THE NATIVE MEN approaching the survivors, residents of Uwambo and nearby villages, had all danced to celebrate the deaths of foes. They’d grieved the loss of family and friends as casualties of war. Some had shed blood in battle and drawn the blood of their enemies. Some had taken a life, or several. All could recount where those deaths had occurred and the names of their fallen foes. Some might have butchered dead enemies and tasted human flesh as a spoil of victory.
“When we killed somebody we’d have a victory dance,” said Helenma Wandik, who was a boy at the time. He accused his enemies, a clan called the Landikma, of eating the entire bodies of battle victims. He considered that barbaric. By contrast, Helenma Wandik said, his people only ate the hands of their enemies, severed after death and cooked in a pit with hot rocks.
The bad news, then, was that at least some of the bogeyman stories that Margaret, McCollom, and Decker had heard about the natives eating the flesh of their enemies were true. The nearly naked, adze-wielding men who emerged from the jungle had no qualms about killing. And they had every reason to consider it wise to strike first at strangers.
The natives sorted the world into three useful categories of people: themselves, their allies, and their enemies. They lived or cooperated with the first two. They routinely tried to kill, and avoid being killed by, the third. Margaret, McCollom, and Decker obviously didn’t belong to the first two categories. But they also didn’t resemble the natives’ usual enemies. The survivors didn’t know it, but their best hope would be if the people of Uwambo continued to think they were spirits.
One piece of good fortune for Margaret, McCollom, and Decker was that the Yali people of Uwambo weren’t among the natives who’d come into contact with the Archbold expedition. They owed no payback to appease the spirit of the man killed by gunshot seven years earlier.
STANDING IN THE native sweet potato garden, separated by a gully and ten thousand years of what’s commonly called progress, the survivors and the natives waited for someone to make the first move.
In every immediate way, the natives had the upper hand. They outnumbered the survivors by more than ten to one. They were healthy and well fed. None suffered burns, head injuries, or gangrene. None had lived for three sleep-deprived days on sips of water and hard candy. Their sharpened stone adzes made a joke of McCollom’s Boy Scout knife.
Beyond Shangri-La, of course, the situation was different.
By conventional measures of wealth, education, medicine, and technological achievement, the world represented by Margaret, McCollom, and Decker far surpassed the natives’ Shangri-La. Yet looked at another way, the survivors’ civilization hadn’t advanced all that far from the culture of the Stone Age warriors wearing penis gourds. The crash survivors were parts of a military machine engaged in the largest and deadliest war in history, one that was about to become far deadlier.
As the survivors faced the natives, American political leaders were considering the use of a new super weapon, a bomb that could level a city and plunge any survivors into a primitive existence. The bomb’s makers were still uncertain whether it would work, but if it did, it would eerily fulfill the warning in Lost Horizon of a future in which “a single-weaponed man might have matched a whole army.”
Albert Einstein once said, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Viewed in that light, the people of Shangri-La were the most advanced warriors on earth.
At the moment, though, Margaret wasn’t thinking about the moral and practical relativity of modern and traditional warfare. She stared at the men with the stone-and-wood axes, their dark skin glistening from a coating of pig grease. As she waited for orders from McCollom, a thought ran through her mind: how awful to have survived a plane crash only to end up in a native stew.
AFTER THE B-17 stopped waggling its wings and flew off, McCollom had relaxed for the first time since the crash. Now, as the natives approached, he leaped back into action, barking orders at his companions.
“We haven’t any weapon,” he told Margaret and Decker, wisely discounting the value of his little knife. “There is nothing we can do but act friendly. Smile as you’ve never smiled before, and pray to God it works.”
McCollom told them to hold out their hands with their remaining Charms—they were sick of the candies by then, anyway. He added his knife to the paltry peace offerings.
“Stand up—and smile,” McCollom said.
For the previous hour, since their discovery by the search plane, Margaret and Decker had been sitting in the dirt of the garden clearing. Exhausted and in pain, Margaret was unsure she could stand again. But with McCollom commanding her to rise, she struggled to her feet, as did Decker.
McCollom watched as the natives began to line up behind a fallen tree, perhaps twenty-five yards from where the survivors stood. By McCollom’s count there were about forty of them, all adult males. Margaret, possibly exaggerating in her fright, put the number at more like one hundred. Over their shoulders they carried what she called “wicked-looking stone axes.” At least one carried a long spear.
Margaret felt her hand shaking, rattling the Charms like dice. As she put it, “The bottom had long since dropped out of my stomach.” She wrote in her diary: “Black heads began to pop out from behind jungle trees. ‘Smile, damn it!’ rasped McCollom. We smiled. Oh, we smiled to high heaven. We smiled for our lives. We smiled and held out the candy and the jackknife and then we waited as the black men advanced.”
McCollom heard one of his companions darkly muse: “Well, maybe they’ll feed us before they kill us.” He didn’t recall who said it, but it sounded like Decker.
The noises the survivors had thought resembled dogs yapping stopped. After a brief pause, the silence was replaced with what Margaret called “an excited and frantic jabbering, accompanied by much gesturing. We couldn’t tell whether that was a good sign or bad. We could only fasten the smiles on more securely.”
A gully separated the survivors’ clearing and a knoll at the edge of the jungle where the natives emerged. A long, fallen tree served as a bridge across the gully. An older man stepped forward. He was wiry and alert, naked except for a necklace with a narrow piece of shell that hung over his sternum and a penis gourd more than a foot long that pointed toward the sky. McCollom and the others took him to be the chief.
He beckoned the survivors forward toward the log bridge. No one moved. He waved them toward him again, more forcefully this time.
“I think we ought to go,” McCollom said. “We’d better humor them.”
Margaret didn’t move. Her feet and legs hurt so badly that she could barely stand. She was sure she’d fall off the slippery log. But that wasn’t her only hesitation. She despaired at the thought that, having survived the crash and the march down the mountain, and having just been spotted by a rescue plane, she was being asked to deliver herself to men she thought were savages and, worse, cannibals.
“Honest, McCollom, I can’t walk it,” she said, “Truly, I can’t.”
“I know, Maggie,” he replied. He considered the situation briefly then decided: “Let ’em come to us.”
The survivors used their candy-filled hands to motion the natives toward them. After a brief discussion with his troops, the native leader stepped alone onto the log. McCollom thought it wise to meet him halfway, man to man. If McCollom felt afraid, he’d never admit it. As he inched forward on the log, he called back to Margaret and Decker, demanding that they keep smiling.
The natives on the other side of the gully continued talking and staring at the survivors, until they again fell quiet. “Their silence seemed a thousand times more sinister and threatening than their yapping or their chatter,” Margaret wrote. She and Decker stretched their arms forward to more submissively offer their gifts.
The two leaders edged closer on the log bridge. When they met in the middle, McCollom reached out and grasped the native’s hand. He pumped it like a cross between a politician, a car salesman, and a long-lost relative.
“How are you? Nice to meet you!” McCollom said repeatedly.
In Margaret’s recollection, the native was the one who held out his hand first, and McCollom, “weak with relief, grabbed it and wrung it.”
Either way, McCollom turned the leader’s attention to the smiling candy-bearers: “Here! Meet Corporal Hastings and Sergeant Decker.”
Regardless of who had extended his hand first, the tension was broken, and now both groups were smiling at each other. The native leader shook hands with Margaret and Decker, and in no time the rest of the natives followed suit. Margaret described the moment in her diary: “There on the knoll we held as fine a reception as any ever given by Mrs. Vanderbilt,” she wrote. “The black man who never had seen a white man and the white man who never before had met a savage on his own ground understood each other. The smiles had done it.”
As her fear ebbed, Margaret sensed that the natives weren’t fierce. They seemed shy, perhaps even afraid of the three bedraggled intruders. When she asked Decker if he thought the same thing, he shot back: “Shh, don’t tell ’em so!”
McCollom nicknamed his handshake partner “Pete,” after a college classmate. The survivors didn’t know that “Pete” and his fellow villagers thought they were spirits from the sky. And they never learned “Pete’s” real name.
“PETE” WAS WIMAYUK WANDIK, a leader though not a “chief” in Uwambo.
Wimayuk had listened closely to his clansman Yaralok Wandik describe what he saw at the crash site. Although his name meant “Fearful of War,” Wimayuk was more cautious than afraid. He’d been in many battles, and he knew the cost of war—his younger brother Sinangke Wandik had been mortally wounded in battle. He and Yaralok Wandik shared the responsibility of calling the men of Uwambo to fight. It was a role he didn’t take lightly.
He told his son Helenma Wandik, the second of his five children, that he acted warmly to the creatures he thought were sky spirits because of the way he’d learned the Uluayek legend. Although the spirits’ return meant the end of an era, Wimayuk Wandik believed that something good could come of it. He hoped the new era might be better for his people.
John McCollom with Wimayuk Wandik several weeks after the crash. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)
Also, Wimayuk Wandik was a man willing to be flexible when an opportunity presented itself. He and his fellow villagers were traders, regularly walking twenty or so miles from their homes to the Baliem Valley lands of the Dani tribe, the heart of what the outsiders called Shangri-La. They exchanged feathers from birds of paradise, string, and bows and arrows for cowrie shells, pigs, and tobacco. If a battle happened to break out while they were trading, they’d join the fight on the side of their trading partners, even if they had no beef with the enemy. It was good for business, and good fun, too. When he found the survivors smiling and offering gifts in the clearing he called Mundima—the place of the Mundi River—Wimayuk saw an opportunity to befriend the spirits.
ALTHOUGH MARGARET CONTINUED to refer to the natives as “savages” in her diary, she realized how much fiction had circulated around Hollandia about the natives:
Far from being seven feet tall, they averaged from five feet four inches to five feet seven inches in height. And certainly, only on close observation, they didn’t look very fierce. They were black as the ace of spades and naked as birds in feathering time. Their clothing consisted of a thong around their waists, from which a gourd was suspended in front and a huge triple leaf hung tail-like in back. Some wore bracelets above their elbows. There were two kinds of bracelets. Those woven of fine twigs and those made of fur. . . . All but Pete, the chief, wore snoods suspended from their heads and hanging far down their backs. At least they looked like snoods. They seemed to be made of heavy string, like a shopping bag, and they were certainly the New Guinea counterpart of a shopping catch-all. In these snoods, the natives tucked anything they had to carry. After all, they didn’t have any pockets.
Margaret wrinkled her nose at the powerful, musky scent of sweat mixed with the ash-blackened pig grease the natives smeared on their bodies: “Pete and his boys certainly needed baths and a lot of rosewater,” she wrote. “The breeze was coming from the wrong direction, and I prayed they would get tired of staring soon and go home.”
The feeling was mutual, at least about the odor. Wimayuk and Yaralok told their children that the spirits carried a terrible smell. Considering the gangrenous sores on Margaret and Decker, combined with their unwashed days in the jungle, all three survivors almost certainly reeked.
Margaret recoiled at the swarms of flies that hovered around the natives’ cuts and scratches. She marveled at the “biggest, flattest feet any of us had ever seen.” The survivors thought all the natives at the edge of the jungle were adults, but during the handshakes and greetings Margaret noticed that a group of boys had followed the men—they’d hung back until friendly relations were established.
As the greetings continued, a native started a fire—splitting open a stick and quickly rubbing a rattan vine to make a spark—to cook sweet potatoes, which the natives called hiperi. McCollom bent down and pulled up a plant he thought looked like the rhubarb he’d grown in a garden back home in Missouri. He wiped off the dirt, bit into the stalk, and felt smoke shoot from his ears.
“That’s the hottest damn stuff I ever tasted!” McCollom said later. He spit it out—sending the natives into peals of laughter. All except one.
The unamused native began protesting to “Pete” in a way that the survivors interpreted to mean that they’d trampled through his personal garden. Margaret felt afraid of the man, whom she called “Trouble Maker.” But “Pete” stepped in.
“The native who had the garden,” McCollom recalled, “he apparently started griping to the chief, and the chief, in effect turned around and said, ‘Shut up.’ And from then on we were friends.”
THE UNHAPPY MAN was almost certainly Pugulik Sambom. His objections, according to Yaralok’s daughter Yunggukwe, weren’t about the ruined crops but about the survivors themselves.
Margaret Hastings with a native child. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)
“Pugulik was yelling at everyone that something bad would happen because of the spirits,” she said through an interpreter. “He said, ‘They’re spirits! They’re spirits! They’re ghosts! Don’t go in there with them.’ ”
Yunggukwe watched as Pugulik paced back and forth on a fallen log, more scared than angry, repeating his warning that the strangers were mogat, spirits or ghosts, and certain to bring bad tidings. The woman whose legs Yunggukwe had grabbed in the field when the Gremlin Special flew overhead was Pugulik’s wife, Maruk, whose name meant “Bad.” Maruk echoed her husband’s warnings. Fortunately for the survivors, the Wandiks outnumbered the Samboms and welcomed them, spirits or not.
THE SURVIVORS TRIED to get the natives to take McCollom’s knife as a gift. They encouraged them to try the Charms.
“They handled the jackknife curiously,” Margaret wrote. “We tried to show them that the candy was to eat. We would open our mouths, pop in a piece of hard candy, smack our lips and look rapturous—though we had come to hate it like poison. Apparently they didn’t understand us. So we thought we would give the candy to some boys of ten or twelve who had accompanied Pete and his men. But when we started to feed the kids, ‘Trouble Maker’ danced up and down and shrieked until we backed off in a hurry.”
Alarmed, Margaret dug into her pocket for her compact. She popped it open and showed “Pete” his image. Delighted, Wimayuk Wandik passed the mirror from man to man. “If ever anything was calculated to make friends and influence savages, it was that cheap red enamel compact from an Army PX,” she wrote. “These naked strangers beamed and gurgled and chattered like magpies over a sight of their own faces.”
“Maggie,” Decker told her, “you ought to write home to the missionaries to stock up on compacts.”
PHYSICALLY AND EMOTIONALLY exhausted, her burned legs and feet throbbing, Margaret dropped back down to the ground. A group of natives circled around her, squatting on their haunches and staring. Using her compact, Margaret took stock of herself and understood their curiosity.
She wrote in her diary that not only was she the first white woman the natives had seen, she was “the first black-and-white person they had ever seen.” Burns from the crash had darkened the left side of her face, while the right side was unmarked. Her eyebrows and eyelashes had been singed, and her nose seemed swollen. McCollom’s jungle salon treatment didn’t help—short tufts of Margaret’s once-lustrous hair stood at attention all over her head. She didn’t know it, but even more interesting to the natives were her bright blue eyes.
As she stared at the natives and the natives stared back, Margaret felt relief. Soon it spread into affection. “At the moment, I could not have loved Pete and his followers more dearly if they had been blood brothers,” she wrote. “They had turned out to be a race of Caspar Milquetoasts”—the name of a mild-mannered comic book character—“in black face instead of head hunters or cannibals. I was duly grateful.”
McCollom brought “Pete” to Margaret and Decker to show him their injuries. The native leader nodded solemnly. Margaret detected sympathy in his reaction.
“He looked again and muttered, ‘Unh, unh, unh,’ over and over again. We knew he was trying to tell us he was sorry and wanted to help. The only native word we ever picked up was ‘Unh, unh, unh’ repeated over and over,” Margaret wrote. In fact, unh wasn’t a word in the Yali or Dani language. It was a murmur, a local equivalent of a polite listener in English saying “Hmmm” to express interest.
“Pete” examined the gash in Decker’s scalp. He stepped in close and blew into the cut. Margaret made light of it: “For the first and only time, I thought Decker was going to faint. Old Pete then came over to me and blew on my legs and hand. And I thought I would faint. Pete undoubtedly had the world’s worst case of halitosis.”
“Decker and McCollom and I came to the conclusion,” Margaret continued, “that the blowing of the chieftain’s breath on a wound was probably some native cure-all custom, like laying on of hands in other parts of the world. But Decker and I didn’t appreciate the honor.”
The survivors’ conclusion about the practice was close, but it failed to capture the full significance of the moment. Margaret and Decker had just received a remarkable gift, one that signified that the people who’d found them hurt and hungry in a sweet potato patch wanted nothing but for them to survive.
WHEN A YALI or Dani man is wounded in battle, the physical damage is almost a secondary concern. More worrisome is the possibility that the injury might dislodge the essence of his being, his etai-eken, or “seeds of singing.” A better translation: his soul.
Among people of the valley who enjoy good physical and spiritual health, the etai-eken are believed to reside in the upper part of the solar plexus, just below the front arch of the ribs. The native leader’s shell necklace, hanging as it did at just that spot, might well have been placed there to protect his etai-eken. Under pain or duress, the etai-eken are believed to retreat from the front part of the chest to a person’s back. Such a move is a spiritual calamity, a threat to an individual’s well-being that demands urgent action.
First, a specialist removes any remnants of the arrow or spear that caused the wound. Then he makes several incisions in the victim’s stomach to drain what the natives call mep mili, or “dark blood,” which is believed to cause pain and sickness. Next comes the more essential treatment. A person who is either close to the wounded warrior or especially skilled in the healing arts speaks directly to the man’s etai-eken. He coaxes the soul matter back to its proper place, blowing and whispering special pleadings in the victim’s ear. He also blows directly on the wounds.
A short time earlier, the survivors had feared that they’d be killed and eaten by Wimayuk Wandik, the native they called “Pete.” Now he was tending to their souls.
BY MID-AFTERNOON THE survivors were bushed, but the natives were so fascinated by the sky spirits that they showed no sign of leaving. Then, around four o’clock, the cold nightly rains arrived. The natives gathered up the cooked sweet potatoes—“They took the chow with them!” Decker complained—but left the knife, the compact, and the hard candy behind. It would be another starving night for the survivors.
The trio found a smooth spot of cleared ground, laid out one tarp, used the other as a cover, and went to sleep, “too weak to do much and too happy to care,” Margaret wrote. They’d scratched their way through the mountain jungle to a clearing, been spotted by a search plane, and made friends with the natives. Margaret summed it up with understatement: “It had been a big day.”
When she awoke in the middle of the night, she sensed that someone was hovering over her. Before she could scream, she recognized a man’s face: “Pete.”
“It was as plain as day that he was worried about us and had come back to see how we were. He hovered over us like a mother hen. I woke up McCollom. He took a good look at Pete and said, ‘Holy smoke! We’ve got a guardian.’ ”
Later, when she compared notes with McCollom and Decker, Margaret learned that whenever one or the other woke that night, he saw Chief Pete/Wimayuk Wandik watching over them.