Wild Ducks Flying Backward (4 page)

The Cannibal King Wants His Din-Din

W
hen the roosters that scratch in the yard of Brastagi’s best hotel crowed me awake that steamy tropical dawn, I, personally, wasn’t feeling all that cocky. In retrospect, however, I suppose I might be forgiven had I rolled out of bed with a bit of attitude because—believe it or not—before the Sumatran sun would set, I, an unassuming, modern, civilized commoner with a taste for donuts and garden vegetables, would be brandishing the savage scepter of a man-eating monarchy. That’s right. Tom, King of the Cannibals!

The previous day had been interesting enough, much of it spent at a jungle outpost that functions as an orangutan rehabilitation center. No, no, Indonesia’s population of big red apes isn’t plagued by drug or alcohol problems, but some of the goofily beautiful animals (imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger crossed with Lucille Ball and the prototype for the Gerber Baby) do suffer an addiction of an even more dangerous sort. Captured as infants to be pets in the households of the rich, they develop a fondness for and a dependency on human companionship. When they grow too large and powerful to be any longer manageable around the house, the domesticated primates are turned over to a government agency that transports them to a wilding compound in the mountains where they’re gradually taught to fend for themselves and be mistrustful of men. An excellent idea, of course, since every living thing on this planet, including men, would be wise to be mistrustful of men. But I digress.

My little group was in northwestern Sumatra to raft the Alas, a remote river that cuts through the rainforest with a silver track, offering a few thrilling rapids, but, most alluringly, daily opportunities to spy on truly wild orangutans and, if we were lucky, an Asian rhino or a tiger or two. (We tried not to consider possible encounters with cobras or kraits.)

An exploratory party from Sobek, the California-based adventure company, had accomplished the very first rafting of the Alas only months before, and we—eight paying passengers, four Sobek guides, and an Indonesian forest ranger who spent his spare time reading Louis L’Amour westerns—were to be the second rafters ever to run the strand.

So serenely did we conceal our nervous excitement that morning that we could have been compared to a bag of marshmallows at a Girl Scout camp. After nibbling at the hotel’s advertised “American breakfast” (chilled fried eggs, diced papaya, and processed cheese), we hurried aboard a snub-nosed buslike vehicle of unknown manufacture to be driven to the spot deep in the leafy hills where we’d be putting our inflatable boats in the water.

Adventure travel is by definition unpredictable, however, and we never reached the Alas, alas, at least not that day. Instead, acting on a fortuitous tip from a Mobil Oil geologist that a rare daylong exhumation ceremony was about to unfold in an isolated village of the Karo Batak tribe, we detoured, parallel-parked between two water buffalo, and, following the oilman’s crude map, hiked five miles into an anthropologist’s dream.

Aside from the occasional oil explorer, timber cruiser, or misguided Christian missionary, the Karo Batak had never been exposed to blue-eyed devils. Yet, when—blue eyes as wide as poker chips—our foreign mob suddenly appeared out of nowhere, we were received as honored guests. So gracious was their hospitality, in fact, that after a confab, tribal leaders declared that a pair from our group would be crowned king and queen for the day.

Being both very strong and very sweet, the guide Beth was a logical choice for queen. Why they chose me as their king I haven’t a clue. Certainly it had nothing to do with my literary reputation, although some novelists are known to practice
verbal
cannibalism, biting and gnawing on one another insatiably at cocktail parties or in reviews.

At any rate, our hosts escorted Beth and me to sexually segregated longhouses where they wrapped us in regal sarongs and other colorful raiments and hung about thirty pounds of solid gold jewelry—the village treasury—from our respective necks and appendages. (They must have figured we were too weighted down to skip town.)

There was then a royal procession back to the principal longhouse, where now on display were the remains of seven persons recently exhumed from the graves where they’d lain for years while their families saved enough money to fund the ceremony that would finally usher their spirits into the Karo Batak version of heaven. The bones were lovingly washed, dried, and stacked in seven neat piles, a skull atop each pile like some kind of Halloween cherry. Then the celebration began.

Beth disappeared into a shadowy corner where she remained for hours (afraid, perhaps, that her regal counterpart might demand his conjugal rights?), but my “subjects” and I commenced to dance ritualistically around those graveyard sundaes. Danced around them and around them and around them. Energized by betel nut, the chewing of which stained my numb mouth the color of Buck Rogers’s rocketship, and inspired by two talented groups of drummers and snake-charmer flute tooters, I managed to learn the proper repetitive steps and to tirelessly dance the day away.

Now, to be quite truthful, the Karo Batak appeared innocently tame and, despite periodic reports to the contrary, are believed not to have lunched upon any of their fellows in about four generations. Many are Christian (leading me to wonder if they might especially enjoy Holy Communion: that is, “swallow the leader”). Nevertheless, when toward evening an unappetizing zombie-gray stew was served, we intruders politely excused ourselves—as an abdicating monarch, I shook every hand in the village—and took the long muddy trek back to our bus.

At the very worst, the stew meat was dog, and probably it had come from upcountry cousins of those Hotel Brastagi roosters who had cock-a-doodled our reveille. Be that as it may, I shall never cease to insist that once upon a time, in the tiger-haunted hills of Sumatra, I reigned as King of the Cannibals. And at those who might dispute that claim, I’m fully prepared to hurl the ancient and traditional curse of the Karo Batak: “I pick the flesh of your relatives from between my teeth.”

The New York Times Magazine,
1986

The Day the Earth Spit Warthogs

T
he first time I was bitten by a tsetse fly (Ouch! Son of a bitch! Those suckers
hurt
!), I was convinced that in days, if not hours, I would be nodding out, snoring on the job, dreaming at the switch, yawning like a heavy-metal rocker stranded in Salt Lake City, just another droopy victim of the dreaded and sorrowful “sleeping sickness.”

During my two weeks in the Selous, my tender flesh was subsequently stabbed, my vintage blood swilled by at least forty tsetse flies, so far without dire consequence—although I must confess that as I begin this report, I’m starting to feel a teeny bit drowsy. Should I doze off in the middle of a sentence (an experience probably not uncommon to some of my readers), I want it known there’s no regrets. The lethal lullaby of an infected tsetse (the most romantically named of all flies) is arguably preferable to the anesthetic drone of computers, freeway traffic, and television sets; and the wild, hot beauty of the Selous is worth almost any risk.

The Selous is the largest uninhabited game reserve in the world. Located in central Tanzania, a couple of hundred miles south of Mount Kilimanjaro, the Selous is no national park where tourists sprawl on rattan sofas, sipping gin and listening to the BBC as from the air-conditioned safety of posh lodges they spy shamelessly on mating lions. In the Selous, one doesn’t catch a safari bus to the corner of Zebra and Watusi. To see the Selous, one hikes and one paddles. And when an aggravated hippopotamus is charging one’s rubber raft, one paddles very hard, indeed.

When I announced to family and friends that I was going hiking and river rafting through a vast patch of African cabbage, they didn’t ask why. They must have realized that after three years bent over an idling and backfiring novel, skinning my knuckles on every bolt and wrench in the literary toolbox, I needed to blow a little carbon out of my own exhaust. Perhaps they also sensed that after my recent dealings with editors, agents, lawyers, producers, and reviewers, I might be primed for the company of crocodiles.

Nobody was particularly concerned that I was off to walk with the animals, talk with the animals, squawk with the animals. After all, I once turned down an offer of manatee steak in a weird restaurant in Cuba, and I have made it a lifelong practice never to date women who wear leopard-skin pillbox hats. My beast karma was pretty good.

Nevertheless, having heard AMA terror stories of schistosomiasis and malaria, of elephantiasis-enlarged testicles so huge the poor owner has to push them around in a wheelbarrow, and yes, of the narcoleptic legacy of the tsetse fly, family and friends fretted one and all about tropical disease. Apparently, the evident scares us less than the invisible: we figure it’s easier to outrun a bear than a bugbear.

Well, folks, not to worry. First, I was stuffed to the gullet with malaria prophylactics and pincushioned with inoculations against the most prevalent tropical maladies (unfortunately, there’s no [yawn] serum that wards off “sleeping sickness”), and second, the very fact that the Selous is unoccupied by humans or farm animals means disease is rarely contracted there. In the Selous, the tsetse is all pester and no siesta.
Ah,
but I’d overlooked one thing. The Selous
itself
is a tropical disease: feverish, lethargic, exotic, achy, sweaty, hallucinogenic, and, as I’ve learned since coming home, recurrent.

Just when I think that I’m over it, that rush-hour gridlock, income-tax audits, and two viewings of
Amadeus
have worked their acculturizing cures, I suffer yet another attack of Selous flu. It comes on with a humid vapor, with a vibration of membrane, with howls and hoofbeats that nobody else in the room can hear, and although I might be in the midst of something truly important, such as choosing which brand of burglar alarm to install on my newly violated front door, it never fails to distract me with memories of a sweeter, cleaner, if less comfortable place; a place where clocks dissolve, where even death is honest, and primitive equalities prevail….

It’s our first day in the bush. At this point, I’m still a tsetse virgin. From the port city of Dar es Salaam, we have traveled into the interior on a toy railroad: one locomotive, one car, and narrow-gauge track, all three built by the Chinese. It was definitely not a main line. It was a chow mein line.

Okay, okay, but the chow on the train
was
pretty good. We bought it through our windows at brief village stops. There were cashew nuts, absolute state-of-the-art mangoes, and thumb-size bananas that melted in our mouths. Prices were so cheap they made us feel like muggers.

During the five-hour rail trip, we’d gotten acquainted with our leaders, employees of Sobek Expeditions, a company of, well, reasonably sane adventurers from Angels Camp, California. The Sobek people had chased thrills, chills, and spills all over the globe, but they were as excited as the rest of us when, halfway into the ride, we began to spot a few animals: a baboon here, a warthog there, a small herd of distant bushbuck, and in the ponds and marshes (lavendered with water lilies the color of Oscar Wilde’s hankies) yellow-billed storks taller than most Little League second basemen, poised there among the lily pads as if waiting for a throw from center field.

Yes, it was exciting, but there was a bit of a theme-park atmosphere about it as well; as if those random creatures had been placed in our field of vision by a San Diego entrepreneur. Then, suddenly, a pair of giraffes bounced into view. When the engineer mischievously sounded his whistle, the giraffes panicked. Stiff stilts churning, necks waving like rubber bands, they bolted toward rather than away from us, and in their confusion very nearly crashed into the side of our car. One wheeling giraffe was so close I could have flipped a cashew into its terrified muzzle. Oh, Boy! Oh, Cheetah! Oh, Tarzan and Jane! This was Africa, baby, this was the real thing! But it was not yet the Selous.

Our first day in the bush finds us up at dawn. Having only seen dawn from the other side of the clock, I never imagined daybreak might actually be pleasant. The tsetselike sting of 5:00
A.M
. is softened by the sight of an elephant family, Mom, Dad, Bud, and Sis, carelessly mashing a million dewdrops as they jumbo down a deep green valley to a water hole.

We watch the elephants from the rustic veranda of the Stiegler’s Gorge Safari Camp, the last outpost of humanity we’ll enjoy before we venture into the Selous. We had slept at the camp, or rather,
tried
to sleep, for an all-night newsboy choir of hyenas periodically sang us awake. Late the previous afternoon, the train had deposited us at a village called Fuga, the end of the line, where we—eighteen of us, including the guides—were met by a trio of Land Rovers and driven for a couple of battering hours down an Armageddon of a road, a moonscape of a lane to Stiegler’s Gorge. By the time our gear was stowed in our respective huts, it was dark and a rusty gong had summoned us to a dinner of green beans and steak.

Dave, a veteran guide, had hoisted a morsel of that steak aloft in the lanternshine. “Impala,” he had said authoritatively, studying his fork. “At first I thought it might be sable. Africa is an adventure in meat.”

At any rate, it’s our first morning in the bush, and a detachment of us hike for three hours from the Stiegler’s Gorge complex, beneath a blue sky that’s already hissing like a blowtorch. Down in Tanzania, it’s July in January, and if the sun has anything to say about it, there’s a fireworks display all day, every day.

The savanna grass is green but dry, and it crunches underfoot. J’nanga, our native game guide, steps noiselessly on the bare patches between clumps of grass, but we cement-footed Americans sound as if we’re breakdancing in a silo of Rice Krispies. Our gauche sneakers scuff at fresh cheetah tracks, at shiny licorice drops of wildebeest dung, at impala skulls as bleached as a surfer’s eyebrows, at midget wildflowers, and a mega-Manhattan of ants.

Scattered about the plain are trees that resemble huge stone jars; trees that resemble dendritic delicatessens festooned with salami and pepperoni; trees that appear to be growing upside down; trees that look like 50’s haircuts, their foliage organically barbered into Sha Na Na flattops; and—outnumbering all the rest—leafless trees bristling with thorns so long and sharp they could pierce the heart of a bureaucrat.

The trees, the flowers, even the piles of gnu poo are attended by butterflies, some as tiny and yellow as buttercup petals, others as big as pie tins and colored like Shanghai silk. There are also a great many bees. They’re not killer bees, but we haven’t learned that yet, and it is while fending off one of these buzzers that Flo falls, cameras and all, into a warthog burrow.

Warthogs aren’t killers, either, except maybe when cornered, but with their curved tusks and flatiron faces, they look like the nightmares of a lapsed Jew who’s just had his first bite of ham. The steel-wool warthog, not pink Porky, is the pig that ought to have the job of announcing “That’s all, folks!” Who’d argue? On another game walk, a week later, seven of these fearsome swine suddenly came barreling, one by one, out of a deep burrow that we were innocently passing, nearly knocking the pins from under a startled Yvonne and planting the fear of the Ultimate Bacon in each of us. On our calendars, that day became known as The Day the Earth Spit Warthogs, and Yvonne, for one, will probably devote January 21 to prayer and fasting for the rest of her life.

On this, our first day in the bush, there are no pigs at home, however, and nothing is bruised except Flo’s dignity. It is while she’s brushing herself off that J’nanga sights a herd of buffalo.

There are about two hundred of them, weighing in at three tons each (and it doesn’t take Ronald McDonald’s calculator to figure that that’s a whole lot of McBuffalo burgers). Fortunately, we’re downwind of the herd, so we’re able to move within forty yards of it before we’re noticed.

There’s a large fallen tree in our vicinity, and J’nanga directs us into its dead branches. We watch the buffalo and they watch us. It’s difficult to tell who’s more nervous. The mature bulls station themselves at the perimeter of the herd, glowering with almost tangible menace. They paw the ground and snort short Hemingway sentences, resonant with ill will.

J’nanga is thinking he might have made a mistake. The Cape buffalo, rotten-tempered, heavy of hoof and horn, is among Africa’s most dangerous animals, and here he’s gone and got a half-dozen honkies treed by a herd that could reduce Grand Central Station to gravel. The buffalo are indisposed to retreat, and we seem to have lost that option.

Jim, an environmentalist cowboy attorney accustomed to stalking Sierra sheep, grinds happily away with his video camera while J’nanga ponders the situation. In Jim’s ear, I whisper,
“Hatari!”
I suspect Jim has seen more John Wayne movies than I, but if he remembers Wayne’s 1962 film and recognizes the Swahili word for “danger,” he doesn’t let on. “Big
hatari
!” I whisper. He goes on videoing.

It’s hot enough in our tree to broil escargot, and even our daredevil guides are beginning to see mirages. Over there to the left: is that a grove of thorn trees or a Club Med swimming pool? Perhaps J’nanga is getting light-headed, too. He commences to whistle, shrilly, through his fingers, as if at a babe in a bikini. At the sound, the buffalo stage a semistampede. They thunder to a spot beyond the phantom tanning beds, a good eighty yards away, before stopping to resume their Cold War diplomacy.