There’s a slight but important difference between secondhand stories and the capture tales discussed in the previous chapter. The capture stories, of course, also concern people who supposedly encountered ape-men. But only in the reports I discuss in this chapter did a reputed observer tell the story directly to a particular person who, in turn, narrated it to me. In no case was I able to consult the original sources, usually because they were already dead.
I start with a story that has a decidedly mythical air. By all indications it reflects a dream, specifically something dreamt by the original teller. Niwa, a middle-aged resident of a highland village in the Mego region, related how, as a small boy, he and his elder brother often slept together in a field-hut. One night the brother woke up screaming that a pair of ape-men, a male and a female, were about to lift Niwa from his sleeping mat. The account thus recalls the theme of hominoids abducting children, present in two tales discussed in the chapter 4. But whether this was the intention of these hominoids Niwa couldn’t say, and his brother had died before I heard his story.
Interestingly, Niwa’s brother reported to the boys’ father that “two monkeys” had approached the younger boy. The father, however, interpreted the incident differently; he argued that the intruders must have been ape-men, as monkeys would not be bold enough to enter a field-hut. (Whether ape-men would be so bold either is another matter—and anyway, Niwa’s brother almost certainly dreamt the incident.)
During the same conversation, Niwa related another episode where ape-men had approached him while he slept, this time with an evidently more benevolent purpose. When he was about eight years old, Niwa was assigned to guard a field but eventually dozed off, in the open. As he slept, rain began to fall. But he was kept dry by an ape-man that carried him, still asleep, to a nearby field-hut; so when he later awoke he found himself inside the hut. How the sleeper knew an ape-men, or anything else, had carried him away is quite unclear—unless, of course, he saw it while asleep, which is to say, in a dream.
It’s also worth noting that when Niwa told his parents about the incident, he suggested that a spirit had carried him to the hut. But they contradicted this, saying that it hadn’t been a spirit but a “living being,” which they further identified as a lai ho’a (ape-man).
A theme in folklore the world over, strange beings (often fairies, spirits, or souls of the dead) taking pity on and helping youngsters is not confined to Niwa’s evidently imaginary encounter with ape-men. In 2014, the same year I met Niwa, the owner of the house where I was staying repeated an at least third-hand story about a man named Nonga. Nonga was an orphan who was raised by cruel grandparents. Every day they ordered him to guard their field against monkeys, close to a dense forest that, by this time, had come under government protection. Feeling sorry for the boy, one day an ape-man appeared and, after asking him to tie up his dogs (as hominoids are afraid of dogs), offered to guard the field in his place so he could go home. (How the creature conveyed this message, the narrator could not say.) Nonga was scared he would be beaten if he arrived home in the middle of the day. So the ape-man told him to take the stick his grandparents used to beat him, tear off a sliver, and hold this between his teeth; then he would feel no pain. Some time later, Nonga went to live with the hominoids in the forest for several days. Later still, he became a mystical practitioner, or “man of power.”
Although a person going to live with ape-men is unique to Nonga’s story, it almost goes without saying that this tale, presumably told originally by Nonga himself, serves to illuminate and support his claim to exceptional powers. At the same time, hominoids offering to guard cultivated fields recalls the mythical exploits of the ancestor Péro summarized in the last chapter, as well as accounts of how people obtained beneficial relics from ape-men. The myth of Péro is even more clearly echoed in another secondhand account, which I now relate.
Describing the experiences of a man named Seké, the story is one of four that concern ape-men visiting human dwellings, specifically field-huts near isolated gardens surrounded by forest. With one exception, all contain details of the hominoids’ physical appearance that narrators claimed they’d heard directly from their sources. (The exception was a legend I include for the sake of comparison, which the storyteller had heard from his long-deceased parents.) The narrator of Seké’s tale was Goda, the elder who told me the ape-man origin myth summarized in the chapter 4. Goda heard it from Seké in 1987 or 1988, by which time Seké was already very old, and the events he recounted had occurred over ten years previously. Both Seké and his wife had died by the time Goda related the story. They’d left no descendants—at least none who knew of their experience. According to Goda, shortly after the events, the couple told a number of people their story, which he described as causing quite a stir at the time. Yet, apart from Goda, no one I met some forty years later could recount the details.
Seké and his wife were living alone in a field-hut surrounded by forest, in the region now known as Kali Wajo (actually the name of the river that flows nearby). Their garden was close to the hut, but at a higher elevation and not far from a cave reputedly occupied by ape-men. One day, a pair of ape-men, a male and a female, approached the dwelling. This was about the time people had begun planting maize, possibly in October. Seeing the hominoids, the couple became frightened. They’d never seen such strange creatures before, so they ran away. When they returned, the ape-men were gone. But several months later, in January or February, just as the corn was ripening, one of the “animals” (as Goda called them) reappeared.
One evening after sunset, Seké, who was alone at the time, lit a fire in front of his hut, as people commonly do to keep warm. (Typically field-huts are too small to accommodate a fireplace.) He began calling out in the direction of his elevated maize garden, a usual way of scaring away unseen wild animals that come to feed on ripening crops. According to the direction of the plot, cultivators will cry out, for example, “hoo up there” (huu ghéle, where ghéle means “upslope” or “toward the interior”). The cultivator might then repeat the cry, mentioning other directions from which animals might come. Hearing a human voice the creatures should run away, but on this occasion something echoed Seké’s call. This happened several times. After that, Seké saw a single ape-man approaching his hut, which he recognized as the male of the pair that had come previously. So he recited a conventional declaration uttered when confronted with an unfamiliar visitor: “If you come with good intentions you may approach, but if your intention is bad we will not receive you.”
To this the hominoid responded: “If you receive me, my purpose will be good; I’m hungry and have come to request food.” So Seké gave the ape-man food, and when it finished eating, it told him he didn’t need to guard his maize field as they (assuming the female hominoid was included) would watch over it until harvest time. The man and his wife, the ape-man further explained, were no longer young and should simply rest, warning that if they continued to exert themselves they might ail and die. All the hominoid asked for in return was food, to which Seké readily agreed. He added that until the harvest, he would feed the ape-men whenever they (implicitly the male-female pair) requested—so long as they never bothered him again. And, indeed, that was the last time Seké and his wife ever saw them.
After recounting his story, Goda related what Seké had told him about the hominoids’ appearance. Although looking like monkeys, the creatures were in many ways more like humans. In fact, when Seké first saw them he thought they were humans, although of a strange kind. They had no tails; their faces were wider than a monkey’s; and, though described only as “rather flat,” their noses differed as well. The body hair was short and sparse. The chest hair was either absent or sparse, and there was none on the undersides of the arms. Hair grew on the calves, upper legs, and buttocks and around the genitals, but nowhere was this particularly thick or plentiful. In response to my question, Goda said there was not much hair on the face and none on the forehead. The feet were small and “thin” or “flat,” possibly meaning the instep or arch was low or nonexistent, or that the hominoids had flat feet. For some reason, Seké mentioned the creatures’ calves, which he described as humanlike. The female of the pair (which Goda referred to as a metu, the Lio term for female animals) had small breasts. When I asked about height, Goda immediately responded “one meter,” though he added that Seké “knew nothing of meters and centimeters” and had indicated stature only with his hand. Goda’s informant never mentioned the color of the body hair nor, apparently, anything about the head hair. But he described the skin color as dark, like that of local people.
Though more detailed than most, this description corresponds to the way Lio generally portray ape-men. And despite Goda’s confirming that he’d heard all this from Seké, I’m not entirely convinced that some doesn’t derive from another source, or simply Goda’s own knowledge. For one thing, such a naturalistic description sits oddly with seemingly fantastic details of the account, such as the creature’s speaking to the cultivator, apparently in his own language, and requesting food in return for guarding Seké’s ripening corn. What’s more, ape-men performing agricultural tasks for an elderly cultivator obviously recalls more fantastic tales, especially the myth told by Rani about his ancestor who detained two thieving ape-men. In fact, Goda had accompanied me when I visited Rani to record the myth. Yet the details of the myth and the elderly cultivator’s account are not exactly the same. More specifically, Seké’s tale contains fewer fantastic elements and makes no mention, for example, of his hominoid visitors transforming, disappearing, or surrendering urine or body parts. To be certain, I asked Goda whether Seké ever received relics from ape-men, and he said he did not.
In several respects the following story, concerning a man named Mbira and also recorded in 2014, is similar to Seké’s. But the location is different, the time is more recent and, more importantly, this narrative seems thoroughly naturalistic. Mbira had died some three years previously. The narrator was his sister, an uneducated village woman in her late sixties named Wonga (see figure 5.1). Mbira told her about his encounter with an ape-man on the day after it occurred. So far as I could determine, this was about five years before Wonga related the tale to me.
At the time of the encounter, Mbira was lodging in his field-hut, in a mountainous location and a short distance downslope from his maize garden. One evening, just after nightfall, Mbira lit a fire in front of his hut to keep warm. Afterward he began periodically calling out “hoo” to drive away pigs and other invasive animals that might have entered his garden—in the same way Goda described Seké as doing. A little later, something began answering his calls. At one point Wonga indicated the return cry was “hoo,” but she later described it as sounding like “ooo-ko-ooka doo.” (This is not a sound generally attributed to ape-men, and I never heard of it again; but in any case, it doesn’t correspond to any phrase in the Lio language.)
Mbira then saw a hominoid figure coming down the slope toward his hut. As the moon was bright, he was able to see it clearly. Mbira recited, “If you are bringing something good, I am willing to receive it; if something bad, then turn away” (just as Seké had done). The ape-man kept coming, making no sound, vocal or otherwise. It then stopped within a meter or two of the hut (4 to 6 feet), and when it saw Mbira—evidently it had not heard or understood his declaration—it immediately turned around and hurried away. Wonga’s brother never saw the hominoid again, nor did he ever have other experiences of ape-men.
Although effectively ending here, one interesting aspect of this account is the abortive nature of the creature’s visit. When it saw the man, it fled from fear. Unlike Seké, Mbira received no benefit from the creature, nor did Wonga say that it spoke. The ape-man’s appearance also scared Mbira, though subsequently he suffered no illness or other negative effect. Wonga could not say why the hominoid might have approached Mbira’s hut, for example, whether it was looking for food or was attracted by the fire (a possibility suggested by another story I discuss below).
As in Goda’s rendition of Seké’s story, the narrator gave details of the visitor’s physical appearance. It was naked and generally human in form, and it stood erect and walked bipedally. Wonga described the hominoid as “small-bodied,” or thin, but it seems not to have been particularly short. In fact, she thought the figure might have been no shorter than she was. As Wonga was an old woman and apparently smaller than average, this could mean as short as 1.45 meters (4 feet, 9 inches). Measurements taken in two regions of Flores in the 1920s revealed average heights for adult women of 1.48 and 1.501 meters (4 feet, 10 inches and 4 feet, 11 inches).1 That said, I was unable to clarify whether Mbira himself had ever said anything about the creature’s height.
The face of the hominoid visitor was “like an extremely ugly human’s,” and the neck was “quite long”—a feature I never heard in any other account. It was the creature’s ugly face, Wonga said, that gave Mbira a severe fright. The eyes were not significantly different from a human’s, and the skin was “dark,” like local people. Answering my question, Wonga thought the body was not especially hairy, but she qualified this by suggesting that Mbira had been so drawn to the face that he’d paid less attention to other parts of the body. Even so, she said the creature’s hands or fingers were (proportionally) longer than a human’s, as were its nails.
Mbira had not described the length or color of the head hair, nor the mouth or teeth. Nor did he mention a tail—something he might have seen as the creature turned and moved off. More surprisingly perhaps, the man said nothing about the sex. But what’s most distinctive in this account is the way the creature walked. Mbira had described it as “hopping” from one foot to another and swaying from side to side. A man who was present during my conversation with Wonga illustrated this, to the old woman’s approval, in a way that suggested someone walking barefoot on a hot surface or walking on skis. The demonstrator also characterized the movement as “walking by hopping or jumping.”
I’ll have more to say about this peculiar walk later on. But whatever its significance, taken as a whole, the story sounds realistic. If the height estimate and relative hairlessness are accurate, there’s little to distinguish the figure Mbira saw from a small and ugly naked human being. On the other hand, several details are reminiscent of an apparently older tale, more accurately classified as a legend, about a man named Wanggé. First recorded in 2015, it was narrated by Nuwa, the elderly man we met in chapters 2 and 3, who before his death in 2017 was a leading figure in his village. Nuwa was a lively, assertive, and intelligent person, not always easy to question as he would often change the topic. But he was always friendly and generous with his time.
Wanggé belonged to the generation of Nuwa’s great-grandfather, and Nuwa heard the story from his parents. A bachelor his whole life, Wanggé suffered from a skin disease that left him scarred and unattractive, which might be why he had always lived alone in a hut near his garden, again in a place surrounded by thick forest. One cold evening he lit a fire on the ground in front of the hut to keep warm. Some time later, he heard a voice calling out from a higher-lying location, “Friend Wanggé, friend Wanggé, we are cold.” Wanggé saw ape-men coming down a hillside, heading toward his hut. They wanted to warm themselves by the fire. There were two or three of them—either a male and a female or two males and a female. Mulling over how he could get rid of them, Wanggé went inside his hut, closed the door, and kept quiet. But the ape-men knew he was there. He heard one exclaim, “there’s the smell of Friend Wanggé,” indicating they had caught his scent. Then he had an idea. Wanggé had a dog, a bitch that had just given birth. As the hominoids came closer he released the dog, which started barking furiously and caused the ape-men to flee in disarray.
Nuwa insisted that these events had “actually happened” and were not just a “fairy tale” (Indonesian “dongeng”). All the same, he expressed surprise that the ape-men would have known Wanggé’s name, wondering where they could have heard it. In fact, this is the only story I recorded where a speaking ape-man addresses a human by name. Retold a year later, in 2016, Nuwa’s second version of the story was similar to the first but differed in a couple of particulars. On this occasion he said there had been just two ape-men and both were male. Also, whereas in the earlier version he’d implied that the dog was inside the hut with Wanggé, in the second telling the bitch and her pups were kept in an enclosure outside. Nuwa then explained that when the ape-men arrived at the hut they didn’t yet know the dog was there. But all of a sudden, Wanggé opened his door, roused the dog, and set it on the unwelcome visitors. (Nuwa then mentioned, as I’d already heard many times, that ape-men are very afraid of dogs.)
Actually, the detail of the dog may be one of the less credible parts of the story. As I know well from experience, Lio dogs will bark incessantly at any unfamiliar visitor and often begin barking before a person gets anywhere near a dwelling. Also, a bitch with pups should be especially nervous with strangers. And since Lio credit ape-men with a good sense of smell, they should have smelled not only Wanggé but his dog too. But this is perhaps taking a stylized folk narrative too literally, and one can imagine a more factual basis in a dog simply chasing away unknown nocturnal visitors.
While relating the tale, Nuwa mentioned several details of the hominoids’ appearance. Given the age of the story and the fact that Nuwa didn’t hear it directly from Wanggé, it is likely that, rather than forming part of the original narrative (or the version Nuwa heard from his parents), these details derive from the narrator—or do so to a greater extent than, for example, in the story told about Mbira. Yet not all features mentioned were typical of Lio representations of ape-men. At different points in our conversations, Nuwa variously described the creatures as “short,” “almost the same [height] as humans,” and “a bit shorter” than people. This sounds rather like Wonga’s account of Mbira’s experience. However, Nuwa responded positively when I later mentioned that I’d heard ape-men described as standing just over a meter, which would definitely be diminutive by local standards, and he went on to compare the height of the creatures (apparently ape-men in general rather than the specimens that visited Wanggé) to the height of figures he’d seen on television. These turned out to be the western Indonesian “elves” (kurcaci or tuyul) discussed in chapter 3.
Nuwa described ape-man faces as “like animals, monkeys” or “forest people” (“orang hutan,” perhaps referring to orangutans). Apparently specifying the specimens Wanggé saw (at least when he said these included one female) Nuwa said male ape-men are hairy-bodied whereas the females are less so and may be no hairier than local people. Referring more definitely to Wanggé’s visitors, he also described the creatures as looking “old.” Nuwa thought the head hair had been short and not much longer than the body hair. Both the body and head hair were “black” or “dark.”
Although evidently much older, the story of Wanggé closely resembles not just Mbira’s story but also Goda’s account of Seké’s experiences. All three men were visited by ape-men while occupying field-huts close to cultivated gardens surrounded by forest. In two instances the gardens were located at a higher elevation than the huts, though this arrangement is not unusual in Lio. Before their hominoid visitors arrived, both Seké and Mbira were calling out in the night to drive off animals. Wanggé was not so engaged. Yet the fact that the ape-men called to him from somewhere higher than his hut, as did the creatures that responded to Mbira’s and Seké’s cries, reveals another parallel with the other two stories.
All in all, the similarities suggest we may be dealing with a conventional form of narrative into which different informants have inserted different details regarding specific characters. Still, the story of Wanggé is most similar to Mbira’s tale, and this is both the most recent and the most naturalistic. Wanggé’s story contains the only clear reference I recorded to hominoids coming to warm themselves by people’s fires. Yet this may be implicit in the stories told by Mbira and Seké, where ape-men approached field-huts in front of which these men, too, had built fires. Interestingly enough, hominoids attracted to manmade fires also appear in stories from other parts of the world—from the neighboring island of Sumba to Mongolia to nineteenth-century California.2 Finally, in Mbira’s story and the legend of Wanggé, the ape-men were physically similar. Neither was particularly short; in fact, the height mentioned by Mbira’s sister exceeded all others I recorded. Also, while in Nuwa’s account of Wanggé’s experience only female ape-man had relatively hairless bodies, the creature described in Mbira’s story (whose sex was not specified) was also not particularly hairy.
Differing in several respects from the foregoing narratives, I recorded two other secondhand accounts of ape-men seen near human habitations. The first concerns a man named Ligu who—like Seké, Mbira, and Wanggé—encountered an ape-man approaching a remote field-hut. This was told by Ligu’s son, Muda, who was sixty-eight years old at the time. The reputed incident occurred in the early 1950s.
One night Ligu was guarding his maize field. In the evening he heard a sound he thought was a wild pig; then later, around midnight, a humanlike figure, an adult male with fully developed genitalia, appeared in front of Ligu’s hut. It was naked, and just over a meter in height—about the same size as a small boy the narrator pointed to, who stood 1.1 meters (3 feet, 7 inches) tall. Its body was covered in sparse hair, and the face, including the chin, resembled a monkey’s. Ligu asked, “who are you,” and the hominoid responded with exactly the same question!
Though the details could be clearer, the hominoid apparently remained for a time by Ligu’s hut. Ligu prepared to shoot it with an arrow, but fearing there might be a serious consequence, he hesitated, and the ape-man grabbed the bow from his hand. The hominoid then ran off, so Ligu summoned several companions to pursue the creature. Though they searched all night, they could not find it. Then, on the following day, the searchers discovered the ape-man had taken refuge in a nearby cave. The men gathered a large quantity of palm fiber, placed this inside the cave, and set it alight. However, the creature was able to escape through another hole. At some point someone grabbed the hominoid by the arm, but it broke free and fled; even five men could not restrain it. On another occasion—whether before or after the cave-burning was not made clear—the same ape-man gave Ligu a wooden cudgel with magical properties.
Including a speaking hominoid visiting a field-hut, a cave-burning episode, and the transfer of supernatural benefits by way of a material relic, Ligu’s story reads like a potpourri of mythical and magical ideas regarding ape-men. Considered as a possible account of actual events, therefore, it seems less credible than other stories about ape-men voluntarily visiting human habitations. Nonetheless, the narrator’s description of the subject’s physical appearance sounds completely naturalistic, and all but one of the accounts reviewed so far—Mbira’s tale—contain at least one fantastical element.
The next account is even more realistic. This is perhaps significant since it was first related to me as an eyewitness report—as it may well have been. The narrator was Reku, a fifty-year-old man from a mountain village some distance above Moni, a roadside settlement that now provides services to tourists visiting the famous three crater lakes atop nearby Mount Kelimutu. A school teacher currently resident in the north coastal town of Maumere, Reku was introduced to me in 2015 while I was visiting his elderly mother-in-law to inquire about another matter. The following summarizes what he told me on our first meeting.
One evening between six and seven o’clock, when he was about twenty and still living with his parents on the slopes of Kelimutu, Reku opened the front door of their dwelling to see an ape-man walking through a nearby maize garden. Apparently alarmed by the opening door, the creature moved away quickly. It was erect, bipedal, and over a meter tall (3 feet, 3 inches), and the head looked bald. Because it was visible only from the back, Reku couldn’t say whether the face or body were hairy. But the creature did appear “strong,” which Reku explained to mean thickset and not thin or slight. As it moved through the cornfield, it held its arms forward, pushing the stalks aside. At this time the maize was over a meter in height and approaching 1.5 meters (4 feet, 11 inches), and the figure “was almost as tall as the corn.” Though it was getting dark and misty—a condition common year-round at these high altitudes—Reku said he could see the hominoid because the field was very close to his house.
When I interviewed him a second time, Reku said the ape-man was walking toward him when he opened the door but then immediately turned around and entered (or reentered) the garden. But if so, it’s not clear why he didn’t see more of the face. When I asked whether the figure might have been an ordinary human, Reku simply responded that it was very short and bald—apparently meaning that he took the baldness as a sign the hominoid was mature or elderly yet too small for an adult human. Reku never saw the creature again, nor did he hear of other people nearby seeing anything similar, though in the same conversation he mentioned that someone had recently found village pigs that had been killed.
It was at the end of this second conversation that Reku, after previously representing himself as the sole witness, suddenly asserted that it was not he but his late father who’d seen the ape-man and had described the incident immediately afterward. I didn’t find this attribution entirely convincing, partly because, on this occasion, Reku had been called away from another task to speak to me, needed to get back to it, and clearly wanted to bring our conversation to a close. It’s also possible that, even though at the beginning he didn’t seem particularly reluctant to discuss the topic, by this point Reku wanted to distance himself from the incident. Be that as it may, I found his story quite compelling—and comparable to sighting reports detailed in later chapters.
More definitely secondhand is a report of an experience claimed by a young man, about thirty years old, named Tiwa. According to Boka, the narrator and a leading man in a mountain village in central Lio, Tiwa was too embarrassed to tell me his story himself because, unlike most people his age, he was illiterate. So Boka, a man who regularly hosted me in his village and assisted me in other investigations, had Tiwa describe the experience to him the day before he related it to me. Obviously, the arrangement was not ideal. But Boka was a man I’d always found trustworthy, and besides, he mentioned that he’d heard Tiwa’s story a month or two after the incident occurred.
Some ten years prior to 2016, when Boka recounted the tale, Tiwa and his now-deceased father were returning home late one night from another village after a gambling game, when they came across a strange creature sitting on a large boulder. From a squatting position the creature “jumped away” to a higher spot, “holding its hands behind its head” as it did so. On seeing this, Tiwa’s father, who was walking behind, pulled Tiwa back and stepped in front of him. Being ignorant of such things, Tiwa asked what it was, and the father identified it as a lai ho’a (ape-man). The thing was small, like a child of five or six years. (Boka also compared the height to that of a nearby child, who stood 1.05 meters [3 feet, 5 inches] tall.) Tiwa compared the face, though generally human in form, to that of a “grasshopper.” Though the comparison could conceivably reflect the jumping movement, Boka thought Tiwa meant that the hominoid appeared gaunt, with sunken cheeks. The body, too, was thin. The head was bald on top, with hair growing only at the back.
The grasshopper comparison is interesting because grasshoppers also have relatively large eyes, but Tiwa never mentioned the eyes. In response to my questions, Boka provided further details of Tiwa’s encounter. It occurred near a stream at a spot distant from any settlement, when the moon was bright, thus allowing a reasonably clear view of the subject. When I asked about the legs, Boka thought these too were humanlike. Tiwa had said each foot had only two toes, but his father had inferred this from footprints he later found nearby. The arms too were humanlike but “short”—though in comparison to what, the narrator could not say.
In view of the several peculiar (though quite specific) details of the subject and the fact that Tiwa never mentioned body hair, it is unlikely that Boka would have concocted this story from his own general knowledge of ape-men. He would have had no particular reason to do so. And Boka had never seen an ape-man himself.
Like Tiwa’s tale, the next story differs from most secondhand accounts because it doesn’t feature ape-men visiting either dwellings or cultivations. It is also set in a far more distant past. The story concerns a man named Kowa who, perhaps around 1910, had a brush with two ape-men in a forest while traveling from his village to his garden. It was told by Kowa’s fifty-nine-year-old grandson, named Dugo, who remembered his grandfather from the time Dugo was about twelve years old. Kowa died when Dugo was in his twenties, by which time, Dugo thought, Kowa was ninety years old. Dugo estimated the old man’s age at the time of the incident as around twenty-five.
Early one morning Kowa was walking alone on the way to his garden, following the course of a stream, when he came to a place where there is a high waterfall. On a cliff near the top of the fall, he saw what from a distance looked like small children. They were “jumping about,” apparently playing, at the edge of the cliff. Fearing they might fall off the cliff, Kowa shouted out, warning them of the danger. But they ignored him. Kowa then climbed up to the spot, but when he arrived the hominoids grabbed hold of him. Despite their small size, they were extremely strong. Kowa was thus unable to free himself, and in the ensuing struggle they threw him down the slope. When he finally recovered—apparently, he had lost consciousness for a time—the hominoids had gone. It was only then that he realized they could not have been human and must have been ape-men.
When he fell Kowa broke his lower jaw and remained disfigured for the rest of his life. His face was “crooked,” so water would dribble from the corner of his mouth whenever he drank. From this encounter, Dugo suggested, his grandfather may have become a “man of power;” he was well known as a mystical practitioner, and—unusually—he even professed to be a witch. Still, the idea that the hominoids were the source of the older man’s powers was only the grandson’s speculation. Answering my questions, Dugo said his grandfather had described the ape-men as naked, tailless, and hairy; he added spontaneously that the body hair was sparse and grew only in certain places, including the chest. But it is not clear if the old man had actually related these details or whether the younger man was drawing on his own impressions of ape-men. And when I spoke to Dugo the following year (2017), he was not sure his grandfather had mentioned whether the hominoids were hairy-bodied or not.
As told by his grandson, Kowa’s story seems quite realistic. Dugo was one of a number of Lio who spoke of ape-men as able to change shape. Yet neither this nor any other supernatural ability is mentioned in the story, only the hominoids’ great physical strength. As such, the tale is one example where an older representation, in this instance dating to the early part of the twentieth century, appears more naturalistic than more recent stories of ape-men. Another may be Wanggé’s story as related by Nuwa.
Kowa’s story is unusual insofar as it describes ape-men physically attacking and permanently injuring a human protagonist. Another, rather briefer, secondhand report had a hominoid killing a human. In the early 1940s (during the time of the Japanese occupation) dogs belonging to an unnamed man chased an ape-man that had entered his garden into a tree. The man then struck the hominoid with a stick. But, unaffected by the blow, the creature struck back at the man, “breaking all of his bones” and ending his life. It then proceeded to eat his corpse—the only reference I ever recorded to an ape-man consuming human flesh.
By contrast, several stories describe people killing ape-men, as, of course, do myths and legends reviewed in the previous chapter—for example, by burning caves with hominoids inside. We might also recall the ancestor Péro threatening two ape-men with death and Ligu’s thwarted attempt to shoot an arrow at a hominoid visitor. Rather more prosaically, a man in central Lio told me about a (now-deceased) highlander whose dogs chased and killed an ape-man, perhaps in 2001 or 2002. From the carcass, the dog owner, a mystical practitioner, retrieved one or more bones, which he retained as magical relics. Specifically, he would carry these on his person to render himself invisible.
Another secondhand report described an inadvertent killing of an ape-man. The narrator was Sipo, a young man employed as a modern travel guide who’d heard it around 2010 or 2011 from a man named Tuka, whom he’d met in a highland village in northern Lio. Sipo was not entirely sure whether the killer had been Tuka or someone else. The incident took place some years prior to their meeting, but how many years the travel guide never asked.
At the time, something was stealing tubers from villagers’ gardens. Cultivators suspected wild pigs. One night, a man—either Tuka or another man—was guarding his plot, armed with a bow. In the dark he heard an unseen creature he thought was a pig and so drew his bow and released an arrow. (Sipo thought the intruder might first have been caught in a snare, but he couldn’t remember.) However, when the archer inspected his kill, it looked human. Although “hairy like a monkey,” it had the form of a child standing perhaps between 60 and 70 centimeters (2 feet and 2 feet, 4 inches). The face also looked human and resembled the face of an old person.
Before drawing his bow, the garden owner exclaimed, “I’m going to shoot you,” whereupon the victim—in the manner often described as typical of ape-men—repeated his words verbatim. Why the archer didn’t infer from this that the creature was not a pig, Sipo couldn’t say. And though Sipo suspected that Tuka had been the killer, the man was reluctant to acknowledge this—because, Sipo thought, he was scared of confessing to having killed something so humanlike.
Though slim on details and generally vague, Sipo’s secondhand account contains themes found in other stories, including cultivators threatening ape-men with bows and hominoids stealing tubers. As regards ape-men being mistaken for other creatures and thus killed accidentally, the story also resembles a report I heard directly from an eyewitness. In 2005 I was talking about ape-men to people in the administrative subdistrict of Kotabaru, in a settlement several kilometers landward of Tuka’s village, thus closer to Lio’s north coast. During the conversation one man mentioned that his nephew had once seen an ape-man. As luck would have it, not long afterward the nephew, a man in his late twenties named Laka, showed up. Laka appeared nervous, even frightened, when I introduced myself and mentioned my interest. But pressed by his uncle, he reluctantly told his tale.
About two years previously, Laka and another young man, named Mité, had been guarding a paddy field at night when they heard what they thought was a water buffalo running loose. Exercising a traditional right to kill any livestock that enter cultivated fields, Mité shot the animal with an arrow. But once the carcass was discovered, the creature turned out not to be a buffalo. Or rather, as Laka expressed it, “the buffalo (had) disappeared”—a way of speaking discussed in chapter 3 when unpacking Lio claims about disappearing and transforming ape-men. What he and his companion found instead, Laka said, terrified him. While generally hominoid, the body was small and thin, no more than 10 to 15 centimeters (4 to 6 inches) wide. The limbs were like those of a monkey as were the body hair and ears. The creature also had a tail, but this was only about 20 centimeters long (less than 8 inches), far shorter than the tails of local macaques.
Rejecting my suggestion that the creature may simply have been a monkey, Laka said the head was large in relation to the body and the face was unlike a monkey’s. Unable to describe it, Laka characterized the face as “unlike anything [he] had ever seen.” Two canines grew from the creature’s lower jaw, and it looked “vicious.” Before it died, it made several sounds, including sounds like a dog, a cat, and a child crying. Laka claimed not to know what happened to the body. After he departed, though, others present suggested that Laka and Mité had buried it so they could later retrieve the bones.
The circumstances of our conversation left something to be desired. I was never able to meet Laka again in 2005, and when I attempted to do so years later, I learned he was in jail for having stolen two of his uncle’s buffalo. A local man who introduced me to the Kotabaru villagers thought Laka had been frightened of me because I was a stranger and, possibly for the same reason, was especially reluctant to reveal his involvement in killing a humanlike creature. (Recall that he claimed that not he but his companion—whom I was never able to fully identify—had dispatched the thing.) It is also conceivable that, because of what he interpreted as a humanlike appearance, Laka had not accurately described its facial features, portraying these as more animal-like. In fact, nothing in Laka’s demeanor inspired confidence, nor did anything I subsequently heard about the man. So on these grounds, his story remains suspect.
All the same, it is interesting that, unlike Tuka’s victim, Laka never mentioned the creature he encountered echoing human speech—a difference suggesting Sipo, the narrator of Tuka’s story, possibly added this detail while retelling what he’d heard from Tuka. The point, of course, applies equally to seemingly fantastical features of other secondhand stories. It’s also noteworthy that, taken as a whole, secondhand accounts include fewer implausible details than many popular accounts of hominoids given by non-eyewitnesses. For example, none mentions flying or transforming ape-men, and none describes hominoids with tails. Interestingly, the one report that did speak of tails and, if only implicitly, transformation was Laka’s. But, ironically, Laka claimed to be reporting what he himself had seen!
Without questioning the original observers it’s obviously impossible to say whether seemingly fantastic details of secondhand accounts—or, indeed, details of any kind—were part of the original story or are embellishments added by narrators. But whatever we make of them, secondhand stories have more in common than just being secondhand. For they reveal a number of themes that, although not exclusive to such stories, nevertheless occur in several instances.
The most common is an ape-man (or ape-men) visiting a human dwelling, typically a remote field-hut (e.g., the stories told by Seké, Mbira, Nuwa, and Ligu). A variant theme is someone coming across a hominoid in a cultivated plot (Tuka, Laka)—also the setting of the myth of Péro and legendary encounters, described in the last chapter, concerning men who obtained relics from ape-men caught in traps. In a more realistic vein most human participants are described as guarding their fields at night against intrusive animals. In fact, only the incidents reported by Tiwa and Kowa don’t reveal either of these themes. But just as common to secondhand stories, all involve close encounters with ape-men and in most instances a sustained interaction between hominoids and humans (for example, an exchange of words). As we’ll see in the next three chapters, eyewitness reports tend to concern more distant and more fleeting observations. And almost all seem more naturalistic and, therefore, more credible.