Yesterday the Wittaia asked for war, but the Kurelu, anxious to work their fields, refused it. Today the enemy staged a garden raid, to revenge the one in which Huwai had been killed. By midday a large party of them had crept to the belt of woods which separates U-mue’s kaio from the Tokolik. Women were scattered through the fields, but none came near the ambush point. In the late afternoon, exasperated, the Wittaia rushed out and set fire to U-mue’s shelter, then retired to the Tokolik. Their jeering howl was answered by the Kurelu, and warriors ran for the frontier; U-mue himself was at Homuak and at the first alarm leapt to his feet, screeching maniacally. Somehow he had grasped from the discordant shouts that the shelter was his own, for the prospect of battle does not ordinarily excite him; he ran off to fetch his spear. Others were already on their way. The young warriors ran in files along the paths among the purple sweet potatoes, among them Yeke Asuk, whose pale brown form among the dark bodies of the other men was luminous in the failing light.

An audience of yegerek scrambled up the grassy slope behind the araucarias. Tukum, on the way, was stung on the foot by a bee. He sat down on a rock like a sad troll and clutched at the foot. Behind him, Uwar located the small beehive in the grass: it was gray and papery and had white larvae in it. Without giving a bite to its discoverer, Uwar popped the hive into his mouth and ate it, rubbing his stomach in satisfaction.

Against the dusk the fire plume of the burning shelter was bright, and its white smoke rose toward the wreath of cloud at the peak of Arolik.

The warriors picked their way uneasily through the wood toward the Tokolik; they knew that the reeds might conceal the waiting enemy. A mokoko heron rose like a gray shade, venting its grim croak, as other men came on from the Liberek. Fighting broke out immediately, to fierce howling, and from the distance the white feathers could be seen between the trees, spinning disembodied in the gathering darkness. There were nearly one hundred Wittaia, and though the skirmish lasted but a few minutes, they wounded four of the outnumbered Kurelu. At dark both sides withdrew, for dark is the hour of the ghosts; the Wittaia built a high, bright fire at the east end of the Tokolik but deserted it after a short while and continued homeward.

The man of the Kosi-Alua speared in the last moon by Tegearek and Yeke Asuk was speared again, this time along the side of his neck. Yeke Asuk, fighting nearby, was arrowed in the back. The arrow was removed by Aloro, but a short time later Aloro himself was wounded in the front part of his thigh. Aloro is wounded more often than any other warrior, not because he is careless or reckless but because he never leaves the battle line. One day he will be wounded mortally.

Two days later the Wittaia appeared in battle array again, having moved boldly to the wooded strip between the Tokolik and the shell of U-mue’s shelter. Again the Kurelu went out to meet them, though not nearly numerous enough to fight. They gathered watchfully at the end of the Tokolik, while opposite them several hundred of the enemy massed in ranks. Weaklekek, Asikanalek, and Husuk circled apprehensively among the few young warriors who moved out to face the taunting party of Wittaia; more Wittaia lined the Waraba. A brief skirmish took place in which Husuk threw and lost his fine dark spear; annoyed, he walked around in the front line without a weapon, hands folded behind his back. Plainly the Kurelu were waiting for the rain, which swept in dense palls along the northeast mountains; the men gave way in spite of Maitmo, who ran forward to rally them, screeching with his usual belligerence.

A party of Wittaia had crept through the swamp from the Waraba and appeared suddenly on the flank; a roar broke out, and the Kurelu fled. The Wittaia did not press them. Light airs from the west swung around and freshened, bearing the rain out of the north; the north wind is a rare cold wind, and both tribes withdrew, hugging their shoulders.

Asukwan of Homaklep returned by way of Homuak. Like a little boy, using excited jabbing motions, he described to foolish Woknabin his own deeds of heroism. Woknabin, still lame from two arrow wounds suffered on the Tokolik, listened to Asukwan’s tale with awe. Woknabin is a huge kindly man, blind in one eye and simple; he is a brave warrior and a poor one. Woknabin’s name was given in childhood; he was terrified, each time his mother left the sili, that she would go away from him forever. His name, which suits the sad entreaty in his face, means “Take Me with You.”

The arrow which struck Yeke Asuk entered near his right shoulder blade and penetrated toward the center of his chest, causing injury to the etai-eken—literally, the “seed of singing”—the life energy, the soul. The etai-eken, which occurs near the region of the diaphragm, varies in size according to the spiritual progress of each person, but it is always present except in smallest infants. Pigs also have etai-eken, but dogs and other animals have none.

The belly of Yeke Asuk was cut with a bamboo knife in several places to drain off the “black blood,” and the vein of his arm punctured with a pig-bone needle, after which he was bound up tightly in a poultice of taro leaves. He slept well but this morning was in severe pain. He was helped down from the sleeping loft, and many men came to see him. Tuesike helped Yeke Asuk to a sitting position and, with loud Huonke, applied wet leaves of hiperi to the arrow hole and to the bleeding wound, binding him tight again with gleaming purple strips of fresh banana leaf. Yeke Asuk’s wound is serious, but not serious enough to justify the catching and killing of small animals.

Outside, squatting in the smoke of a yard fire, U-mue made fetishes for his brother. Yeke Asuk was not well enough to come out, and Uwar and Kabilek, each holding a fetish high in the air, ran back and forth before the entrance of the pilai. Then they fled away down the yard, holding the canes high between them in a kind of arch. Both fetishes were planted outside the village, by the paths leading toward Wittaia land. Like the fetish made for Tuesike, they were intended to warn away unfriendly spirits.

The women’s life, and that of the pigs and children, trudged ahead. Hiperi and toa, a large succulent grass, were cooking in the shed, and the smoke rose through the dark wet straw the whole length of the roof. Ekapuwe had come down the night before from Lokoparek and was greeting the visitors in a cheery manner. Holake, a little girl with rusty rag-doll hair, stood pigeon-toed and proud, hands clasped tightly on the headband of her net; in the net was Ekapuwe’s new baby. From time to time Holake walked it up and down the yard, and the invisible child, which has passed most of its life to date within the net, murmured contentedly, a pale finger poking outward toward the sun like a small tendril. Beside Holake marched her small fat brother Oluma, who is Natorek’s friend and double. Holake and Oluma are the children of Wereklowe; their mother came long ago to live in U-mue’s sili, because of excessive beatings administered by her husband. The mother looks older than she is, but at moments she smiles the same shy merry smile as her ragtag little girl. Though she is said to be the woman of Yeke Asuk, she did not seem in the least upset about her lover’s peril.

A yellow hog barged forth from the gourd garden. It snuffed, tail wagging, among the vegetable skins and husks cast out before the pilai and consumed a discarded butt of sweet potato with loud, chopping relish, contemptuous of all the world beyond its mouth. As it ate, it cocked a small evil eye, more like a sore, on guard against the man or pig who might attempt to interfere with its ingestion.

Some large hiperi were handed from the cooking shed, and the men returned into the pilai to consume them. Polik had come and took advantage of the visit to appraise a fine cowrie belt; he stretched it around the fireplace. In the corner Hanumoak, reaching for his shell bib hanging on the wall, saw the larger bib which belongs to Yeke Asuk and tried it on. He was watched by Huonke, who, caught watching, smiled his furtive smile, and Hanumoak returned the smile, though coldly. He removed the shell bib of the wounded man and tied on his own.

One afternoon Weaklekek obtained a fine small pig. Pigs are normally not eaten without ceremonial reason, but a reason was found, as it often is, and in the afternoon Weaklekek drove an arrow into the pig’s lungs. The pig ran squalling around the yard, but in a little while it was caught again, and Palek stood with his foot upon it until it died.

Weaklekek singed the pig on a fire in the cooking shed. He dressed it out, with the help of Asok-meke, on a bed of fern, cutting it up with a bamboo knife and a small stone adze. Asok-meke drew the tripes out from the viscera and handed them to the boy Supuk, who took them to the stream to wash them.

Weaklekek’s wife Lakaloklek, farther down the long hall of the shed, had built a large fire to heat rocks. Lakaloklek’s old mother sat alone in the dense smoke like a brown bundle, as if, after so many years, smoke had replaced air as her natural element; she watched the dressing of the pig with the slack avidity of old age. The women were joined by Weaklekek’s youngest wife, just in from the fields; she swung her nets of gourds and hiperi into the corner. She also swung down her daughter, placing her next to the old woman. The little girl is the favorite of Weaklekek and wears two pretty cowries and a string of snails. The old woman stroked the child and showed to it a baby piglet which she carried with her in her own bottomless net. Then the young wife, returning, took the baby from her. While the child sucked at her breast, the mother smoked, using the long holder; her chin rested on the baby’s head.

Supuk returned, bringing the tripe, but Lakaloklek sent him out again to put the pigs into their stalls; the child went promptly, without grumbling. Lakaloklek and the young wife, with the mother of Supuk, were whirling like three witches in the smoke, hair and breasts flying: they took up the heated stones with long stick tongs and placed them in the pit.

Lakaloklek is elfin and pretty in appearance, though she wears a smear of black grease across her face and her hair hangs down across her eyes. She is gay and quick in all her movements, in no way oppressed by her woman’s life. Supuk’s mother is a big woman with the plaintive jollity of middle years, and the young wife, who can’t yet be fifteen, is graceful and big-breasted, complete in the thick torpid way of a fleshy, unopened flower. From the inferno of the smoke, the three women laughed.

Originally this young wife was to have married Supuk’s father, but, arriving in the sili for the first time, she fell in love immediately with Weaklekek; when she refused to go to Palek, Weaklekek accepted her philosophically into his household. Palek, having small choice in the matter, was philosophical about it also.

Palek’s son Wamatue appeared, a diminutive boy with red hair; the red hair, of a deep rust color, is typical of the children and glows like a halo on their dark heads when the sun is low, toward twilight. Wamatue wore fern bracelets on his wrists, and a miniature horim. The horim was the diameter of an arrow, too small even for Wamatue; it hung in a token way in the area of his navel. Wamatue is a shy sort of creature and stood camouflaged in the brown shadows by the entrance, thinking long thoughts, but finally his presence was remarked upon, and he came forward.

For nearly an hour the pig steamed with fine redolence, and in this time the chortling of the honey eaters in the casuarina trees around the village gave way to the rigid twilight chant of huge cicadas. Weaklekek sat off to one side, holding his baby daughter on his lap; he squeezed her in inarticulate delight, and once he placed his lips against her head in a sort of mute instinctive kiss. Weaklekek is ashamed of nothing, and the great life in him shines outward, with nothing withheld behind the eyes.

Asukwan, lank and indolent, arrived in time to help take the browned thatch from the fire. When this was done he sat down to one side to await his dinner. Wamatue sat next to him, shoulder to shoulder, and Asukwan punched the little boy playfully on the back. Wamatue cried out, seeking attention from his mother. His mother did not bother with him, and he stopped.

The food was laid on fresh banana fronds: except for the sliver knife of bamboo and a concave length of bark which serves as a sort of tray for discarded scraps, there are no utensils of any kind. Though clays of several colors are common in the valley, the art of pottery has not been learned; the people are content with their string nets, leaf packets, and small water gourds.

Stern Asok-meke, the guest, divided up the meat. The men were given the best pieces, while the women, sitting separately in the darkness, were passed a few poor scraps. The tripes Asok-meke slung disdainfully at the yegerek, who also ate some of the bloodied ferns used in the cooking: all the household consumed hiperi and toa and the spinach-like leaves of mallow, eaten with gray salt from the wells at Iluerainma: the precious salt was sprinkled carefully from a long tube of banana leaf. They ate in silence, without greed or haste.

When the men had retired to the pilai, and the women to the huts across the way, Lakaloklek remained seated by the embers, weaving a new net; the fiber stretched in a long band from her stump fingers to her toes, vibrated by old rhythms of her hands. As she worked she hummed and smiled, at peace in her own world. But soon she too retired, and the fire died.

The sky of night was high with stars shining on other centuries beyond the mountains. This was the time of the night feeding, the nocturnal animals, creeping forth in the last flickers of man’s embers. In the shed rats and mice came from the walls with their tight squeakings, and bats on fingered wings flopped to the village—the tiny twilight bat, with its high ascending shriek, and the flying fox, which did not cry but sounded its coming with the quaking flaps of five-foot wings. The bats circled beneath the stars, in the ringing of the tree frogs and the crickets. In the light wind of night weather, the banana fronds stirred with a loud, lonely clacking, and the great dog-faced bats pumped back and forth, thump, thump-thump, thump, to their rude landings on the hanging fruit.

As the night grew, the feeding hour declined, and cold descended from the mountains; the bats vanished, and the rodents withdrew to their dank passages. Even the mosquitoes sought their corners, to shrivel in the dim, dry sleep of insects.

The soft voices in the pilai died, and Weaklekek came out alone, to visit Lakaloklek in her ebeai. The earth turned beneath the stars, and Weaklekek cried out in the night, a pure, sweet cry of pain, and all was quiet.

The nightjar, done with its wide-mouthed hunt for insects, grunted digestively in the black evergreens. Slowly it began its hollow, metronomic tok, tok . . . tok, and the sound wore away the night. Weaklekek came from the ebeai and went into the cooking shed, where he drew a fire from the straw to warm himself and smoke. With his fingers he worked his swollen calf where an arrow tip, broken off, was deep embedded. Of late this old wound had given him much pain.

At first light a dusky green emerged slowly from the gray, and the surrounding woods took shape. Somewhere, on a limb, the nightjar ruffled its loose feathers and blinked its yellow eye; camouflaged like a great moth, it would grow into the wood until night came again. Its place was taken by the honey eater, for this was the morning-of-bird-voices.

Weaklekek, at his small fire, sighed. He squatted there immobile, his silhouette like a statue of black igneous rock against the transient flickering on the walls. A woman came, and they spoke gently to each other, but she moved off to her own shadows and built up her own fire. When it flamed, she took sweet potatoes from a net slumped by the wall and stacked them against the embers.

A mountain pigeon called, and day appeared.

Tukum, that morning, found a bird’s nest in a pink-flowered myrtle tree. The nest was a miniature cup of soft grass, circled around with bright green sphagnum moss. There were two tiny birds in it, olive and yellow, and, though they had never done so before Tukum found them, they could be made to flutter for short distances.

Tukum carried the nest about all morning, making the little birds fly; they would buzz along on a downward angle, careening inevitably into the ground. The birds delighted Tukum, who talked to them and encouraged them, but he had no recognition of his feeling, any more than Aku and Eken and Werekma had understood why they had picked their flowers. Late in the day he would take them home and eat them.

High in the dark cloud forests of the upper Elokera stands a huge beech, and high in this tree hangs a ponderous nest of the great black hawk. Weaklekek wished to obtain this hawk, the feathers of which are valuable, and he set off with his bow and arrow to investigate the nest, the news of which had spread down to the valley. With him he took Asukwan, the young warrior of his pilai, who is credited with a sense of birds and a keen eye. They were accompanied by Tukum, who is credited with almost nothing.

The three went up the valley along the stream bed of a tributary, wading the quiet pools under the banks and leaping from rock to mossy rock; honey eaters and birds of paradise shrieked at their passing, and mountain pigeons, veering off, broke the humid airs with the sharp clap of pigeon wings. Farther on, they took to high ground, crossing abandoned fields; in the hillside woods small flocks of parakeets, red under wing, criss-crossed the treetops in loud senseless consternation.

At a place along the trail the grass was crushed and flattened; Asukwan laughed. He poked the forefinger of one hand back and forth between the second and third fingers of the other, and Weaklekek grinned. Tukum, embarrassed, grinned as well.

In the forest of the upper slopes, with its black mud and thorned rattan, its hanging shapes and gloom, the pale clear boles of the canopy trees soared to crests which closed away the sky; the trail crossed sagging pig fences, and hidden animals grunted hollowly from the shadows of these dark pastures. The trail skirted dismal wells where the limestone had caved in; one well was a hundred feet or more in depth, and strongly fenced around, though the fence was waterlogged and rotten. Asukwan tossed a stone into the well, and the three exclaimed at the time which passed before the splash resounded. Lagging behind, Tukum tossed another stone, but this time a sound came back immediately, for Tukum’s stone, barely clearing the edge, had fallen on a ledge inside the rim. Tukum glared balefully at the well and trotted onward.

Farther still, in a steep clearing, lay a new pig village, perched on a ledge of mud. Here miniature blue butterflies fluttered like gentian petals, alighting as one on the mud’s black gleam and all but vanishing, for with closed wings they were nothing more than small scraps of drab gray. Then the blue color would explode again as the butterflies danced in their odd motion. Tukum laughed, pronouncing their apt name—sigisigit.

At the village a man joined them, and the four went on to the high forest above. A black hawk soared in the gray cloud which hung upon the forest, and Weaklekek whispered at it, making gestures, in order that it circle lower. But the hawk slid off and disappeared, and its nest, when they came to the base of the tree, had no bird at its edge. Weaklekek crept higher on the slope but could not attain the nest level. After a while he came down again and, on the way home, out of frustration, wasted an old arrow in a shot at one of the green parakeets.

The season turned, and the night was clear and cold. The akuni kept to their warm huts until the morning was well started, and out in the crisp air built high brush fires. The brush was of dead sticks and dry brown leaves, and around a large fire built under the pines the air sparkled with autumn; light filtered down in long delicate columns onto the fallen needles. But in the undergrowth just at the wood edge the sun was hot, and the bushes flowered in the rich green of the valley’s ceaseless spring.

Once or twice a year, depending on its current fortunes, a clan will hold a ceremony which renews the power of the holy stones and invigorates and protects in battle the warriors of the clan that holds the stones: the cleaning of the stones with grease of ceremonial pig, wam wisa, is the most sacred of all rituals practiced by the akuni.

In early June a stone ceremony was held by the clan Wilil, in the small village which adjoins Abulopak. Because this place is more safely located than Wuperainma, which lies close to the frontier, the ancestral stones are still maintained there. They are entrusted to the care of big Woknabin, the only Wilil warrior left in the pilai.

As political kain of the southern Wilil, the man most important in the ceremony is U-mue. He came to the sili in the middle of the morning, bringing three of the pigs that would be slaughtered. He was accompanied by Weaklekek, and on the way past Abulopak he stopped by to invite Wereklowe and Polik. None of these men are Wilil, but the feast is attended by kains, relatives, leading warriors, and boys of all the other clans, depending upon their significance and kinship.

Other Wilil were arriving at the sili, and a period of greeting and singing began, in which a crying takes place very like the windy sound of mourning. The crying lasted ten or fifteen minutes and was followed by excited chatter: this part of the ceremony is designed to bury feuds or ill feeling within the clan itself, and to restore an atmosphere of friendship.

Behind the pilai, Aloro and other men cleared all weeds and refuse from a special yard, using digging sticks to scrape the earth. The yard is a pretty and sequestered place, shaded by banana trees and casuarina and pandanus. All morning large hiperi had been brought in, and wood and cooking stones and leaves. Ekali brought a pig, and Apeore and others brought bundles of split timbers; they marched in procession through the sili and stacked the wood under the trees in the small yard. Old cooking pits were cleared and new ones dug. Loliluk appeared and went into the pilai, followed by old Elomaholan. Elomaholan wore his usual array of fur bits and small bags; only the old men carry such bags, which are slung at the waist from a fiber shoulder strap. Elomaholan’s voice is high and squeaky, scarcely audible, and he is prey to the young warriors, who sneak up behind him on the paths and shout Wittaia shouts. Elomaholan is a wisakun, or “medicine man”: the wisakuns, in addition to their medical duties, supervise the rituals pertaining to the holy stones.

U-mue, freshly greased for the occasion, returned into the pilai from the yard, and the sobbing of greeting was resumed. He would utter a phrase, and Wereklowe and the rest would join it at the end, carrying it onward in a soft dying wail. All held their fingers to the bridges of their noses, snuffling wetly.

The pilai itself is small and old and littered as a witch’s den. Dark packets cling to all the walls and rafters, and strange-shaped gourds and long straw bundles, old arrows and feathers; the ceiling shines with black accumulated grease. It is no longer a pilai of warriors, all its strongest men having long since moved away. Some years ago the Wilil were having trouble with the other clans living at Abulopak, and U-mue felt it time, in any case, to start a new sili of his own, as a mark of power. Most of the Wilil went with him to Wuperainma, though a few, like Aloro and Woknabin, remained in the old villages.

Fat hiperi and new banana fronds were brought into the pilai, and the leaves were spread out in the rear, before a kind of cupboard on the wall. Elomaholan took eight flat wrapped packets from the cupboard and laid them on the leaves: these were the holy stones, and he peered into the packets to see which was which. Then he sat back and stroked two very big hiperi, which lay between the stones and the fire. After a moment he left the pilai, taking a bow and arrows into the yard; these U-mue would use to kill the pigs. There were no women anywhere in sight.

The gathering men sat on a mat of straw before the pilai, in the sun. Aloro held the first pig by the head, and Woknabin held it by the haunches, and U-mue shot it through the lungs; the process was repeated with the others. U-mue bit his lower lip as his arms strained at the bow; he smiled briefly upon the release of every arrow, as if in response to some private satisfaction.

A large sow was wheedled toward its doom by Tegearek and Apeore; U-mue awaited them, posed on one knee. But the sow broke free repeatedly and had finally to be seized and overpowered by eight strong warriors. They struggled forward, and the men laughed. A lath was held under the pig’s chin to support its head, and the pig bellowed, shuddering all over. U-mue shot it gingerly, and it wrenched free, scattering the people in its path. The grunts and laughter of the men made him look cross. More small pigs were brought and killed; they ran bleeding down the yard, in flight from death, and kept on running even after they had fallen.

The big sow was cornered once again and thrown to earth. Tegearek pumped at its lungs with his foot, but it had been shot badly, and Aloro brought a spear to finish it. It was carried up the yard at last, big dewlaps quaking, its bloodied bristles stiffening in the sun. There were nine pigs in all. Each pig was earmarked, and each man in the company of more than fifty knew not only who had brought them but exactly which was which; they had a very good idea, as well, as to which piece of which pig each man would receive, for the akuni world is a world of protocol and gesture, and those details not preordained by time are painstakingly determined at the slow small fires.

The sow was a long time at the fire, hoisted and kicked and rolled and scraped by Apeore and Tegearek. The dressing of the eight small pigs was already in progress, with two or three men working on each. U-mue stood regally above his people as they bent over their work, the new clay like yellow gold on his black shoulders.

While the pig-dressing proceeded, the sili became quiet once again. Voices drifted from the shadows, to the fitful chopping of stone adze on bone. Behind the pilai, in the yard, a large fire was constructed, like a pyre: here the cooking stones were piled and heated. From the steep hill above the sili men rolled more rocks down the hill; the rocks rumbled through the woods.

Behind the fire, under a pandanus, a small fencing guards the spirits of the dead. The fencing was replaced now with new laths, and its earth weeded and tamped down, to show the spirits that they are not neglected. In the center of the fencing stands a pole of cane with dried ferns attached; this is a warning sign, to indicate that the place must not be violated.

On a rack by the pilai Aloro and Tegearek hung bloody slabs of meat. The hands of both warriors were crimson, and when they were through they drank water from a gourd and wiped their hands with ferns.

Apeore stood in the cooking pit, covering its earthen sides with long fresh grass; the strands of grass fanned outward several feet from the edge, until the pit looked like a gigantic blossom. Wet leaves were placed around the rim, like a bright green heart of the grass flower; nearby lay purple hiperi. The rock fire popped loudly as a stone exploded; the stones were seized and borne away in tongs to line the pit, mounting the sides until an igneous center had been formed. The stones were covered with wet grass, and the big hiperi laid in the steam. U-mue appeared and shouted orders, but in the general exhilaration everyone else was shouting orders too. The voices meant nothing; everyone worked hard and willingly, with swift efficiency. The hiperi were brought, and more wet grass; the rock fire rose above the ground. More stones were laid into the core, while Polik and others wove the grass sides tight: Polik does not hesitate to work side by side with the warriors, or even the yegerek, though he is an older and a greater kain than U-mue. The tong men came and went, grunting like penitents; they moved mechanically from pit to fire, fire to pit, their six-foot implements clacking dismally on the rocks. On the pit’s edge Apeore sprang about, demonic in the steam.

More stones, more leaves, and a large packet of ceremonial pig, wrapped in banana leaf. And still more stones. The stones exploded and a fragment burned hard-faced Huonke, who cried out. More grass, and now a heap of fern, brought forward in huge bundles and sprinkled with water from a sunlit gourd. Tegearek ran forward with the raw sow hide, heaving it flesh down onto the ferns. More pig meat was arranged around it, in fern packets. More stones, more ferns, more silver water, sparkling in the sunlight—and a cry passed on from a distant kaio. Kaio, kaio, a man shouted, and there was a brief stir, but no one left the feast; today the other clans must take care of the enemy.

The grass extending outward from the pit was folded upward, enveloping the whole, and the entire edifice, like a small haystack, was bound around with a long coil of rattan. The finished job was handsome and compact, the product of uncounted years of practice; the voices had been profligate, but scarcely a gesture had been wasted.

Aloro removed the spare meat from the rack and hung it in the pilai; it would be eaten in the ceremonies of the second day. Nilik came, walking quietly up the yard: the name Nilik derives from this man’s lifelong knack for finding himself in the vicinity of pig-eating. There is something ominous in Nilik’s hungry presence, and his arrival seemed foreshadowed by the clouding-over of the sun. The west wind freshened, and the skeletal fronds rising above the roofs stirred in hollow, ruined apprehension. He greeted, unsmiling, Asikanalek and other men who passed him in the yard; they were taking advantage of the cooking time to go and investigate what had happened at the kaios.

The rock fire was stripped in the late afternoon, and the browned ferns spread out in a great mat before the pilai. More than one hundred men had now assembled, and most of them sat in a circle around the ferns. Many of the ferns were eaten, and on the rest the pig meat was arranged. The fatty skin of the large sow was hoisted up, and U-mue sliced it in thin strips: these were passed to the individuals and groups deserving them, and there was no sign of quarreling, for each knew and received his share. The warriors ate the meat with gusto but without haste or greed, saving some of the hot lard next to the hide to rub on their own skins. The grease of the ceremonial pig is beneficial in every way, providing both strength and good appearance; by the end of the afternoon the dark skins were gleaming.

The sow rump and other special cuts had been taken into the pilai, where U-mue and the old kains had disappeared; there a bundle of new fiber strings, worn at the throat to protect the men in war, were rubbed in wisa grease. The fibers were dispensed to warriors like Yeke Asuk, whose recent wound, a serious one, indicated his need of new protection; Yeke Asuk handed some spare strings through the door, and the men outside grasped at them eagerly.

In the rear of the pilai the holy stones, still wrapped, lay in a line on the banana leaf. The following morning, the cleansing of the stones was to take place. Noisily, in the near-darkness of the hut, the old men ate, while behind them, slung from the rafters, the raw meat dripped cold blood, turning slowly against the chinks of light.

For several days the Wittaia, unable to effect a death in battle or in their field raids from the Tokolik, had attempted a raid near the river, coming across early in the morning from the Turaba. The akuni were aware of this, and Weaklekek’s kaio had been strengthened by Aloro, Husuk, and other warriors, who attempted to ambush the raiders; despite several alarms, no real battle had occurred.

This morning the men did not go to the kaio, for the feast of the Wilil was taking place. Aloro was an important Wilil, Weaklekek an important guest, and Husuk went off to war on the north frontier. No women were permitted in Weaklekek’s fields, and the kaio was abandoned for the day. The Aike frontier, with the looming Turaba, had always been a dangerous place, and as Weaklekek’s absence, like all other important matters, was common knowledge, no trouble was expected.

But the day was hot, and in the afternoon the solitary Woluklek went to the river to drink water. The people tire of the stale, silted waters of the ditches—they have no drink but water—and in dry weather will often go a long way to the river, where they squat on the bank and drink slowly and steadily for minutes. Woluklek took with him three little boys who were playing near Mapiatma.

One of the boys was Weake, whose father had been killed the year before on the Waraba. His mother had since run off to the Wittaia, and Weake was now the ward of his uncle, the warrior Huonke. He was a small yegerek, a friend of Tukum, with the large eyes and thick eyebrows which make many of the children beautiful. His name meant “Bad Path,” and recently he had hurt his leg. For this reason, on this day, he was slower than his friends.

Near the Aike, on a little rise just short of the side path to Weaklekek’s kaio, Woluklek and the three boys were ambushed by a party of Wittaia; the raiders sprang from the low reeds and bushes. Afterward Woluklek was not sure about their numbers, but a raiding party is usually comprised of about thirty men. There was nothing to be done. He dropped his spear and fled, the boys behind him.

All his life Weake had been taught to hate and fear the enemy, and when he saw the strange men with their spears he turned with the rest and ran. But he was not fast enough and was almost immediately run down. He screamed for help, but the others were running for their lives and did not turn. The face of a man, of several men, loomed above him on the bright blue sky, with harsh, loud breathing. The men rammed their spears through him over and over, pinning him to the ground, and then they were gone, and Weake was carried home.

The cry of Kaio, kaio carried swiftly past Homuak and to the pig feast: the hot stone fragment that had burned Huonke must have struck him close to the same instant that his nephew had been pierced by the long spears. While the rock fire was still steaming, word came from Abulopak about the boy. The two villages almost adjoin, and the pilai where Weake lived was scarcely a hundred yards across the fences from the Wilil fire. Huonke and Tamugi, his brother-in-law, ran toward Abulopak, where the women’s wailing had already started.

In the long yard of the sili two women were kneeling, facing the mute pilai. The sili lies under the mountain, at the north end of the great grove of araucaria, and the pilai at its southern end is shaded by the tall pines against the hill. Inside the pilai were a few old men, and then Asikanalek arrived, and Tamugi and Huonke, and Siloba.

Weake lay on a banana frond beside the fire. He was still alive, and his clear childish voice seemed out of place in the brown solemnity of the men’s round house: it cut through the decrepit snuffling of the old men as the shaft of daylight in the doorway cut through the motes of dust. Weake spoke of his own etai-eken, his seed-of-singing, the life he clung to with all his strength, as if the mourning he could hear must be some dark mistake. An etai-eken werek! But I’m alive! Though he not once screamed or whined, his voice was broken as he spoke by little calls of pain, and the blood flowed steadily onto the frond beneath him.

Huonke tried to quiet him, repeating the same terse phrase over and over, like a chant: Hat nahalok loguluk! Hat nahalok loguluk!—But you’re not going to die! Huonke’s voice was the only firm one in the pilai. Tamugi, a large-muscled man whose ready smile is bolder than his nature, sobbed as loudly as he could, while Asikanalek cried silently. The boy’s voice answered Huonke obediently—Oh, oh, he repeated gently. Yes, yes. But now and then pain or terror overcame him, and he cried out and fought to escape the death that he felt in their hands. Huonke held his left arm and Siloba his right, while Tamugi and Asikanalek held down his legs. Siloba neither talked nor cried, but breathed earnestly and ceaselessly into the boy’s ear, oo-Phuh, oo-Phuh: this ritual breathing, which brought health, would be used in the next hour on the wisa pig meat in the pilai of the Wilil.

Weake twisted in their grasp, his back arching; his legs were released and he drew his knees up to his chin, covering the gleam of the neat spear holes at his navel and lower belly. The old cut on the boy’s leg still had its green patch of leaf dressing, but the spear holes, like small mouths in his chest and sides, his arm and leg and stomach, had not been tended. Some fresh leaf was brought at last, and the two stomach wounds were bound up hastily, almost carelessly, as if the true purpose of the leaf was to protect the pilai floor from blood; in their distress the men handled him ineptly, and he cried out. The figures hunched over him in the near-darkness, with the old men’s snuffling and the steady oo-Phuh, oo-Phuh, and the harsh tearing of the leaf.

Behind Huonke, in the shadows, a woman sat as rigid as a stone. The custom excluding women from the pilai had been waived while the child lived, but nevertheless she maintained silence: when she spoke, but once, out of the darkness, her voice came clear and tragic, like a song. The woman was Huonke’s sister, married to Tamugi; she has a wild sad quality in her face and is one of the handsomest women in the Kurelu. She counseled the men to take the boy down to the stream.

Weake clung to life and would not die. His writhings had covered him with blood, and he lay in a pool of darkness. When the woman finished speaking, the men agreed to take him to the water, which, entering his wounds, would leach out the dark blood of illness. He was picked up and carried outside, Siloba holding his head up by the hair. The women in the yard began an outcry, but the men did not pass through the yard. They took Weake through a hole in the back fencing, across a pig pasture, over a stile, down through a small garden to a ditch. There they laid him in the muddy water, so that it lapped up to his chest.

Tamugi did not come. After leaving the pilai with the other men, he kept on going, for the Wilil fire was now open, and he wished some pig. The others accompanied Huonke to the ditch. Soon they too left, for there was nothing to be done. Only Siloba remained, and his friend Yonokma. Yonokma sat in water up to his waist, holding the legs, while Huonke and Siloba, their own lower legs submerged, held the child’s arms: Weake’s head rested on Huonke’s right thigh.

Fitfully Weake talked and now and then cried out: the voice rang through the silent garden, against the soft background of lament and the low hum of the men’s voices at the pig feast. Once he cried, Tege! Tege! in terror of the spears, and Huonke shouted him down: Hat ninom werek! Hat ninom werek!—over and over and over: You are here with us, you are here with us! He said this dully every time Weake called out. You are here with us. Then Weake would resume his own meek, rhythmic Oh, oh, oh, of assent. Hat ninom werek—oh. Hat ninom werek—oh. His eyes closed, opened wide, and closed again; he seemed to doze. In the muddy ditch, with its water spiders, round black beetles, and detritus of old leaves, his blood drifted peacefully away. Against the firmament above soared the great arches of the banana trees, and the hill crest in a softening light, and the blue sky. Taro and hiperi grew about him, and the blue-flowered spiderwort lined the steep banks. Swiftlets coursed the garden, hunting insects, and the mosquitoes came; the men slapped one another.

Huonke sighed and leaned his head against the bank. In grief, Huonke’s face had lost its hard, furtive quality and become handsome. Yonokma, sitting in the water, yawned with cold. Okal, who had gone with Weake to the river, came and stared down at his friend; he looked restless and unhappy and soon went away again.

In his last sleep Weake cried, a small, pure sound which came with every breath. When pain awakened him, he tried to talk, but his voice was faint and drowsy. Siloba breathed fitfully into his ear, but his efforts were disheartened: he only did it, guiltily, when the little boy called out. The small slim body had more than twenty wounds, and the wonder was that the boy had lived so long. But Weake would live until the twilight, asleep in the healing water, while the men attending him grew tired and cold. They coughed and slapped themselves and stared into the water, and the little boy’s chest twitched up and down, up and down. Sometimes Siloba poured water on the wounds above the surface, and more blood was drawn forth, flowing down his side. Huonke said, You will stay with us, You will stay with us, and the child said Yes, yes, yes, and did not speak again.

Siba came and stared at the little boy. He broke off the stem of a taro leaf and with it probed the wound on the left side. The belly leaf was floating, and the small horim: Siba attempted to push back a trace of white intestine which protruded near the navel as if, by concealing the evidence of hurt, he might somehow be of help. Weake was failing rapidly and did not cry out; his mouth was open, and his lips had puffed and dried. In the attack he had received a heavy blow, for the side of his face had grown swollen and distorted.

Yonokma leaned forward and removed a bit of straw from the dry lips.

Siba ran across the garden and sprang onto the roof of the pig shed by the fence. There, with a great cracking sound like anger, he broke off a banana frond and hurled it down into the sili yard: this leaf would be the little boy’s last bed. Returning, he picked Weake up out of the water and carried him homeward through the garden. Huonke and the two elege trailed Siba through the dusk, shaking with cold.

The small body was limp, with one foot lying on the other, and arms hanging: the blood dripped very slowly on the weeds. His breathing had silenced, and his eyes, half closed, had glazed, like those of a fresh-killed animal. Nilik, Wereklowe, and Polik had come to look at him in his pilai, but it was evening now and he was dead.

The next morning, in the middle of the yard, Huonke and Tamugi built the chair. Four women emerged from the cooking shed and kneeled before it, and more women were already climbing the stile which separated the small sili from the main yard of Wereklowe. The wailing had commenced, and the Alua clan was coming through the fields from all across the southern Kurelu.

In the pilai crouched Asikanalek, twisted by grief. Against the wall, where sunlight filtered through the chinks, sat Weake’s small silhouette, already arranged in the position he would be given in the chair. Asikanalek went to him and carried him outside into the day. Still holding the boy, he kneeled in the bright sun before the pilai and, staring upward at the sky, lamented. The men about him looked disheveled and distraught, and Asikanalek’s shoulders were smeared with yellow clay. Weake’s appearance in the yard had caused a stir among the women; the long day of fierce wailing had begun.

Weake was draped with two large shell bibs, which covered not only his mutilated chest but his torn stomach; the wife of Tamugi kneeled before him, binding up his legs. A man adjusted a new funeral horim to replace the one which had floated off in the brown ditch. Beside the chair Huonke and Tamugi cried out and rubbed their legs. Now and then Huonke would rub his hands together in a strange, stiff-fingered way, and glance about him, as if uneasy in the light of day.

Weake was carried to his chair. His bound legs were hung over the cross piece, and his head was held up by a strip of leaf passed by Tamugi beneath his chin. At the foot of the chair, wailing, Tamugi’s wife crouched upon the ground and mopped at it with torn-up grass; she made a circular motion with her hand, scarring the earth. Other women, with girls and small children, filed steadily into the yard and arranged themselves upon the ground before lending their voices to the waves of sound.

A lizard darted from the fence to seize an insect. It gulped busily, its small head switching back and forth, and moved in quick fits and starts back to the shadows. Above, a honey eater bounded to the limb of an albizzia. It too cocked its head, unsettled by the wailing, but calmed before it fled, and sat there preening. In the blue sky over the hill the kites harassed one another, screeching.

The men draped shell belts on Weake, binding his brow with the bright colors and building the belts into a kind of crown. But his head was small, and most of the belts were lain along his sides and down the chair arms. While his attendants scratched and shuffled and thought thoughts, in the warm doldrums of their existence, the child sat alone in cold serenity. He seemed to grieve, nevertheless, as if oppressed by all his trappings; when the women came and draped their nets, they almost hid him in the shadows. Huonke came and smeared him with fresh pig grease, and his shins, still in the sun, took on a gleam: Tukum, himself gleaming from the pig grease of the day before, perched by the fence on a small stone and watched Weake. Tukum was one of the few children who seemed upset, though, like all his companions, he had seen many funerals and would see many more.

A group led by Polik sang wheezily and long the ancient chants of mourning, working the ground with gnarled old toes and rubbing spavined thighs. One of them, his wrinkled skin reptilian, felt peevishly for the tobacco roll buried in the pouch strung on his back. At the same time he contributed his mourning, a frail woo, woo, woo, and his long nose ran tumultuously with all the rest: the hole for boars’ tusks in his septum had stretched wide with old age, so that the light shone through it.

Some of the men brought belts, and Huonke called out to them in greeting, a loud wah-h, wah-h, somehow impertinent, and at the same time self-ingratiating. He and his brother-in-law stood at the chair and haggled covertly about the placement of the belts. While haggling, Tamugi contrived to sob, rolling his eyes in the frank, open face of cant.

Four pigs came forth, and the pilai’s owner destroyed them with a kind of sad authority. All four died speedily, snouting the ground, legs kicking, as if they were trying to bore into the earth. They were dressed swiftly, and the yegerek brought logs. Weake’s friend Okal was among them: he wore the yellow clay of mourning and a pad of leaves to protect his shoulder from the wood. Like all the other boys, he played a large part in the funeral of his friend.

Nilik, with his affinity for pig, had come in time to finger the bloody pieces, which were hung on a rack behind the chair. Before the chair an old woman beat her breast with stumpy hands: Aulk, aulk, aulk, aulk, she cried—Loo, loo, loo, loo. The yellow clay was crusted in the skin folds of old breasts, of fallen hips. On the far side of the yard a giant butterfly, dead white and black, danced out of the shadows of the woods and, passing through the akuni, danced back again.

Huonke and Tamugi cried loud and long, mouths trembling and eyes alert. They watched the entrance of Weaklekek, his people behind him carrying three large flat ye stones decorated around the middle with fur and cowries. The ye stones are valuable but not sacred, though they may later become so; they are used, like cowrie belts, as a medium of exchange. Wah! Wah! cried Huonke. Wah! Wah! cried Tamugi. The party stopped before the chair to grieve, and then the men went onward toward the pilai, while the women and small children remained in the upper yard.

Weaklekek sat down quietly and stared into the earth. He was one of Weake’s namis, and plainly he blamed himself for the boy’s death, since it was his kaio that had been abandoned. But the raid and death were part of akuni existence, and neither Weaklekek nor Woluklek were blamed by any of the others. Even so, Woluklek, who had been unwise enough to lead the three boys to the river, did not come to the funeral at all.

U-mue’s wives had come, and with them the children of his sili. Aku and Holake joined the little girls of the village, who were going about on small self-conscious errands; the girls smiled modestly at everyone, in the pretty illusion that all eyes were upon them. Nylare, who is very young, had a poor grasp of the situation, but she took up the wail of mourning, humming it contentedly to her own rhythms. Natorek, escaping his mother repeatedly, played in the narrow path through the massed women; like most akuni children, he accepted his mother’s cuffs and cries in great good spirits and smiled expansively at all and everything even when latecomers stepped upon him. He was finally placed under the care of his brother Uwar, who took him to a corner of the yard and picked his lice.

While the food cooked, more men arrived; they overflowed into the woods behind the fencing. The mourning faltered in the midday pall, and nothing stirred. Only the stinging bees, black and yellow, toiled remorselessly on a small open hive, hanging upside down from a pandanus leaf beyond the fence; they hung in the air below the hive, their hair legs dangling, or clasped one another in dry, delicate embrace.

Near the main entrance of Abulopak the tips of the long grasses had been tied together in three places in the weeds: the tied grass forbids trespassing. The signs were a warning to the women, who were nearly two hundred strong, and whose use of the near weeds to urinate had become an offense to Wereklowe.

The rock fire was dismantled, and pig distributed among the men: a few bits were borne to certain women. Asikanalek’s daughter Namilike walked around with her small net stuffed with hiperi, passing it out; Weake’s little sister Iki Abusake was also there, as pretty in a baby way as Namilike herself. Iki Abusake’s curious name means “Hand That Could Not Help Itself,” the expression used by the akuni to account for the phenomenon of pig-stealing.

During the eating, soft waves of mourning rose and fell. The sun, sliding down into the west, burned hotly on Weake, and women tried to shield him with their nets. But now the men came forward and stripped him of his belts: the meal was over, and the day’s business must begin. The belts were stretched on a frond before the pilai, with the kains seated in a line along each side. When the belts had been admired for a time, and their destiny decided, Wereklowe stood up to dispense them.

Until this time Wereklowe had remained out of the way, ceding the administration of the funeral to Asikanalek: Asikanalek was not only a sub-kain of the Alua but a fine warrior who had killed two, and a close relative of the dead boy. But the exchange of goods was an end purpose of the funeral, and the greatest leader of the clan usually directs it. With a weighty pause between the names, Wereklowe gave out the belts; he was attended by respectful silence. One belt was awarded to Weaklekek, but Weaklekek was still morose and waved it off; in his despair, and despite all his rich gifts, he felt he did not deserve it. Lakaloklek, more practical, came forth and took it in her husband’s name.

Despite the great amount of grieving, there seemed small hint of outrage. Huonke complained that the pavi should not have done it, but then, Huonke has killed once himself, a harmless woman found near the frontier who had run away from the Siep-Elortak. Revenge there would be, inevitably, but without moral judgments. Nevertheless, for the funeral of a small boy, well over two hundred people had pushed into the small sili: more presents were brought, and more pigs killed, than for the funeral of Ekitamalek, a kain’s son and a warrior. Only a few could have come there in real sorrow, and only a few for the exchange of goods. The rest had come because the killing of a child, despite its ancient sanctions, had made them unhappy and uneasy.

His back to Wereklowe, the child sat naked in the chair. The women came to remove the nets, and Weake stirred; his head dropped slowly to his breast, for his chin strap had been loosened from behind. Then suddenly a man began to shout, and a complete silence fell. The speaker was Polik, and he was warning the people that they might be in danger.

In the fortnight previous Amoli, the violent kain of the Haiman, had killed the young brother of a man with whom he was having a dispute: taking the life of a relative of one’s antagonist, or even that of his small child, is not unusual, being not only a more subtle punishment but a less dangerous one. The man had fled to the Siep-Kosi but had sworn revenge, and Polik, on behalf of Amoli, warned any of the latter’s friends or kinsmen to be on guard. The fugitive’s wife was ordered to come to him the next morning in Abulopak, so that he and Wereklowe might have a full explanation of the affair: it is one of the duties of the great kains to settle feuds within the tribe, not infrequently at the expense of their own pigs. When Polik had finished speaking, the guests fidgeted uneasily, but after a while the voices mounted once again, and the women returned to remove Weake’s nets.

People were already departing from the sili. The thongs were loosened, and Weake was carried back to the banana leaves where the shell belts had lain. The yegerek, grim, brought timber for the pyre: Tukum looked frightened and was openly upset. The mourning quickened. Huonke greased the body a last time and, when he was finished, took up the bow and arrow. Another man held up the great thatch bundle. The arrow was shot into it, releasing the spirit from the body, and the man ran with the bundle up the yard; he laid the bundle on the sili fence.

The fire had been assembled quickly, and a loud outcry erupted with the flames: the body was hurried to its pyre. Weake was laid upon his side, in the way that small boys sleep, with a rough timber pillowing his head. The flames came up beside him, and more wood was laid on top of him, and he disappeared.

The mourning died after a time, and the sili emptied quickly. Huonke brought out a red parrot feather and performed the purification ceremony on the men who had handled the boy’s body. The men, seated in a circle, held out both their hands, and Huonke passed the parrot feather through the air above the outstretched fingers. Afterward, as much was done for him.

The last of Weake was a sweet choking smell, carried upward by an acrid smoke from the crackling pyre, and diffusing itself at last against the pine trees, the high crest of the mountain wall, the sky.

The second part of the stone ceremony had been postponed a day, out of respect for the funeral of Weake, and meanwhile the hanging pig meat had acquired a sweet stink which filled the Wilil pilai, overpowering the old resident smell of grease and sweat and strong tobacco. The ears, tails, jaws, sow rump, and other pieces lay separately on burned fern leaves before the pilai fire: the blood had dried a purple brown, and the meat itself, its juices gone, had shriveled into charred, amorphous lumps. Only the pig mandibles, teeth gleaming in the lean smile of death, stood out from the rest; these were arranged in a neat row beside the fire.

Early in the morning, in the presence of Elomaholan and other wisakun old men, as well as the warriors Aloro, Tegearek, and Yeke Asuk, and a single non-Wilil, Wereklowe, U-mue removed the holy stones from their crisp packets. The stones are rarely exposed to view, and the ritual was performed in awe and silence.

Each holy stone is far older than the reckoning of the clan, and its particular powers are well known. The stones are of the dark green color of the ye stones, a deep, opaque jade, though a few are black; they are shaped beautifully in the same spatulate flat way, narrowed sometimes in the center, but they are smaller and they are undecorated. U-mue took each one up—he was on his knees—and smeared it gently and lovingly with grease of the wam wisa until, in the firelight, the stone seemed to glow. The stones were then put in their packets and replaced upon the mat.

Now U-mue returned to the front of the pilai, where, taking up the pig tails, he sliced off the tufts with a bamboo knife. Some of these tufts he threaded on a sliver; these will be worn by important men as decoration. Another tuft was hung up by Wereklowe among the fetish objects on the frame above the fire, and a last one was inserted by Elomaholen into one of the stone packets to assure the ghosts of dead Wilil that they had not been forgotten. The packets were replaced in the high cupboard behind the hanging bundles in the rear.

Elomaholan now went outside, followed by U-mue and the warriors. Through the wide carpet of ferns and grasses on which the pig had been devoured two days before, Elomaholan cleared a path to facilitate the departure of the ghosts: these would now go forth in concert and set the Wilil community to rights.

Since the eating of the wisa pig, the men had been under a wisa ban and could not smoke or drink or touch their wives. It was now time to remove the ban. A large company of men went from the sili, taking sticks. In the fields and undergrowth they beat the cane brakes and the grass, searched coverts, and dug under stumps, in a search for small wild creatures. All the men and boys took part in this, even Elomaholan, as well as such guests as Wereklowe and Polik—all, that is, except U-mue himself, who, supremely careful of his own dignity, stood to one side, arms folded on his chest.

Wild creatures, when blown upon by the wisakun, then eaten, have the power to remove the wisa ban. The people do not know the basis of this power; they only say it has always been this way. Although anyone can do the blowing, only the true wisakuns are effective, and the power is passed on from father to son. The blood line is not important: Asok-meke is a wisakun and can transfer his power to his stepson Tukum. If Tukum should not wish it when the time comes, Asok-meke’s gift will be inherited by Siba.

In a half-morning of search and shouting, twenty-one large mice and field rats were taken, and a beehive with its edible larvae, and a large yellow-faced grasshopper. The first animals, four mice, were given to Elomaholan, and he cupped them in his hand; the tails hung neatly in a row out to one side, and on the other a bouquet of mice heads, their round black eyes beady with terror.

A little girl came running from Abulopak in hysterics; she was one of those supposed to undergo the mourning mutilation. She was caught and thrashed by an old woman, and, as the thrashing of a child is a very rare event, it created a pleasant diversion for the hunters.

Toward midday U-mue returned to the pilai, carrying the creatures with him in a net bag: they were wrapped with women’s neatness in leaves and grass. A banana frond was laid on top of the wam wisa, and the dead rats and mice, the grasshopper and the small open hive, were laid in a row along its spine. U-mue smoothed the rodent’s fur with the same delicacy and care that he had used to handle the green stones; he then straightened the rat whiskers, a touch which a less fastidious kain might not have thought of. When he was finished he sat back, and the other men shouted violently at the ghosts, Go out, go out! The men rushed out of the pilai, chasing the ghosts before them.

The animals were given to young boys, who opened them with bone needles and removed the entrails. Stones were being heated in a pyre, and the cleaned rats were placed along the edges of the fire to be singed: their backs arched as they shrank, and their teeth protruded. Okal toasted one rat on the end of a pointed stick; like all children, he did not turn his body from the flames but leaned backward from his own hand, squinching his face to alleviate the heat. The charred rats were wrapped up in leaf and returned into the pilai, where the ritual blowing was performed on them, prior to their baking in the fire.

Big Woknabin, the only Wilil warrior still living in the pilai of the holy stones, sat by himself. Woknabin’s blind eye saddens his face, though true sadness may stem from the knowledge that his wife is a known slut. The woman is condemned by the community as kepu, in the sense of “worthless,” but this knowledge must be small consolation to her husband.

Tukum, sucking his thumb, sat on a rock and watched the older boys. In a little while he joined some smaller children—Natorek and Oluma and U-mue’s tiny daughter Nylare, the only female in the company. Together they gnawed on some old pig bones left over from two days before and watched the construction of the cooking pit. Yeke Asuk, who labors rarely, sat by the pit, chewing on a pig ear; he was nearly burned by the boy Weneluke, who dropped a hot stone from his tongs while trying to help the older boys construct the fire. Weneluke always tries very hard. He is high-hipped and gangly and a sissy, with the sissy’s unhappy recourse to sneaky giggling and dirty jokes; it is he who has done the finest rock drawings at the fire sites across the mountainside. Yeke Asuk sneered at him, though mildly: he had recovered now from his bad arrow wound, and with his full belly, new fiber string, and fresh coat of grease, was fat with good spirits. He took up a piece of raw ginger and ate it with a happy crunch. Ordinarily ginger is eaten wrapped in its own leaves, which cool it, and Yeke Asuk, gasping for breath, rolled his eyes and moaned and clapped his hands over his ears as if otherwise his poor skull might explode. A moment later he ate another piece, with the same ceremony.

Natorek, with his ferocious energy, toddled from group to group, assaulting people. For his girth he is very quick and strong, and he snapped a piece of savory fern right out of Tukum’s mouth. Tukum retrieved it, looking injured and owlish, but a moment later he laughed huskily to himself with a kind of jolly fiendishness, the sort of laugh that might issue from a stump.

Natorek had concealed himself behind the grass stack of the fire and was throwing grass spears at his brother Uwar. The stack was as tall as Natorek, so that only his rust curls could be seen, agitating furiously as he plotted; every few moments a pudgy hand would rise out of the smoke and hurl a spear, then disappear again. His concealment was superior to his accuracy, but nonetheless Uwar got up with his lank grace and drove him disdainfully into the open. The embattled boy leapt and cavorted to avoid Uwar’s missiles, but most of his energy was exerted before, between, and long after the moments that the spears were thrown, for his timing was primitive: Natorek is very much an earthbound creature, and despite all his precautions the battle ended as it was doomed to end, and an old man came to comfort him when he cried.

The pit was opened, and the men gathered in the small yard. Pig meat and rats were passed around, and though everyone was supposed to receive at least a small scrap of the latter, U-mue and other men passed it by: the bulk of the rats was consumed by the yegerek and by Woluklek. The boys gnawed fiercely at the rats, which, quite aside from their curative powers, are a delicacy. Okal and his twin—they are the sole identical twins in the southern Kurelu, distinguishable only by the fact that Okal’s right ear is cropped in mourning—ate rats most avidly of all. Their sharp ears and quick slanted eyes, their vulpine faces, gave them a predatory air, like wolf-children.

The yard filled with the soft, slippery sound of pig-eating and a faint scent of putrefaction. Everyone ate the cooked ferns and hiperi, sitting cross-legged in the sun, and at the end of the feast, before going home, they greased one another once again, with jovial rubs and slappings. The yegerek did the same, and Natorek stood up for his anointing, which was administered by Uwar. He stretched his arms high above his head, as if on the point of clapping for the world’s attention.

When the feast was over, Tukum ran straight around to Weake’s sili in Abulopak. There, early that morning, a very different ceremony, iki palin, had taken place. Out of respect for the dead boy, the two outer joints had been removed from two fingers of Weake’s sister, Iki Abusake, and three other little girls. In addition, the upper third of a young boy’s left ear had been sliced off with a bamboo knife.

A half-hour before the ceremony the fingers of the little girls had been bound tight, to cut off circulation; just prior to the operation the children were struck forcibly on the upper arm, to render the hand numb. The fingers were placed on a piece of wood and severed with a blow of a stone adze. This latter task had been performed by Tamugi, who is considered skillful in such matters. The fingers are hung in the cooking shed to dry, and the next day burned, then buried in a special place behind the pilai.

The boy is a member of Wereklowe’s sili, and his ear served as a token of that sili’s grief. One little girl is Wereklowe’s niece, another the daughter of a warrior who, having neither pig nor stone to bring to the funeral, offered the fingers of his child. A third is the daughter of Tamugi, and Iki Abusake is an orphan. One of these girls had taken the place of a fifth child, the one who had gotten hysterical and run off. Though this little girl had been beaten, she had not been forced back to the ceremony; as in the case of kepu men in time of war, her shame is thought to be sufficient punishment.

At three, Iki Abusake is the smallest of the girls, though the other children cannot be more than four. The children sat together in the cooking shed. Their hands had been bandaged heavily in leaves, bound round with grass, and to slow the bleeding each held the green mass upright, beside her face, like a toy or present to be shown to friends. The hands bled badly all that morning, and each little girl held a clump of grass under her elbow to absorb the blood. None of them gave evidence of more than slight discomfort, but all were silent in a way that children rarely are, and the eyes of Iki Abusake, whom the children call Kibusake, were round with shock.

Their relatives talked quietly to the little girls, and after a while the children were taken out into the yard. Many women had come, for this was their occasion, and they sat talking cheerfully by the funeral ashes. The women made a kind, mild fuss over the little girls, but otherwise no notice was taken of them. They were fed hiperi and ate it. Later the little boy with the sliced ear went to the men’s feast of the Wilil and gnawed his rat meat with the rest; the side of his head had been smeared carelessly with clay.

Tamugi’s wife sat by herself, picking the bones of Weake out of the ashes. She used small wooden tongs, and she laid the white scraps in a little pile on a banana leaf. The motion of her arm, though sure and graceful, was infinitely slow, as if she were entranced. Her eyes were wide and sad, and she looked peacefully at the others without really seeing them. When her task was finished, she folded the leaf over the bones and took it away into the cooking shed.

The few men in the sili kept out of the women’s way. Weaklekek was silent still and spent most of the day weaving fiber, hunched in upon himself. But late in the afternoon the men asserted themselves once more. They raised a shout, and the yegerek came flying up the yard through the packed women, hurling stones at the fences and gateway of the sili and crying out: this was the banishment of Weake’s ghost, reminding it of its journey to the Wittaia. The yegerek came back laughing, and all the women laughed as well, for the ghost-stoning is a constructive ceremony from which nothing but good can come. More hiperi were taken from the fires, and Tukum, still greasy with his pig, secured two round ones for himself and made off with them to the terrains of the men.

On the third day of the funeral another hiperi feast was given, this time in the sili of Wereklowe. Among matters discussed were steps to be taken in the future to safeguard the Aike frontier, as well as the details of the retaliatory raid which was to come: the death of Weake, who had claimed Weaklekek as his nami and who had not only been a member of Wereklowe’s village but related closely to Asikanalek and other important Alua, was not going to pass unavenged. Huwai had died for the death of Ekitamalek, and another enemy, and preferably more than one, would pay for the death of Weake: that Weake had died as a result of the death of Huwai, or of Torobia, or of Owak, Tegaolok, Wie, Haknisek, or Mali, all five of whom had died of wounds received in recent moons on the Tokolik and Waraba, was not the point: revenge was an ancient rhythm of akuni life, a cycle without end.

The feast was scarcely started when an alarm cry came, and this time the sili emptied of its warriors. The Wittaia were said to have struck again, on the mountain path to Lokoparek, killing both women and children.

The warriors ran through the araucarias in a swift, loping stride, past Wuperainma and up across the fields above Homaklep, into the trees. But the alarm was born of the high tensions of days past; if there had been Wittaia on the mountain, no trace of them was found. The men came down the hill, and most returned to Abulopak, where the feasting was resumed. Once again, to shouts and laughter, Weake’s ghost was sent upon its way in a hail of stones. The ceremony was enacted a final time on the following afternoon, and on all these days the grass near the place of ambush was burned and burned again. Weake’s ghost would linger near even a faint trace of his blood and would not, until all blood was gone, be free to cross into the country of the enemy.

The bones of Weake had already been placed in a fenced shelter behind the pilai. Until his death has been avenged, a kind of altar will be maintained in the cooking shed of his sili, where two of the funeral nets still hang upon the wall. The tails of the slaughtered pigs are fastened to the nets, and with them a stalk of toa, the heavy-bodied cultivated grass which tastes like a fine mixture of artichoke and celery; Weake had been very fond of toa, and its place on the nets is designed to please his ghost. In the rafters above hangs the grass bundle used as a sign to ghosts that all has been taken care of in the sili and that therefore they need not loiter but should get on about their business. When a Wittaia has been killed by Weake’s people, the grass will be burned and the altar taken down.

The death of Weake was not called out to the Wittaia, for this was scarcely necessary; nonetheless, the enemy celebrated an etai. The boy’s mother, who lives with the Wittaia, was certainly aware of Weake’s identity, but what part she played in the celebration the akuni did not know.

When the sun had risen from behind the wall, Yeke Asuk and Tekman Bio came up through the fields, bound for the mountains to cut weapons. Yeke Asuk wore a new head net and carried a stone adze slung upon his shoulder; his mouth harp was stuck jauntily through a hole in his earlobe, a hard red berry dangling on the end of its string. Tekman Bio wore a fine hawk-feather pouch slung on his back, and carried a pale laurel spear. The boy Supuk went with them. They traveled slowly up the hillside, observing the mountain morning.

Above their heads loomed the limestone walls, and the men called out, Yeke Asuk-a-o, Tekman Bio-e, and the spirits answered them—asuk-a-o,—bio-e. Mokat, mokat, they said, and laughed: these were their own spirits and did not frighten them. Farther on, the path was intersected by a small stream where it flowed over a large pale boulder buried in the ground. Here the people sharpen their stone tools, and the boulder’s surface is scraped and scarred with ancient labors. Yeke Asuk put down his adze, removed the stone from its fiber binding, and scraped it back and forth under the water: white powder issued from the limestone and flowed away in the clear rivulet, toward the valley.

The men went upward. In a beech tree, in a bower of graybeard lichen, a bird of paradise flapped and spun, cawing more loudly and more harshly than any of its drab crow kin across the world; the sound is a strange grating squeal, the dominant noise of the mountain forests. Protruding sideways from its breast like a brilliant double-pointed shield was its bib of iridescent blue. The bib flashed against the mist which felt its way along the wall above.

They had entered the cloud forest: here the clouds convene in all but a few hours of the day. The mosses flourish, climbing from a dense carpet on the ground to thicken the twigs and tree trunks; in the constant damp, the mosses have made their kingdom. The mossy forest drips with moisture; the naked men moved carefully, avoiding the cold branches.

They went on higher, to one of the numerous congregations of squared boulders on the hillside; the boulders form natural amphitheaters of great majesty, and the people choose these places for their fires. The men had now climbed very high, and the whole course of the Aike, which descends from the mountains through a narrow gorge, twisted out onto the plain before them.

Supuk built a fire, using dead pandanus leaf and graybeard lichen for his tinder. A stick split at the end—a stone holds the split open—is placed on the ground, the tinder within the split, and a strip of rattan is run around beneath: the rattan, one end taken in each hand, is pulled up and down until a spark ignites the tinder, which is protected from the wind by the split wood. On the fire Supuk laid the sapling, to dry it and sear its bark.

Tekman Bio, meanwhile, had found a fine straight laurel pole, fourteen feet long when dressed; with Yeke Asuk, he split it down its length, using log wedges. One piece was split again in two, and the best of the three lengths was stood against a boulder and its bark chipped away.

Yeke Asuk, perched on a rock, carved some new arrow points from a split piece of myrtle, using a boar’s-tusk scraper which he carries hooked in his fur armlet. Yeke Asuk avoided the heavy work, attributing his reticence to his recent wounds. Now and again he described excitedly to Tekman Bio the activities of the enemy, which he imagined he could see: the distance was great, but the men have kept their hunters’ eyes, and Yeke Asuk is an imaginative man.

When the bulk of the spear pole had been chipped away, with only the finer work remaining, Tekman Bio laid it on his shoulder; Yeke Asuk took up the adze and Tekman Bio’s spear, and the boy followed them down the mountain. The rains of afternoon were gathering on the rim, and they moved swiftly. On the way Tekman Bio gathered a bundle of coarse grass, which will be used in the last stages as a kind of sandpaper.

Early in the morning Tekman Bio brought his new spear to Homuak, where he laid it in the waters of the spring. He broke rocks to make new edges and, after removing the spear from the spring, took it up to the council ledge above, where he built a fire. He scraped the long pole with the stones, and finally he rubbed it with the gritty grass to make it smooth.

The spear-rubbing with leno or hugi grass is a suggestive motion to the akuni, and the words appear in a kind of chorus to a sportive song which Tekman Bio sang softly as he worked. The song concerns two promiscuous women named Kiluge and Yai-ige who give themselves—lelokano—to the young men along the paths “all the way from Homuak to Abulopak”:

	Kiluge Yoi-ige Homuak lelokano Araken arahalok Abulopak lelokano
(Vigorously):	Hugi are ara Leno are ara.

The shape of the spear was still unsatisfactory, and with the stone adze Tekman Bio did some more light chipping. Again he scraped the whole spear with a boar’s tusk, and especially the long white blade, on each face of which he carved two facets, so that the cross section of the blade was like a flattened diamond. All this work, performed steadily but without haste, took a long time, and it was not until afternoon that he took a substance from a leaf and rubbed it on the spear: this is a kind of wax made from the cocoon of the black and yellow caterpillar, a creature esteemed highly as a food. The wax is thought to cure the wood, and he rubbed it painstakingly all over. Warm pig fat was then applied, for the grease is said to give the spear resilience and to facilitate its final straightening. Finally he rubbed on another coat of wax, turning the spear carefully against the flames.

On the day following, Tekman Bio helped Werene and Tegearek with the heavy work in their new gardens, but the day after, he completed his new spear. He pared it finer with the boar’s tusk, bent it continually at the fire, and rubbed it all over again with the magic grease of pig. At last it was ready for its simple decoration. Just at the base of the long blade he wound a sleeve of fern pith, copper-colored. He held its point up to the sky, pleased with the feel of it, with the knowledge in his own hands.

Tekman Bio had left his new spear for a day to help Werene and Tegearek in their new gardens. He did this out of friendly obligation, as they must do another day for him. The men had worked in these gardens for a month or more, between wars and feasts, etais and funerals, and only now were they beginning to emerge out of the broken litter of dead bushes. The roots and trash had been removed, and the hiperi beds, laid out, were climbing slowly with the excavation of the ditches.

Aloro was there, with Woluklek and Siloba, toiling and grunting. Aloro worked savagely, driving his hiperi stick like a plunged spear. In the heavy postures of field labor his shriveled leg swung clumsily, recalcitrant. He seemed to sense this and stumped angrily about his work. Unlike Aloro, Woluklek worked slothfully, picking and poking and gazing philosophically across the land, while Siloba, laughing, worked in furious fits and starts.

The men dug and levered, scraped and pried, and the sticks thunked stupidly into the ground. Tegearek worked hard, but often he straightened to offer an opinion he had come to, usually on the subject of war; unlike the rest, he found it hard to think and work at the same time.

The rain came swiftly through the sun, but it was transient and the men worked on—not against time, for time is not of meaning in the valley, or against seasons, for seasons are weak and fitful, untouched by laws of distant springs, temperate autumns. The men worked against the field itself, the weak soil of it and the wild growth which would not relinquish it without a struggle, nor for very long.

The rain passed. The sun reflected from the copper wings of a black hornet, from the thatch of a small shelter which, in this light, was gold, from the white fiber sleeves at the bases of the long spear blades. The spears were planted at the corners of the fields, the only sharpness in the swollen landscapes of hot middle day.

Like most of the young unmarried men, Walimo visits a good deal among the other villages and sleeps casually in the pilai where night finds him. Last night he slept in a sili of the Haiman, beyond the Elokera, but this time his visit was not casual. The village belongs to Maitmo, who fiercely believes that Walimo should be killed for having crossed enemy lands to visit clansmen on the far side of the Baliem. It was Walimo’s idea to sound out the people there in order to keep closely in touch with Maitmo’s state of mind.

It appeared that Maitmo still held the same opinion, and Walimo returned to the southern Kurelu as downcast as before. He wandered about in his airy way, playful and equable as ever: Walimo is liked by everybody, perhaps even Maitmo and Wereklowe, who are anxious that he die. On the savanna he took up some strands of sedge and wove grass toys; he fashioned a tiny decorative basket, a replica of the men’s back pouch, some miniature coil skirts, and a cat’s-cradle.

When his toys were completed, he abandoned them to the mice and insects, trailing homeward toward Hulibara.

In eight months or ten, or in a year, a mauwe feast will be called by Kurelu. The most elaborate festival of the akuni, the mauwe is held once every few years, its timing determined by the tribe’s need of the ceremonies which comprise it as well as by the supply of pigs. Though the mauwe is called formally by Kurelu, it is celebrated in all the villages, under the direction of the local kains; the ceremonies require more than a week, and the period surrounding the mauwe is a time of peace, of restoration and renewal—from the sili fence and buildings and whatever else may need repair, to friendships and clan relationships—and a cleaning of the holy stones.

The ceremonies of the mauwe surround the initiation of young boys and girls into the tribe, followed by marriage of the eligible girls; there are no spinsters, for no girl is so poor or ugly that she will not be taken, if only as an extra wife, by some old or poor or ugly man. There is a song that the young men sing:

Where are all the young girls gone?

We danced with them at the Liberek

And now they are all married.

Well, what can be done,

When the kains take all the women?

The initiation of the girls is little more than a first step in their marriage: the rush skirt is removed and thrown away, and a woman’s coil skirt given in replacement. At the next mauwe Loliluk’s Werekma may reach womanhood in this way, and, if she wishes it, and is wished in turn, she may be married. The marriage is arranged between the families, since it involves a complex set of obligations and exchange. The arrangements concluded, Loliluk will cry ceremonially at his loss, and matters will proceed.

On the day before the marriage Werekma, with her mother and other women of her family, will be presented by her male relatives with a large amount of pig meat; this is perhaps the one time in her life when Werekma will eat more than a few scraps of meat. The pigs are given ordinarily by the girl’s brothers, but since Natorek and Uwar are not yet pig-owners, the animals must be supplied by Loliluk himself. Should Loliluk be poor at the time of mauwe, the pigs would probably be given by U-mue, as the kain closest to the household, though U-mue will expect to be repaid.

The following day Werekma will remain at home in Wuperainma. The man—it may be Walimo, who is thinking these days of marriage and who, as an Alua and therefore waia, is eligible to marry a Wilil girl—comes to Wuperainma, where he is feted with fine pig meat; he is accompanied by sisters or other female members of his family. Werekma remains inside the cooking shed, protesting modesty and indifference, but after a while she wanders out. The sisters then ask if they may take her back with them to their village, and, when permission is granted, a request is made for all her property—not only the nets, ye stones, shell goods that she may have been given by her family, but the leftover pig meat of the late feast. Werekma then goes off with the women, while the man remains behind; he is now forbidden his own village and must skulk about in other pilais. His family, meanwhile, holds a feast—part of the mauwe—in honor of Werekma. In two or three days the husband is sent for and returns.

With Werekma and a small number of his people, he enters a new ebeai built for the marriage. The couple sit together on her net, where they receive marriage instruction, including the advice not to be shy with each other. Pig and hiperi are eaten in a kind of marriage supper, and, after a few hours of pleasant conversation, Werekma will be left alone with her new husband. At this time Werekma may or may not be a virgin, but, as she is a self-righteous child of prudent character, she probably will be, and the first night of her marriage gives every promise of being a forlorn one.

Should Werekma’s brother Uwar be among those boys initiated at the mauwe, his ordeal, a gentle one, will be approximately as follows.

For a period of four days or so he will be largely confined to the lower floor of U-mue’s pilai; he is not allowed to go up into the loft, for he is meant to abstain from sleep as best he can. This is a test of his ability to undergo privation. To sustain himself, he is given a piglet and four sweet potatoes. He may go out to relieve himself, and for a period each day he is taken to a field with other boys, where they are taught the niceties of war and ambush, and where they join for the first time in a kind of etai and fierce dancing.

At the end of this period he will be required to shoot arrows through a circlet of grass, to establish his skill in this most important regard: from now on he may go to war if he likes, though he is not forced to do so. His nami, a Siep-Kosi, will be present and will present him with his own bow and arrows and a ye stone. For perhaps half an hour he must stand still, with the bow and arrows in his left hand and the ye stone in his right. The nami also gives him a small net bag for his belongings, and a cowrie belt, which is wrapped around his head; this is the second of three occasions in his life on which he wears the shell belt, the others being birth and death. At this point the initiation is concluded, and pigs are killed and eaten in celebration.

Throughout this period of initiations and marriage, purification rituals are held in all villages holding sacred stones, with a continual round of feasting and exchange of goods in the guise of gifts: the presentations and rewards, the settlement and creation of obligations, are one of the main reasons for the mauwe. Guests and relatives are entertained, for visitors come to mauwes from as far off as the Yalimo: except in time of mauwe, the Yali men, in their extraordinary corsets of hard hoops, appear very infrequently, on trading missions. Every effort is made by the great kains to strengthen ties and promote good feeling and to bury the more dangerous feuds, which weaken the whole tribe. Pigs are awarded by the kains to the slayer of each enemy, as well as to children who had ears or fingers cut in sign of mourning. Hundreds of pigs are slaughtered during mauwe, and it will be another year or two or three before the tribe can afford another.

A woman in Hulibara, village of Walimo’s father, Yoli, was visited last night by a man. She was half asleep when he crawled up into her sleeping-loft, and in her drowsiness she did not pay full attention to him; he was in haste and was already inside her when it came to her that he was not her husband. She shouted for help, and another woman in the ebeai came flying to her assistance. Between them they grasped the man, but with their cropped fingers they were not able to hold him. The husbands came finally from the pilai, but by this time the intruder had departed, leaving his horim behind.

Though there is really not much hope, horims being difficult to trace, the villagers are most anxious that the man be identified, for they are short of grease and in dire need of the pig that he must forfeit.

Not far from Lokoparek, just to the north, the upper Tabara flows through the forest, under the mountain wall. Here a man named Pumeka came to cut wood. He had been working for some days, and rough laths roughly pointed at both ends were stacked beneath an overhanging rock. The woodcutters knew of the techniques of ringing trees or building fire at their bases, and the latter method was employed infrequently on the old dead giants among the beech and oak. But for the most part they confined themselves to smaller laths, to which their building had long since been adapted.

On the face of the rock where Pumeka stacked his wood, above a shallow fire site protected from the rain, was a rich pattern of charcoal drawings. Most of the drawings on this rock had been done in the past year by the boy Weneluke. Of all the rock drawings in the region, these were the most complex and original, though so many had been made, overlapping one another, that some were difficult to pick out from the rest. Nevertheless, rude human figures were discernible, and several big puna lizards, and some pigs, including a pig splayed open with its ribs showing, in a strong pattern quite unlike any other drawing on the fire rocks. There was a sad-faced woman in a few simple lines—head, eyes, nose, and genitalia—and a remarkable man, nearly four feet tall, whose head and arms had been blacked in—this technique, too, was unusual—over a blank ovoid body, like a great spider perched atop an egg. This drawing was so unlike anything else on all the rock faces that Pumeka at first imagined the black thing to be not a human head but an awesome sort of insect. His son then pointed out the inevitable penis, situated in this case just beneath the chin; the lower body appeared to have been an afterthought, contributed perhaps by another artist.

Pumeka, whose name means “Water Snake,” is a toothless, kindly man with foolish wrinkles on his face and a high, delighted laugh. He is a village kain of Sinisiek, in the Kosi-Alua. Though he has a withered arm and cannot fight, he has become an expert woodcutter, using his strong left side. The Kosi-Alua, living far out on the valley floor where the forest has disappeared, are in constant need of wood, and Pumeka spends much of his time in the cloud forest near the Tabara. Sometimes he is assisted in his work by his son and by one or more old men. They lop the branches where the tree falls in the forest, then haul the poles to the clearing where Weneluke’s rock drawings are located. Here the bark is beaten with a heavy chunk of wood, to soften it, after which it is stripped and the pole leaned against one of the open rocks, out in the sun, to cure.

Pumeka started off down the mountain, bearing on one shoulder a long tapered pole of kai and on the other his stone adze; he moved in the long, swift stride of the akuni and within a short time was below the cloud forest, on the hillside tundra. The trail followed a small stream bed, and the wet white sand between the rocks was cool beneath his feet. Down he went, skirting the giant boulders, some of them fifty feet in height, and on through the cool myrtle woods of the lower hill, emerging at last in the old fields above Homaklep. Women came up through the fields, bound homeward to the mountain villages with their vegetables, and he greeted all of them in his cheerful toothless way.

Pumeka is dismissed by other men, as all cripples but Aloro are dismissed, with a wrinkling of the nose in a face jerked sideways, the shrug and simultaneous motion of the hand back past the face—Why talk about him? the gesture seems to say. But he is liked and, in his way, respected.

He strode along the path below Wuperainma. He had not eaten since early morning, and, as it was now midafternoon, he was quite hungry. In the grove grew wild raspberries and the small puffball mushrooms, but he did not stop to eat them, nor did it occur to him to visit in Wuperainma. The Wilil and the Kosi-Alua were in a state of tension, as they often were, due most recently to the abduction by Kosi-Alua of U-mue’s wife Yuli and to the spearing of a Kosi by Tegearek and Yeke Asuk: the Kosi had recovered, but the grudge had not been settled. Furthermore, now that U-mue had established his new pig village at Lokoparek, he was trying to claim that the forest near there was his domain; he had expressed great anger that the Kosi-Alua should use it without asking his permission. Husuk, for one, was open in the opinion that U-mue was kepu; at the very mention of U-mue, Husuk’s nose wrinkled, and his hand rose past his face as if waving off a fly, but Husuk, like U-mue, was an intriguer, maneuvering for future power, and he suppressed his sardonic smile in U-mue’s presence. Nevertheless, the Kosi-Alua went right on cutting wood. For all these reasons, Pumeka would not have felt welcome in U-mue’s village.

Tukum and Supuk were coming through the wood. At the edge of the grove they stopped and shook the small willowy trunks, then picked up the large stinkbugs of brilliant green which rained in the grass. Passing Pumeka, the boys offered him a bug, and he accepted it. Kain-a-laok, Pumeka said, sucking in his breath: the phrase, with the sucking-in of breath denoting awe, is used customarily in accepting a gift, whether or not the giver is a kain, for generosity is the ultimate sign of kainship. The stinkbug had a violent smell and taste, from musk secreted from its glands, and while this musk had evolved across millenniums to repel the lean stomachs of birds, Pumeka bit into the bright bug with his rear teeth, screwing up his face with pleasure. Kainmotok. Pumeka grinned. Great kain—the exaggerated phrase was used affectionately, half joking.

The knoll of Anelarok lies at a crossing of the paths, a way station where the warriors pause to search the landscape, to build a fire, to smoke at midday in the shade of the small trees. Here women dance on days of etai, and the yegerek come to play a game of war.

The symplocos tree bears quantities of seeds like small hard olives. Each seed represents a warrior, and the yegerek, beneath the trees where the grass of decades has been rubbed away, move companies of warriors about in sudden charges, much as the companies move up and down the Waraba or Tokolik. Sometimes small kaios are erected and seeds are posted on the high straw platforms.

One sunny morning Uwar played war with Weneluke, and Kabilek with Supuk; Natorek, Uwar’s round brother, large-eyed as a cuscus, sat in a small hole between the war grounds. Uwar had a sharpened stick, a dart, and this he threw into the ranks of Weneluke’s warriors; Weneluke picked it up and drove it into the army led by Uwar. Now and then a seed would be run through and was carried to the side; the army claiming the most punctured seeds would win the game.

During the battle the boys kept up a ceaseless whistling and sighing, to simulate the howls and chanting of real war. Natorek sighed and whistled too, and now and then reared up to hurl an impartial pudgy spear into one side or the other, only to be banished back into his hole.

Off to one side thin Aloka, blind in one eye, played by himself. A root emerged from the bare soil between his armies, and this he called the Waraba. Aloka is jeered at for his deformity, as Aloro must have been, but, unlike Aloro, he is timid and will not escape from his condition.

Perched on a rock beneath the tree, in black, enigmatic silence, the war kain Husuk watched the yegerek. He wore a pair of long sedge tassels in his hair, like horns. Natorek, hissing furiously, rose suddenly from his hole, his spear of bent grass cocked back to throw; he jockeyed and feinted on his tuberous legs, then threw himself flat to escape the arrow that his recklessness might invite. Husuk’s face twitched briefly in a smile; he turned his head, as he had done each little while, and gazed across the fields toward the frontier.

Weneluke is the sensitive boy who did the fine rock drawings near Lokoparek; he stays at times in the third sili of Wuperainma, which belongs to the Wilil wisakun, old Elomaholan.

Supuk, son of Palek of Homaklep, is one of the leaders of the yegerek, a boy of great spirit and humor whose merry face is the very face of childhood. Like many of the akuni, he was given his name in remembrance of an event in the life of a parent or nami—in Supuk’s case, his mother.

Supuk’s mother was originally a Wittaia woman who, unlike U-mue’s wife Ekapuwe, came to the Kurelu of her own will. A woman who crosses an enemy frontier usually does so with an eye to suicide, but if she cries out that she wishes to live, and takes the fancy of the warriors, she may be accepted into the tribe. Supuk’s mother was escorted as far as a village, where, her charms proving inadequate, it was agreed by the inhabitants that she should be executed after all.

The unlucky woman fled into an ebeai and barred the door. The villagers besieged the door and, getting nowhere, decided at last to get at her from above. Without further ado, they fell upon the thatching and proceeded to dismantle that part of the roof known as the supuk. At this point Wereklowe happened along and decried what they were doing: the destruction of the woman, however laudable, did not justify the destruction of a fine ebeai. The people deferred to Wereklowe, and, cooler heads having prevailed, the poor woman was given a pardon. Later she married Palek, a hapless man without a wife, and their first child was named for the supuk of the ebeai which had saved her life.

Heavy rains of the dark of the moon had delayed the raid which was to avenge Weake. But one morning the sun glinted in an iron sky, and warriors came to the southern Kurelu from as far away as the Loro-Mabell. The raid was planned for Wittaia fields near the Aike, and parties of warriors which would support the war to follow assembled inobtrusively at Anelarok, at Puakaloba, and at other vantage points; at some places there were thirty or forty warriors. The men moved covertly, in small bands, so as not to alert the Wittaia sentries on the hills across the swamps. One group concealed itself in the stand of wild sugar cane, close to the Aike, where the Wittaia had lain who killed Weake. This is a pretty place just above the winding river, but today it had a blasted look from the grass fires which had burned away all trace of Weake’s blood.

The raid was a failure, and withdrew almost before it started. Asikanalek had led a band to the top of the Turaba, where they lay in ambush for any passing enemy, but the ambush too was frustrated, and in the late afternoon they returned, picking their way nimbly and swiftly down among the tumbled badlands. From Puakaloba the men watched them, and in a little while they took up their own spears and started home.

The next day, despite the rain, a war was called. Tekman Bio was delighted, as the war would give him his first chance to carry his new spear.

Because of Weake, the Kurelu had its heart set on a kill, and though the war was a formal one, to be fought according to the ancient pattern, a preliminary ambush had been prepared. Led by Weaklekek, a party crept up the east flank of the Waraba, under cover of an advance goup which, in plain view, had taken possession of the north end in the usual manner: the men went up the grass slope on their bellies. Weaklekek wore his shell bib on his back, and Asukwan, finding himself encumbered, took off his horim and carried it in his spear hand. The plan was to assault in sudden numbers the few Wittaia who would dance out in the first forays.

Meanwhile a second ambush party was stalking the Waraba from the north. An hour earlier Nilik had come to the Kosi-Alua kaio nearest the Waraba, where he was met by Maitmo and Wereklowe with nearly a hundred men. Wereklowe was very excited and talked ceaselessly, walking in and out among the warriors; at one point he scrambled up the kaio like a boy, to look over the situation for himself. The Wittaia warriors were visible from the kaio, a dark crest of black bodies and long spears on the far southern knoll of the Waraba. Wereklowe jumped down again, and, after a brief discussion with the other kains, he told the ambush party to move forward. They crept out in small bands, keeping low, dragging their spears behind them by the tips. Farther on these warriors were joined by Husuk and his men, and the entire party slid silently into the low wood which adjoins the flats on the inside corner of the Waraba. In theory, Wittaia warriors advancing toward the crest above would be cut off in pincers.

But the first party had been discovered by the Wittaia, who were now on the alert; when the skirmishing started, they avoided the lower woods. Wereklowe went forward from the northern knoll, speaking under his breath with a soft fierce intensity. Eme, he said, eme. Come. Nilik followed, spectral and bony against a hellish rain smoke on the northern rim; the rain came and went all afternoon, but neither side withdrew. In the downpours the men retired, but they did not retire very far; they wrenched tall grasses from the ground and held these on their heads to guard their feathers.

Asikanalek and Huonke led the fighting on the heights. This is not a usual position for Huonke, but today, as the uncle of Weake, he was obliged to choose the forefront. Aloro, as usual, was down on the lower flats, where the fighting is closer and where the terrain is better suited to his bad leg. He had brought a spear, but on the battle line itself another warrior lent to him a bow and arrows. Aloro moved forward with his curious oblique gait, the bow, with its arrow poised and set, held in one strong hand where bow and arrow met; with the other hand, which held spare arrows, he could snap the bowstring in a second.

A few yards to his right the ambush party hid; a suspense hung upon the ridge, in the gray pall. Aloro tried to lure the Wittaia men who faced him to a point at which they might successfully be cut off and overwhelmed, but the Wittaia remained wary and skirted wide. What they did not imagine was the large numbers of the ambush party, and when suddenly the bushes burst and fifty or sixty men charged at their flank, they howled in alarm and bolted. The main body of the Kurelu howled also, rushing forward in support; they streamed in waves along the hillsides and across the rocks, pouring down the rain horizon. Polik ran after them, bawling orders like a man possessed.

The Wittaia, outnumbered, fled in panic, and the Kurelu swept them back almost a mile; though the enemy tried briefly to hold the final knoll, they were soon driven off, pursued by the screeching Kurelu onto the flats. They made sporadic efforts to recoup and return, but they were badly demoralized. The Kurelu, far stronger, held the heights, and the day was won.

Despite the victory, no warrior of the enemy had been run down and killed, and the returning warriors were disgruntled. A number of the enemy had been wounded, however, and on the Kurelu side several men had been hurt. Feckless Siloba had an arrow in his shin, and Werene, carried away to an unusual degree by the exhilaration of the rout, returned with a wound in his shoulder. The stunned man, in the thick of things for the first time that the akuni could remember, drew as much attention to the wound as possible, under cover of outrage and anger; he was plainly delighted by the prestige that had come his way through his own miscalculation, and was determined to make the most of it.

One warrior was all but pierced through by an arrow entering below the collarbone; he was carried back on another’s shoulders, supported on both sides. Aloro tried to remove the arrow, using sharp bamboo splinters. He picked and pried, and the blood came, but, though he probed deeply, the shaft remained. Another man, feeling in the back, located the arrow point beside the shoulder blade, and the onlookers remarked on this excitedly. Bending forward, Aloro tried to grasp the broken splinter with his teeth; he came away with bloody lips. Yeke Asuk squatted nearby, giving advice, while Tuesike, who in the previous moon had sat with an arrow in his stomach only a few feet from this spot, looked on in silence. Tekman Bio came, and Aloro ceded his place: Tekman Bio picked and worried at the arrow and was able, after a quarter of an hour, to grasp and withdraw it with his teeth. The blood started, and leaves were brought to stanch the wound.

Uwar stood watching on the slope above, arms wrapped around his neck, hands clasped on his nape; his elbows were pressed together before his chin. All akuni assume this posture when they are cold, in evening and early morning and in rain, but the children adopt it also when they are thoughtful.

A man brought sphagnum from the swamp, and the wounded man was sponged with its cold water. He was then stood upon his feet. Two men grasped folds of his stomach skin and pinched them hard, and these Tekman Bio sawed through with a bamboo sliver, in three places, to bleed out the black blood. The splinter was then inserted into one wound and jabbed upward into the abdomen, to bring more blood; the warrior went weak in the knees and sank down to the ground. He coughed harshly, vomiting white fluid. More moss was brought to wash away the blood, and a stretcher was prepared behind him; the men chewed strands of cane to soften them, and these were strung loosely between two parallel poles braced at each end with three short sticks.

In the first part of the operation the man had remained entirely stoic, frowning without outcry, and talking now and then in a quiet, controlled voice. When Tekman Bio bled him, he did not cry out either, but his face was shrunk with agony. He ground his teeth loudly, and his toes clawed at the ground. His resistance was failing fast, as if at any moment he must scream. They had bled him on the field of war because his wound was thought a serious one; another man came forward and blew into his ear, oo-Phuh, oo-Phuh.

Pumeka the Woodcutter squatted beside the wounded man, clutching his own crippled wrist, his merry toothless face clownish with pity, while Limo, passing, scarcely glanced aside, erect and expressionless as a god.

They bandaged the man with leaves and laid him in the stretcher, which had been lined with grass; more grass was laid on top of him, covering his face, and the whole parcel lashed around with thongs. Toward dusk the faceless shape was borne off through the swamps. He was one of Kurelu’s men, from the north, but the warriors who had treated him did not know his name.

Siba’s boar was sick and finally died. Siba kept the fact as quiet as possible, so as not to have to share the meat with the half-hundred people who, getting wind of it, might happen to pass by, and who, according to the codes of hospitality, might be refused only with rudeness. The men of Siba’s sili were welcome to a share of it, and a few others were invited also. The men of U-mue’s sili he did not invite, and most of the latter went out to work in the field of Yeke Asuk. U-mue himself heard the news of the dead boar from Aloro when their paths chanced to cross at Homuak, and though he was annoyed at not having known about the feast—U-mue likes very much to know of everything—he did not loiter in the vicinity in order to get invited.

One night not long ago in Wuperainma, Ekali left the pilai to visit his young wife. Ekali is neither young nor brave, nor is he as potent as he has been, and this fine evening his wife decided that she would not receive him. She barred the door of his ebeai and listened to him shout.

Barring the door is a common recourse of disgruntled wives and is usually the occasion for a loud commotion; all up and down the sili yard the heads pop in and out and voices fly, and marital disputes on all sides get an airing. The men take the part of the husband and bellow about their rights, while the women take advantage of this opportunity to laugh at them. In spite of the fierceness of the din, almost everyone is amused except the husband, thwarted at his own portal under the naked moon; since the door is small and there is no practicable way to force it, he has the poor choice of retreat or setting fire to his own property. Unless he is in a position to lend force to his fulminations, he must retreat, and this is what befell poor Ekali. He did not even have the satisfaction, in the morning, of thrashing his young wife soundly with a stick, for he knows very well that the first time he should try it would be the last. She is a pretty woman and would not hesitate to run away, for she can easily find another husband. It is the opinion of her neighbors that she may leave Ekali soon in any case.

Tamugi has had a small pig stolen and wanders about seeking sympathy or staring vacantly at one and all, as if unable to comprehend his loss, much less the idea that anyone could play him such a trick. His suspicion is that the pig was taken by the elege, big wayward youths like Siloba and Yonokma, and devoured in some dark feast in the woods, but he cannot account sensibly for this intuition, and no one takes his anguish very seriously.

The case is reversed with Walimo, whose plight has worried the whole region. Eight pigs, the entire herd of Walimo and his father Yoli, were taken from the fallow fields near Hulibara, and this is the least serious aspect of the matter: the pigs were not stolen but seized, in the light of noon, by men of Amoli, as if the small boy tending them had not been there at all. Amoli, kain of the Haiman under Maitmo, lives just across the river in Hulainmo.

The seizure seems to be a provocation on the part of Maitmo. Walimo can disregard the act, but if he does so he will be much poorer and he will be thought kepu: even should this high price be acceptable, his chances of forgiveness would not be improved but lessened.

His alternative is to muster such assistance as he can and either attempt to retrieve his pigs or seize eight others. But this is not an ordinary theft, and, since Amoli is very much more powerful than Walimo, reprisal might well end in the latter’s death. Walimo’s father, Yoli, is the village kain of Hulibara, but he is not a steadfast man, nor is he likely to stand up strongly for his son: Yoli’s first act, when he heard of his son’s peril, was to retire to his new village in the mountains, out of harm’s way. And while the men of the southern Kurelu are fond of Walimo and give him sympathy, they are afraid of Maitmo, and they know too that their own war kain, Wereklowe, shares Maitmo’s conviction that Walimo should be killed. For these reasons, in addition to the fact that Walimo’s guilt is recognized, the chances are that he will find no friends to help him.

Walimo has lost his careless air, and looks like the frightened boy he is. His whimsical smile is fleeting and unhappy, and his hand strays continuously about his body, rubbing his knee as he squats, or running a finger along the side of his nose.

Aku, small net on her back, trudged up into the mountains to fetch beech fagots and lisanika leaves to wrap tobacco; she was accompanied by her uncle, Yeke Asuk, whose work on his fields is temporarily at an end. At Sulaki they met Huonke starting downhill with a herd of pigs. Yeke Asuk talked with Huonke while Aku chattered at an old woman of the village: the woman was preparing banana stalks for a journey to the salt wells the next day. Strips of stalk are used to absorb the brine, but before the stalk is peeled it is scraped down with a rough stick to break its hard glossy surface. This the old woman was doing. The long stalk leaned against a rock, while Aku stood on top of the rock itself, belly and behind gracefully protruded, hands folded on the top of her quick head. Yeke Asuk hissed at her to come, and they started off again. Aku kept her hands on top of her head, and Yeke Asuk marched along with his arms folded behind his back.

The slope was grassy, and its limestone soil was reddish with a tint of iron; on the path the soil was greasy from the rains, but Aku skipped upward lightly, a new gold skirt of rushes at her hips. On the spine of the ridge they met two men bound for the high forest with their adzes. The four moved eastward, up the slow incline of the rim, to a small village nestled in a cleft: this was the pig village of Patosaki. Here, just outside the village, they came upon two crotched poles, in the clefts of which were rat bodies turning to skeletons in brown, dry nests.

These mountain villages, of which Lokoparek is the largest, are largely inhabited by pigs and women, who are put there for their own safekeeping. At Patosaki, which is owned by Tegearek and Asok-meke, the piglets had been growing very slowly, and Tegearek at last decided, with the assistance of Asok-meke, that the failure of the piglets was a consequence of eating rats. Rats were not bad for pigs, which hunt out and eat with relish almost anything, but the ghosts of their rodent victims had banded together in revenge against the pigs and conspired against the piglets’ growth. To warn the rat ghosts that he is on to them, and to banish their influence from Patosaki, Tegearek had erected these two poles. If this precaution does not work, Yeke Asuk informed his niece, then Tegearek will be driven to sterner measures.

A short distance above Patosaki the clouds awaited them like mountain fogs, and the forest changed. The forest was ruled by oaks and beeches: in a weak sunlight glinting through the mist shone yellow young leaves of the oak and the new red leaves of the beech, cresting great trees which arose from a subsidiary gorge beyond the rim.

Aku walked on a narrow spine between two worlds, the cloud forest below her on her left and the sunlit floor of the wide valley far below her on her right.

The woodcutters followed a trail far back into the beech forest, and Yeke Asuk and Aku pursued them a short way; they paused among the buttressed roots of tall pale beeches, awed by the silence of the mossy floors. Strange bird calls, of a liquid note heard rarely in the valley, rang here and there, but the only birds visible were parakeets, hurtling through the canopy in nervous bands, like green leaves taken wing. In the air, dense as cold smoke, hung the rich dark fungus smell of mossy earth and wood decay; Aku wrapped her thin arms about her neck. Around them, sinking beneath beds of moss, lay fallen trunks of beech; the fine red wood of all these trees, girdled and killed long, long before, would be split and hauled to Patosaki and the villages below.

Yeke Asuk and Aku wandered toward the rim. Already Aku had gathered her lisanika, back on the grassy ridges, and the woolly leaves were tucked into her net; a few steps earlier she had come on a fresh-fallen limb of beech, and from this she had snapped and wrestled a large bundle of good fagots. Aku placed some ferns upon her head, and Yeke Asuk placed her heavy bundle on the ferns. He preceded his niece along the rim, bandy-legged and self-assured, his arms still folded behind his back. Once he paused to powder his shell bib with the white spores of a lycopod; then on he went, the burdened child tottering behind him like a bundle of sticks with legs.

They perched on a rock lookout. Behind them, the stone tools of the woodcutters resounded from the forest, like the hollow tok . . . tok of the nightjar calling at night from Homuak. They were now above seven thousand feet, and Lokoparek lay eight hundred feet below them. They called out to Aku’s father, who was working there—U-mue-a-oo. U-mue did not answer, but a woman responded with a long, impassioned outcry; high on their pinnacle, Yeke Asuk and Aku nudged each other, laughing. Against the deep mountain silences the words of the woman wandered, and the voice thinned to a wail of mortal bitterness.

Tekman Bio’s tribal father, who lives in the village of Abulopak, is getting old, and as the holy stones belonging to him will go to Tekman Bio as well as to his own son, Yonokma, and as it is more suitable that a man move to the village of the stones rather than vice versa, Tekman Bio is preparing now to move away from Wuperainma. In the past few weeks he has constructed a new sili leading off the great yard of Wereklowe, directly opposite the one in which Weake died. The cooking shed was completed a little while ago, and today, with the completion of the pilai, a consecration ceremony was held.

In the middle of the morning Tekman Bio, accompanied by Tuesike, came from Wuperainma with a pig. Polik, who is Tekman Bio’s uncle—they are both of the clan Halluk—was already at the new sili, and Wereklowe, who has strong ties with the Halluk, came shortly after, from his own pilai across the fence.

The kains gathered in the new pilai built sturdily of chestnut laths and beams of oak, with a cane ceiling and a cone roof of saplings and thick thatch. Already the pig jaws of past feasts had been brought from the old pilai of Yonokma’s father, and with them his collection of ye stones; the stones and jaws lined the rear of an otherwise bare wall. As yet, the new pilai has not acquired the fine dense smell of tobacco and men and woodsmoke.

The Halluk’s wisakun old men arrived and were greeted warmly, with handshakes and embraces and the gentle, soft wah-h, wah-h. Wereklowe, who cannot sit still, fell to splitting bamboo sections to make knives; he used a pig-bone scraper, pounding it down the length of the upright bamboo with his gnarled hand. Some of the large sacramental hiperi for the feast were brought into the hut, and at the sight of them Polik started a new chant of approval, a short fast wah-wah-wah, noro-a, noro-a, less because he looked forward to the eating—in the course of a feast Polik is apt to stand quietly, hands behind his back, observing the seated men—than because he rarely avoids an opportunity to chant or sing.

Outside, Tekman Bio and Tuesike, with Yonokma and his friends, were hacking down banana trees to make room for the new cooking pit; this part of the yard had not been cleared as yet and will eventually be occupied by ebeais. More men arrived, most of them old; there were few warriors other than Tekman Bio’s own close friends. The men passed ceremonially around the group seated before the pilai, taking hands and murmuring low greetings. This courtesy is no less pure for being protocol: the affection is there, and the will to show it, for these men have counted on one another in the past and will do so again before too long. A day earlier a Kosi-Alua had died of an arrow wound suffered four days before at the Waraba, and in his village, a few miles across the fields, was seated at this moment in his final sun. Including Weake, there were now two who would have to be revenged.

Wereklowe emerged from the pilai with a bow and arrows, but he did not kill the seven pigs; at the last moment he presented the bow to one of his men. To kill the pigs is a small honor which may be transferred, and the man was surprised and very nervous. His face trembled as he drew his bow, but nevertheless he worked efficiently, and the pigs died quickly. The rock fire was ready, and, while it cooked, the holy stones, wrapped in their packets, were brought to the new pilai. The rock fire was opened in midafternoon, and the elege served the hiperi and pig and fern, depositing the food quietly in the center of grass circles around which the men sat. As usual, there was no haste or greed; only Siloba’s old father, he of the extruded rectum, seemed more intent on his share of the food than on the talk. He squatted by himself, small eyes flicking back and forth and old loose muzzle sliding over and around the shank of bone.

A mild rain came, despite Polik, who called out to the sky that it should stop: his craggy face was silhouetted on the storm clouds, the big face of a leader. Hah! Miso lan! Hah! Legasin! Rain, go away! At the end of the feast Polik took grease from the wam wisa and cleaned the holy stones. The holy stones were now restored, and good fortune would befall the Halluk warriors.

Asikanalek’s old father, in recent moons, has been too weak to move from his son’s pilai; a woman, taking advantage of this situation, stole hiperi from the old man’s garden. The other women caught her at it and were very angry, and when Asikanalek got wind of it he went out to the gardens and beat her with a stick. The women cheered him on, and when he gave it up at last and went away, the quiet air of early afternoon was rent by the squalling of the culprit. Ekapuwe, the wife of U-mue, was among the spectators and expressed for some time afterward a loud and cheerful satisfaction over the outcome of the matter. A few weeks later the guilty woman ran away to the Siep-Kosi.

Kabilek, son of Ekali, who may be twelve, wishes now to be known to his people as Lokopma. The latter name will commemorate the death of Kabilek’s nami, who was killed in a Wittaia raid near a stand of lokop cane, or “place of cane”—lokop-ma. Kabilek sees no reason to retain his present name, Kabi-lek, which means “Sharp Not,” or Dull. While the people try as best they can to adapt to the frequent name changes, the chances are that Kabilek will henceforth go by two names rather than one. This is common enough: Asikanalek is also known as Walilo, U-mue as Wali, Polik as Mokat.

Yeke Asuk too is in the process of a name change, though his reasons are quite different. Having been wounded twice in recent months, he has decided that Yeke Asuk is an unlucky person and that he will fare better under the name of Iki, which means “Finger.”

A few days after Kabilek and Yeke Asuk decided to change their names, Tukum announced that he was henceforth to be dealt with under the name of Pua. Tukum lek, he growled at everyone. An etara Pua. I am called Pua. When asked the reason for the change, he said, Mel . . . met . . . mel . . . Welegat. Unlike all other name words among the akuni, the word Pua means absolutely nothing, though Tukum himself insists that it means “Mud.”

Some time afterward, Tukum admitted that he had named himself in memory of his friend Weake; Pua was short for Puakaloba, the kaio near which Weake had died.

A Wittaia man died in the first days of July, but he had been wounded in the northern wars, and the southern Kurelu did not consider themselves avenged for the death of Weake. Revenge had been delayed by weather, cold and wet, which had continued all through the full moon. Now two days of sun had dried the land, and a raid was set in motion. In the early morning of the second day the men streamed toward the Aike, but only a few of them were in full view, out in the fields; the rest moved by way of Homuak, down through the wood and up across the knoll of Anelarok. From there they descended into the gorge of the lower Tabara. Across the path was placed a branch which pointed at the gorge, to remind those who came after that they must not take the open path toward the river.

The raiders, led by Wereklowe himself, convened at the place on the Aike where the natural bridge occurs, above Puakaloba; they climbed quickly to the top of the Turaba and disappeared on the far side. Others gathered at Puakaloba itself, and these sang a chant, with ritual weeping, which might protect the raiders.

We will fight at the Alogalik [between Turaba and Waraba].

Wereklowe! Weaklekek! Hide carefully!

Husuk; take care they do not see your neck, your back,

And you, Tegearek, with that big wife of yours, keep hidden!

Beware, beware of the cutting grass,

Wereklowe! Weaklekek! Keep hidden!

They will hurl their weapons, but be brave,

Keep on!

There would be a wait of several hours while Wereklowe and his men crept down the length of the Turaba, recrossed the river, and stalked the people working in the Wittaia gardens; if everything worked out, one or more of these men, women, or children would raise their heads, like Weake, and see too late the fierce men rushing down on them with spears.

The sun of the morning disappeared behind low grays; the clouds drifted at all levels, from the rain smoke in the gorges to a dirty cumulus high in the east A falcon came across the plain and stooped to the crest of a river casuarina; it perched a moment, turning its dark head. Then it flew on across the river and alighted on the highest rock of the Turaba. From there, shifting its wings, it glared back across its shoulder, feathers pressed flat by the southeast wind.

Toward noon men from the northern Kurelu appeared, slipping down the Tabara or angling out through garden ditches to crouch near the southern kaios. A few came to Puakaloba, strong, heavy warriors with heavy faces, heavy names. Politely they passed from hand to hand of the waiting men, and, though the precaution was unnecessary, no voice rose above a whisper, as if the burden of suspense which must be frightening the creeping raiders should be shared.

Limo came, striding alone across the gardens; his arrival caused a stir, and some of the warriors, at his command, moved off into the woods. Limo feared that too many men had concentrated at Puakaloba and might give the raid away. Soon he himself went back into the Aike woods, followed by U-mue. Almost all the best warriors of the southern Kurelu not with the raiders were already in hiding, until the moment when they should slip downriver in support of Wereklowe and his men. Only Yeke Asuk, still complaining of his wounds, held back, remaining in the shelter with the old men. Yeke Asuk is brave enough so that he can malinger from time to time without being called kepu. The old men spoke rapidly of a kain of the Siep-Elortak; word has drifted across the hills that the Siep-Elortak were responsible for Weake’s death.

A low whooping rode the wind from a point on the Turaba; the raid was starting. The warriors gathered in the woods streamed down along the Aike, between Puakaloba and the water. They moved low and swiftly in two lines, one skirting the river bank, the other through the tall grass near the shelter: Asikanalek, passing, flipped his tobacco roll under the thatch and disappeared again into the grass. In a few minutes more than a hundred men had come and gone, trailing the long spears by the blades.

Rain came, and with it heavy gusts of wind. The Turaba forms a barrier toward the southeast and keeps this corner of the valley almost windless, but today the wind was far stronger than usual, howling audibly through the pocked eroded rocks of the badland’s summit. From the Aike, farther down, a scattering of ducks rose as the warriors passed; the birds swept outward across the gardens, veering wildly in the tumult of the air.

Maitmo appeared in his roosterish red crest—like Limo, he had come alone—and paused briefly in the shelter to smoke. He too spoke excitedly of the Siep-Elortak, and the other men, most of them old, regarded him with deference and vague disquiet: they seemed relieved when he got up and went away downriver.

Soon all but the oldest men moved after him. Below Puakaloba they crossed a deep inlet of the Aike, up to their chests, and moved on down along the bank. Already word had filtered back that Tekman Bio had been wounded. Siba ran by, followed by young Siloba; Siloba panted loudly in excitement.

At a sudden rise of rock the old men and yegerek climbed to the crest; the warriors ran on, across the fields of Likinapma. Likinapma is a village near the river, abandoned a few seasons past. Its thatch roofs are sagging, and its banana trees sink away in the surging shrubbery. The ditches of the gardens have filled in, and the coarse grass has usurped the plots, bedding them over with gold tussock, for the village is now in no man’s land. It belongs to the men of U-mue’s pilai, but its proximity to the enemy makes it unsafe. Beyond it and below is a wide, low swale of bright marshy green, ending at a neck of woods; on the far side of the neck is the Wittaia end of the Tokolik, with a large kaio.

From the wood itself there came shrill howling, and now a large number of Wittaia burst out upon the swale, driving back the Kurelu; more Kurelu were strung out along the trail from the dead village. There was a brief vicious skirmish and exchange of arrows before both sides suddenly drew back. The Kurelu on the rock crest, like those at the gate of the old village and on the swale itself, stood in silence in a cold, driving rain. They watched the Wittaia, who had formed a large leaping circle and were chanting in etai.

The raid had not avenged Weake, and a Kurelu had been killed. Four or five other men were wounded. Already the injured hobbled or were carried back, one after the other. One was Tekman Bio with a spear through his front thigh, another Siba with an arrow in his leg, a third Wereklowe’s wild-smiling son; Wereklowe’s son had been speared twice, in the back and side.

The dead man was Yonokma, who, with Tekman Bio, was to inherit the pilai and holy stones of his old father in Abulopak. Yonokma was a stocky, cheerful boy, close friend of Siloba, and he had been in the advance raid. The raiders had attacked a garden, chasing the Wittaia into a wood; the Wittaia had rallied in the wood and waited in ambush for pursuers. The frustrated Kurelu had rushed ahead, Yonokma in the lead, and in a furious fight Yonokma had been cut off; he was set upon and speared, over and over.

Already word had flown back to the villages, and a few Wilil women crept out across the fields. Wailing softly, arms around their necks, they sat on the high rocks in the rain, like owls. Far below the men stood in groups, staring at the woods into which the Wittaia had disappeared. Not only was Yonokma dead, but the Wittaia had his body: the warriors waited in the cold to see what the enemy meant to do.

The Wittaia could very well have thrown Yonokma’s body into a field to rot, but they did not do so, less out of courtesy than because, should they do so, Yonokma’s ghost would never leave their territory: they called out that they wished to return the body. Meanwhile, in the shelter of the woods, they went on with their etai, in full view of the waiting Kurelu.

Kurelu himself came back alone across the marsh and climbed into the rocks. With the rest he gazed back for a time toward the woods, then went on down the far side of the rock and began his long walk home.

A band of Wittaia left the wood, bearing the body of Yonokma. The group hurried toward the battle line, escorted by dancing warriors. The Kurelu came forward, and both sides feinted with spears, but no arrows were exchanged. The Wittaia dropped the body in the grass and fled, for the Kurelu immediately attacked. In the fighting the Wittaia were driven back toward the woods, and under cover of the melee the body was retrieved, and a man ran forward with a brand and some dry thatching and set a fire where it had lain: thick smoke billowed up against the high Wittaia hills.

The body was carried back a little way and laid to earth while the warriors conferred; in a few minutes it was picked up again and hurried toward the old village, and its second resting place burned behind it. The rain had stopped, but the air was very cold; it was nearly dark. The line of men accompanying the body paused at the village, where a stretcher was constructed; the body was wrapped in grass between two poles and carried on. One of the bearers was Siloba, Yonokma’s friend. The procession went northward across the fields to the central kaio, the people falling into line behind it.

A young pig had been brought out from the villages; it was killed as the stretcher came near. The body was put down and warm blood from the pig rubbed on it. Then U-mue, outlined against the silver sky of rainy twilight, shot four arrows over the body toward Wittaia land, one to the northwest, one due west, and two over Yonokma’s head, toward the southwest, where he had died: the arrows would drive back all unfriendly ghosts which might have trailed the body. The stretcher was taken up again and carried back toward the villages under the mountain wall.

Like most of the elege, Yonokma had lived in many pilais but, since U-mue’s wife Koalaro was his elder sister, he stayed most commonly in Wuperainma. For this reason his loss was as upsetting to the Wilil as it was to his own Halluk. The fact of Yonokma’s death and Tekman Bio’s wounding but five days after the consecration of their holy stones would decrease the power and prestige of the stones, which would now go to Tekman Bio.

The death was thought of as a most important one, not only because Yonokma had been brave and a good warrior but because his death compounded the grief and bitterness caused by the killing of Weake, because he was one of “Werek’s” men, and because he had been widely known and liked; the mourning was entirely serious. Even Maitmo came from the northern Kurelu, though he stood off by himself and was not a part of the gathering of southern kains before the pilai.

All day the mourning rose and fell, counterpointed by the split of wood and the clacking of wood tongs on the rock fires. The women’s requiem was soft and steady, while inside the pilai the old kains sighed and quavered in a harmony resonant and old. From time to time the younger men took up the chant, in a strong, pure refrain, as if all breathed together.

The moaning persisted until late afternoon, though it was weary now, and stray voices of the women rose brokenly from the rest. One sang out of harmony with her sisters, Yay-y, yay, egh-egh-egh. Often the women’s wail began with a single uttered word hurled out as a point of departure: nyerakenare-e-e, ay, ay, hitu nan a-ay-ay, egh-egh-egh. The nyerakenare is the long shell belt; hitu nan—fire-eaten—described the burning which would come.

The nets were removed, the chair dismantled. Yonokma was carried back to the banana fronds before the pilai. There Tuesike supported him while others greased him, while the laths were brought and stacked, while the pyre rose. Pigs squealed hungrily in the stalls, and the restless infants caterwauled. At the pyre the adzes rang, and a clamor rose over the mourning.

Yonokma was hurried to the fire, and a howl like fear vibrated on the windless air. The men worked in the smoke, adjusting him on his side, and finally they fell back, staring, for there was no more to be done. The fire burned slowly and badly, and it was near twilight before the flames took hold and rose into the sky.

The one-eyed Aloka had retreated to the hill above before the funeral had ended. There, on a grassy knoll, singing to himself, the boy built a toy sili out of twigs and grass, complete with entrance way and fence. He hunched over it, content, staring and picking at what he had accomplished. The sinking sun fell through the western clouds and gleamed on the savanna pools with promise of fair weather. Below the hill where Aloka was playing, the flames turned cold and thin, and dark figures hurried back and forth through a thick smoke.

Nylare, U-mue’s daughter by Koalaro, was one little girl certain to lose her fingers, for not only was Koalaro the sister of the dead boy, but Nylare had never undergone iki palin and was of age to do so. At dawn she accompanied her mother from Wuperainma to Abulopak, under a fresh pink and blue dawn sky.

The sun had not yet fired the mountain rim, and in Abulopak the sili yard lay in a dense blue shadow. Two old women squatted at the funeral embers, picking out the bones with tongs, while other women and small children filled the entrances of the cooking shed, their backs to the warm smoke. Hugunaro and Yuli came with hiperi, and as the sun touched the bushes outside the village, then the village door itself, other women clambered through this entrance, all sticks and string and knees, Aku had come with Nylare and strolled about with her arm around her little sister’s shoulder.

In the pilai the kain men sat, nursing their cold bones around the fire. One of them, in slow, measured strokes, raked bits of wood and ash onto fat hiperi placed side by side among the embers. No agreement had been reached as to which children were to undergo iki palin, for this was an important matter involving pigs and shells and obligations.

In the yard a tall man smeared with yellow clay arrived alone. Standing near the funeral ashes where the two women were picking bones, he burst into loud mourning. Strangely, he had carried his spear with him into the yard and held it upright while he cried, a breach of custom probably caused by confusion and distress. This was Yonokma’s nami, from the Siep-Kosi, who had come across the hills for the second day of the funeral. The women near the stranger’s feet and those collected in the yard—there were fifty or sixty—took up the man’s mourning in a low chorus of their own, and big Woknabin came forward to join him. Woknahin is a friendly man, and his gesture seemed intended, at least in part, to spare the man from far away from having to sing alone among the women.

The women, even as they mourned, investigated the pile of ceremonial nets heaped up before them, and soon their wails turned into chatter. Hugunaro sat at one end of the nets, leading negotiations. Koalaro was on the inner circle, her blunt hand on Nylare’s small shoulder. Nylare stared about her out of round dark eyes, a miniature figure in the humped avid circle of brown flesh. After a while she spoke to Oluma, who stood nearby, next to his mother; their heads were on a level with the women’s. Across the circle, Loliluk’s wife listened intently to Hugunaro, in no way distracted by her small son Natorek, who was drumming on her head with a piece of bark. Hugunaro was sifting through the nets, discussing each with everyone; the discussion was quiet until joined by Ekapuwe who, arriving late, made a place for herself quickly. The young wife Yuli stayed aside, straying idly where the men might see her and keeping her own dim counsel.

Ekapuwe confined herself, at first, to an ill-tempered and contemptuous dismissal of Hugunaro’s authority; for a while she kept her back half turned, tossing remarks over her shoulder. Hugunaro took notice of this, and her own voice grew hard; Hugunaro’s large eyes are in no way gentle, and clearly she has little taste for avoiding trouble. Within a few minutes the voices of U-mue’s wives dominated all the rest, and at one point both women had risen to their knees, each clutching one end of the same net. Yeke Asuk, observing the rivals from the far end of the yard, squealed in hoarse hushed laughter, clenching two fingers in his teeth in a pantomime of terror. From time to time akuni women go at one another with their sticks, almost always over a man, but this prospect was avoided by the appearance of a crone. It was she who was to distribute the nets, and Hugunaro and Ekapuwe subsided.

The old woman stood among her seated sisters, leaning on a stick, a ragtag of nets twice her own bulk collected like blown trash on her bent back. In a weak voice, as each net was passed up to her, she uttered the name of a woman; she was tottery and confused, and the real business was transacted around her legs by younger women. Another old woman, cold as a dawn lizard, crept into the sun’s warmth: the sun gleamed on the ranks of naked shoulders and fired the rusty heads of the small children.

The iki palin was now postponed a day, until its principals could be determined, but the real reason for the delay was a reluctance on the part of the kains to take on further obligations: the giving of one’s daughter’s fingers is worth a small pig or shell belt, but, unlike other gifts, a small child’s finger is not currency. The waiving of the iki palin is quite unusual in a funeral of such importance, and U-mue is already hinting darkly that Wereklowe, in discouraging the women from the ceremony, is we-ak—bad. But as it has been put off a day, and thus lost its order in the ritual, the chances are that the iki palin will not occur at all. The women’s feast will proceed as usual, and the banishment of the ghost will occur for several days to come, but U-mue’s Nylare and the other children will keep their fingers for a little longer.

Just after dark, Yonokma’s ghost paid a visit to Wuperainma. The men of U-mue’s pilai were at the fire, and the shadow of the ghost passed along the wall, then up into the loft. There was a stir of exclamation and uneasiness. Yonokma’s ghost should have been in the land of the Wittaia, causing trouble, and while the men did not feel it wished them harm—indeed, they laughed about it when light came again—its restlessness seemed a bad omen.

The next morning an armed party went out to the floating marsh beyond the abandoned village, to the point where the Wittaia had brought the body. While the enemy jeered at them from the hill beyond, they gathered and burned the grass near every place where the body had lain, to make sure no drop of blood had been overlooked. U-mue himself was there, looking worried and morose. The people are stunned by the bad circumstances of Yonokma’s death, and the inevitable revenge has yet to be attempted, as if first they must determine why their sacred powers have forsaken them.

Uwar and Tukum, Okal and his friend Weneluke, and Supuk went on a crayfish hunt in a grassy little stream which trickles down past the salt-burning rocks and around the fences of Wuperainma, through the grove and down into the gardens. They arrived at the brook on the run and leapt into it with a great shout, though the stream, even in time of flood, is rarely more than two feet wide and one foot deep. Coming down off the steep bank, Tukum misjudged the opening and hurt his leg; he sat dolefully in the grass, feet in the water, consoling himself, uncertain about crying.

The boys moved quickly up the stream, extravagant and inefficient in their power; they felt in the mud with their swift feet, darted their hands under the grassy banks, and flew ahead. Soon Kabilek came and joined them, leaving his pigs to fend for themselves. Kok-meke! Kok-meke! they cried out—Big one! Big one!—and in a file, Tukum zigzagging in the rear, they would crowd and pummel into one small lead, leaving untouched long stretches of stream behind them. In the shadows of the grass, facing each other as they probed, the tops of two heads would press together in concentration.

Weneluke found a first small crayfish, and because Weneluke is a sissy his feat irritated Uwar; he hurled grass spears at Weneluke in false playfulness, while Weneluke, backing off, smiled miserably. Kok-meke! Kok-meke! Tukum cried, for no reason at all, and the boys rushed ahead, darting upstream through grass and sedge and the wild sugar cane.

Namilike came flitting past, correcting the vagaries of her pigs by smiting the burly creatures with a fern. For some piggish reason they minded her, and she danced away behind them, calling out to the other children over her shoulder.

At Wuperainma, Oluma and Natorek came out to watch, as did Eken, who strayed down along the path from Homaklep. Eken’s left ear is smeared with clay, and she kept touching it with her short fingers, for in the last day or two it has been cropped, in a belated gesture toward Yonokma. Eken joined briefly in the hunt herself. But, drunk with the fellowship of their male associates, her swineherd companions paid no attention to her. Eken soon fell behind, then stopped entirely, plucking a grass stem and working it in her fingers in the lonely sun of childhood’s afternoon.

More crayfish were captured, to fierce cries, the largest of them two inches in length. Some large dragonfly nymphs were caught as well, and these were eaten on the spot; the crayfish would be broiled upon the fire.

Now and then the hunt was interrupted by a cry of Puna! or Pelal!—at which the children would explode out of the ditch: the puna is the large frilled lizard, and the pelal any sort of snake, and the yegerek affect great fear of them, to render life more perilous. In their glee in the face of danger, they are like the men in war. But the cries had been raised by Uwar and were probably baseless, for Uwar is bored readily; he likes to tease and disconcert the other children, who have retained their innocence.

Uwar has intelligence and charm, courage and great prowess with grass spears, and he is beautiful, but he is a child no longer, and a mean streak gleams in him which may only be the first sense of his own power. Again he fired grass spears at Weneluke, who again wilted in the face of it, and now, still smiling in his wild, bright-eyed way, he hurled missiles at the rest. The little boys raised their heads out of the grass and stared at him, Tukum growled fiercely, breaking off in his pride a fat bundle of spears which his instinct told him not to throw; like the great frogmouth in the woods of night, he huffed and squawked in a hideous voice, depending on the terrible nature of his appearance to dissuade attackers. Kabilek and Supuk, though in no way timid, are gentle children, without Uwar’s itch, and fought back mildly until the storm should pass.

Okal, on the other hand, is a contender: he popped up out of the grass, thin shoulders smeared with the yellow clay of war and death, and fired spears until Uwar himself affected boredom. But the spell of the hunt had been broken, and the boys regarded one another in discomfort. They dispersed.

Eak, the old father of Asikanalek and the grandfather of Namilike, died during the night. He had shrunk away to nothing, and when his body was seated against the wall he looked no bigger than a child. In the morning he was draped with shell belts, like an old packet badly wrapped. Sitting there in the brown darkness where his life had ended, he was reduced by the dim light to a strange pattern of white luminescent cowrie shells, as if, after all, he had gone away long ago.

Eak had been decorated in the pilai because he was an old man and had died naturally; the mourning would be no more than a formality, like the funerals of women. No chair was to be built, no fingers cut, and two small pigs would honor him. A few people came to grieve, but most of these were neighbors from Homaklep and Wuperainma, come out of respect for Asikanalek. Werene wore a head-net of fresh spider webs, acquired by rolling his hair through the vast gossamers of a large spider harbored in banana groves for just this purpose.

Since there was no chair to mourn before—the old man was kept all day in the pilai—the men mourned at the fire of rocks. Tamugi, who loves to grieve, came and ululated like a dog, but no one else mourned for very long, and many came who did not mourn at all. U-mue sat glumly in the pilai with Weaklekek and Wereklowe. Since the cooking pit was not ready and the men were hungry, they roasted sweet potatoes on the pilai fire, oblivious of the choking smoke. In the dense pall, Eak’s body floated eerily.

The children moved cheerfully about the yard. Namilike herself fled happily from group to group, self-conscious and a little spoiled; at one point she nearly choked herself over the embers, attempting to light tobacco for a woman guest. Wamatue leaned against the entrance, sad-faced and solitary, his miniature horim in its usual offset position.

Altogether about fifty people had arrived in time for the opening of the pit.

The eating finished, the belts were stripped from Eak and brought outside, where they were distributed by Weaklekek; though Wereklowe was present, he was an honorary guest, and it is Weaklekek who is head of the Alua in the three villages near the Aike frontier. One of the belts was awarded to Tuesike, who sat down with it, smiling modestly, near other men and yet somehow not with them; when the belt ceremony was at an end, Tuesike seized the chance to help Eak’s kinsmen build the pyre. Because Tuesike is quiet and not articulate, yet wishes to take part in things, he often does much of the heavy work at other people’s ceremonies.

Eak was brought out of the pilai, carried like an injured child. His face was composed and pure. In the light of day it was discovered that two cowries were still fastened to his collar; a delay occurred while these were tugged at, and finally the neckband had to be cut free. Because the fire was already burning, the tugging had been hasty; it shattered the serenity of the funeral, not only in its own implications but because, during the process, the old man’s mouth fell open wide and his eyes bulged, as if suddenly he had come to life and glimpsed the pyre. An uneasy murmur swept the women, who were seated in a line under the eaves.

As a final courtesy, and to placate Eak’s spirit, his body had been smeared for the last time with grease. Shiny and hairless, he was hurried to the pyre. The men tucked Eak down among the logs with something like affection, and at this late moment a real grieving began. As if to compensate the dead old man for their long day of apathy, the men and women sobbed and wailed in earnest. In this desiccated thing they seemed to glimpse themselves, just for a moment; this was the way that all of them would go, under a blue sky, in a late twilight.

The children of Wuperainma engaged in the morning tussle with the village pigs, shouting and banging and hissing and squealing through the pig stalls and the yard and in the weeds outside. Loliluk’s pretty Werekma, running through the bushes to cut off a sow, ran afoul of excrement; she squeaked with distaste and chagrin and fled to clean her foot, while the younger children laughed; Werekma, who may marry at the next mauwe, has been giving herself airs.

The children were watched dourly by Ekapuwe, her baby creaking in her net—Ekapuwe is restless and is looking at the men—and by Loliluk, who is crippled these days by the long infection of a spear wound in his hip; the hip has collapsed rather than swollen, as if his body were slowly being eaten out from the inside. Suddenly the man is old and squats, staring at nothing, or creeps about his yard among the women. Perhaps this is age, which comes on early in the valley, as if the eternal spring burned lives out swiftly. Loliluk may be thirty-five. At forty-five he will be a village elder, and at fifty-five, if he is still alive, he will be a decrepit and spindly old man.

The elder wife of Loliluk is a woman of the Wukahupi, a people down the valley, on the far side of the Baliem. Through their success in killing and pig-stealing, the Wukahupi had incurred the violent anger of the Huwikiak; the latter joined forces with the Wittaia and other tribes and, in a rare maneuver, attacked the Wukahupi villages at night, killing and burning. The Wukahupi fought back, but their allies failed to come to their assistance. They shall be scattered like the mokoko heron, the kain of the Huwikiak had said, and indeed they were scattered all across the valley: they had even lost their tribal name and were now known as the Mokoko. The wife of Loliluk was one of several Mokoko women among the Kurelu.

In recent moons this woman had grown weak and sick, with bad internal pains, and lately she has been called Wako Aik, which means “Worm Biting in the Stomach.” Her people are very worried, and early this morning a hunt took place in the savannas below the village. The hunters were not content with rats but caught small songbirds, for the ritual to come was very serious.

Loliluk, with Hanumoak and Yeke Asuk, went out in the morning-of-bird-voices, followed by Uwar and Kabilek; Uwar is the son of Wako Aik, but the mother-son relationship is not emphasized, and Uwar was as lighthearted as ever. The men were joined by Walimo and Asukwan, and the boys were joined by other yegerek. All these people came along for the fun of throwing sticks.

Songbirds are hunted in a kind of bush-beating or drive. Each hunter breaks off several lengths of madder or other branching shrub and strips the leaves. The party forms a driving line through the tall grass, or encircles a brushy copse; when the birds fly out they are met with a hail of missiles. The boys and men, trained from infancy to hurl spears of grass, then cane, then wood, throw with great force and skill, and though few birds are retrieved—the small bodies are easily lost in the dense undergrowth and grass—a surprising number are brought down.

The sun pierced dull black clouds over the cliff and caught the red leaves of vaccinium; the leaves and grasses were wet with the night rain, and the sun, still low, brought the whole world sparkling to life. The men were haloed by the sun’s gleam on their shoulders; they stalked the bushes, arms cocked, saying Hoo-sha, Hoo-sha. A gray rail fluttered up, wavering slowly before Yeke Asuk; it was the first easy shot, and the others laughed and hooted when he missed it.

Three birds were soon recovered. Wrapped in neat leaf packets, they were borne back in triumph to Wuperainma.

It was agreed that the spirit of Wako Aik had deserted her, and that ceremonies must be held to lure the spirit back. Yoli’s wife, a well-known woman wisakun, was called in to assist, and Yoli, his expansive self once more now that the danger brought on him by his son Walimo seemed less imminent, came along to help eat up the pig.

The pig was slaughtered in the early afternoon and was butchered by Tuesike, who came in to help. Behind the fence, in the banana grove, a small rock fire was built and the small pig placed in it, with sweet potato. Werekma helped build the fire, after she and Uwar had cleaned pig guts. Aku watched them from a doorway, but she and the other children took no part.

During the cooking, the men gathered in U-mue’s pilai. They talked, and Yoli wove at a long shell belt. Loliluk asked Hanumoak for a feather of egret, and this he sent with Uwar to his ebeai. Yeke Asuk went down into the wood; he returned with three saplings and with these constructed a kind of sturdy tripod, in which the largest pole, almost erect, was braced by the two others. Loliluk called out to the women, who were in the ebeai of Ekapuwe. The sick woman appeared with the egret feather in her hair. She was draped with nets, and the men withdrew to the end of the yard: this was a woman’s ceremony, and they had no part in it.

The pig had been killed because spirits, like people, cannot resist the smell of cooking pig. The tripod, which Wako Aik now mounted with the help of others, was to render her as nearly airborne as possible; the spirit is a flying thing and might be more prone to re-enter a body found in its own element Natorek was handed up to his mother, and she held him, not because he would be of much assistance in the cure, but because he was underfoot and threatened to jostle the tripod; Natorek clung for dear life to the longest pole, enjoying himself hugely. Finally Wako Aik was handed a bow and arrow by Yoli’s wife; she clutched them for half a minute while this woman muttered healing imprecations. She was then relieved of both bow and Natorek and helped back down to earth. She went into the ebeai with the bow and arrow, followed by Yoli’s wife and Loliluk. The other women went into the cooking shed, and Yeke Asuk returned into the pilai.

The egret feather worn by Wako Aik had been a sign, a first warning to the bad spirits which infested her that they were unwelcome. The bow and arrow was a second warning: perceiving by this weapon that she was armed against them, they would certainly be frightened off. The next morning the rout of the bad spirits, represented by the hunted birds, was made complete: the birds were laid upon the ground, and Wako Aik attacked them with her hiperi stick, dancing around and jabbing the air over the bodies.

The ceremony over, the birds lost their significance and were eaten by the men.

The next day the women held a hiperi feast to bring to a close the banishment of Wako Aik’s illness. The women themselves built the fire, assisted by Ekali. Ekali’s wife worked opposite him, hauling with more strength than his own on the rattan binding. The rain began before the fire was completed, but they finished it hastily and retired to the cooking shed, leaving it smoking in the yard. Although the women had worked merrily together—a merriment from which Ekali had been excluded—they sat around their separate fires, once inside.

There are five fires in the cooking shed. The two at the west end, nearest the sili entrance, belong to old Aneake and whichever of U-mue’s wives are present: Aneake sat at the farthest fire, weaving a net dyed purple and bright yellow. Aneake is having trouble these days with her etai-eken, which is giving her stomach ache, but she is impatient rather than complaining, as if she had only to speak to it in her spirited way for it to cease its nonsense. She is a hot-tempered little person, and her name, derived from ane-weak, or “Voice Bad,” suits her at certain moments very well: she maintained a rapid peevish chattering. Two of Aneake’s neighbors, younger than herself, were far sicker than she was: Asok-meke, the stepfather of Tukum, had not even been able to attend the pilai consecration of Tekman Bio, and a special wisakun man had been sent for from the Siep-Kosi. As for one old woman of Abulopak, she was not far from death. Within a few days she would be bundled up in her own nets and given to the flames.

With Aneake sat Hugunaro and Aku, and Hugunaro’s smoky laughter and her wild, hard eye tightened the whole atmosphere. At the next fire Ekali’s wife and the second wife of Loliluk sat in dull silence. With them was the boy Weneluke, and Werekma, and Natorek: Natorek, though prostrate on his stomach, and despite the fact that Werekma was behind him, contrived to strike her with a stick. The movement was a strange, rubbery, convulsive one, peculiar to this boy, and possibly it was unintentional, but Natorek has a bad character and was not given the benefit of the doubt: Werekma spanked him smartly where he lay. Werekma promises to be a scold; she is just coming into puberty and young breasts, and the put-upon air that so often accompanies female adolescence; hence the talk that she will be married at the next mauwe. However, she is still young, perhaps twelve, and the talk for the moment is mostly for its own sake.

Wako Aik, looking disconsolate and weak, came and squatted by the fire of the younger wife: though there appears to be no animosity between them, the latter chose this occasion to move down to the next fire. The young wife, a thin-faced, withdrawn girl who looks discontented without quite knowing why, is presently nursing a small baby. Wearing taro leaves upon her head in a kind of bonnet, she watched the other women without interest. She had removed her nets, and on her small shoulders and round back shone the silk skin of girlhood, for she is no more than a child.

The boy Weneluke wove hand patterns with a string, working it skillfully into abstract designs on all eight fingers: one of these represented a man and woman facing each other, and, by manipulating each sex, he arrived at a nice parody of copulation. Self-consciously Werekma tossed her head, and the uneasy boy grinned furtively at his own talent.

Awaiting the baking of the food, the women ate toa stalks and rolled fiber thread. They laughed and chatted peacefully in the fine warmth, out of the rain.

Asukwan of Homaklep is a strong, indolent warrior with a huge head of hair and a heroic nose made fierce by its black band of charcoal; his handsome demeanor, coupled with a rare talent for grinding his teeth, have made him much admired by the women. But these days Asukwan is plagued by an old arrow wound in his ankle which does not heal, as well as a fresh arrow wound in the back of the same leg, suffered in the raid in which Yonokma lost his life; he is reduced to hobbling about with a heavy walking stick, a kind of club, used commonly by men recuperating.

Finally he went to old Elomaholan, the wisakun. Like almost all medical treatments of the akuni, his cure would be external and spiritual in nature, though there is an internal medicine imported from the Yali which is taken sometimes for arrow wounds. Asukwan sat on the council ledge above Homuak, while Elomaholan, hunched on his knees over the wounds, fingered each in order. As he massaged, he blew on the wounds, oo-Phuh, oo-Phuh, and between puffs chattered a litany of healing words: the simultaneous nature of his treatments soon had him short of breath. Now and again he would raise his head and inquire of Asukwan in a soothing manner about other factors that might influence the treatment, and Asukwan answered him seriously, brow furrowed in concentration, with the modest self-importance of the ill.

Asukwan was still hobbling on his cane when, on the afternoon of the women’s feast, he caught and raped the wife of Palek, mother of the boy Supuk; this is the same woman who was almost killed by the akuni after fleeing the Wittaia. Palek did not wish to remain with Asukwan in the same sili, and that same day he moved his family away to Wuperainma. Palek is a kepu man with neither wealth nor power, while Asukwan is a warrior of Weaklekek’s pilai: to demand a pig of Asukwan in compensation could only lead to further ignominy. It is not a question of Weaklekek’s lending support to a man who is in the wrong, for Asukwan is not really in the wrong. Asukwan took Palek’s wife because his strength gave him that right; the only wrong involved is Palek’s weakness.

Though Asukwan is young, he has a history of disorder in his love life. Only last year a wife of Amoli, the fierce kain of the Haiman, was so overcome by Asukwan’s imposing appearance that she ran away to join him in Homaklep. Amoli demanded her return and at last came to fetch her, bringing with him an armed party. A skirmish took place in which several men were wounded, but in the end the love-drunk woman was still with Asukwan. This episode, unresolved in the eyes of Amoli, is one of a number at the seat of trouble between north and south.

The only salt available to the Kurelu occurs in a briny spring on the mountainside two hours north of Homuak. Weaklekek’s wives set out early in the morning, taking with them banana fiber to absorb the brine. Lakaloklek’s daughter Eken accompanied the women, and with her came two other girls from the sili of Werene. Supuk also went along, accompanied by Tukum. Weaklekek went too, for to reach the salt wells the party would have to traverse the territories of Amoli and Maitmo; the enmities between north and south had been building again in recent days over the episode of Walimo and his pigs, and Weaklekek wished to protect his women. The party was joined before it had got very far by Woluklek and Siloba, who, as usual, were on the lookout for some distraction to occupy their minds.

Despite the time of the full moon, the rains had been very heavy, and the paths across the fields and around the villages were waterlogged and greasy. At the sloughs and ditches the pole bridges were slick with mud, but nevertheless the burdened women and the men moved quickly, as they always did, in a fast walk which was almost a short trot; with centuries of instinct in their feet, they could run the thin poles with scarcely a break in pace. Very shortly they came to the Elokera River, just south of the place where it bends outward from the mountain wall toward the Baliem. Here, in a grove of fig and myrtle trees, a large myrtle had been felled across the river, which flows about five feet below the log. The grove is on the farther side, with shady grass beneath the trees and a bank where the people go to drink.

The Elokera is the tacit boundary between the Kurelu of north and south. The two groups, regardless of close ties of clan and family, are dominated by separate kains; in the old days, despite their ties, they feuded regularly, and even now they rarely overlook a chance to quarrel. The northern villages threaten constantly to deny the southerners access to the salt wells, and this too is a source of trouble and the subject of a southern song:

We wish to go to Iluerainma

But the men of the north forbid us.

Forget them, then, we will not help them in their wars. . . .

Near the west bank of the Elokera, not far from the grove, is the village of Hulainmo, run by Amoli. The party skirted Amoli’s village and kept going.

The trail went west under the mountains, across old fields and shrubby grasslands, down across a quiet stream and up again through a small wood of araucaria and chestnut. The travelers were passing now through the lands of Kurelu, and one of his villages, where four or five of his eleven wives are kept, lay in sight on the savanna. The trail approached the mountains at the mouth of a steep gorge; here Weaklekek and the young warriors sat down under a tree to wait, while the women and children went on upward to the well.

The mountain trail to the salt well and onward to the Yalimo is worn down to bare rock, and the rock itself is polished smooth by the generations of bare feet; in many places it is stained with purple, for juices dripping from the burdens of soaked fiber have this color. Among the stones wind exposed roots, these also polished smooth; the roots change, as the path ascends, to the beech and oak of the mossy forest. Here the strange stiltroot pandanus fills the clearings. The trail itself is bordered with deep greens—ferns and lilies, orchids and begonias, glistening with that ageless damp and splendor peculiar to the silver air of mountain gorges—the whole infused with the warm, secret smell of wood decay and fungus. Below the trail flows the bouldered stream, its white rush smothering the calls of birds in a huge silence. The water voice is a forest voice, part of the rocks and greens and filtered light; near where Weaklekek waited, the water voice would die. The stream would wander in slow sun and silent grass, seeking the river, the broad lowlands, and the sea.

The bent women crept upward on the rocks, dark bodies muted by the shades. Light fell in shafts and splinters, in warm pools of green gold. Here and there the trail traversed the stream on boulders slick with algae, and on one of these the child Eken’s foot went out from under her, so that she landed on her head. Her woolly red-black hair protected her, though she was shaken; she cried quietly and briefly. Lakaloklek tied a bow of grass and laid it on the rock in warning. Another bow, half rotten now, lay there beside it.

Not far below the crest of the pass lies the salt spring, Iluerainma. This is one of two salt springs in the valley; the other is far off to the southward, in another country. The spring occurs in the stream itself, in a clearing formed by a broad outcropping of boulders. A pool has been dammed, and here the women descend into the water. There are always women at the salt wells, sometimes forty or fifty at a time, and from the bank comes a steady whack and chop—the breaking up of the small banana stalks with flat wood knives. The dark pool is small, scarcely ten feet across, and so the women must stand and bend and press together, the pale fibers floating at their knees. The gloom of the cloud forest and the packed, straining flesh, the primal browns and the salt waters from the inner earth, are somehow infernal—and a butterfly passes, a magenta scrap of light, like the tip of a wand.

When the cargo is well soaked it is carried back down to the villages: dried in the sun, it is then burned on a special salt rock behind Wuperainma. The gray residue of salt and ash will be packed away in neat leaf bottles and stored for use at feasts.

Lakaloklek, finished with her work, sat on a rock and smoked. Then she rose slowly with her wet heavy load and started homeward. At the mouth of the pass Weaklekek joined them silently, and they moved southward swiftly through the fields.

This morning the pigs of Walimo were returned to him, at the end of a dangerous sequence of events.

Three men of Amoli appeared yesterday at Homuak, where Walimo and Husuk and several others of the southern Kurelu were at the fire. The three declared to anyone who would listen that the reason Walimo’s pigs had been taken was that Walimo had stolen one of theirs, and not only that, but Walimo had made improper advances to one of the wives of Amoli, who had already lost a wife to Walimo’s friend, the young warrior Asukwan.

Walimo listened in silence for a time. Then, without a word, he grabbed two spears which leaned on a near araucaria and drove one of the men out of the grove; in the course of the chase he succeeded in spearing this man in the thigh. The other two left promptly.

When the wounded man was brought back to Hulainmo, Amoli became enraged; Amoli is known as hunuk palin, a man of violence. He knew already that Weaklekek’s party had passed by early that morning on the way to the salt wells, and he also knew exactly who was in the party: Siloba and Woluklek were both friends of Walimo, and it was immediately decided to waylay the party on its return and kill whichever one might tarry or wander aside. If this was not possible, one of the small children would do as well, especially Tukum, whose father is dead, and from whose clan a less serious reprisal might be expected.

Near Kurelu’s village Weaklekek was stopped on his return by an old woman. The woman knew only that a man had been speared in the southern country and that there might be trouble.

Weaklekek went on. He stopped every man he met, in order to make inquiries. Many avoided him, and the others gazed at him and at his people in an uneasy and embarrassed way. He learned at last that he was walking straight into an ambush. The party halted for a little while and talked, but for want of a better choice—they were deep in unfriendly territory, with no way to slip off or hide—it was decided to proceed.

People were now openly avoiding them, stepping off the path a long way ahead. The villages they passed, in the oily haze of the hot afternoon, were silent. They went onward, single file, across the wide savanna, the women and children herded close, and the men before them and behind. All but Weaklekek and Woluklek were frightened: Woluklek walked jauntily, lifting his feet high off the ground in an unconscious parody of himself, a coy, self-deprecating smile on his strange face.

Weaklekek guessed that the ambush would occur at the Elokera, near Amoli’s village, for this crossing could not be avoided, and there was a cover of heavy cane a short distance from both banks. Nearing Hulainmo, they came upon a place where the grass had been stamped flat; here the men danced before a war or ambush, to work up a fierce spirit, and there had been dancing in the past few hours. Ahead of them a group of women, surprised in the path, took fright and fled into the bushes. In the village itself the banana fronds were still.

Hulainmo lies a few hundred yards to the north of the Elokera. Upon reaching it, Weaklekek went alone into the village, leaving his party on the path. He did not know that, a few minutes before, Amoli had withdrawn the ambush party: Amoli had learned that the party was moving in close array and cautiously, and, since it appeared impossible to cut out and kill any single member, he had decided against attacking the whole group—not out of fear of failure, for it would have been simple to kill them all, but out of respect for the consequences. To kill Weaklekek would be a very serious step and one which, Amoli knew, would probably not be approved by Maitmo, for it would insure open warfare within the tribe which might not be settled for years to come.

Weaklekek sought out Amoli and talked to him. Amoli was candid about the purpose of the ambush, and Weaklekek warned him that he was very angry about it and that Amoli and Maitmo were risking serious trouble. Wereklowe himself was already disturbed: apparently he no longer feels so violently that Walimo should be killed, or not, at least, at the cost of intertribal war.

Maitmo may also be of this opinion, for the next morning word was sent to Walimo, in the disdainful way that these things are done, that he might come and fetch his pigs. Walimo did not go himself, for tempers were still high, but sent some boys who would not be molested. For the moment Walimo’s emergency has passed, but this does not mean that the whole business is concluded.

Strong winds careened from the southeast, clearing the cloud shreds from the last corners of the valley; the mountain Arolik was naked in a crystal air, with scars of snow tracing the crevasses of its upper flanks. The wind and sun of several days had dried the banana fronds soaked by Lakaloklek at the salt wells, and early this morning she went with her daughter Eken to the special rock west of her village where, in a hollow like an oven, the salted fronds were burned. Weaklekek went with them. He sat in the grass, finishing a new shell belt and glancing every little while, as the men do, toward the frontier.

Eken plucked dry leaves of cane as tinder—she had brought a firebrand from the village—and the long strands were heaped onto the flame. The strands were soon reduced to a gray ash. Lakaloklek picked out the roughage, then transferred the fine residue to a piece of banana leaf, taking it in pinches with her fingers. She had filled her mouth with water from a gourd, and as she worked she let the water fall onto the ash so that the salt would cake. The final pinch, constantly moistened so that more ash would adhere to it, was rolled around the fire base to retrieve any salt that she was unable to pick up with her stub hands. Even so, there was some left, and Uwar came by and salvaged it, employing a wet fingertip.

Asukwan also came along, seeking diversion; he limps less than he did before his cure and seems much happier in his mind. Asukwan sat upon a rock, weaving pretty bracelets out of fern. While Lakaloklek packed the salt in round thick cakes and bound them neatly in fresh leaves, he and Weaklekek talked of the day’s events. Asok-meke had made a good recovery and was once more up and about, but in Abulopak an old woman had died over the night; that afternoon she would be taken by the fire. Maitmo was giving a large feast in which twenty-three pigs would be killed: this ceremony would finally close the mourning period held in honor of his three wives, killed four moons before by the Wittaia. Apparently U-mue had been invited but was nervous and upset, for he was supposed to bring a pig; he was short of pigs these days, as a consequence of the funeral of Yonokma.

When Palek moved away from Homaklep, unable to suffer or revenge the disgrace put upon him by Asukwan, he took his family to the sili of Elomaholan in Wuperainma. Though Elomaholan himself is one of the important wisakun men of the Wilil, the other inhabitants of the sili, like Palek himself, are kepu men of middle age. The sili is a small and undistinguished one, with a pilai almost innocent of weapons, and because most of its inhabitants spend their time in the mountain villages, the sili yard is patched with stubborn weeds.

Palek stayed but a week or two in Wuperainma. He came originally from the lands of Kurelu—the name Palek, which means “No Family,” was given to describe his status in the southern villages—and he decided to return at last to his native territories. With him he took his luckless wife and his sons Supuk and Wamatue.

Supuk was one of the best boys in the villages, and the society of yegerek will miss him, though he himself is probably glad to leave behind the land of his father’s disgrace. Wamatue is too young to care, and doubtless stands this very moment just inside the door of a cooking shed very like the one in Homaklep, his toy horim still dangling free from the region of his navel.

In a lull in the rains an ambush was attempted in the same gardens where the enemy Huwai had been killed. The men lay in hiding all day long, but the Wittaia were alert, knowing that raids would be inevitable. No chance was offered for a surprise attack, though the raiders waited until late afternoon. They then returned to the Waraba, where they were joined on the crest by the supporting party. The men stood there in the Place of Fear until dusk settled in the valley, as if at a loss to know how to change their fortunes.

Another moon had come and gone since the death of Weake, and he was still unavenged. Of four attempts at ambush, three had ended in frustration and the fourth in the loss of Yonokma. The days turned past in half-light and gray rains, a prevailing gloom and dankness which muted the voices of the children, of the cloud-drenched birds: the people made no secret of their conviction that their fortunes had taken a bad turn for the worse and that any further attempt at raids must end disastrously. Their faith in their holy stones had been shaken by Yonokma’s death but five days after the stone-cleaning of his father, and as they had no gods to invoke, they sank into despondency. Nit nai-uk, they said. We are afraid.

But the full moon’s coming brought three fresh clear nights, and the Southern Cross glittered with promise in the sky. Day by day the people’s spirits rose. Gold-green mornings danced with the bird voices, sparkling in the sun and gleaming leaves, and the clouds, white and without weight, drifted off into the blue, and one day Weaklekek and Asikanalek went off with other warriors to join a war on the north frontier.

That morning a party of Wittaia had staged a raid on the Kurelu gardens. They had swum a stream which winds through the heavy cane brake of the region, then crept through the dense swamps to the garden edge. No people were in the garden, nor were there sentries in the nearby kaio. Disgusted, the Wittaia rose to their feet, and a warrior went forward to the kaio and climbed up to look around.

But the raid had been detected by the Kurelu, who had guessed where it was headed. They prepared an ambush and were lying in wait by the time the enemy had crept up through the cane. The warrior, nearing the platform of the kaio, spied the ambushers; he uttered a howl of fear and warning, and his own party fled, leaving some weapons behind them. The warrior himself jumped to the ground, still howling, but he was cut off and killed.

In the war that followed, no man on either side was seriously hurt, and at the end of the afternoon a Kurelu victory dance was held at the northern etai field. The singing spread across the Elokera to the paths and gardens of the southern Kurelu.

Weaklekek and the other men returned in the wake of the noise, triumphant, and by twilight a formal chanting had started in Abulopak. Though the victory was not theirs, and would not remove the need to avenge Weake, the southern Kurelu felt that their luck had changed. For the first time in many weeks the whooping rang from all the fields and villages, taken up and carried onward, to die for a little while and resume again.

The following day a formal etai was held in the north and a smaller one at the Liberek. The dancing at the Liberek was led by the warriors who had gone to war the day before, all but Weaklekek, who rarely dances. Woluklek rarely dances either, but today he ran fiercely with the rest, as if his life depended on it.

Walimo, whose blitheness has returned, attended both celebrations, going early to the north, then hurrying back four or five miles to dance with his own people.

In the fields above Homaklep, with Kabilek and Uwar, Tukum played a game of whirligig: the point of the game was to whirl, arms outstretched like wings, over and down a steep bank of grass, and to land gracefully on one’s feet at the bottom. Since Tukum landed regularly on his back, in a stunned, crucified position, the point of the game was lost on him, and after a while he trudged away.

Down in the little stream which flows past Wuperainma, some children much smaller than himself, mostly small girls like Namilike and U-mue’s daughter Nylare, were throwing twigs at dragonflies; they threw delicately, from ambush, as the dragonflies zipped past. Tukum took charge of this game, barking orders in his commanding voice, but as he was no more successful than themselves at downing dragonflies, and as his frontal assault drove all the dragonflies away, the game soon ended.

Left to himself, he dug a long, deep burrow in a bank. Into this he placed an ear-shaped fungus he had found nearby. He packed it in with earth, then hiperi leaves and grass, then more earth, then more leaves, and so on, until the burrow was full. The fungus he called mokat-asuk, or ghost-ear, and his idea was that the mokat-asuk would listen for the return of his father, who is dead. Since Tukum is beset by his mother and stepfather over the matter of his pigs, he misses his father very much and would like to have him back. But, so far as is known, the ceremony of mokat-asuk is not an effective one, and is in fact unknown to any of the akuni except for Tukum.

One afternoon in this period four strangers came on a visit to Abulopak. Though the men were of the Asuk-Palek people, a group allied ordinarily with the Wittaia, they considered themselves safe because two of them had close relatives in the sili of Wereklowe.

But, despite the new turn in their fortunes, the Kurelu considered the revenge of Weake and Yonokma incomplete; in addition, a man arrowed in the inner thigh on the afternoon that the Kurelu were routed from the Waraba had since died of this wound in the mountain villages. It was therefore decided to attack the two strangers who had no clansmen, with the excuse that the two had doubtless come to kill somebody.

A fierce howling burst the twilight air. One man fled the sili and, as dark was near, escaped entirely in the heavy brush which lies just opposite Abulopak. The second took refuge in the loft of the pilai; he was dragged out to the yard and speared to death. As most of the men involved were Wilil, U-mue took loud credit for his clan, a credit which, in high excitement, he shortly transferred to himself.

The body was taken by the heels and dragged out along the muddy paths, all the way from Abulopak to the Liberek. Tegearek led in the hauling, beside himself with the joy of violence.

Some boys had been playing in the fields as twilight came, and these now danced along beside the body, Okal and Tukum among them, and jabbed at it with their cane spears. Though Tukum took part, he seemed frightened by what he was doing, and the next day broke the toy spear he had used over his own head.

The Asuk-Palek was of middle age and strongly made, with a large forehead. He had been breathing when the spearing stopped, a short, ragged sound, but he was dead long before he reached the Liberek. He lay on his back beneath a high, hard moon, his eyes wide open, an eager smile upon his face. The face looked oddly trusting and untroubled.

The people were gathering; they danced beneath the stars.

Husuk came from the Kosi-Alua, an ax gripped in his hand. Taking the body by the hair, he wrenched it into a seated position and inspected the spear holes in the back. The man’s mouth fell slack and the eyes stared; for a moment it seemed that Husuk would sever the head.

He let the body fall.

Tegearek, excited still, dragged the body to the field edge. Behind a low fence there lay a slough from which yellow clay is taken in time of war or funeral or etai. The body was dumped over the fence, then thrown face down into the ditch. The men prodded it with spears until it slid beneath the surface, and black bubbles rose. Grass was thrown on top of it.

Later in the evening the body was taken from the ditch, and the two Asuk-Paleks who had not been attacked carried it off beyond the Elokera. The following day a large etai was held, for the score had been settled at long last, and the faltering etai-eken of the people had been restored.

For three months Werene had worked on his new garden, and finally it was ready to be planted. The roots and old grass had been burned, the ditches weeded out and excavated, and a series of new trenches dug: these led away from the main cross ditch like fat teeth in a jaw, a kind of harmonious deep scalloping. The ditches were fed by a small stream draining the brushy wetlands below Anelarok, and because the garden lay on a slight slope, toward the Baliem, the large ditch which encircled the whole garden, including the plots worked by Tegearek, was finished in a series of steps, perhaps twelve feet apart, so that in dry weather the water would not pour away. This ditch would also deter pigs from undoing the work of man.

Between the ditches the new plots, perhaps twenty feet across and eighty long, had been built high with the excavated earth, and the clods, dried to a gray clay in the sun, had been broken and leveled. In Werene’s half of the new garden the men’s work was finished, and in a day or two the women would come and plant the shoots of hiperi. Tegearek, who busies himself with war and other matters, had fallen several weeks behind and still labored fitfully in the old trenches.

For the most part, Werene had worked all by himself, his solitary spear and the thin plume of his small fire isolated on the valley sky. But others had come to help him with the deepening of the ditches, and in the last weeks he was assisted almost every day by Hanumoak.

The quarrel which had separated the two brothers years ago had come about when Werene had ordered Hanumoak, then still a boy, to go to work out in the gardens. Hanumoak had rebelled and, after a dispute which became serious, had left the sili of Werene and gone to live in Wuperainma. Now, long after, he had come to work for Werene at last, and, while the two were not affectionate, they laughed mildly together while they heaved and dug, as if embarrassed and relieved that their quarrel was at an end.

Hanumoak’s own garden plot, part of a large new garden worked by the men of his pilai, lay down the stream a little way, across a neck of brushland. This garden, a few days ahead of Werene’s, had already been turned over to the women, but since Hanumoak had no wife his plot was planted by the wives of U-mue. For the labor of these women, Hanumoak will be in U-mue’s debt, just as Werene will be in debt to Hanumoak. Between the women as they worked lay a net filled with hiperi tendrils. They hollowed each hill and buried in the pit the graceful length of morning-glory vine, so that only the tip, with its cluster of pretty, heart-shaped leaves, was exposed to the air and sun. In the grass along the garden edge the bees hummed sleepily in the midday heat, and a robin chat sang fitfully its rolling song. From across the fields a woman’s voice rose monotonously, a keening o-ay-wa-ay, o-wa-ay; o-ay-wa-ay, o-wa-ay, over and over and over.

A pig of the Wittaia, bent on some hoggish errand in the frontier woods, blundered and snuffled within view of one of the Kurelu kaios. The men at the kaio waylaid this pig and escorted it with pomp and ceremony to Abulopak, where they ate it. The pig was only further evidence of their new luck, and the next morning the Kurelu, riding the storms of fortune, went to war. This war was led by Nilik and Yoli: Yoli in recent days had held a holy stone consecration in Hulibara and, feeling more important than usual, had enlisted Nilik’s support in the initiation of the stones.

In midmorning a party of warriors slipped down through the woods north of the Waraba, for the war was to start with a raid; another party crept to the base of the Waraba from the Tokolik. The first group crouched and ran along the cover of the high cane brake which fringes the stream between the Waraba and Siobara. Some of the warriors wore mikaks and white feathers which flashed across the fields; whether for this reason or another, they were seen by Wittaia sentries on the crest of the Siobara. The sentries scrambled down among the rocks, silent as ghosts, and by the time the raiders tried to cross the open place between the hills, the Wittaia were prepared. They attacked the raiders at this place, driving them up onto the Waraba, where the first band rushed to support them. The Kurelu’s luck had continued, for none of their men was seriously hurt, while a Wittaia was struck in the stomach with an arrow and may die.

Both sides now held back, awaiting reinforcements. In the slow morning hours before the war commenced, Aloro, sitting cross-legged at the fireplace at Homuak, scraped down a new white bow. He was absorbed in it, paring its ends long and sharp, using his boar’s tusk; the fine white shavings fell and curled on his cordy shrunken thigh. Later he braced and bent it into shape between two saplings, his face fixed in his intense grimace which is not quite a grin.

At the Kosi-Alua kaio near the Tokolik, men gathered beneath the shelter. It was a damp morning of intermittent rains, and the sparks of the fire, flying high, caught on the thatching of the roof. A heap of blazing ferns was knocked from the crest of the fire, and Wereklowe’s son stamped them to ash with his bare foot. He is still limping from two spear wounds suffered in the raid in which Yonokma died, and walks about with a heavy walking stick.

Wereklowe himself came along, striding outward from the mountains with the rain. His white spear swayed against the rim, sharp on gray clouds flowing out of the high forest, down into the valley. He leaned his spear among the rest on the side of the shelter and crouched down to slip beneath the thatch; bent, he picked his way around the fire, taking the men’s hands in both his own and smiling his furious wild smile. Wah, he sighed in his gentle voice, wah, wah. Though he had no special greeting for his son, who lives apart from him in his own small village at the edge of the Kosi-Alua, he came and sat beside him when the round of his greetings was at an end.

The rain diminished for a time, and the men at the outer kaios moved on across the swamp to the Waraba. Already warriors of the Kurelu were bunched on the high rocks toward the Siobara, and on the Siobara itself small parties of Wittaia were convening. But the rain drifted in again, and some of the men returned to the reedy knoll at the corner of the L. Asikanalek and Pumeka came together, and Pumeka was carrying with his good arm Asikanalek’s long dark spear. Pumeka looked glad and foolish, carrying this weapon he had never used, and pointed at it in self-deprecation before the other men could tease him. Asikanalek laughed, a shrill, high laugh peculiar to him—An nai-UK, he cried, springing away from Pumeka. I am afraid! And they laughed together.

When the rain diminished once again, the Wittaia whooped in challenge, though in fact they were badly outnumbered, not nearly strong enough to take their own end of the Waraba from the Kurelu. The latter were ranked on the farthest knoll, overlooking the small meadow and the stream which separates the Waraba from the Siobara. The Wittaia had come across the stream, and more approached along the extension of the meadow from their villages to the southward. The Kurelu danced down the hill to meet them. But Nilik, asserting his own power, decided that this war should be fought in the corner of the Waraba; he stalked down the slope, screeching at his warriors to pull back, and finally sent a messenger onto the field. This man, an older wisakun, was excited and nervous, and the warriors did not take him very seriously: they shouted, Mare! Mare!—Arrow! Arrow!—and howled fearfully, and when the old man skittered in alarm, the hillside laughed. But soon the warriors withdrew until more Wittaia should appear, for the contest was unequal; one old kain from the northern Kurelu drove his men back with a flat blade of his spear.

The warriors climbed up onto the hill, but before they had returned along the ridge the Wittaia danced forward on the meadow, jeering and prancing; they wished to fight on the present ground, suspecting, perhaps, that the Kurelu had hidden men in the low wood at the corner of the L. The jeering goaded the Kurelu, and some Wilihiman-Walalua rushed down the hill again with an awesome drum of feet. They drove the Wittaia back across the stream and far down the meadow to the southward. More Wittaia ran up from the rear, while a few of their best warriors, wheeling and crouching down and switching their arrowheads back and forth on bows drawn taut, dispersed the charge.

The battle line quickly stabilized on the meadow to the southward, where the narrow terrain, bordered on one side by a dense brake and on the other by the tangled growth of the old gardens, offset the advantage in numbers held by the Kurelu. A hundred or more men on each side were now actually fighting, and the line spread out into the brush. The battle was led, for the first time in several moons, by the Wilihiman-Walalua, and particularly by Weaklekek and Asikanalek, who are leaders in a way that a warrior like Aloro, with his own cause to fight, is not. Asikanalek, in the early afternoon, led the dangerous skirmishing in the gardens, ducking and feinting and shooting forward to invite attack from hidden Wittaia who might thereby show themselves. Supported as he was by warriors like Huonke—Huonke looked grim and set but did not venture forward—Asikanalek fought his battle almost single-handed. In war Asikanalek is quite different from the gentle, shyly smiling man who built his pilai all alone, who grieved so passionately for Weake: he is reckless to the point of madness when possessed by battle.

Weaklekek quartered the meadow, moving swiftly and powerfully along the line, directing the other men; Weaklekek has found himself again, after a long period when the old arrow point still in his leg, with the responsibility he took upon himself for the death of Weake, had crippled his huge spirit. His leadership inspired his men, and his strong commands appeared to keep their injuries at a minimum. In an hour of fighting, but two warriors, with arrows through the forearm and the foot, were led back to the hill, while a third arrow, scarcely penetrating, was removed on the battlefield from the shoulder of big Woknabin. Woknabin wandered back unaided, an expression of confusion and hurt feelings on his rough, foolish face.

When Aloro received his inevitable wound, he retired behind the hill. Unlike Woknabin, he did not go home but helped remove the arrow points from the wounded who came later. He still carried his old bow, for the new one is not completed, and after he had drawn the arrow point from the calf of a young elege his bow and arrows were returned to him respectfully by the boy who held them.

Tegearek, Tuesike, Hanumoak, and Siba shot steadily and carefully, and Walimo ran wild in his odd skittish way. Siloba too fought bravely for Weaklekek. Like his friend Yonokma, he has left the ranks of elege to join the adult warriors. Feckless as ever, he dodged arrows all afternoon, running back and forth in his loose, loping stride, shouting and laughing. When Siloba runs, all the bones in his arms and legs seem thrown to the toes and fingers, yanking him in all direction, yet this disjointedness is pure high spirits, a crazy joy in his own being, and despite it he maintains a frantic grace. His courage has not made him a good warrior, but on this afternoon he contrived to escape the wound inflicted on him almost every time he decides to fight, confining himself to a sprained foot acquired in a leap of pure abandon.

Woluklek also spent his afternoon in the forward line, preoccupied and solitary, dallying with spent arrows. Now and again he would pause to gaze around him, as if not quite certain where he was, and smile shyly at his friends. Even Ekali of Wuperainma joined the warriors briefly, but soon he retired to the hill: his long hands shook badly as he lit his tobacco. Ekali is made miserable with dread, with the necessity to save face, in time of war.

Of all the important southern warriors, only Yeke Asuk and Tekman Bio took no part in the fighting. Yeke Asuk has lately acquired a taste for the rear echelons, while Tekman Bio is still chastened by his spear wound. They sat in the ranks on the hill above, three or four hundred strong beneath their spears, and behind them the sun emerged through a turbulence of black clouds, catching the greased shoulders, the long spear tips, the white feathers. With a Wittaia death so recently behind them, they were all in great good spirits, and laughter rang out frequently among the howls of war. In the height of battle a dove hurtled up across the hill, and the men leapt to their feet, straining after it with their spear points, so that the hilltop swayed as with a wind, but the dove escaped, and the men groaned good-naturedly. At other times they cheered and hooted the efforts of their own elege, who were conducting a side war with the older boys of the Wittaia. The elege faced one another across the stream where it broke from the tall stands of cane to cross the soft meadow between the hills. They fired their poor arrows back and forth, shouting insults without rancor in the terrible cracked cries of adolescence.

A Wittaia warrior came and sat among his elege, on the bank directly opposite the elege of the Kurelu. Putting his hands behind his head, he leaned back into the grass, calling out comments on the boys’ poor aim and inviting them to shoot at him. Both sides laughed at this, and for a little while it seemed that the war was little more than a harmless game, a sport, for only a few warriors had been hurt all afternoon, none of them badly. The rain had gone and the day was bright, with lovely shadows in the soft harmony of mountains. The men of both sides ran up and down, fine-feathered and with fanfare, tossing their long hair from side to side, stopping suddenly to cock their spears in comic menace at an enemy too far away to threaten them, and leaping up and down for the sheer splendor of it, the sun burnishing their skin.

Yoli remained high on the hill, conferring with Nilik at every opportunity in an effort to identify himself with leadership. Nilik, annoyed that his will had been disobeyed in regard to the choice of battleground, paid no heed to Yoli. High on the hill, he glared out at the battlefield, clutching his beautiful carved arrows. Nilik’s head was low and forward, like the head of a falcon, and his hands were clenched.

The men ranged up and down below them, yipping lustily—Kip, kip, kip, kip—hoo-r-ra, hoo-r-ra—and now and then there rose the deep abysmal groan vented by both sides when a man is struck. Wereklowe came to the crest, gazing down excitedly on the battle ground, and with him Polik, his hair down across his shoulders, brandishing his great spear and shouting: Polik wished revenge for a woman of his sili killed by Wittaia raiders three days before, and his face with its deep lines and stony eyes wore the wild, haunted expression that it must have had in the violent days when his name was Mokat.

Wari-gi-jee! he bellowed. Wari-gi-jee!

Listen, you people . . .

Po-kan Kul-ma! Po-kan Kul-ma!

Now watch the ones along the Kulma stream. . . .

E-lop-i-nima! E-lop-i-nima!

Move back! Move back!

Tugi! Tugi!

Strike them! Strike them!

But Polik’s voice is a part of every war, and though the men are in awe of him, and think him a great kain, they paid small heed to his fierce ranting, for Polik is growing old and goes no longer to the battle line.

The battle waned, renewed again, the egret wands whirling on the Wittaia side, the twirling black whisks of cassowary. A bird of paradise sang from the wood behind the Waraba, and some of the warriors took up its strident call.

In a lull some Wittaia fled up and down, running and feinting with their spears, spinning their white wands, stopping short to snap their bow cords, leaping, menacing, loping back—an elaborate dance, performed and observed in utter silence. The nearest Kurelu was five hundred yards away, yet the dance was part of war and taken seriously. Then these warriors screeched suddenly, as if under attack, and the screech was answered: the Kurelu on the hill talked faster, laughing and pointing but intent, and then as one they leapt away down the hill, spears high, in a din of whooping and running feet struck down forcefully upon the earth, an avalanche of black muscle and white feathers. The battle raged between the silent hills and then, as transient as a thunder squall, it ended, and the men streamed back, singing in etai. The wild battle had been indecisive, and both sides claimed victory.

The Wittaia gathered at the base of the Siobara, and the enemies sat in the warm, waning sun, shouting out insults and shrill laughter. The insults included coarse remarks about the women of their foes—Go home to your sluts before your hiperi grows cold!—and each sally was carried forth on a wave of loud delight, a cheering and whistling. Then the Wittaia would respond, while the Kurelu kept silent; the Kurelu not only wished to hear what the enemy had to say but laughed aloud when it was humorous.

Then, toward twilight, Asikanalek led a wild, sudden charge across the meadow, screeching furiously, legs flying through the grass as he shot forward, long spear tilted on the sky. He spun gracefully to avoid an arrow and rushed onward, infusing his own recklessness in the men behind him, and for a moment the fighting was fierce and silent. Then the Wittaia broke ranks and gave ground. Asikanalek and his men did not pursue them, for the glorious charge had been the point; they raced back to the hill, leaping and smiling.

Dark was coming from the mountains, and the Kurelu climbed back up onto the hill, against the sky. Woluklek kept off to one side, still smiling sheepishly, as if he had no right to be there. They filed homeward down the Waraba, through the white flowers of rhododendron. Content with Asikanalek’s last charge, which had brought their mild victory to an end, they paid no heed to the few Wittaia who pranced back to the battle line as they departed.

Spears on their shoulders, the men splashed across the swamp. They trailed along the Tokolik past the black ponds, then crossed the frontier woods into another world, where gardens breathed the heat of the last sun. A gold light washed the beds of dozing hiperi, in the slow folding of the lavender-hearted flowers. From the day’s trash fires a thin smoke strayed and vanished; ducks gabbled in the water lilies of the long ditches ahead, and evening herons flew. Children’s voices drifted from the villages, and the gold light rose to the mountain rim, the clouds.

Now the wild duck shot up out of the lilies in neat sprinkles of silver drops; they fled like black shreds of night across the softening sky. Ahead of the men, on the shoulders of their friends, swayed two warriors hurt badly in the last charge.

The mother of Tukum has been having trouble with Asok-meke, her husband, and has gone away to her own people at Lukigin, on the far side of the Elokera. Tukum remained behind in Wuperainma, but yesterday he was reprimanded by Asok-meke for permitting one of their pigs to wander away toward the frontier at the Aike. Tukum is at times forgetful about his pigs, being readily distracted by other children, dragonflies, puddles of water, and wild foods, and the chances are that Asok-meke was in the right.

Nevertheless, Tukum is a very proud little boy, and since his nami lives in Lukigin, where his mother has already gone, he has decided to go away for good. This morning he put on his thin neck the cowrie collar with its brief string of shells which is his sole belonging; he smeared his body with pig grease until it shone, in order to make a fine impression at Lukigin. There, perhaps, he will be known as Pua. Then he set off alone on the long journey in the sun across the woods and fields, a small brown figure with a flat head and pot belly. His back was turned on Wuperainma, his pigs and his friends, his childhood, and he clutched a frail stick in his hand.

A pig has been stolen from Kurelu, and it may be a sign of his weakening power that he is abroad among the villages, conscripting help. In former days to steal from Kurelu would have invited death, but now someone has dared it. As late as a few moons ago Kurelu appeared quite commonly in the southern villages, and his claim to control all the southern lands was taken seriously. But now he rarely comes, and his appearance on this errand will be noted, for it may signal the beginning of the end of his long leadership and the ascendancy of the hungry Nilik.

Four new moons had come and gone, and the great cicadas, anikili, no longer filled the twilight woods with their shrill ringing. In the morning-of-bird-voices, the whistlers sang fitfully, in a kind of wistful torpor, leaving the midday silences to the shrill discords of kites, the searching cries of birds of passage paused a moment in the high limbs of the araucaria. For this—midwinter August—was the season between nestings. At night, the frogmouths and nightjars, the stealthy owls, moved without sound, and the tree frogs clung like wet leaves to their perches.

The red flowers of the ginger plant had vanished from the fields, replaced by scarlet of the myrtle karoli; the karoli, drab since early May, had burst forth in new flowering. On other plants, the petals fallen were restored on the next bush, so that the land maintained its dappling of lavenders, of reds and whites and yellows, renewing its cycles without cease under the high sun of the equator.

In the gardens abandoned above Wuperainma, the grass choked off the last weak leaves of hiperi, but new gardens had been hacked and wrenched from the savanna and even now were being planted. Akuni had died and gone up in the fire—Weake, Yonokma, old Eak, a few others, and just recently, despite all her precautions, Wako Aik. The infant daughter of Weaklekek had also died quite suddenly, and Weaklekek, who had delighted in this child, smeared himself with mud and cried, but the grief of his young wife was still more terrible. U-mue’s baby, now three months old, had at last been named Woraisige, after the fact that her mother had been picking worai orchids at the time of her abduction by the dynamic kain of the Wilil.

Yeke Asuk and Tekman Bio had new spears, Aloro a new bow, and the new bow had already taken life; in recent days the enemy had killed Tikiliak of Mapiatma, but two of the raiders had been cut down, one of them by Aloro’s swift arrows.

Tukum had moved away from Wuperainma, but another boy had come. Elomaholan’s sili had grown weedy with disuse, but a new one was under construction just behind that of Asok-meke. Natorek in recent days had tied on his first horim, though for the nonce he wore it in much the same casual fashion as had Supuk’s little brother. Some of Walimo’s pigs, it was now agreed, would be seized and eaten, and if he pretended not to notice it, the whole episode would be forgotten.

In the days after his daughter’s funeral, Weaklekek climbed slowly to the top of his kaio tower. He was much saddened by the death and stared heavily at the silent Aike. Two white egrets in a near ditch craned their long necks at a stiff forward angle, rigid as stalks, and a blue-gray mokoko flapped off toward the Tokolik, rasping its cry. The mokoko was a more common heron than the white egret, and Weaklekek saw one every day, flying sometimes with its long neck outstretched or soaring high over the valley, two things which the egret never did. The mokoko was a strange bird, always solitary.

A strange smoke drifted on the wind from down the valley. There the remnants of Wako Aik’s Mokoko tribe clustered for protection around the village of the Waro; this people had come out of the sky to live on the Mokokos’ abandoned lands.

In the way that tue meant “bird,” waro meant “snake” or “insect.” The first Waro had come to the Kurelu just after the last mauwe, through the land of the Wittaia. He had white skin, and he was accompanied by black men dressed like himself. The strangers had been stopped at the frontier, and a warrior named Awulapa, brother of Tamugi, had been shot down and killed by a Waro weapon with a noise that echoed from the mountains. Though these men had fled, the Waro had not left the valley; already they were building huts among the river tribes throughout the valley.

While he kept watch, Weaklekek’s hands moved rhythmically in the sun, for once again he had started a long shell belt. He was proud of the old ways, proud that his own people went on as they always had since the time of Nopu. But from the Waro changes in the land had come, brought by the wind: a strange blue flower had rooted in the fields, and in an old oak by Homuak there was a yellow stinging bee. This bee gathered in large swarms, howling in the hollow wood like a bad wind in the rocks of the Turaba; in the past moons it had come across the swamps and gardens from the Waro village on the Baliem. The blue flower and the yellow bee did not belong in the akuni world and had no name.