The People in the Trees

  “Sit down, you two,” said Tallent, and we obediently did. “Are you hungry?” He pulled from behind him a club of yolk-yellow bananas. The entire stalk must have been three feet long, but each banana was only about three inches, though perfectly shaped and as gently curved as a sword. “Fa’a cut these down a little while ago,” he said. “Taste them—they’re delicious.”

  And they were: though clearly bananas, there was nothing mealy or starchy about them—they were juicier than I thought the fruit could be, and so sweet they left a burning singe on the tongue.

  “I asked the guides to take the others down toward the stream so I could talk to you both,” he continued. He ate a few bananas before he continued. “We’re in a delicate situation here, one I need to explain to you as best I can.” Esme adopted a serious expression, and I tried to as well. “Although we’re welcome to stay—well, perhaps the better way of putting it is that we are to be hospitably tolerated—there are certain rules, and we must be careful to respect them at all times.”

  He listed them for us. We could observe the villagers, but should not initiate conversation unless the village chief permitted us to do so. We must never touch the hogs, nor the men’s spears; nor should we feel entitled to their food, although of course if it was offered we could accept it. We must adhere to their schedule, which meant sleeping away most of the morning because we, like they, would be awake late at night (I didn’t quite see the point of this rule). We would remain out of sight of the villagers, well into the forest, until told otherwise. And most important of all, we were not ever to bring the dreamers into the village. This was for their sake as well as the villagers’.

  “But why not?” Esme asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Tallent admitted. “But I can tell you this—most of yesterday’s negotiations involved the dreamers, and it was their presence that so distressed the villagers.”

  “But they are from here,” I pressed.

  “Yes,” he said. “They knew them. Well, they knew Mua. And I think they knew Ukavi, and maybe Ivaiva and Va’ana and Vi’iu as well, just from the way they were trying not to look at them. Maybe. But regardless, they didn’t want to see them. And Mua—last night, when you were asleep, I heard him say to Fa’a again and again, ‘I must not go back there. I must not go back there.’ ”

  We were all silent for a moment, trying to interpret what Mua could have meant.

  “What did Fa’a think he was trying to say?” Esme asked.

  “He didn’t know. He only told me—and this I could see for myself—that Mua was frightened. But there was something else,” said Tallent, who stretched his arms above his head, almost as if parodying a casual gesture—but unconvincingly, because he was worried too. “He wanted to be here, he wanted to set foot in the village, but he dared not.” And we were all quiet again.

  That night it was the same scene: the unbearable smells of cooking meat, the whine and chatter of the dreamers, the throbbing manama fruit, the darkness of the forest drawing shut around me like the throat of a drawstring purse. And once again, before I fell asleep I tried to seize the scattered thoughts that were flying through my head like bees: What was the significance of the villagers knowing some of the dreamers but not others? Why was Mua craving and fearing the village, both? Why would the villagers not allow them back in? There was something, some kind of connection. I knew it, knew it for certain.

  But what?

  II.

  Time compresses and conflates one’s memories, but I think it accurate to say that soon after our unilluminating talk, things began to happen very fast indeed. In retrospect, I understood that several things were occurring simultaneously, although at the time they seemed semidiscrete events, related to but ultimately independent of one another.

  The first thing that happened was that Tallent, Esme, and I were invited by the chief to explore the village and the villagers. I realize I am somewhat understating here the significance of our discovery of the tribe, and that is perhaps because that discovery was soon to be eclipsed, far eclipsed, by my own. But now, many decades later, I must say that even without my own revelation, the village’s mere existence would have been sensational enough. In the moments of discovery, however, we were oddly muted. So many strange things had happened in the course of our journey that I believe all of us had, somewhere along our trek, begun to assume that something astonishing was awaiting us at the end of our walk, an assumption that made us take for granted what we had actually found: a lost people, a microsociety of sixty-six that had never been studied before.

  Now, I know, both from listening to some of Tallent’s and Esme’s talk and from the many books and explorations that preceded and followed our own discovery, that many others have purported to have found a lost people as well. It is almost as if every generation or so, a new group of people is unearthed (which, if you look at it from a purely mathematical standpoint, is highly unlikely. The world is quite well explored by now, and yet every decade or so, like clockwork, a new claim is made and much time and money must be spent to disprove it). But if one discounts the fraudulent claims from that number, one is left with a very small population of potentially unknown peoples. And if one looks at that population, one sees that most of those “lost” tribes are actually lost only to the white man: just because civilized society stumbles upon a group of Amazonian people does not mean that those people are unknown to dozens of other, better-documented, neighboring tribes. One of the things that made our discovery so profound was that ours was of a group of people who had not only never been seen by a white man, but rarely by a U’ivuan either. For hundreds of years they had lived and hunted and bred and died while remaining nothing more than a myth, a dark fable, half human and half monster, to the very people from whom they had originated.

  Given that, it was startling, almost unnerving, to witness the almost eerie equanimity with which the village accepted our presence. Of all the characteristics and temperamental quirks and oddities that were particular to them, it was this, their ability to readjust and recalibrate to almost anything that they encountered (or, in this case, that encountered them), that I found most compelling. In later years, of course, the village would be rediscovered multiple times by boatloads of civilized visitors, and although they came to learn the secrets of something else the villagers uniquely possessed, I would always think that they should have concentrated instead on isolating whatever gene endowed these people with such an expansive, unshakeable calm, with their ability to absorb (and in many cases simply ignore) whatever was new or disagreeable or even unfathomable.

  During these early days, while Esme and Tallent were taking notes and conducting more fruitless interviews with the dreamers and then taking more notes, I explored the village in greater detail. Initially Esme and Tallent were reluctant to disrupt or contaminate the villagers’ daily routines and so spent hours sitting like gargoyles on opposite edges of the village, watching its inhabitants toddle about their daily activities and filling entire notebooks with minute descriptions of the most mundane of activities. (Once, while Esme was bathing, I peeked inside one of her notebooks and found a six-page narrative of observing one woman’s shit, down to a many-paragraphs-long detailing of the shit itself: its consistency, color, odor, tone, texture, etc.) I, however, was bound by no such ethics, real or otherwise, and was happy to step over the forest’s boundary and into the circle of the village.

  I liked to watch the children most. They were smaller than the children I had seen in America and, unexpectedly, more handsome: the features that looked odd on their parents—the squat, bricky legs, the inappropriate volume of hair, the large, batty ears, the coarsely chiseled messiness of their features, like something half melted—were charming on them, and they wore their nakedness well. They were bolder than American children too; the boys, even the toddlers, played with bits of stick sharpened into points, which they pretended were spears and with which they charged at one another, shrieking, and both boys and girls had the h
abit—which I initially found alarming—of running full speed toward their parents’ hogs and then landing atop them with a whump (the hogs seemed accustomed to such treatment and merely flicked their tails, as at a fly, or twitched their ears).

  Remarkable too was their almost total lack of supervision. There were twenty-six children in the village,37 ranging from four infants to three who I knew were at least fourteen, for each—they happened to be boys—carried at all times his palm spear, which was about a foot and a half longer than he was tall. Unlike the case in other primitive societies, the children here were not made to do any work, not even the eldest among them; instead they seemed to spend their days simply playing. Sometimes the older ones would slip into the forest singly or in groups and return hours later with a whole clan of vuakas impaled on their spears and stacked one on top of the other like linens on a shelf, or with a palm leaf wriggling with harvested grubs. Sometimes I watched them play at the stream—the same stream we had followed uphill, although here it was wider and faster still, hurrying its way over rocks and twigs, ferrying briskly down-island the scraps of flowers and leaves the children tossed into it.38 I knew from Tallent that they had been told to avoid the dreamers, and curiously—for this would certainly not be my experience with children later—they complied without challenge. There were days when I myself was told to avoid the dreamers, because Tallent or Esme was engaged in allegedly important interviews with them, and on those days I felt myself drifting almost inexorably toward them despite Tallent’s request to keep away.

  The women spent their days sorting: beans, vuakas, manamas, palm leaves, palm wood, palm braids. Whenever I saw them, they were engaged in busy organizational work. They took pride and comfort in being well prepared: at the end of their day, as the air began to gray, they would heave their baskets back to the appropriate hut and place their supplies within and then stand in the doorways, making a satisfied clucking sound as they regarded the way the day’s labor had added to their stores, which, given their steady work, seemed never to diminish. Unlike Esme, whom I overheard enthusing to Tallent one night that their efficiency must be attributable to some obscure and superior technique, I quickly realized that the reason they had so much time available to them was that they weren’t wasting it doing things that women spend hours doing elsewhere in the world: they had no clothes, for example, and so did no laundry. Their hair, like the men’s, was folded into a simple roll at the back of their heads, and I never saw them washing or brushing it. They never cleaned their huts or did repairs on their mats: when one was frayed, it was bent and snapped apart for kindling and placed on the fire, and a new mat was fetched from the hut. And they certainly, as I have mentioned, never minded the children.

  I watched one morning as two of the women—one so fat that she could not even bring her hands to meet over the globe of her stomach—braided some palm leaves outside one of the palm-storage huts. A few feet away, an infant, a little girl, was pulling herself with her elbows toward a splinter of dried bean pod that had fallen from one of the baskets. Upon reaching it, she of course put it in her mouth, and when she did so, she of course began choking on it. I watched, fascinated, as her breaths grew shorter and wheezier, and then as she flipped onto her back, her stubby legs and arms pinwheeling, her face painting itself a radishy hue. Finally she gave a great cough, and the piece jumped out like a hiccup, and the girl began wailing. Neither woman moved the entire time. It is certainly possible that they hadn’t seen her—they seemed quite focused on their palm braids—but even after she cried, they didn’t look up. In the end, it didn’t make a difference, as after a few minutes the girl rolled back onto her stomach and pulled herself off again, presumably in search of something else dangerous to gnaw on.39

  The men hunted daily. Half the group would remain in the village, polishing their spears and talking to one another and stroking their hogs, and the other half would disappear, their hogs following them, between the trees. Watching them return with their catch—which was always disturbingly unidentifiable, as they skinned the animals on-site and returned with only the carcasses, already hacked into large ragged hunks—I always found it difficult to remember that we were on an island. Except for the stream, which was too shallow to support anything but the smallest slips of minnows, there was no sense of water, no sense of the sea. We were of course surrounded by it, but I had no concept of what the villagers knew of it: how and whether they conceived of it, or how much experience they had of it, or whether at any time in their village’s history they had turned to it for food or exploration.40

  The only animal they valued was the hog, and even those they did not fetishize. In later decades, after I had visited my share of remote and backward civilizations, I would come to recognize the animals and decorations and behaviors that mysteriously unite them, as if they had all outfitted their societies from some inner-jungle department store that catered exclusively to primitive peoples. They all had beads of one sort or another, for example, which were either worn or traded, and they all had body decorations of one sort or another, and finally, they all had dogs: mangy, hungry, patchy creatures, some thin and some very thin, and every one of them dumb with exhaustion and neglect and a vague, persistent malnutrition that was never quite remedied. But there were no dogs in the village (or body decoration, for that matter), and when an animal was on occasion brought back to the village alive (usually because it was too big or there had been too many for the men to kill and dismember themselves), it was promptly attacked, killed, and cut up. Once they brought back a sloth, dangling by its paws from one of the men’s spears. It was so large that the two men holding the ends of the spear had to rest the spear on their heads rather than on their shoulders, and even so the sloth’s back dragged on the ground, its silvery fur tracing sad and graceful patterns in the dust. The men staggered to a spot behind the meat house, where the dirt was stained a permanent rust color, and began pummeling the creature with what seemed unnecessary avidity and force, thrusting their spear tips randomly into its pelt, while the reinforcements beat it with the blunt ends of their weapons. The sloth did not fight back but simply lay there on its side, its front and hind legs still bound to one another, and let out high, kittenish chirps that seemed to bother no one but me. After everyone had enjoyed beating the life out of it, the women joined the men and they collectively worked at peeling off the skin—which they tossed, its inside pearly and satiny with fat, to the hogs, who immediately set about slurping at it—and then hacking it into pieces, which were wrapped in fresh palm and banana leaves and stored in the meat pit. The whole thing was done very matter-of-factly, with something more than contentment but less than glee, and afterward they all cleaned their hands and the women began to prepare dinner.

  But if they were unsentimental about animals, they were sentimental about their own existence. I was struck time and again by the smallness of the society, by what it must be like to live a life in which everyone you knew or had ever seen might be counted on your fingers. And yet although it was small, it was not in any way incomplete: every ritual that might have been practiced in a civilization a thousand times its size had been accounted for here as well. Indeed, it sometimes seemed as if there were a surplus of rituals and rules, as if to compensate for the number of people who would be able to participate in them. Life—a brief life, at that—unfolded as a series of bright-dazzled occasions, a drumbeat of celebrations marking events and milestones that would in a more crowded, busier society be considered everyday events, worthy of nothing more than a comment.

  For example: There was a ceremony each month to mark the start of the women’s menses, and another to mark their conclusion. There was recognition of sexual intercourse. The first time I saw a man and a woman disappear into a hut together, the rest of the village broke into wild ululating, and the children—it was very late—raised their bushy heads and looked around them with sleep-squinted eyes. The couple seemed not at all embarrassed, and when they were done, they came out of
the hut to more ululating and then laid down their mats and went to sleep themselves. In the first few weeks in the village, I witnessed celebrations to mark a baby’s first steps (in fact, the little girl I had seen with a craving for dangerous foodstuffs) and to celebrate a boy’s receiving his first spear, and to celebrate a girl’s birthday, and to mark the hunters’ return to the village with what looked like a whole generation of vuakas, who wept and scritched from within a bulging, ad hoc palm-leaf sack that two men dragged behind them, and another, the purpose of which I was never able to decipher, in which four men and four women danced (jogged, really) arrhythmically around the fire, holding up to their foreheads one of the grinning lizardy things I had seen in the dried-goods hut before tossing them into the flames while everyone else watched solemnly.41

  One evening I wandered back over to the village after my shift bathing the dreamers and saw that the entire population was standing around the ninth hut, and that they were collectively emanating a low, almost metallic hum, like the throb of a generator. In the opening to the hut stood the village chief, looking relatively tall and relatively stately and wearing a crown of pale fern leaves, whose tips bent and lifted in the limp breeze like a beetle’s antennae. He said something, and one of the women gently pushed forward a young boy. It was still, at the time, very difficult for me to guess any U’ivuan’s age, but later I would learn that he had just made maku o’ana, or eight o’anas, which meant that he was around ten by the Western calendar.

  The boy and the chief turned to face each other, and the chief placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders and said something to him, and the boy bent his head. The chief spoke again and then stepped to the side of the door, and the boy went in, followed by the chief.

  The crowd began to move closer around the hut, and their humming grew louder. The woman who had plucked the boy from behind her sat directly in front of the entryway, facing in, and next to her sat a man—I assumed they were the boy’s parents.