black, and the tiny brilliant myzomela. The parrots and parakeets scour the canopies of the river forest and the forest of the upper slope and rim; they are seen in the valley’s open air but fleetingly, in high, swift flocks, at dawn. They shatter the dank air with their screeching and vanish into the mountain mist which seeps each morning down the ridge, thinned out by the pale, cataracted eye of the climbing sun.

Tukum the swineherd, elf-faced and pot-bellied, shouted gruffly at his pigs while his mother shouted at him. He was followed on his way not only by pigs but by small girls and women; they went along through the low wood to the fields in front of Homuak.

Tukum’s horim is forever askew, tucked sideways under his belly; there is straw in his hair and gray dust on his skin. He marched along, a half-hiperi in his hand, and now and again he stifled his own growling by plunging his round face into it.

Tukum hated pigs, and though he tended them nearly every day, the very idea made his huge eyes overflow. At these moments he looked more like an elf than ever. Tukum is nearly four feet tall and looks, not full grown, but complete. In his way, Tukum is spiritual; his natural haunt is not the pigsty but the toadstool. Tukum, with his wild brown eyes and portly evanescence, does not belong among the flies and swine, nor even in the sun, but in the ferny glades of distant woods.

In the night before a sunny day of May, in the hill village of Lokoparek, Ekapuwe had a child, a little girl. The birth was a simple one, assisted only by an older woman of the village. Ekapuwe took the baby in her stride and by midmorning was sitting up in her ebeai, smoking tobacco in her long holder and chattering with her usual good-humored petulance.

On the occasion of a birth the child’s nami usually comes and wraps a ceremonial cowrie belt about its head. But Lokoparek is a long way up the hill, and girl children are not important, and for one reason or another—the akuni are often informal about minor ceremonials and waive them readily when it is expedient—this little girl was suffered to embark upon her life without a shell belt. She will pass a week or two in the darkness of the ebeai, after which she will take up a residence of indefinite length at the bottom of Ekapuwe’s nets.

The new baby was U-mue’s third girl child—he has no son as yet—but even so he was anxious and solicitous and gave a great many senseless orders, interspersed with fits of shouting. U-mue dearly loves a drama, the more tempestuous the better; the joy he takes in the passions of the mind is childlike in its abandon. Wracked with grief or rent by rage—it is all one to him, he is in his element.

I will go off into the mountains, U-mue cries, striking a pose, Never to return again—and his quick, sly face collapses in comic grief. For he enjoys himself hugely at these moments, though he tries heroically to muster tears, eked out with dreadful sounds, part grief, part laughter. When outrageous, he caws and swirls like a bird of paradise, but in his way he is a kindly man; he is often with his small Nylare, walking and talking, holding her hand. Like most of the men, he treats his little girls with the same gentleness that boys receive only from their namis.

U-mue is both charlatan and buffoon, but he is intelligent, perhaps the most intelligent of all the akuni, a statesman and deft intriguer who, for all his frailties, is a true leader, demanding and receiving strict obedience from his people. The people respect U-mue’s intelligence, his pride in and exhaustive knowledge of akuni ways, akuni ceremonials and family lines. U-mue has whimsy in his face; he seems to be laughing, from time to time, at insights that his people will not ever understand, but this laughter is veiled and rueful, as if he did not know the source of it himself.

The time of dawn and the first sun is called the morning-of-bird-voices, and is quite distinct from the ordinary morning, which comes later. Today a pigeon called in the high araucaria all through the morning-of-bird-voices, and the warriors, as if stimulated by this sound, went to war when morning came. The great war kain Wereklowe strode out toward the frontier, and behind him trotted Yeke Asuk, decked out in fierce red clay. The armies would take some time to form, and in the next hours, as the sun gained strength, a silence lay upon the fields. Only the black robin chat sang its sweet liquid song: this bird appears to have an affinity for war, for it perches commonly on the tips of spears implanted on the ground, or on the tops of kaios, and sings even in the midday hours, at the outskirts of a battle.

The older men moved gradually toward the Tokolik. Embracing, two bony elders stood together in the green-purple leaves, gazing outward at the Waraba. Few Wittaia had appeared on the far crest, and there now seemed doubt that there would be a war.

An hour more passed by as tension slackened, and the enemy did not appear. The kains returned across the fields and gathered at a fire in the araucaria grove. This fire site, on a ledge of needles under a deep bank of fern, is often used for councils, for it lies between the two main groups of southern villages, overlooking the cool spring of Homuak. In a hollow trunk above the ledge dried graybeard lichen, which tatters the araucaria, is stored as tinder, and with it a small bundle of long tobacco pipes.

Several warriors and yegerek loitered in attendance, but Wereklowe himself clambered up onto the slope above to gather dry sticks and grass: this is partly because Wereklowe cannot contain his energy and must see to it personally that all matters proceed as rapidly as possible. But it is also true of the great kains that nobody is asked to do what they will not do or have not often done themselves, whether going to the fore in battle or picking lice from a child’s head.

The men talked quietly and quickly in their low sweet voices: every little while one would reach forward and place a twig or fagot in the flame, the hand seeming to know by instinct just where the twig should lie. The fire neither grew nor faltered. They moistened the dried lisanika leaves for their tobacco and talked and talked, for it is at these fires that news is passed and war discussed and the affairs of the valley regulated. The sound of smoking—a soft, implosive phoot made by pressing the tongue to the roof of the mouth as the smoke is taken in—was a rhythm of the conversation, which was gentle and deferential, little more than a murmur, and at the same time rapid and intense.

Limo, the tall war kain of the Alua, ground his teeth in a loud, ruminative manner. All men of the akuni grind their teeth habitually, in pauses between speech, but few as powerfully and rhythmically as Limo. Also expert are the young warriors Huonke and Asukwan; these men are audible at thirty feet. Loud Huonke with his hard, furtive face was present at the outskirts of the kains, his expression insolent and cornered; Huonke has never killed an enemy warrior, though he once took the life of a woman of the Siep-Elortak found wandering near the frontier.

Wereklowe and U-mue led the talking, and once the other men rapped their horims with their fingernails in a fast staccato racketing, saying u-yuh in quiet exclamation, and a soft, explosive f-whe-oosh. The horim is invariably tapped at moments of astonishment or awe, and when a number of men are astonished all at once a sound rises like a gust of chattering finches in tall dry stalks of cane.

At the edge of the circle the men and boys squatted in silence; though some were kepu, they were neither disregarded nor dismissed. With few exceptions, the kains do not brandish power or maintain distinctions of a social kind between their akuni and themselves. Any strange boy or halt old man, except in the most urgent councils, may sit at the side of Kurelu himself, or Wereklowe or Nilik, and may even have his head picked by his betters. Generosity and simplicity of manner are marks of the great kain and are regarded as such by one and all. Of the chief kains among the Kurelu, only Maitmo of the Haiman clan, north of the Elokera, keeps his people at a distance; he is a small belligerent man, with a shrill, distempered voice when he is angry, and the awe in which all kains are held is in this case tinged by fear. While Nilik of the Walilo is also fierce, and Wereklowe and Polik indulge fits of violence, these men do not abuse their power; the young war kains Husuk and Weaklekek, like Kurelu himself, are almost invariably soft-spoken. Kurelu listens and listens, watching, watching, and, though he is a harmless-looking man, he is the most powerful of all.

The Kurelu, perhaps twelve years ago, were split into two warring tribes, separated roughly by the Elokera River. In those days the north was already led by Kut-ilu, the Wise Egret. His name, from which was taken the name of the eventual alliance, referred not only to his intelligence but to the light color of his skin. In those days too the southern Kurelu were allied with the Wittaia: the patterns of old ditches rolling beneath wild grass, with the banana trees of abandoned villages now grown up in woods, are skeletons of distant days when the area of the Waraba was not a Place of Fear but peaceful garden.

Thus the alliances in the northeastern valley are transient and uneasy, and it is never certain from one season to the next which group will represent the enemy: a child protected fiercely as a member of one’s own people may become an enemy overnight, to be killed on sight, without ever being old enough to know the difference. In the Kurelu, though many clans have intermingled in the villages and are well represented north and south of the Elokera, the bad feeling between the groups persists, and men fleeing the wrath of one side may still find sanctuary in the other. Weaklekek and the cold-eyed warrior Apeore are among many who have taken refuge in the south, where their respective clans—Alua and Wilil—are more strongly represented.

A feud, which could occur at any time, is feared by the great kains, for it could lead not only to a weakening of the alliance against the Wittaia but to a merciless civil war, fanned by old grudges. Those most likely to cause trouble are Maitmo and Amoli, war kains of the clan Haiman, who go out of their way to take offense.

The Haiman kain Amoli, whose village of Hulainmo lies just across the Elokera, shares with Weaklekek the reputation of hunuk palin, which refers to fits of manic bravery in battle, joined with a capacity, when in temper, to take life among one’s own people. Hunuk palin men, few in number, are very well known and are treated prudently; in the southern Kurelu, besides Weaklekek, the hunuk palin are Apeore, Polik, Tegearek, Limo, Asikanalek, and Husuk. Asikanalek and Husuk are both warm, quiet men, and their reputation as hunuk palin is as surprising as the exclusion from this category of a fanatic warrior like Aloro.

All of these men but one are war kains, and most lead their own villages. Even Tegearek, though young and without great wealth, shares with Aloro the war leadership of the southern Wilil, due to a reluctance to fulfill this role on the part of U-mue.

The exception is Apeore, who is an exception in many ways. Of the best Wilil warriors, only Aloro and Apeore do not live in Wuperainma. Aloro lives in Abulopak, which was formerly the central village of the Wilil and where his father still maintains a sili, but Apeore has withdrawn to Lokoparek, under the mountain wall; he has no family, for his only wife was stolen by the Wittaia. Unlike Ekali and U-mue, who go to Lokoparek to see to their pigs, Apeore remains there. He is slashing a field out of high forest to the southward and works relentlessly, day in, day out, like a man possessed.

No other man resembles Apeore, who is yellow mongol in his color, whose forehead slants back to a scalp drawn tight beneath a head net so that his skin seems stretched, whose browless eyes are flat and cold in a face as hairless as a skull. Apeore’s skin gleams with fresh grease, and his muscles slide powerfully beneath it.

Apeore is seen rarely at the kaios, and he is rarely seen at war. When he comes, he comes to fight. His legs are painted with gray clay, and he appears suddenly out of nowhere, stalking quietly, alone, at the edge of the underbrush near the front line. Apeore fled long ago from the northern Kurelu, and his full name, Apearole, which commemorates the murder by the northerners of his best friend, means “Killed by Strangling.”

In the middle of the day the yegerek Supuk and Tukum, Uwar and Kabilek, were gathering firewood by the small stream which flows in front of Abulopak. The air was gold and humid, and the three kites which haunt the crest of the ridge above jeered at each other in the heat. By Abulopak a small myrtle tree had come into pink flower, and the finches with their black heads and blue bills droned like fat bees in the high brakes of cane.

Supuk climbed into an oak to knock down old dead limbs. One limb, breaking open on the ground, revealed a tiny twilight bat, torpid with sleep, and a hidden clutch of large white snake eggs, thirty-five or more. Some of the snakes had already hatched and gone, making their way down the great tree on its rough bark, but most of the eggs were still intact, and a few were hatching in slow reptilian silence in the moment that the limb had struck the ground. In the slime upon the eggs, the thin dark baby snakes lay like dead nerves.

Snakes are not common in the valley, owing perhaps to the numbers of foraging pigs. A small bronze-colored skink is plentiful, as are tree frogs and a large tree lizard, but there are no salamanders, toads, or turtles. No reptile or amphibian is used for any purpose by the akuni, though many insects and any sort of bird or mammal, including rats and cormorants, are eaten cheerfully.

The yegerek are afraid of snakes and left the broken egg mass where it lay. The insect bat is smaller than a mouse, but it is good to eat, and they wrapped it neatly in a leaf and took it with them.

Running home by way of Homuak, Tukum stubbed his toe upon a root. Tukum is at odds with his own reflexes and is constantly stubbing his toe or stepping on bees; when he shows someone something he has found, he is apt to open the wrong hand in his excitement, permitting the escape of a huge cicada, or a beautiful hesperid moth with a scarlet silken head, or one of the lovely tropic butterflies with bright metallic wings, or some other, earlier prize he had forgotten that he had.

Discomfited, Tukum growls in his deep voice, talking fiercely in a series of sharp breaths, his large eyes flashing. He lives in a state of perpetual astonishment, and his words come in gasps, so that, when excited, he sounds like a small bellows.

Mel . . . mel . . . mel, he stammers. Mel is an interjection, uttered as a stopgap while the correct answer to a question is being considered. Tukum rarely arrives at the right answer, and at the end of a long series of mels, he usually says his favorite word, welegat. Welegat means “any old thing,” or “just for the hell of it,” or “how should I know?”

When his injured toe permitted him to walk, Tukum marched straight out to the fields and plucked a long blade of grass; bringing it back to the offending root, he tied it there in a sort of forlorn bow, to indicate to other passers-by that a dangerous root existed.

Some time ago the men of Amoli’s village on the north bank of the Elokera accused U-mue of having stolen and eaten a pig. Though pig-stealing is a time-honored practice among the akuni and is not considered shameful, one must make compensation if one is caught. U-mue protested that he had not taken the pig, but he was not believed, and, as he has a strong dislike for violence, he relinquished an animal of his own.

In recent days U-mue has decided that the theft had been committed by the Wittaia, and early one morning he set off, accompanied by Yeke Asuk and Hanumoak, to request the return of his pig. His request was refused. In the next hours, however, a pig was removed from the environs of the village, and the identity of the thief was common knowledge, as it often is, within hours. The thief was Yeke Asuk, assisted, in all likelihood, by his friend Hanumoak.

A raid on the Wittaia took place on the following day, in revenge for the death of Ekitamalek. Warriors from Wuperainma went along, but as Amoli’s men went also, Yeke Asuk and Hanumoak remained at home.

When the sun was high, a party of men under the leadership of Nilik, kain of the Walilo, went west quickly and quietly to the albizzia forest in the country of the Kosi-Alua. From there they moved toward the north side of the Waraba, slipping through low woodland. From the wood they crept down along the banks of a small stream which flows between the Waraba and the Siobara. They were nearly a hundred, including Husuk and his men and a band of Wilil under the leadership of Tegearek. Siba was there, and Tuesike, reserved and quiet, and Aloro, the lame man.

Sometimes their women weep when the raiders go, for the raid is very dangerous, and on hearing the women, the men may sing this song:

See, we will set an ambush in the gardens of the Wittaia,

But we are afraid,

For if caught, we shall be killed.

The raiders slipped through the brush and sedge grass, crossing the deep sloughs of the April rains in water to their chests. A Wittaia lookout outlined on the crest of the Siobara failed to see them, for they kept close to the bottom of the hill, and they were hidden as well from the sentries on the grassy ridge off to the southward.

It was a quiet morning, overcast. The Kurelu women worked stolidly in the fields, and sentries climbed into the kaios. In the woods of Homuak a dove called dolefully. Dull light reflected from the smoke of fires, from the leaden water of the ditches, from the banks of white quartz sand on the hills of the Wittaia. On the savanna between the gardens and Homuak the yegerek fought noisily with spears of grass, but the men were nowhere to be seen. Two egrets which frequent the Place of Fear sat still as white flowers in the distance, just west of a tall bush which, in the few days past, had burst into orange flame.

In the early afternoon the Kurelu crossed the frontier of the Wittaia. The main party had been left in hiding in the wood by the Waraba, while thirty or more young warriors led by Tegearek crept forward. They were stalking a kaio and the surrounding fields of a village south of the Siobara.

There was a sentry in the kaio tower; he did not see the attackers until they were at the field edge. There were no warriors in the shelter, and but a solitary man, named Huwai, working in the gardens. The man on the kaio scrambled down and fled, shouting the alarm. Huwai was not fast enough. The war party surged out of the brush and rushed upon him; he was run down and speared to death by the wild-faced, shaggy-haired son of the war kain Wereklowe.

The raiding party returned quickly through the woods and climbed onto the rocks of the Waraba. There they were joined by the others, and the rest of the Kurelu came forward from the kaios, prepared for war.

The Wittaia came quickly, shouting out their rage, and challenged the Kurelu to a battle on a grassy meadow just below the Waraba and to the south of it. Though badly outnumbered, this advance party of the Wittaia fought with ferocity and drove the Kurelu back among the rocks; a man of the Kosi-Alua was speared through the calf, and Tuesike of Wuperainma caught an arrow in the stomach, just one inch to the right side of his navel. The Wittaia moved into the rocks of the Siobara, awaiting reinforcements, while the Kurelu perched on the gray boulders which lie tumbled along the crest of the Waraba. The spears of both sides wavered on the sky like spines.

Tuesike was carried back on the powerful shoulders of Siba and put down in the shelter of some bushes on the north flank of the ridge. He was in terrible pain and in a little while passed into a state of shock. Siba supported him from behind, grasping his hair to hold his head upright. Tuesike’s horim was gone, and his blood ran down his stomach onto the grass. The wound was not bleeding badly, for the arrow shaft had broken off inside, and the point was in too far to be withdrawn on the field. Tuesike panted tightly, harshly, as his brown face, draining, turned to gray. He was half conscious, and the others stared at him like awed children who have hurt one of their friends by accident. Tuesike, whose name means “Bird Bow,” closed his eyes.

The Wittaia continued to gather on the Siobara and in an open area between the Waraba and the kaio near which Huwai had been killed. There a grass fire had been lit to burn away his blood. Wereklowe and other kains sat on the highest rock, observing, and now the Wittaia called out to the Kurelu across the way, confirming that Huwai had died. At this the Kurelu raised a shout, rushing forward to mass in a large body at the west end of the ridge. Some went farther, down onto the middle ground, and danced and shouted insults at the enemy. The Kurelu wanted war, but, strangely, the Wittaia now refused it. They sat in dead silence on the rocks and would not take up the challenge. Opposite, on the knolls and boulders of the Waraba, the Kurelu awaited them.

The Waraba, shaped in an L, is a rock garden of strewn boulders, set about with ferns and orchids and shining islets of wild sugar cane. Old gardens dance in the wild flowering below its flanks, for in the corner of the L, in years of peace, had been a village; banana fronds gleam in the low forest, a sparkling varnished gleam which turns to silver in the western light.

The horizon beyond is a dark mid-mountain landscape, dark with cloud shadows, distant thunderheads, dense tropic greens of montane forest, high black walls. But the darkness is muted by the soft colors of the gardens, by the green velvet of low marshy swales. The gold grass of the old fields draws the light, and rays of white break the green weight of the distances—a sprinkling of vivid whites, like snow patches. In the dawn of certain days true snow is visible, a scraggy outcropping near the peak of Arolik at fifteen thousand feet; for a few moments, on these days, the peak casts back the clouds. Soft white smoke rolls from the garden fires, soft as the mists on the horizons of far rains. And there are the blaze of sands on the flanks of Siobara, the alabaster statues of egrets, the shower of rhododendron. . . .

The Wittaia rose out of their silence, filed away.

At this the shouting was renewed, more strongly than before. The wild dancing of etai began, a whirling and prancing in which the men leapt high in the air or in a circle, driving both heels against the ground, or performed an odd taunting shuffle in which the feet are still, the knees pushed in and out, the hips and shoulders cocked in turn, and the arms darted snakily forward; the effect is one of lewd, jeering enticement, though it is a joyful dance, performed out of the wild high spirits brought about by a death among the enemy and the knowledge that no further risk will come that day.

Only the Aloros and a few others enjoy the risk, though all enjoy the war. At the first shout Aloro, alone among the warriors around Tuesike, had seized his bow and hobbled desperately toward a battle not destined to take place.

In a forest of spears the Kurelu were streaming back along the ridge, their stamping thunderous, their voices soaring. O-o-A-i-i-A-y-y—WU! O-o-A-i-i-O-o—WAH! Other voices, in simultaneous high counterpoint, howled, WUA, WUA, WUA! The egret wands and whisks of cassowary twirled like bright maddened insects, and the white of plumes and shells and boars’ tusks flashed in the surging brown. At the edges of the tide ran yegerek, setting fire with thatch torches to the grass tops. Here and there bobbed a spot of brilliant red—the feathers of a parakeet, or a crown of the red ginger flower. These colors spun, and the weathered grays and greens of the ancient land lay still.

There came a shout, and Weaklekek with two of his men ran from the Waraba. They crossed the swamp and plunged through the reeds on the far side of the Tokolik, sprinting across the field toward Puakaloba. Once again the Wittaia had set fire to the shelter, which was burning fast. Apparently the enemy had been scared off, for the kaio itself still stood.

The warriors stopped to dance again. Some of them charged in a great circle, while others swayed and shimmied, way-o-way-y—YO, lay-o-lay-y—AH! to an answering din of hootings and wild high shrieks. In the middle of one group U-mue, resplendent in his clean bright ornaments of white, stood looking off into the distance, leaning on his spear, for he keeps his own counsel even in time of celebration.

A few women had collected from the fields, and these had begun their own slow sensual dropping of alternate knees, a swaying of the shoulders, while their arms shivered in and out, palms upward. One tall woman danced alone, far out in front of the rest, wearing a mikak shell above her breasts; in her splendor, she dominated a grassy hillside between the men and the women. This was the wife of Wereklowe’s son, who had killed Huwai. Wereklowe came and danced beside her, but in a little while he went away again, and she swayed on, as if rooted to the landscape.

Soon the warriors ran down the slope, passing the bushes where Tuesike sat upon the ground and moving into the swamp of brush and sedge grass which separates the Waraba from the Tokolik. At the Tokolik they assembled to dance again, before moving on to the etai field called Liberek.

Tuesike was lifted painfully onto a stretcher. Siba and Asok-meke and Tegearek—the men of his pilai—were helped by a few elege like Siloba and Yonokma. Siloba winced himself, for, in the curing of an arrow wound which he carried at his left collarbone, his stomach had been lanced in several places and blood drawn; while the arrow wound had healed itself, the places of his cure had become infected and still hurt him.

Together the men hoisted the stretcher and entered the low ground. Tuesike was unconscious, and his body and face had been covered with green straw. The procession wound slowly through the black water of the swamp and, crossing the Tokolik, entered the home territory. It disappeared once more into the heavy swale of reeds and in a little while emerged, near the kaio which guards the outermost of the fields. Already, at the Liberek, dancing had started, and the chants of triumph did not cease at dark but rose and fell throughout the evening, from all the villages below the mountain.

The next morning U-mue’s men adjusted their appearance. This was a slow and careful process. Yeke Asuk and Hanumoak, both single men, took the most pains, not only because both were vain but because the etai was traditionally an occasion for showing off one’s beauty to the women and thus laying the groundwork for liaisons or wife-stealing. The women would dress too, to the best of their ability, especially those discontented wives amenable to the idea of being stolen.

Yeke Asuk, though still quite young, had already had three wives and was not in haste to find another. The first three had left him, less because they did not like him than because he had paid no attention to them, pursuing the single life to the best of his ability. Hanumoak, on the other hand, had never had sufficient property to obtain a wife; he had lived in U-mue’s pilai ever since a quarrel with his brother. But he did own a fine headdress of bird of paradise, the black plumes of which rose three feet from the fiber headband of pandanus. He arranged the plumes upon his mass of hair, very careful that a certain amount of hair should show beneath them. He then smeared his face and shoulders with a gray wad of fresh pig grease and singed in the fire some straw from the pilai floor; the ash of this he rubbed into the grease, using his thumb. In this way he blackened his forehead, which was naturally blackish-brown, and drew a clean black line about an inch in breadth across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. Hanumoak is handsome, but his face is rather soft, and the hard black band, making his eyes more fierce, became him.

Yeke Asuk is not handsome, and the hair on top of his huge brow is nondescript. Of late he has worn a spray of cassowary plumes, but this has not pleased him, and today he replaced it with seven white egret feathers. Like Hanumoak, he greased his face and drew a black line across his cheekbones, but his forehead, beneath which his pug face is squashed, he treated with special attention. He took a dried piece of red clay and rubbed it on a stone; the dust he moistened with water, producing the dye he needed. His red eyes, when at last they passed inspection, gave him a remarkable look of choler. Both Hanumoak and Yeke Asuk put on their snail-shell bibs, and Yeke Asuk also put a boar’s tusk in his hair. To his rattan stomach hoops, behind, he fastened a long green leaf of spiderwort which lay on the cleft of his buttocks and, thus adorned, he scrambled on all fours out of the pilai.

With other warriors, Yeke Asuk and Hanumoak went with their spears to a hillside above Abukumo to stage a preliminary celebration: the location was chosen to provide any Wittaia not at Huwai’s funeral with a clear view of the celebration of his death. From this point, early in the afternoon, the warriors would move on to the Liberek.

At the Liberek, during the morning, a few young boys and women had collected. Husuk and his men, passing through from the villages of the Kosi-Alua, went on to a frontier kaio, where they staged a small dance comparable to that being held above Abukumo. The sun boiled a damp close air, and a large black harrier with gray tail feathers quartered low and lazily above the bushes.

The sun had already reached its crest when a large company of women came, led by the tall young wife of Wereklowe’s son. She is a handsome girl with a strange abstracted gaze, and for the etai she had dressed herself like a young warrior. In addition to the mikak she had worn the day before, dancing alone in the twilight of the Waraba, she had red and black plumes of birds of paradise. Snail shells in separate strings rather than the close bib favored by the men swayed gracefully between her breasts as she began to dance. In a small circle on the grass of the etai meadow she moved slowly, as if feeling for her rhythm, and as she did so she began to call, We-Re-A Re—WAY! We-Re-A-Re—WAH! Another woman answered with the high, pure hoot of chorus, and the rest joined them, moving forward. Most of the women had confined their decoration to a thick coat of yellow ocher or gray clay, but a few had feather crowns or shell bibs or inferior small mikaks. From the masks of clay their dark eyes glared, depthless and spectral. Led by the girl, they moved back and forth in a massed body, wheeling sharply at the end of each phrase, We-Re-A-Re—WAY! We-Re-A-Re—WAH! the turn being made on the WAY or the WAH. Periodically they would screech, breaking into a heavy run, breasts flying, faster and faster and faster in a tight, driven circle, like creatures fleeing pain. Small girls in their reed skirts pattered hopelessly along on the fringe of the bodies, until exhaustion spun them away from their mothers; they sank in little heaps into the grass.

Then the women would stop, getting their breath and laughing, until one of their number, softly and slowly at first, would renew the chant and begin to sway, moving her arms languorously in and out. The others would take it up, and the dance would be repeated, up the field and down, around and around, the nets sailing on the turns to bare hard buttocks pinched tight by the coil skirts. At the side of the field the oldest women swayed in accompaniment, their mantis arms outstretched, their long feet twitching. U-mue’s old mother, Aneake, was one of these, calling out fiercely.

At the west end of the meadow the boys and old men sat in the shelter. Some of the men performed on each other’s faces the plucking of hairs from the upper lip and the neatening of beards, using the pitch of the araucaria and araucaria-twig tweezers; while almost all men wear short beards, the mustache is considered very ugly. The legs were also cleaned of hairs, and the hips and pubis, until the dark skin gleamed. One old man appeared from the bushes with the lost smile of uncertain eyesight: he was greeted with affection, and a young warrior barbered him. Other warriors had gathered, and now the Kosi-Alua at the kaio in the distance were mustering for their entry upon the Liberek.

The women danced on, for this was the last hour that they would have the meadow to themselves. Two carried infants on their shoulders, and the head of one of these was submerged in a man’s white egret crown; with his mother, from behind, he formed a giant, rushed along by the lesser creatures underneath.

We-a-AY       O-o-Aia-OH

The men came in midafternoon, arriving from two directions simultaneously. They massed at the end of the field, then charged across it, spears held high against the clouds and long plumes tossing. Immediately they turned and thundered back again, AY-A-Wo-AI, then broke to form a roaring circle. Some women rushed in from the side to mingle with the fringes of the men; as the speed increased, they ran more like men than women, the sulphurous colors of their bodies blotting out without obscuring the female breasts and hips. Ay-HOO, ay-HOO, the women wailed, their voices remote in the men’s tumult. Just as their grief was deeper at the funerals, their joy was fiercer in etai, as if all of their emotions, accumulating in their long brown days, must find release in this abandon.

As the father of the man revenged, Yoroick was the guest of honor. He wore no decoration but the yellow clay, which was daubed thickly on his head and shoulders. Even his hair was yellow-white, patriarchal, and, with his great height among the men, he looked like some mad hermit, naked and glaring in the wilderness. He crouched down at a small fire near the shelter, mourning his son among the older men; the soft, wailing wind they made rose with strange force against the storm of victory. The old men, bony-spined, sat with bent heads over a clear flame invisible in the sunlight.

Yoroick rose suddenly with a hoarse shout. Seizing his spear, he bolted down the field through the startled dancers, The dancing stopped, and a deep moan arose. The men of the Kosi-Alua took up their spears and followed.

The cause of the outcry was the soft-walking U-mue. Approaching the Liberek from the field above Homaklep, U-mue had come upon one of the men who had seized his youngest wife not long before. U-mue was accompanied by four of his best warriors and perceived an excellent opportunity to avenge the outrage. A melee started up just beyond the etai field, but, before anyone was hurt, Yoroick got wind of it and ran forward.

Yoroick is ordinarily a peaceable man, so peaceable that his reticence in time of war is a matter of common knowledge, but on this day he was the important person, full of noise and fire. Already in an excited state of mind, he was greatly offended that U-mue should have caused a distraction on this epochal occasion. Yoroick was anxious to kill U-mue, but he was prevented from doing so, not only by the people who caught up with him but by U-mue himself, who took his leave. The men calmed Yoroick and escorted him back to the etai.

The Wuperainma warriors trailed behind, but they were uneasy and remained on the outskirts of the celebration. Yeke Asuk, particularly, moved up and down with uncustomary diffidence, Tegearek and two others at his side.

Over five hundred people were present, all of them dressed to the best of their resources. Tukum the swineherd wore a thin, battered mikak and some shell strings; he bounced the shell strings on a round belly taut with sweet potato, producing a hollow sound which made him laugh. Some other boys carried their bows and arrows; they had drawn white patterns on their bodies. Five yegerek wore crowns of blossoms from the yellow rhododendron.

Wereklowe’s son, who had run down the Wittaia and killed him with his spear, caused a quiet stir of greeting and respect as he moved about; in his hair were silver streaks of clay. A man with a headdress of red ginger flowers sat beside another with red feathers, in a pair, jutting out from his temples like low horns. Limo wore the long barred feathers of a large hawk; he sat in silence, watching, his handsome face, like that of Kurelu, gentle and merciless by turns. Nilik swayed, facing the dancers; he had armlets of thick fur of a rich brown luster, and a red and black wig of tiny seeds strung in cordy strands like hard, long hair. Nilik, as the political leader of the successful raid, was anxious to assert himself and did so.

Rain drifted from the mountains in the wake of a soft sun of twilight. Some older people moved onto the savanna paths toward home, but the dancers surged and chanted back and forth, undiminished. To one side of the central bodies a girl dyed red pranced back and forth with a girl of dead gray color; on the far side the tall wife of Wereklowe’s son, with two men and another woman, formed a line apart, moving ceaselessly up and down the field with loose-limbed fervor. She had danced all afternoon, in a kind of trance, and was still dancing when Yoroick, perhaps fearing that he had lost his world’s attention, cried out again: he wished that the men of the Kosi-Alua fall upon U-mue’s men and kill them. Hanumoak, though he is Yoroick’s youngest brother, moved out toward the brush uneasily, joining his friends. But the men of the Kosi-Alua were not prepared to act on Yoroick’s wish, and the shouting died.

Aloro stood alone and watched the dancers. He stood on his good right leg, still as a heron, supporting his left side with his spear. He too wore the barred feathers of a hawk, and he had painted white circles around his eyes. He seemed to avoid the looks of others, as if ashamed that he could not dance.

Aloro’s eyes slant back into his forehead, and his mouth hangs open in a way less slack than wolfish; without taking his eyes from the dancers, he turned his head slowly, as a predator will, to pick up sounds from behind and from the sides. The white eyes and the toothed grin which is not a grin gave him an air of madness.

The day after the etai Tuesike was brought down from the sleeping loft of his pilai. The pilai belongs to Asok-meke and is inhabited also by Siba, Tegearek, and Tekman Bio, as well as by Asok-meke’s small son, Tukum. Tuesike was helped to a sitting position against one of the frames of the pilai fire, and rattan was strung from one post to the next to support his head. He breathed slowly and poorly, and it was thought that he would die.

Tukum slipped in and sat down next to him, holding a piece of hiperi. Over a period of time he nibbled at it, chewing slowly, intermittently, to avoid the pain of swallowing. From time to time he coughed, a taut, dry cough that caused him to turn and stare at the other men in surprise and pain.

Tuesike’s eyes looked glazed, and he did not respond to the friends who had come to sit with him, but remained with his back to the ashes of the morning fire, staring into the dark recesses of the round house.

Asok-meke, who was in tears, was crying for Tuesike, but he also cried with pleasure because a friend whom he had not seen for a long time had come to visit him from the Siep-Kosi. At these times, crying was the custom.

Thunder rolled out of the mountains like an avalanche, and the rain came down. An old man wove ceaselessly at the cowrie belt used in funerals, and in the darkness by the wall Aloro drew unearthly sounds from his cane harp. The other men, fourteen in all, sat smoking. They gazed stolidly outward at the mud forming in the sili yard, absorbed by the brown certainties of their own lives.

A few days later Tuesike was much improved, and in the early afternoon he sat alone, facing the doorway. Though he was not comfortable, he was not really in pain. Blood had been let from two cuts in his stomach, near the hole made by the arrow, and the long red point of the arrow itself was there above his head for any visitors to admire, on the rack over the fire frame. With it was an arrow point removed previously from the body of Tegearek.

Tuesike had felt much better since the capture and cutting of a field mouse and a rat. The cutting was done by Aloro. The belly skins of the animals, still alive, were slit open with a bamboo knife: if the stomach wall had been pierced and entrails spilled, Tuesike’s own wound would have been mortal, but the entrails of both animals had remained intact, as his own must therefore be. The rat ceremony was only performed when death was close, and everyone had been much reassured; more likely than not, had the hand of Aloro been less steady, Tuesike would have given up and died. At the moment the animals hung from the fire rack behind him, strung up by the throat. The teeth of the rat were bared and its tail hung in a stiff curl, as if it had tried to climb or gnaw its string.

That morning Siba had made a fetish. This fetish was a piece of cane three or four feet long into which feathers had been inserted, in the end and along the length. Tuesike had crept outside, and the cane, with a bundle of lukaka grass, was waved over his head. Once Tuesike had been treated, it was planted on the path in front of Wuperainma; the grass was laid at its foot, wrapped in pavi leaves. Pavi is a word which also means both enemy and excrement, but the choice of this leaf was purely fortuitous, the pavi tree, in this spot, being the closest growth at hand. The grass bundle, on the other hand, is almost invariably used in any such communication with the ghosts.

A man badly wounded, and thus troubled in body and spirit, is especially vulnerable to the wiles of ghosts. The fetish was placed between Tuesike and enemy lands to show the ghost of Huwai that the Kurelu were aware of its intentions and had taken suitable precautions; the grass bundle, like the bundle placed around the base of a new kaio, was there to indicate that a close watch was being kept.

Siba was confident that his warning would keep the ghost away, and Tuesike felt much better for it. He touched with his fingers the leaf poultices on his wounds and coughed a little. He had gotten very thin. In the silence of the afternoon he listened to a pig—the sound was more like a hollow thump than a live grunt—and to the peaceful droning of the flies, the flies of summer, in a summer which would never end.

In a war of the yegerek Uwar was struck beneath the right eye by a grass spear; this accident is a common one and accounts for the large incidence of boys and men among the Kurelu who are blind in one eye. Uwar barely escaped blinding. Though he was badly hurt and crying, he found the shaft of reed which struck him and took it to U-mue’s pilai. Unless he is very lucky, he will do this again some other day, in the wars with the Wittaia. The arrow will be of hard, sharp cane, and, more likely than not, it will be carried back for him by another warrior.

In the village of Abukumo, which lies on a low spur of the mountain between Homaklep and the Aike, there is a sili abandoned after an argument between its owners. The small garden of the sili is sadly overgrown with amaranth and daisies, and the huts, weighted down by rotted thatch, sag slowly among the weeds.

The sili was owned formerly by three brothers. The eldest, Yoroick, left Abukumo and went to live with the Kosi-Alua, outraged by the seduction of one of his wives by the second brother, Werene: Yoroick’s name means “Pigeon,” and Werene’s name means “Parrot,” and Pigeon had previously done to Parrot what Parrot was subsequently to do to Pigeon. Since physical retribution is usually avoided except by the kains and the violent ones, the fitting revenge is thought to be the identical offense.

Before long Werene left the sili too. He moved down the slope to Homaklep, taking with him a third brother, Hanumoak, at that time no more than a child. One day, a few years later, Hanumoak refused Werene’s command that he go out to work in the gardens. After the quarrel which occurred, Hanumoak left Werene’s sili and moved to the pilai of U-mue in Wuperainma.

Another old sili adjoining the abandoned one is occupied by a kepu man and his sick father, and a third is being restored by Asikanalek: Asikanalek, a solitary man, is a very brave young war kain of the clan Alua whose name, “No Sound of Bow”—literally, Sike-Ane-Lek, or “Bow Voice Not”—refers to the cessation of the wars with the Siep-Kosi. Already a new pilai has been constructed, where his old father can blink away his days, and in early May, Asikanalek started work on a new cooking shed. Assisted by his neighbor, he turned the dogged earth. The earth was hard-surfaced, baked to rust-colored ceramic by old fires, and with his digging stick he chunked into it, foot by foot, while the other man spread the raw hunks of clay on the old yard.

When the foundation of the new shed was completed, two hollow trunks of the pandanus were laid parallel as sills. The ends of the structure were erected, followed by the front and back. Each side was a double wall of oak and beech slats pounded and worked into the ground. Cross slats were wedged down between the uprights, knocked tight by a heavy wooden knout, and the whole affair was lashed with strong rattan: to tighten the bindings, Asikanalek would place one foot high on the wall and haul on the rattan with his whole weight.

In the wall at each end a central post had been installed, and a ridgepole was laid down the length of the shed. The slat roof was laid against the ridgepole, forming a peak, and the slats were covered with a loose layer of cane strips, before the whole was thatched. Air spaces had been left at the ends of the shed, between the wall top and the peak, and the structure was nowhere tight, in order that the smoke of the fires could readily escape. The fires were placed between each of three posts supporting the roof. By the time of the new moon the shed would be in use, and it would shortly acquire the interior smell of all the buildings in the valley.

In the pilai, sitting before the fire, Asikanalek’s old father supported his rotted frame by clinging to a rattan strung between two posts. At one time a warrior who had killed three, he had now reached extreme old age and had shrunk away to nothing. His skeleton, casting off its long disguise of flesh and blood, asserted itself indecently, and the long nails grew untended, as nails grow in a grave, an inch or more of yellow horn scratching fitfully among the few leaves of lisanika scattered between his feet. His skin, long dead, contrasted with the gleam of the cane ceiling greased black by the fire smoke. It was encrusted with hard scabs, as if his pores were to close over, one by one. His eyes, drained of all depth and luster, were two flat, rimless wet places on his face.

But still he heard and saw and smiled, and he could stir. He lifted a lisanika leaf toward his mouth, for his hands recalled tobacco; the lisanika leaf is always moistened before the tobacco is rolled into it. The yellow nails scratched dryly on the leaf, a mousy sound, as his gums lost it. There was no moisture in his mouth, and when the leaf escaped him he forgot about it. His feet were cold, and very slowly he lifted the bone club of his right heel toward the flame.

Asikanalek’s child Namilike came in. Though girls and women are forbidden to enter the pilai, small children of either sex are at times tolerated, and Namilike cannot be more than four. Like all the other little girls, she wears a miniature grass skirt, a circlet of soft reed gathered at the water’s edge, and she has her own small net. Namilike has large eyes and large eyebrows and a smiling mouth, and she is the prettiest child in the southern Kurelu. She sat next to her grandfather, her hand with its missing fingers on his dead knee, and at the same time unaware of him, as if he had assumed a final place among the dull brown packets of smoked straw and withered leaves which hung like bats from the dark rafters.

Woluklek is a wild-eyed man with an enchanted smile, and he is almost always by himself, Like Apeore, Tuesike, and Asikanalek, he is a solitary. But while Apeore and Asikanalek go their way alone because they like it, and Tuesike seems cut off from others out of shyness, Woluklek is alone because he is unique, and his solitude, though marked, is his condition. Unlike the others, he is not a respected warrior, but neither is he kepu, in the sense of cowardice. In war Woluklek is very often at the fore, but his activity is distracted, aimless, as if he had wandered across the battle lines on his way elsewhere and remained within the range of death out of bemusement. Yet he is not simple. It is as if, on the sunny paths of childhood, he had strayed out of his world into a dream and allowed the dream to waft him where it would, his life or death a matter of indifference.

So now he moved slowly through the world of shadows and hanging shapes which is the montane forest, squatting here and there to stare and pick, and passing on; he had no real errand, no real destination, a habitual circumstance which, by itself, had isolated him from others long before.

Woluklek wore no decoration on his head or breast: the whites of his large eyes excepted, he was dark as the earth beneath a stone. Behind, however, he had equipped himself with a strange fern, suspended from his horim string. The fern was bent from having been sat upon askew and stuck out to one side instead of hanging in the graceful way he had had in mind before forgetting it was there.

The morning sun filtered through the leaves in patches, alighting on red fruits of the pandanus. Single stems of giant bamboo shot toward holes of light or curved with languid stiffness back to earth, only to bend up again, toward the tip, like the head of a hunting snake. Large trunks of beech and myrtle loomed in the mass of foliage, to vanish into the green worlds of the canopy. Where a giant tree had fallen, an undergrowth of lesser plants fought for place in the new sun—rattan and scrambling fern and tall stalks of wild ginger with its scarlet flower.

Whistlers and honey eaters flicked quickly through the wood, their voices lost in the rush of a small stream. Woluklek squatted once again to eat gilled mushrooms. Woluklek liked to squat upon his heels and often did so even when the other men were standing, as if this angle gave him new perspective.

He moved onto the open slopes and down the white sand of the trickling stream bed, toward the valley floor. Along this path, in the sand beneath an overhanging boulder, some tribesman waiting out a rain had drawn the course of the Baliem River with sweeping arabesques of his foot. Woluklek investigated the sand drawing with pleasure and then, with his own foot, changed the course of the Baliem.

The boulder was one of an assembly of great rocks: close by, the path detoured down through a steep cleft between two others. This place was rarely visited by the people. It was a dark, dripping niche of ferns and mosses, with a solitary pandanus, sprawling and twisted in a welter of its own leaves, as if defeated in its passage toward the sun. Here, on a narrow ledge, protected from the water drops of yellowish short stalactites, lay remnant bones of two Wittaia.

The enemy had been killed years before, and their bodies left to rot: eventually the bones had been placed upon this ledge so that the earth itself, in the slow fall of leaves and petals from the sun above, would not bury them and thus lay them to rest. Woluklek was vague about the story, though it was claimed that the enemy had not been eaten. The akuni did not eat people, but they knew that this was done quite frequently in the southern valley. Only a few months before, a raiding party of people living near the Aso-Lokopals had been cut off and wiped out by the Hisaro. There were more than twenty killed, and all of these men were roasted in a rock fire and consumed. The bones were placed out in the forest, in a wisa ground; this ground was considered very dangerous because of its great company of vengeful ghosts.

Woluklek skirted by the place of bones and went on down the hill into the sunshine. Passing a rhododendron, he plucked an unopened blossom. He bit off the tip and hollowed it and, by holding it pressed to his lower lip and blowing, was able to produce a shrill, thin whistle.

On the tower of his kaio, far out in the center of the fields, Wereklowe sat perched like a great bird. In the shelter below, his warriors mended arrows and wove armlets. Wereklowe, like Kurelu himself, dressed simply. Unlike the lesser kains, who were always in white regalia, Wereklowe was content with the flat black pig intestines at his throat and an armlet the color of pale gold braided onto his left wrist.

All the great fields to the north of the kaio belonged to him, and the women who worked in them, and even the men, and the kaio itself—he included them all with a wave of his arm. An-meke, he called them, Mine, grasping and shaking his horim. And Wereklowe smiled his ecstatic savage smile, a restless smile, constantly working, forcing great creases on his lean cheeks, a smile at the same time merry and without mercy.

Wereklowe’s name means “He Who Never Works in Fields.” It was given originally as a rebuke, but Wereklowe made no attempt to rid himself of the name. He has killed ten men, and the time is long since past when work in the fields would be expected of him: he is the leader of the Alua, and the great war kain of the tribe, with seven wives, a dozen pigs, and eight fine children. Only Kurelu himself, with ten, has more wives than Wereklowe.

Probably there is no man in the Kurelu who has killed more enemies than Wereklowe. But in the Hisaro clans to the southward there is a kain who is said to have taken more than one hundred lives. He is notorious throughout the valley, even among tribes like the Kurelu which have no contact with his own. In the course of an ordinary lifetime of tribal wars and raids it would not be possible to kill one hundred people, but this kain is not an ordinary man. A fanatic warrior in battle, he prowls as well on solitary raids into the countries of his enemies, killing quietly where chance offers. On one occasion he accosted a woman on a lonely path: the woman, assuming the stranger was bent on rape, lay down philosophically to receive him, His spear lay beside them, and, instead of raping her, he drove the spear inside her. Another time he entered a sili at midday, when only old women, infants, and sick people would be about. A sick boy in the pilai invited him to rest himself in the loft above until the men might return; when both had climbed into the darkness, the stranger strangled his young host and took his leave.

Despite the number of enemies to his credit, this man’s need to take life is unfamiliar to the Dani and makes even his own people uneasy. The criminality of his acts is recognized; unlike Wereklowe, he is despised as well as feared.

Besides Wereklowe, the Alua kains include Polik, Weaklekek, Limo, and Asikanalek, village kain of Abukumo; the clan Alua, with its sub-clan the Halluk, is the strongest in the southern Kurelu.

After Wereklowe, the most powerful of these kains is Polik, leader of the Halluk. Polik is a tall old man with straight hair in stiff, cordy strings down to his shoulders; sometimes he wears a magnificent fur crown, and he is never without an enormous broad-bladed white spear eighteen feet long.

As a young warrior Polik behaved strangely and violently and is said to have killed more than one of his own people; because he was feared, he was given the name Mokat, meaning “Ghost.” To this day he is commonly referred to by this name, with great respect: Mokat kain kok-meke!—Mokat is a great kain! His present name, which stems from “He Who Came Up from Behind,” recalls his bravery in a battle of long ago, when he circled back and saved the life of a man cut off by the enemy. Polik is never far from the front line, and his fierce shouts of encouragement and warning are a part of every war.

Polik is proud of his strong voice, which dominates not only wars but funerals. Above all else, he loves to sing. When Polik sings, a sleepy smile comes to his face, and he tosses his great head from side to side in his slow rhythm, so that his heavy hair flops on his shoulders. He sings songs of war and raids, of love and gardens, but sometimes he sings little wordless songs of sheer contentment, alone on a high rock on the sunny hillside.

Ye-we-o          Ya wo-o-lo

          Ma-ya-um

We le-le-e        Ko-lo-lo

One night in late May, while the giant frogmouth, red-eyed and yellow-mouthed, called sepulchrally from the starry points of araucaria, the valley shuddered in an earthquake; the earthquake lasted only a few moments, two brief spasms, and then the earth was still again and the frogmouth resumed its lugubrious night song.

There are volcanic regions at both ends of the great island, but the central highlands are without volcanoes, and earthquakes are quite rare. In this equatorial climate, without seasons, where the steady pressure of the trade winds makes rain and sun constants of every day, nature is less violent than remorseless. High winds, drought, the torrential rainstorms of the monsoon coasts, are almost unknown, and perhaps this is why the akuni, taking for granted their mild, equable weathers, have not invested the rare tempests and earthquakes with supernatural powers; as a people they are notably unsuperstitious. Heat lightning is said to be the blood of a man killed by his enemies, rising into the sky, and the sky itself is thought to harbor other peoples; there was a rope leading down to earth, but, as the sky peoples stole too many pigs and women, the rope was cut. According to Asikanalek, the rope was cut by Kurelu himself, but U-mue says no, the rope was cut long, long ago.

On the night of the earthquake the men of U-mue’s pilai descended from the sleeping loft and smoked; they talked uneasily of the earthquake and wondered at its origin and, after a while, returned above and went to sleep.

A full moon came at the end of May, and, as it filled, a fresh wind of the southeast trades, which prevail from May until October, cleared the humid airs. Buffy night herons had come into the valley and circled the landscapes with the blue heron and egret; the black ducks, now very numerous with the new birds of the spring nests, were joined by the solitary mountain duck, a rare small species, black and white, with a bright orange bill. Together they curved down in the afternoons into the ditches of the fields.

The mountain duck has flown these valleys for a million years and has never been seen anywhere but in the highlands; probably it evolved when the valley floor was still a glaciated lake traversed by limestone salients and ridges. The lakes and marshlands lay between the ridges, and the ducks gabbled in warm mornings never seen by man. But the limestone barriers eroded quickly, and the lakes seeped away. The Siobara, like a great pyramid in the center of the valley, is probably a remnant of just such a ridge, while high ground like the Tokolik may well have been lake shore: the lake-floor gardens, were they not drained by ditches, would still be part of the acid marshland which surrounds the Waraba.

The dry ground in those old millenniums, and the lower slopes to nearly seven thousand feet, were forested by tropic oaks and chestnuts interspersed with stands of araucaria. The oak-and-chestnut forest was a sign of arable land and, with the coming of man, was the first casualty; its destruction was hastened by the advent of the sweet potato, though whether this occurred three centuries or three thousand years ago cannot be known. The hiperi, and the large population which its cultivation permitted, encouraged extensive clearing; across the centuries the fields crept up the slopes, trailing the forest, and the drainage and development of the valley floor evolved. Each garden was short-lived: once the topsoil was cropped out and leached away by year-round planting, it was abandoned and a new plot slashed and burned and cleared.

The topsoil inevitably went quickly. Alluvial sediment, sifted down across the ages from the high massifs, it was a poor compound of limestone and quartz sandstone; the limestone, weathered, produced a weak, soluble soil and, in the end, dead white quartzitic sand: patches of this sand erupted long ago along the base of the Siobara and on the rain-leached hills, the bare bones of a limy, anemic earth.

In consequence, after a year or two or three, the gardens must be abandoned to savanna. The savanna is all but wasteland. Except for small rodents caught for rituals, there are no animals worth hunting. The grass shelters a tiny quail, a small gray rail, a scattering of songbirds like the robin chat and fairy-wren and black-headed weaver finch: the paucity of grassland birds which have occupied the open regions hints that the history of the akuni in the Baliem has been a brief one, for the grassland is of their making. But the time of their own coming the akuni cannot tell, only that it was long ago, with the father of their fathers. The villages rot, and the dead go up in fire, and their history decomposes in the soil.

In the clear days which accompanied the flowering of the moon, a new black patch appeared below Wuperainma, in the bottom of what once had been an ancient pond. Here Tegearek and Werene reclaimed a garden. The work was hard, for the shrubs had long ago established solid banks, even small trees, and the ground between was bound up tight with mats of roots. The sides of the old drainage ditches had fallen in, and the shallow water was choked off with weeds and rushes.

The two men worked adjoining plots and sometimes worked together. From day to day their helpers changed, in the intricate patterns of kinship and obligation. Each man had a heavy digging stick, which he drove into dark, grudging earth of purple-brown: the sticks made a dull biting sound and a muffled cracking as the roots were pried and snapped. The litter of fire-blackened stumps and roots on the scorched ground gave the whole scene an air of barren land, to be worked in vain by the black, panting bodies. Only a few yards away, across the ditches, the undergrowth stood in wait, as if ready to retake this ground at the first sign of negligence: beneath the blossoms and the bright green leaves, the roots were creeping forward, and the new seeds fattened with every sun in the receptacles of the flowers.

Werene the Parrot spat in the dry sun, a neat, quiet, and uneasy man who wears a string of pale blue grass seeds, the Job’s Tears, across his forehead; like his young brother Hanumoak he is a handsome man, but his face is weak and sour, as if he knew that his ambitions must go unfulfilled for want of the power or courage to see them implemented.

A young woman of the Siep-Kosi came to visit the southern villages, and Weaklekek detained her as a wife; the girl was put to work in the gardens below Puakaloba, where he was able to keep an eye on her.

U-mue, hearing of this girl and wishing her for himself, had demanded immediately to know if she were wita or waia, the two moieties or marriage groups into which all clans in the valley are divided, according to their patrilineal line. If Weaklekek, a waia, should make love to a waia woman, both of them might be put to death and their bodies thrown out into the fields to rot. The prohibition is an ancient one, so ancient that no explanation is known; it is not connected by the akuni with incest. Two associated clans are invariably wita and waia, so that marriage may take place between them, just as two men who share a sili are apt to be wita and waia, for, if both were wita, they could make love to each other’s wives. The Wilil are wita, the Haiman waia, the Walilo wita, and Alua waia. Weaklekek had very soon determined the girl’s moiety—it is the first question asked of any stranger who is not killed—which was wita. Since U-mue, as a Wilil, was wita also, he was thus ineligible. A few days later the girl herself resolved the matter by fleeing back to the Siep-Kosi.

This morning a party of Asuk-Palek people, led by a kain named Torobia, prepared an ambush in the gardens of the northern Kurelu. The Asuk-Palek lived formerly in the Kurelu, in the region of Wuperainma, but were driven out long ago. Many were killed and many others had their ears cut off; the rest settled among the Wittaia. At this time they were named, and are called still, the Asuk-Palek, or “Ears Cut.”

While stalking the kaio, the Asuk-Palek were surprised by three Kurelu, then by two more, coming from an opposite direction. The five Kurelu saw immediately that they were outnumbered, while Torobia’s band imagined that they had blundered into an ambush. Both sides fled. Polik and his men, who were nearby, pursued the party of Asuk-Palek. They wounded one man and they caught Torobia; while some held him, others ran him through with spears. From his head they cut some bits of hair. There is rarely time or opportunity to stop and strip an enemy body, and the hair is therefore a prized fetish.

Tonight the celebration started in Abulopak, where Polik lives with his kinsman, Wereklowe. The etai starts always in Abulopak, which is the largest of the southern villages; it is actually two villages in one, since it now includes the former Wilil stronghold which adjoins it. With few exceptions, the most important kains and warriors of the Aike region live in Abulopak or Wuperainma; the exceptions are Weaklekek in Homaklep, Asikanalek in Abukumo, and Apeore in Lokoparek. The other villages in this region are thought of as kepu, since they cannot claim an important kain or warrior between them.

The whooping was pierced by the ringing whistle of the huge cicadas; the cicadas cry briefly every evening just at dark, as time-bound as the folding of the ferns. The evening passed, and the whooping rose toward a moon in its final quarter, continuing on long after the insects had died away. To Homuak there came an owl, hooting uneasily against the din, and the great fruit bats, the flying foxes, on slow leather wings, quartered the evergreen silhouettes. An opossum coughed, and the nightjar with its great mouth and whiskers took up its sepulchral song, an odd tok—tok, like a shell rapped on a block of hollowed wood, interspersed with froggish mutterings. Sometimes the green tree frogs called, and sometimes the black dogs, crying: these strange animals never bark, nor do they howl. Their sound is the wail of a spirit trapped in the body of a dog, and its eeriness passes onward through the night villages in the moon shadows of the mountain wall.

At dawn Polik came to Homuak. Standing at the fire site above the spring, he called, A-OH, A-OH. The cry was taken up from the villages to north and south, and the long day of etai which would celebrate Torobia’s death had started.

But the sun had not appeared above the rim when a troop of warriors, still heavy-faced with sleep, trotted swiftly through the grove, bearing their spears. One called out to Polik, and he ran after them, grunting fiercely; the Wittaia, still raging for revenge, had come in from the Tokolik and set fire to a kaio shelter of the Kosi-Alua. They had destroyed the tobacco patch and uprooted plots of sweet potatoes in the gardens nearby.

The warriors passed through the low wood below Wuperainma and Homaklep, and over the grassy knoll called Anelarok, where the women of Lokoparek, on their way to the Liberek, would stop that day to dance. They ran on toward the Aike, to guard against a raid from the Turaba, and a group of eight had crossed to the Turaba itself, to act as sentries.

The fair weather of the full moon had continued, and a huge blue day expanded above the valley. From southeast to southwest the rim was sharp as a black, jagged blade, with only the northern wall lost in the white cloud mountains, Thin wisps of mist drifted through the distant woods, like spider webs trailed out by the soft wind; this was the trade wind from the ocean, beyond the high horizons, which had dried the valley floor in a rare four days without rain. For the first time since the early days of April the sun rose cleanly from behind the cliffs, scattering small brilliant puffs of clouds: it gleamed on the rufous mantle of a white-headed kite quartering low across the gardens of Weaklekek.

Wittaia appeared on the Tokolik, and a shout arose from the villages beneath the wall; the warriors of the Kurelu streamed out across the fields toward the frontier. More Wittaia convened on the near slope of the Waraba, in silent wait. Polik went out with other men to the large central kaio, which stands on a wide belt of high ground traversing the main gardens. Tuesike was also there. He had done light work in the few days past and was slowly resuming his life as a warrior, but he moved uncertainly and was quieter than before.

On the Turaba, meanwhile, some Kurelu sentries huddled together against the early cold. They had not dared light the fire, for fear of revealing their position. Expecting that any Wittaia ought to come from the direction of his own country, they were facing westward, down the ridge, and were startled when a man appeared quite suddenly from behind them. At first they thought that the man was Tekman Bio, but when he called out to them, they recognized in dismay a fierce warrior who, some years before, fleeing the wrath of his own people, had been accepted by the Wittaia: he knew every stone in the land of the Kurelu and had crept up on the sentry party from behind. He also knew the sentries and their caliber, and, though he had but two men with him, they were good men, and he did not hesitate to approach boldly. He yelled at the Kurelu to get off the Turaba, that it was Wittaia land.

All the sentries except Hanumoak acted swiftly on the assumption that the Wittaia had many others in the rocks behind them; without pausing for their bows and spears, they got off the Turaba so rapidly that big Woknabin sprained his ankle. Hanumoak, the only true warrior in the party, had been sitting a little apart, among the rocks; the Wittaia had not seen him, and, instead of running, Hanumoak remained hidden, reluctant to lose his spear. A good spear was carefully carved and very valuable, and a half-dozen had been left behind. But the Wittaia found the spears and bows and bore them off in triumph. Meanwhile the sentries had raised the alarm, and a terrific howling echoed from the farther bank.

Polik and the rest ran toward the Aike, starting a frightened gray rail from the grass. Other bands led by Yeke Asuk and Weaklekek were strung out across the distance, coming fast. A large company of Wittaia, a hundred spears or more, sprang up suddenly along the crest of the Turaba, and the two tribes hurled insults at each other across the brown, swift silence of the river. In the confusion Hanumoak slipped down among the boulders and returned across the Aike at the land bridge, where the torrent dives beneath a wide ledge of rock.

The enemy, incensed by the recent raids, were clamoring for war. In the weeks past they had lost Huwai, Torobia, and at least four others, casualties of wounds suffered in the wars, while the Kurelu had lost only one man. Their bold appearance on the Tokolik and now the Turaba, with the disgrace of the lost spears, had excited the Kurelu, and war had become inevitable. The Wittaia moved slowly off the Turaba, filing, spears high, down the ridge, and the Kurelu moved out toward the frontier to wait for them. Men of the Kosi-Alua, assembling for the etai, were in war regalia; instead of going to the etai field, they went to the Tokolik. On the flanks of the Waraba another large company of Wittaia watched them come.

The Kurelu filed carefully through the swamp below the Waraba but remained within the cover of the sedges; when they outnumbered the advance Wittaia, the latter retired to the crest, awaiting reinforcements. The withdrawal brought a yell from the Kurelu, who surged onto the flank of the hill; in a short time they had gained the crest and driven the enemy to the west end of the L. In the brief skirmishing which took place Tegearek received an arrow in the small of his back, and a son of Maitmo, kain of the Haiman, was wounded also.

On the Tokolik the men were rallied by Nilik, kain of the Walilo. Nilik is a tall hawk-faced man with a harsh voice and darting eyes, and he was presently engaged in a power struggle with Kurelu. The dispute concerned the ownership of the ap warek—literally, “dead men,” the booty—which came of the raid and resultant battle in which Huwai had been killed. The ap warek are held by the great kains, and in the past Kurelu would have received them, but this time Nilik had kept them and shared them with his kinsman Yoroick, in honor of whose son the raid had taken place; Nilik had also claimed the spoils taken from Torobia. Now he harangued the older men and lesser kains as they gathered and sat and smoked. He wore a tight brown head net, like a skull cap, but, shoulders excepted, he was otherwise undecorated: on his shoulders he wore a coat of heavy clay, yellow-sulphurous in color.

Midday came, in a dead silence. On the west side of the Siobara a large fire had been built, a signal to the Wittaia allies that a war was to take place. By the shelters of the frontier kaios the men waited in the languid drone of flies; most would have preferred the etai, and few went forward to join the warriors who had taken the Waraba. Beneath the great araucaria by the Tokolik, Asok-meke took his arrows, one by one, and scraped them sharp; Asok-meke is too old to fight in the front lines but is still belligerent in the reserves. A bird of the grasslands called now and again, a solitary wistful note which accented the stillness. The blue sky reigned, but the air turned heavy and lugubrious.

On an old man’s shoulder, in the sun, a butterfly opened and closed its wings as if to the rhythm of his breathing.

A band came from the Aike, led by Weaklekek. They moved directly across the Tokolik and into the swamp, and their passage caused an unspoken stir: all but the oldest men rose to their feet and followed Weaklekek to the Waraba. The Wittaia held the long side on the L, and the Kurelu the short: the Wittaia side of the corner of the L would be the fighting ground. Fighting began almost immediately.

The corner of the L forms the high point of the ridge, a reed-covered knoll perhaps eighty feet above the swamp; the advance Kurelu were gathered here. Husuk was there, in shoulders of gray clay, and Limo and Weaklekek and a scattering of warriors good and bad: the main group of the Kurelu remained at the northern end, while a detachment of warriors, constantly replaced, fought on the forward line. The line extended from a grassy hollow in the corner of the L, below the knoll, up into the large rocks of the ridge crest. The fighting was still pantomimed, though a few arrows flew; men of both sides darted out in seizures of bravado, pranced and feinted with their spears, fled back again. The Wittaia warriors were more gaudy than the Kurelu: one man in feathers of black and red wore tusks in his nostrils which stuck straight out to the sides instead of curling down, and another had large white egret feathers in a cape which flew the whole length of his back.

All took chances to display their splendor, but the Wittaia took more chances than the Kurelu, whose apathy about the war was evident in their small numbers. The Wittaia had come in hundreds, and large parties of warriors were posted back along the ridge, with a reserve company of nearly two hundred men in a huge black spear-thorned phalanx at the base of the Siobara.

On the knoll the Kurelu laughed indulgently at the bravado of the elege Siloba, who took wild chances in the forays, glancing backward for approval. Siloba is feckless and frequently wounded. A roar went up when three brave warriors ran into the rocks to seize a Wittaia spear; Asikanalek, reaching it, was set upon by eight or more Wittaia who came at him from above, but he did not lose his head. He backed off slowly into the shelter of the rocks on his own side, holding the spearmen at bay until the moment for rushing him had passed. A cheer went up; the spectators on the knoll shook their heads and laughed.

Only Nilik and Maitmo were excited, the first because he was asserting his new leadership, the second because his son had been wounded in the morning: Maitmo had been the most fanatic of the kains ever since the day a few moons earlier when three of his wives had been killed by the Wittaia. But their fierce yelling failed to stir the warriors, many of whom had started to move back toward the swamp, in the direction of the etai field. Only a few among those at the fore fought with intensity, kept company by Woluklek and a scattering of leggy boys, brave and unfeathered, with small wobbly spears and scraggy bows. Siloba, wounded in the foot, limped back self-consciously, clutching the prized arrow tip where all could see it; he had chosen a look of worried modesty to conceal his pride, as if to say, I did only what I could. Woluklek, with the immunity of an innocent, took desperate chances aimlessly, gathering enemy arrows with a happy smile as if he were gathering up nuts, and forgetting to fire any of his own. Weaklekek, Apeore, Hanumoak, and Walimo gave spine to the Kurelu line, while U-mue, brandishing his spear in the second rank, shrieked menace. Walimo had smeared his lower half with reddish clay, like tights; he skipped frantically as a spear caromed off his thigh but returned again to the front line, leaping and bounding uselessly in the panic of his own bravado. But most of the Wilihiman-Walalua declined to join the battle, so much so that Maitmo, ranging up and down, shouted out at them his contempt.

Below in the hollow, Aloro, disreputable beneath a soiled white crown, fought beside some Kosi-Alua. Speared through the arm only ten days before in a war on the north frontier, he stalked and circled, aiming steadily and firing from the hip. With weapons in his hands he attains grace, as if the bow brought his body into balance. Aloro moved up the hill and down, hunting his chance; he remained forward all the afternoon, when even Weaklekek had returned to the knoll to rest. His arrows, sailing viciously across the tops of rocks, kept his opponents low and wary. In battle Aloro looks peaceful, almost sleepy.

But the Kurelu gravitated to the north tip of the Waraba, ignoring the catcalls of the enemy. In the late afternoon, they staged a preliminary etai, jumping in a circle as they chanted, and a few had already started through the swamp when the Wittaia howled out their frustration and surged forward. They outnumbered the Kurelu, and they seriously outnumbered the Kurelu who wished to fight: in a few minutes they had overrun the lines and taken command of the high knoll. A myzomela, strayed across the battlefield, bounded upward on the wave of noise; the sunlight caught on its crimson cordon as it vanished back into the dull greens of the land.

The Kurelu had backed into the swamp, all but a small company of warriors marshaled by Husuk and Weaklekek. A horde of Wittaia danced down from the hilltop. The howling was immense, seeming to swell, to fill the twilight like a thunder, and the Wittaia, white-tusked and feathered, shattered the long line of the hill, leaping and squatting with the glinting spears; their gleaming bodies, bending, weaving, stretched to throw a spear, were magnificent and grim in the strange light of the failing sky.

The Kurelu were also grim and struggled to withstand them. The fighting was suddenly in savage earnest, with neither taunts nor braggadocio. The arrows crossed one another in mid-air, dropping low and fast as the lines closed; a Wittaia and a Kurelu, nearly colliding by mistake, fought each other off with a clash of spears. All the warriors were crouching now, to avoid getting hit in the stomach or the chest, for the man thus wounded was more likely than not to die. They moved across the hillside, squatting low, swift as great spiders. Husuk moved among the men, touching and reassuring them, but the wounded were already coming back; a man clutched an arrow that protruded from his upper leg, and Wakilu of Sulaki held one that was buried in his inner thigh, below the groin. Wakilu had sunk down just beyond the fighting, and the men who operated on him peered warily over his shoulder: when the arrow sprang free, with a rush of blood, the men laughed in relief and hurried toward the rear. Wakilu’s wound was not serious, but it became infected, and two moons later he would die.

A man came back with an arrow through the skin of his head, along the temple; the arrow protruded like a grotesque feather. Another sprouted foolishly from a young warrior’s right buttock; he returned unhappily to the end of the ridge and sprawled on all fours while an old man dug it out. The warrior grunted with each tug and smiled thinly with relief when it was over. Other wounded hobbled back, and even loud Huonke had miscalculated; he had been speared in the upper leg, and he hastened rearward in consternation, his furtive face glancing back over his shoulder. Walimo was wounded in the shoulder, and Hanumoak caught an arrow on the hipbone, but neither wound was serious, and nobody on either side was killed outright, though a Wittaia was seriously speared and a Kosi-Alua was wounded badly in the breast. Siba had come late to the war, but in the final battle he was struck in the chest, just at the right nipple.

More than fifteen of the Kurelu were wounded, and the battle line fell apart. Another surge of the Wittaia drove the Kurelu entirely off the ridge. The Wittaia screeched and threatened from above, led by two fierce warriors who had been in the forefront all day. One of these was young and swift, with a fixed, quiet grin, the other a wild-mouthed man whose long corded hair flopped crazily on his shoulders as he leapt; from below, the two were silhouetted on the twilight sun, black spears shivering.

With a concerted hail of arrows, the Kurelu regained a foothold on the Waraba. But dark was near, and the Wittaia had already claimed the victory, moving off in triumph. Both sides held a brief dance of victory: the Kurelu, despite the defeat they had suffered, were proud that they had done as well with such small numbers.

Kurelu himself had come and looked morose. He sat alone in the tall grass, taking no part, as if he had learned, just at that moment, that Nilik meant to claim the spoils of war.

Among those injured on the Waraba, the only man pleased with his wound was Walimo. Walimo’s striking dress and warlike behavior, unremarkable in the past, have been encouraged by special circumstances: he has been warned by Husuk that such behavior might save his life.

Some time ago Walimo paid a visit to clansmen among the Huwikiak, on the far side of the Baliem. The Huwikiak are allies of the Wittaia, and the journey was therefore a very foolish one. Still, he returned safely, traveling by night, The kains were very angry, thinking it bad luck for a man to traffic with the enemy: treachery is punishable by death, and while Walimo’s act was in no way subversive, his airy personality was not taken into account. Wereklowe and Maitmo wish to kill him, and either he must run away or try to redeem himself before it is too late.

Community punishment is rare and very serious, in the exceptional cases when it is not fatal. Some years ago a man of the Mokoko tribe on the far side of the Baliem was punished by his own village for setting fires in the fields. He had a taste for mice and rats, which he would catch by burning off the grass hiding their holes; when his fires endangered the crops of his neighbors, he was warned to give them up. But his appetite was too strong for him, and one day he was seized and held face down over a new fire of his own making.

This man is a familiar figure along the banks of the Baliem. He wears a fine mikak and an enormous headdress of white feathers, framing a hideous shrunk face with neither nose nor mouth. There is a small slit through which food may be passed and from which a muffled sound fights free, like a voice calling in a grave.

The etai for Torobia’s death was held the following day. The men of Wuperainma did not go to special pains for the etai, especially since three of their best men had been hurt the day before. Hanumoak, by morning, only winced a little when he moved, though he would limp for a few days to come, and Tegearek sewed stolidly at a new shell bib, for he is not a man readily disconcerted, even by an arrow in his back. Behind him Siba sat, precisely where Tuesike had sat two weeks before; like Tuesike, he would survive, but he was in severe pain. His whole torso was wrapped in taro leaves bound so tightly with vine that he could scarcely get a breath, and his eyes bulged; his horim had been snapped off like the broken bone of a bird and had not been replaced. After a while he slumped onto one side, clutching himself, and began to groan. Then he crept painfully to the dark wall in the back, and crouched there, facing it. A second groan seemed less in pain than in fear, and his friends glanced at one another in discomfort.

Most of the warriors retained their decoration of the day before, including Weaklekek, who is the rare warrior without vanity. He is content with his old modest battered bib and rarely or never wears other decoration; as fast as Weaklekek acquires wealth, he gives it all away.

Weaklekek’s dignity and generosity are important criteria for true kainship, and he ranks with Limo as an important war kain of the Alua. But Weaklekek is more fearless and less ruthless than is good for him, and he may not survive to take a place as one of the great leaders. His clansman Limo will survive, tall, classic Limo with very large eyes full of reserve power and contempt, who on the morning of etai sat eating hiperi in Weaklekek’s pilai, not with the gusto and pleasure of his host, but with a sort of remote arrogance, pointed up by his long tobacco pipe and by the largest shell bib in the Kurelu. One is caught by Limo’s face and drowns in the coldness of his eyes.

Around them sat Asukwan and other warriors of the pilai, all dressed far more splendidly than Weaklekek himself. Weaklekek squatted on his haunches, scraping potash from a sweet potato, delighted with everyone and everything. From time to time he took up a new horim, still green, and blew through it approvingly.

Weaklekek, trailed by Asukwan, went to the knoll called Anelarok for the preliminary etai. There the men had gathered in midmorning and begun to sing. Tekman Bio led the singing in his high, strange voice, as one man always does, and the others chanted in response. On Tekman Bio’s head the strange blue-veined plume from the head of a bird of paradise was mounted on the long black tail plume of another. As he sang he plucked the hair from the buttocks and back legs of a warrior prostrate on the ground, assisted by a man seated on the other side. The Kurelu consider all body hair unsightly and pick ceaselessly at those parts of one another which are difficult for the owner of the hair to reach: the plucking of backs, like the neatening of beards and the reciprocal search for head lice, is an important part of the etai’s morning ritual. Asok-meke, too cross and hairy to be bothered, has made himself an exception: he has strange little tufts like black woolly lint all over him. Asok-meke sang too, in a kind of exasperated groan, and even the man on his stomach sang, his buttocks rising and falling with the effort.

The singing was interrupted by a loud squalling from the women of Wuperainma. The wife of Tegearek had run away and was at this moment on her way to the Siep-Kosi; she could not have been popular among the women, who had decided to betray her.

Her path led behind Homaklep and Abukumo and up into the mountains, and Tegearek moved without haste to cut her off. He dragged her back to Wuperainma, where he beat her. She uttered a series of long, pure screams, which rang above the chant of etai, but the screams themselves were largely ritual, part of her shame and penance.

Nilik came early to the Liberek. He had brought with him the trophy bundle; there were seven or eight fine spears, some bows and arrows, a cassowary whisk, and a small grass packet containing the tufts of Torobia’s hair. The “dead men” were lashed to a pole stuck in the ground at the head of the field, and Nilik sat beneath them at the fire, in the central place. He wore his wig of ten thousand seeds, red seeds and black, and over the wig a white crown of egret feathers. The wig flew when he stood up to shout, and when he danced; at other times it hung forward like a hood, and his eyes peered sharply from beneath it.

In a pause in the dancing, Polik’s men—those who had killed Torobia—came to the fire and took up the trophies. With these they charged to the center of the field, where the trophies were held aloft. A great sighing shout arose, and the men rushed back again in a close avalanche of bodies, O-way-y-O.

Polik himself was present, in his monumental crown. He was smiling his strange smile, benign and absent-minded, but at the end of the afternoon he spoke rapidly and fiercely to Nilik, apparently disputing the “dead men.” Nilik spoke fiercely in return, and at the end of the dispute he moved to the pole and untied the trophies: these he entrusted to two of his men, then wrenched the sapling itself out of the ground. The men went away with the trophies, and Nilik stalked behind them, the sapling on his shoulder, in the direction of the mountains.

Ekapuwe walked up and down the sili yard, alone in the village of Lokoparek; as she walked she sang softly to her new baby, who slept, invisible, far down in the bottom folds of her empty net. The net was a new one, dyed in a red and blue pattern. Ekapuwe was restless, and her walking served to rock the baby. When she was not singing, she would smoke, using the long holder which, despite her bony feet and hanging breasts, gave her a certain elegance. In the distance, under the cliff wall, some Kosi-Alua were cutting wood, and the tock of the stone adze echoed monotonously across the forest.

Before long the sound ceased, for war had been called on the northwest frontier, and the woodsmen had departed. Husuk had come that morning to fetch Wereklowe, and some other warriors had gone along. U-mue did not go: he was cutting a new field in the pandanus forest of Lokoparek. To break the silence, Ekapuwe yelled at her husband, but he did not answer.

Aku, who may have known eight springs, and her friends Eken of Homaklep and Werekma, the pretty daughter of Loliluk, wandered in the afternoon onto the hillsides. Each of the thin children picked a bouquet of bright flowers, mostly the blossoms of the yellow rhododendron, nektamuk, but also red ginger, eroaloali, the small white rhododendron, wamasi, with its sweet spicy smell, a burmannia, le, which is a strange pale blue, and two varieties of ground orchid, one small and purple, the other large and brown and white and lavender.

The girls carried their flowers for a little while, strolling down through the coolness of the evergreens by the spring of Homuak. Above, the war kains sat around the council fire, against the wall of fern, and the children stood apart, pressed to the trees. Small bellies and behinds sticking out, the flowers clasped in hands folded neatly on their skirts of reed, they stared at the fierce old men. Word had come that a woman of the enemy had drowned in the Baliem. Women’s suicide in the Baliem occurs from time to time, but the cause of this death was unknown. The death of a woman was not the same as the death of a man, but it was glad tidings all the same.

The children went up onto the hill again. They did not know quite why they had picked the flowers, which were of no use or consequence, and, looking at one another, they began to giggle, putting their hands into their mouths. Then Aku and Eken and Werekma picked their bouquets to pieces, and, because it rained during that night, the fallen blossoms were still living the next day.

The time of the full moon is past, and a slow rain has come again, filling the valley sky with pale gray clouds. With the rain’s return, the fresh air of the southeast trades has died away, and the yellow gardenia is all but gone. The Aike River, bony with derelict trees after the dry spell, is speckled with large flocks of fledgling ducks, and the wood swallows, their nesting done, come in small flocks to the araucarias.

Weaklekek and his wife went up into the mountains, to the oak forest and beyond, in search of fresh lisanika leaves for his tobacco. Most of the other men worked in the fields, though Tegearek, glad of the distraction, spent much of the morning chasing a small snake up and down the ditch of someone else’s garden, shouting and thrashing as if his life depended on it. His own new garden, though begun at the same time, has fallen far behind the garden of Werene.

Ekali of Wuperainma left on a trading journey to the Yali people, four days northeastward of the valley; he and his companions carried with them nets and stone adzes and will return within a fortnight with fine bird feathers.

Ekali took the mountain trail which climbs from the valley floor, two hours away in the northern Kurelu; it continues past the salt wells at Iluerainma, over the ridge, and into the Pass Valley, and from there in a three-day journey to the Yali Valley, called the Yalimo. The Yalimo, unlike the Baliem—the latter, in the dimensions of its broad, level plain, is unique in all the highlands—is steep and is still forested; therefore the Yali peoples have remained skilled hunters. Shifting agriculture is still the common practice: the gardens are less expert than those in the Baliem, and the pigs fewer.

The Baliem tribes depend on the Yali peoples for certain articles which have vanished, in their own lands, with the destruction of the forests. The Yali supplies the great bulk of the fine decorative feathers, including plumes of the various birds of paradise. The furs come also from the Yali: such creatures as the cuscus and tree kangaroo, whose pelts adorn the crowns and armlets and horims, are now so scarce even in the upper forests of the rim that only one old man of Sulaki still goes in the nights of the full moon to hunt them. Certain woods which must once have flourished in the Baliem are now imported from the Yali, including the bial wood of the beautiful white spears, the wio, a fine dark bow wood, and many others. The handsome spear laurel, though it still occurs in the Baliem, is cut as fast as it is found; it will soon vanish from the cloud forests of the rim, and already the best laurel spears come from across the mountains.

In exchange for articles of feathers, fur, and wood, the Kurelu bring stone adzes, shell goods, pigs, and woven articles. Yeke Asuk only quite recently has acquired from the Yali people an opossum crown and a fine spear sapling in exchange for an adze and other articles; the fur alone required an adze in payment. The green and black stone of the adzes, used also in the holy stones, does not come from the Baliem, where it is unknown; it arrives there by an obscure set of trade routes, probably over the mountains from the eastward, and may well originate some hundreds of miles and many years away, in the far volcanic ranges of Papua. The shells, in turn, pass along from tribe to tribe, over trade routes from the southern coast; the coast is far away, beyond the experience of the akuni, who have no comprehension of the sea. The shells are the chief medium of exchange and travel endlessly, in a series of slow transfers, pausing in a pilai here, a shell belt there, for a month, a decade, or a century, only to pass onward from brown hand to hand.

Uwar and Kabilek are expert at a game called sikoko, which is played with rattan hoops and small cane spears; the boys keep their own hoops among their few possessions in the pilai. Though games are numerous, toys kept by the children from one day to the next are few. They include a bull-roarer—a slat of wood on the end of a string, which produces, when whirled, a loud hollow noise—a simple swing in which a vine is lashed to the middle of a board, and the large purple bulb of the banana tree, also on a string: the latter may be twirled in the air below the hand or towed on the ground behind, a technique favored by Uwar’s small round brother, Natorek.

The rules of sikoko are simple, but the game is difficult One boy rolls the hoops one after another across a length of ground, and, as they pass, the other must hurl the spears through them in such a way that the spear sticks into the ground with the hoop spinning on it. The hoops are hurled at full force, so that they bounce high and erratically as they go, but even so, the boys do not miss often. Unlike most other yegerek, who crowd the hoop and try to punch the spear through at the last second, Uwar and Kabilek keep a distance and impale the hoop with a whipping sidearm throw: Uwar is the only boy who is left-handed. Sometimes they bounce the hoops over the araucaria roots at Homuak, and sometimes they play on a downhill path below Wuperainma; at these times they are watched by Natorek and Oluma, who work as a pair under the direction of the former. Both little boys are fat and strong and truculent—at three, they are as old as fat men ever get among the akuni—and do everything not only together but simultaneously. Today, when Natorek marched into the weeds and squatted, Oluma took up a position right beside him; shoulder to shoulder, they relieved their small bodies in unison, neat and quick as birds, the pair of heads glaring balefully at the world across the grass tops.

The nostrils and upper lips of both Oluma and Natorek, like those of almost all the children and a number of adults as well, are chronically encrusted with dried mucus—the symptom of the one common ailment, a respiratory infection, in an otherwise strong, healthy, and clear-skinned people. Suspended mucus, rising and falling casually, is a feature of the akuni face, since hawking and spitting and blowing the nose are considered very rude.

Unlike Oluma and Natorek, Uwar and Kabilek are beautiful, in the large-eyed, carved-featured way of certain akuni, though the wild brightness in Uwar’s face is replaced, in Kabilek, by wistful sadness; Kabilek appears to long for something he will never know.

As the only yegerek in U-mue’s sili, Uwar and Kabilek are together often, but they are in no way alike and could not really be called friends. Each time they play sikoko the game ends uncomfortably, for while Kabilek is gentle and resigned, Uwar burns with a quiet ferocity and works himself to a pitch of intensity in which, smiling still in a cold, glittering way, he contrives to disrupt the game. He hurls the hoops when Kabilek is not ready, or plays carelessly, in languid contempt, and finally he may hurl the hoop at his opponent or at one of the children looking on. At these moments he is beside himself, there is no real communication with him. The other children, and the adults as well, greet Uwar with deference, for he is quite exceptional, but he is not well liked. Uwar was born to lead and has small need for friendship.

Uwar is named for the Uwar River, which flows through the land of the Siep-Kosi, where he was born; later his mother came to the land of the Kurelu and married Loliluk. The latter is deceptive in appearance, a small timid-looking man in an old brown head net, puttering about the sili. Loliluk never wears shells or feathers and moves quietly. Nevertheless, he is said to have killed five, two of these on the occasion on which he received his present name. The name, which means “Bones Ungathered,” commemorates the day when, a daughter having died, he rushed away into the mountains even before the funeral was finished and there, in a region beyond Lokoparek, then in enemy territory, killed two people in a fit of grief.

Ekali, father of Kabilek, is also deceptive in appearance. He is a tall man with a strong voice, strong face, but in fact he is uncertain of himself, afraid in war, yet unresigned to his own fear, a blusterer. At one time Ekali moved away to the Siep-Kosi, where in one way or another he made himself so unpopular that he was called Lan-i—“Go There,” in the sense of “Go on Back to Your Own People.” His new name, awarded since his return, describes the reaction of his young wife to his habit of gobbling up the best bits of food before the food leaves the cooking shed, rather than sharing it in the pilai with the other men; Ekali means “Shame.”

Though Ekali is intelligent, and has gained a certain wealth in pigs as a result of trading journeys to the Yali people, his ambiguous reputation may put his son Kabilek at a disadvantage in regard to Uwar.