Savage Harvest Part 4

Michael wrote to Robert Goldwater about his forthcoming trip and suggested the possibility of also collecting along the Sepik River of Australian New Guinea. "Collecting along the Sepik . . . needs some reflection and discussion," Goldwater wrote him back. "As you know, there have been several collecting expeditions there in the last few years, and from what we have seen brought back it does not in general seem any longer to be a very promising area."

However, Goldwater introduced Michael to Australian officials, provided a letter of recommendation, and said that he was "looking forward to your coming up with a fine group of objects." And the Dutch New Guinea Department of Native Affairs provided Michael with an anthropologist to guide and accompany him. Rene Wa.s.sing was thirty-four, with a tidy mustache and ropy, muscled calves. He worked across the island in Hollandia and had never been to Asmat before. The two linked up in the capital and on June 20 flew to Merauke, where they had lunch with Resident F. R. J. Eibrink Jansen, the highest government official in the area, along with the Dutch controller and the head of the regional council. In the afternoon, they loaded up on food in the local Chinese-owned shop and then departed that evening at five on the government launch Tasman, heading north along the coast, where Wa.s.sing noted that they encountered turbulent seas.

Early on the morning of the twenty-second, they arrived at the government post of Pirimapun, where they saw their first Asmat people and canoes, some with delicately carved bows, pulled up on the mud. There wasn't much in the settlement-a dock and a few thatch houses belonging to Wim van de Waal, a slender, blond, twenty-one-year-old Dutch patrol officer who was overseeing the construction of an airstrip; Ken Dresser, a Canadian Protestant missionary and medical doctor; and a handful of Papuan policemen.

Van de Waal was Lapre's polar opposite. He'd finished high school late, when he was twenty, and before he could attend university he had to complete two years of military service, which he felt was a waste of time. His best friend's brother had been a patrol officer in New Guinea, a more exciting and exotic alternative to military service.

Out of three hundred candidates who applied as colonial patrol officers, sixteen were selected, and van de Waal was among them. He traveled from the Netherlands to New Guinea in late 1959. After nine months in Hollandia learning Malay and receiving instruction in colonial government, he was sent to Pirimapun in October 1960. "It was an exploration district,' one of the wildest areas of all of New Guinea," he said. He had almost no instructions. " Make contact,' I was told, so that little by little they will gain the trust of the government.' " And he was to make an airstrip, because only in Pirimapun was there enough dry ground. He had no equipment, not even a wheelbarrow. For a month's work, he paid his workers with an ax, a knife, and some fis.h.i.+ng line and hooks. Once a month a supply vessel docked. He had a radio and a generator, which he turned on twice a day to report that he was still alive.

Van de Waal loved it. There wasn't much to do except "move a bit of sand" for the airstrip and wander short distances by canoe. As the postmaster, he'd send letters home postmarked with odd dates, like September 35, 1960. After a couple of months there, he had a carpenter in Merauke create a catamaran out of two dugout canoes connected by a platform topped by a thatch hut. With an outboard motor, van de Waal had freedom; he could go anywhere and could sleep on the boat. He wandered throughout his region, up and down rivers, making contact. Officially, headhunting was no more. That was what Michael was told, as were his father and sister when they arrived a year later. It was what everyone from outside had to be told, given Papua's political situation and the Dutch need, as it readied the country for independence, to present it as capable of leading itself as a productive member of the international community a decade hence. "But there was still headhunting," van de Waal said, "and sometimes even ma.s.sive raids." As there would be for years to come: in 1970 the American missionary Frank Trenkenschuh arrived in the villages of Sogopo and Ti the day after warriors had killed five men and women, and even in the early 1980s Schneebaum heard stories of headhunting raids and killings in the remoter fringes of Asmat.

Still, van de Waal traveled undefended, with only a cook and boat boy. He had a handful of Papuan police officers in Pirimapun, but he always left them behind. He had a revolver, which he never took out of its box. Why were van de Waal, Gerbrands, and men like Zegwaard, van Kessel, and von Peij able to travel and even live among a people so fierce and warlike? For the Asmat, every exchange was greased with constant payment: of tobacco, to which the Asmat had become addicted, as well as steel axes and fishhooks and fis.h.i.+ng line. Remembering their first encounter with Australian explorers in the New Guinea highlands in the 1930s, a Koiari man said: "We didn't know where these creatures came from; we wondered if they had come from the sky, from under the ground, or from inside the water. We thought they might be remo [spirits], but we had never seen remo before. . . . We were very scared of them and thought that eventually many of them would come back and finish us all off. Yet at the same time we liked the good things they had brought with them, such as matches and knives."

The Asmat's love of Western goods was matched by their fear of the gun. Its power hung over every encounter between armed Westerners and native people. The Asmat were fierce and ruthless warriors on the battlefield, but bamboo arrows and wooden spears were no better than toys against the firepower of modern guns. Confrontations with armed whites in New Guinea were little different from those with the conquistadors in the Americas. In a story recounted by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, when Francisco Pizarro met the Inca emperor Atahualpa at the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca on November 16, 1532, Pizarro's 168 men were in the middle of enemy territory surrounded by 80,000 armed Inca soldiers. The battle didn't last long: in minutes Atahualpa was captured and thousands of natives lay dead, with not a single Spanish casualty. When Englishman Charlie Savage arrived in Fiji in 1808, "he paddled his canoe up a river to the Fijian village of Kasavu, halted less than a pistol shot's length from the village fence, and fired away at the undefended inhabitants. His victims were so numerous that surviving villagers piled up the bodies to take shelter behind them. . . . Such examples of the power of guns against native peoples lacking guns could be multiplied indefinitely," writes Diamond.

Indeed, an investigation of the Strickland-Purari patrol, a government-sponsored exploration into the Australian New Guinea highlands, reported in 1935 that the "patrol had opened fire on the natives on at least nine occasions." Fifty-four men had been killed by rifle fire, "with no member of the patrol killed or seriously wounded in the skirmishes." Natives learned quickly that they were virtually powerless in the face of gunpowder.

The Asmat did their best to placate Westerners and to work around them. The whole Asmat cosmos was one of reciprocal violence, and that meant not just between men, or villages, but between men and the spirits. Other men weren't just full of vengeance; so were the spirits. If they weren't placated, they could attack a village just as forcefully as its human enemies, by making men, women, and children sick. Certainly in the early years of European contact, and probably for a long time after, the Asmat were never quite sure who these white interlopers were. Spirits or men? To attack them wasn't just to risk a physical reprisal like Max Lapre's, but to risk something even more frightening: a spiritual reprisal.

While Zegwaard, as the lone white on the rivers in the mid-1950s, had simply appeared in villages in the immediate aftermath of raids, as time went on the Asmat were smart enough to hide the practices that the priests and colonial administrators disapproved of. As Lapre noted in his reports, the Asmat simply went farther into the jungle to carry out their ceremonies, which were integral to their whole place in the world. It is easy to celebrate our shared humanity-after all, we are all human beings who love and hope and fear and feel and dream and mourn-and to dismiss our differences, forgetting that those differences are powerful and fundamental to the way we see the world, each other, and our place within it. We both shake hands. We both smile. We both eat together and laugh and look at the same river and the same palm trees, and we both have to disappear into the jungle to take a p.i.s.s. But what each of us perceives, what we believe, and what's important to us can be profoundly different. All of Asmat culture was based on reciprocation; Lapre might have insisted on Dutch laws and the power of the government, but after the b.l.o.o.d.y fight at the Ewta between Omadesep and Otsjanep, Faniptas had given one of his children to Dombai in an offer of peace. It's almost impossible to know the power of an Asmat bisj pole or the meaning of a song or the sacredness of a skull to an Asmat, or the importance of giving gifts of sago to the jeu and its elders. And so people like Wim van de Waal and Michael Rockefeller were able to collect and photograph and dig into Asmat culture, to travel with the Asmat and be deep in their midst, without ever really understanding their world and the unseen dimensions of its reality.

VAN DE WAAL showed Michael and Wa.s.sing around his little kingdom at Pirimapun for a few hours and introduced them to van Kessel, who was building a house there. The priest and Michael chatted briefly, a conversation that excited Rockefeller and would determine the rest of his short life. Van Kessel, he wrote Goldwater a few days later, was the "first whiteman" to explore the southern Asmat area of the Casuarina Coast. He had deep experience in Asmat and recommended that Michael pay attention to the south. "For several reasons, I think he will prove my most valuable contact . . . and he appears to be willing to help me in my collecting for the Museum of Primitive Art. He could be particularly valuable since he has the confidence of the natives in the area and therefore probably has greater access to the good pieces than I ever would." Michael asked Goldwater to send van Kessel a letter affirming his connection to the museum. Van Kessel was exactly what Michael needed: the missionary knew how to grease the skids, he could speak Asmat, and he knew the power of the people's sacred world. Had they managed to travel together, Michael's fate might have been far different. Instead, it would be on his way to meet van Kessel that Michael vanished.

By noon Michael and Wa.s.sing were gone, arriving in Agats that evening. Michael spent the night in the comfortable house of a Dutch official. The next morning they followed the same route as I would, fifty years later, pa.s.sing Wa.r.s.e and arriving in Atsj late that night, now traveling by native canoe and rowers. Father von Peij was away, and they slept in the post office. They paid each rower a lump of tobacco a day and one length of nylon fis.h.i.+ng line.

In the morning, they pushed on toward Amanamkai, where Gerbrands and David Eyde, an American anthropologist from Yale, were living. There, Asmat sucked them in. Gerbrands took them to the jeu Aman, which had just been rebuilt and was in the middle of celebrations surrounding its reconstruction. "There has been something mysterious about my arrival in first the Baliem, and now the Asmat," Michael wrote in his journal. "Both have been coincident with important ceremonies." The jeu was huge, more than a hundred feet long, with sixteen fireplaces lining its back wall, each fireplace belonging to a different family group, and each marked with a carved pole. The floor was cool to the touch, springy, covered in the peeled bark of the sago palm, and the light inside was magical-dark with shafts of sunlight and thick smoke. The jeu was packed with sweating men, a semicircle of drummers standing or sitting around the central hearth, which belonged to the group as a whole, surrounded by men dancing like ca.s.sowaries-bouncing up and down on the b.a.l.l.s of their feet and waving their knees in and out. One man would start singing, a mournful melodic chant, and then all the men would join in. It was hypnotic, primitive, powerful, otherworldly, an alternative universe untouched by time or technology, a world romanticized and revered, yet only hinted at in the sleek, sterilized displays of Michael's father's museum. Now it was Michael's to explore and untangle and harvest.

The dancing and drumming went on for hours, all day and into the evening, when a canoe of men from Omadesep arrived, bearing the message, Wa.s.sing noted, that Otsjanep "made the region unsafe and that the situation was tense." This was "troublesome" news, because Michael and Wa.s.sing had hoped to go to Omadesep and Otsjanep and needed rowers, who appeared reluctant to make the trip. But with the help of Gerbrands and Eyde, whose Yale dissertation was about headhunting and warfare, Michael reveled in the art and the ceremony, noting that the bisj poles were "a revenge figure . . . whose placement usually preceded a headhunt in former days. The figures represented people who have been headhunted and will be avenged." It never occurred to him that he might end up sating the l.u.s.t for revenge of a people he had yet to meet.

They spent the next day waiting out a heavy rain that thundered down all afternoon, Michael snapping photos from the veranda of the men's house of the intense downpour and men and canoes paddling through it. The day after that he paid the men to reenact an attack. Michael was in ecstasy as hundreds of warriors, some naked, draped in dogs' teeth necklaces and their faces white with chalk, in "tens" of canoes, swept out of the Awor River. The canoes separated into two groups and rowed "as though possessed" toward each other, throwing lime and circling the canoe containing Michael and Wa.s.sing "like a whirlwind, paired with yelling and howling and accompanied by the blast of horns." Michael shot photos, overwhelmed by "the grace of the movements in paddling, the sheer strength and speed, the sense of numbers and the rhythm in each canoe, and the pageantry of the occasion for the Asmat."

They left two days later at three p.m. in three canoes, short on rowers because of the tensions between Omadesep and Otsjanep. Wa.s.sing, Gerbrands, Putnam, and Michael sat in the middle of the leaky canoes, naked men fore and aft. "First there was the quiet, leisurely departure down the Awor," Michael wrote. "The rowers placed little effort behind their strokes, allowing the outflowing tide to carry the canoes easily along. Or perhaps this was only my imagination due to the beautiful ease that always seems to follow from one's having lived a particular movement for a life time." Michael wanted to save film, but he couldn't help himself, for he was "beset with one marvelous sight after the other. . . . I was able to watch the rowers for hour after hour, particularly the rear man of Rene's canoe. The forms never lost interest; the thrust and pull being cast against the lush tangle of plant life and towering trees along the river's bank, and lit by sunlight, rainstorm, brilliant sunset, a full moon and the blue-black night. Could one not take pictures even at the risk of being repet.i.tive?

"I only wish I could have somehow recorded the twittering ma.s.s of sparrows that we saw perched in the trees along the ocean's sh.o.r.es. Hundreds and hundreds of the small birds flew madly from one tree to another, succeeding in accomplis.h.i.+ng glory knows what. Obscure objects darted among the branches, and first one tree and then the next would bend from the weight of a myriad flying creatures lit for an instant among its branches. The air was filled with the whir of wings and the scream of a thousand birds twittering at once." The sun set in a blaze of red-orange, and then the full moon rose, big and glowing, and they paddled on in silence, save the lap of river against canoe and the occasional voice of the lookout in the bow.

After seven hours, they arrived at a bivouac not unlike the one Amates would take me to on the mouth of the Faretsj River. Swarms of starlings surged around the boats, filling the shadowy night with chirps and the rustling of thousands of wings. The group wolfed down a cold dinner of tea, leftover rice, and herring and spent the night. Three more hours of paddling up the Faretsj in the morning brought them to Omadesep. At first Michael was disappointed-a school was there, and in session! And when he asked to see carvings, he felt "almost disgust" with items that "showed the effect of hasty craftsmans.h.i.+p stimulated by the white man's knives and curio interest." Michael realized that they were items "made for sale, not use." He started asking for s.h.i.+elds and drums, and "slowly, quietly, interesting objects began to appear. First a s.h.i.+eld, broken, but old and quite handsome. Then one drum after the other . . . with an interesting variety of carved handles. With this, disappointment vanished and I became immersed in that pent up excitement that is only contained by the realization that impetuosity would lead to disaster." He was, of course, too young, too inexperienced, too rich, to contain his excitement and its impetuosity, and he would tragically fail to heed his own words, especially the day he crossed the mouth of the Betsj River. While he paid for his new treasure "with prices varying in their degree of inadequacy," Putnam recorded the artists' names and entered them in their journal.

IN FRONT OF the school they found four bisj poles, huge twenty-foot-tall carvings from a single piece of mangrove, from which the top figure sprouted a four-foot-long lattice flag, or p.e.n.i.s. All Asmat carvings are beautiful and complex-drums, s.h.i.+elds, spears, bowls, paddles-but none compare to the bisj poles. Their three-dimensional detail, their dynamic lines with limbs and faces intermingled with praying mantises, hornbills, and crocodiles (eaters of fruit and meat, like the Asmat themselves)-all carved freehand, with not even a sketch or line drawn, and no two the same-are things of power and haunting beauty. But removed from their surroundings and culture, as Michael intended, they were stripped of their meaning, of their profound significance in Asmat life, and became little more than exotic objects to be consumed by the discriminating patrons of the Museum of Primitive Art, who had no real understanding of their purpose.

Rockefeller and Gerbrands looked at the four poles and declared them marvelous. With no sense of irony, Michael wrote: "This was one kind of object that seemed to me inviolate for the encroachment of western commercialism upon Asmat art. I quickly decided to buy one made by Faniptas"-the same man who had tricked Pip and company from Otsjanep into following him to Wagin. But Gerbrands convinced him to buy them all; to have all four as a complete ceremonial set was too good a chance to pa.s.s up. (Today those poles stand in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) Then Michael had an idea. "I thought how marvelous it would be to have those poles standing before the yeu [sic] for which they had been carved." Gerbrands plunged in, and soon it was agreed: the poles would be set up before the jeu and the "entire ceremony that accompanies such an occasion would be re-enacted."

Many parts of Asmat ceremonial life are compartmentalized. Certain songs are so powerful and so special that they remain secret even from women and children within the village itself. Asmat reveal some things and don't reveal others. When pressed by outsiders, they will sometimes concoct stories to satisfy them.

Exactly what ceremony the men of Omadesep performed with the bisj poles is hard to know. They stood them up in front of the jeu, per Michael's request, and sang, drummed, and danced around the poles. Not surprisingly, however, Michael found it "quite disappointing" and hard to shoot. "There is no magic involved and no offering or religious attention paid to the poles as such. This fact probably accounts for the ease with which the Asmat were induced to re-enact the ceremony. Where there is no danger of angering a G.o.d or misapplying magic, such an occasion must be welcome by the village."

He was right-who knows what they'd been doing-but he also reveals here a crack in his character, a certain hubris. Routinely described as kind, gentle, hardworking, and without pretense, Rockefeller was also just twenty-three years old. He was young and rich. Used to getting what he wanted, he seemed unconscious of his own role in distorting the local economy and disrupting village ceremony, or of the contradictory nature of his entire enterprise. Here was the heir to one of the largest fortunes on earth plundering sacred objects for pennies-the most privileged person on earth dabbling in the world of the most marginalized, the lowest of the low on the totem pole, so to speak. Despairing of the objects made for sale, he had nevertheless arrived in the village to buy its objects. He was commodifying the culture and its art with every purchase. Over the next four months, Michael would spend prodigiously, which he suspected contributed to a certain reticence and resentment in Gerbrands, whom he called "an elusive personality closed to the world like a clamsh.e.l.l." It took Michael three days to get Gerbrands to call him "Mike" instead of just "Rockefeller," and Gerbrands grew annoyed at Michael's constant questions and either gave abrupt answers or just said he didn't know. But it took Sam, a pauper compared to Michael, to explain how Gerbrands might be feeling as the twenty-three-year-old descended out of nowhere.

"Towards the end of the trip I began to think that maybe [this] closed, distant quality in Adri [Gerbrands's nickname] stemmed from a kind of disillusionment that came from a frustration at his ambition," Michael wrote. "During his stay in New Guinea I know that he had been continually exasperated by such things as defects in the lenses he had bought in j.a.pan, inadequacy in his film supply, the failures of his tape recorder to arrive, and constant difficulty in obtaining the rowers for his various trips. . . . I think Sam may well have been right in pointing out that such a man as Adri might be a bit resentful when relative upstarts such as ourselves come along equipped with the best camera equipment, quant.i.ties of film, money enough to buy bisj poles and any number of objects to say nothing of our ability to pay for the putting up of 2 bisj poles ceremonies . . . and then speak of another collecting trip later outfitted with an outboard motor which he had been unable to afford."

In his description of his purchase later that afternoon can be seen the first glimpses of a burgeoning obsession. A man named Givin brought Michael a spear, which he immediately bought. "This was an old, beautiful one of a kind I had never expected to get. Somehow I had been led to believe from Bob that I would only be at the end of a long line of collectors that had already ravaged the Asmat. Yet now I wonder whether this is the case. I have seen too many beautiful things even in my short stay to feel discouraged by a conviction that the art has gone. Now . . . I am almost confident, at least excited. In any event this one purchase set off a chain reaction among the people. Spear after spear appeared from the dark corners of the houses about the village. I bought four marvelous ones."

In any treasure hunt there comes a moment, if your journey is a success, where imagination and reality coalesce. The journey is born from imagination, from envisioning a strange place, finding the trail, tracking it down. Michael had imagined himself deep in an exotic culture, surrounding himself in it like a thick coat, and now here he was. His dream was becoming a reality. When that moment comes, that realization that you've done it, the more the quest becomes the only thing that matters-and the deeper I went into Asmat myself and read Michael's journals the more I understood that, identified with it. Hunting art and chasing a story, they are the same. Rain, heat, cold, danger-out there in the wild everything becomes subordinate to the task, and the closer you get to the treasure the more you're willing to do to get it. There is nothing more intoxicating; it makes you feel powerful, invulnerable.

Michael wanted Asmat art, but not just any art. He wanted the authentic, objects that were touchstones to a world that was pure, that touched a distant past and a version of ourselves that was gone. But the purer the object, the more authentic it was, and the more power it had, the more trading in those objects put him on the threshold of an alternative universe. He had no understanding that by trading in bisj poles he was trading in the souls of men, souls that could make you sick, that could kill you. Michael was working with a bottomless supply of money-the one thing that limits most people, that checks them, that forces them to use friends.h.i.+p and reciprocity and patience with others. And there is a profound difference between people who are friends and people who want your money. Had Michael had less money, he would have had to move more slowly, would have had to settle in villages for longer, to trade, to make connections, to become known. Instead, he averaged a day or two in every village; he arrived, bought, and moved on.

OMADESEP AND OTSJANEP lie on parallel rivers-the Faretsj and the Ewta-that are connected, like the top of a horseshoe, by a navigable swamp. Officially, headhunting may have been over, but it was clear to Gerbrands, Wa.s.sing, and Michael that tensions between the two villages were high. In the tangled knot of Asmat allegiances, they found a man named Tatsji, who, "because he had relatives in Otsjanep, was inviolable" and so could serve as escort, wrote Wa.s.sing. And suddenly a lot of others wanted to go too; at eleven on the morning of June 30, a fleet of canoes set out up the Faretsj to Otsjanep. Faniptas went too, though it's unclear whether Michael or Wa.s.sing knew who he was, beyond being a carver, or whether they knew that after the disastrous trip to Wagin and the ensuing violence three years before he had given a daughter to Dombai in Otsjanep in reciprocation, to make peace. "It was a marvelous paddle upstream," Michael wrote. "A large number of dugout canoes from Omadesep loaded with warriors accompanied us, using the occasion of our trip and the protection it provided to negotiate a peace treaty with Otsjanep, the much feared, powerful enemy and traditional rival."

The river twisted and turned and narrowed, and they paddled past overhanging or fallen trees under a burning sun. The river grew ever narrower and then turned into little more than a creek through the marsh and tough, man-high plants. Near the head of the Ewta, as it emerged from the swamp, they pa.s.sed the village of Warkai, which was abandoned. That was always in Asmat a sign that a village had either been recently attacked or had been the attackers; with the increasing government presence, villages often hid deep in the bush to carry out the butchering and eating of their victims.

As they entered Otsjanep territory, the paddlers became wary; "every tree and river bend," noted Wa.s.sing, "was watched carefully." They came upon a group of houses on thirty-foot-long poles, a temporary refuge of safety that had recently been built by Otsjanep-yet another indication that war and headhunting were alive and well. Tatsji let out a long, melodious yell, explaining who they were, where they came from, why they had come, and that there were no government, police, or missionaries with them. All was still. Silent. The rowers chanted in unison this time, all of them, the same announcement of their arrival. Then, from all around them in the jungle, horns echoed. Men and women streamed out of the bush, singing. The tension evaporated as men jumped into canoes and paddled out to meet them. They hugged. They shook hands. And they began frantically trading-sago and bulbs of taro for tobacco and fruit.

As wild and untouched as the Dani in the Baliem had been, this was different. Though the Dani fought each other, deaths in warfare were uncommon, and the Dani were farmers, their sweet potatoes giving them a sense of time, a sense of being settled-and most important of all, an abundant and reliable food supply. The Asmat Michael was with were pure hunter-gatherers, cannibals, with a culture far stranger than that of the Dani, and Michael could feel it. "Now this is wild and somehow more remote country," he wrote, "than what I have ever seen before." A group of men from another village that had never seen whites were there. They had never seen fishhooks or the nylon line that Gerbrands gave them, and they sang throughout the night, in Michael's words, in celebration of meeting the whites. But was it in celebration? Or something else, something more complicated, a way of grappling with a profoundly unsettling experience, an encounter with strange, otherworldly superbeings who might be their ancestors in corporeal form?

Michael continued on in the morning away from the temporary refuge high up the river to the permanent village, the rowers from Otsjanep concerned that their women, left behind at the temporary refuge, might be attacked by Omadesep. When they finally reached the main village of Otsjanep, it was the largest they'd seen, with five huge men's houses. Men and boys swarmed around them, a gridlock of dozens of canoes and hundreds of swimming men. Michael grabbed his Nikon and shot like mad. They found seventeen bisj poles still in the jeus of Otsjanep, with details they'd never seen before-the flag of one of them featured two praying mantises facing each other. The ceremony that the Omadesep poles-which Michael had bought-were carved for had been completed: the souls inside them had been dispatched on to Safan, and instead of being dumped in the sago grounds to rot, the poles had been taken by the village's teacher. But these poles in Otsjanep were still in the jeus, were not yet disposed of, not yet thrown into the jungle, which hinted that they still embodied the souls of men whose deaths had not yet been revenged, reciprocated. They were a promise, a pledge, to right that balance, to-in our crude terms-avenge their deaths. Michael and Wa.s.sing also appeared to have had no knowledge of Max Lapre's raid three and a half years before, though Michael noted that the poles seemed to have been carved for a feast that had taken place in 1959-just a year after Lapre's raid.

If that seems as though it would have been a long time before, it wasn't. The Asmat had no watches or clocks, and they forgot nothing. The village of Otsjanep, as Michael could see, was a place apart, a city by Asmat standards, a place with its own customs and styles of carving unique in all of Asmat.

In exchange for tobacco, the village erected a bamboo scaffold in front of one of the men's houses facing the river, where they mounted the poles-a custom particular to Otsjanep. Men drummed and sang, and Michael offered to buy seven of the poles, for one lump of tobacco and one ax each, plus a length of fis.h.i.+ng line and a hook for each rower. The men from Otsjanep agreed. Michael gave them a partial down payment, and the men said they'd bring the poles to a rendezvous spot on the east bank of the Betsj River in three or four days, and then transport them on to Agats, where Michael would pay them with more axes, knives, and tobacco. He also bought twelve s.h.i.+elds.

Michael, Wa.s.sing, Putnam, and Gerbrands left Otsjanep on July 3 to visit a few other villages, and the canoes had to cross the mouth of the Betsj. What Michael wrote in his journal is remarkable, given what would happen to him in four months: "On our way to Biwar we had to cross the estuary of the Betsj River which at this point is several miles wide. Strong monsoon winds sometimes sweep the heavy swell from the Arafura Sea far into the estuary, making the crossing a rather hazardous undertaking in an Asmat dugout canoe. . . . Though there was kind of a swell when we arrived at the estuary our Asmat paddlers, after having measured the sky and waves with expert eyes, decided that the crossing could be made."

Three days later, they arrived at the rendezvous spot, where they camped and waited for two days. The men from Otsjanep-and the bisj poles-never appeared. The paddlers from Amanamkai told them that the men from Otsjanep might have been afraid to leave their women and children behind. That's one explanation. But they had already done just that when they'd left their temporary safety camp to escort Michael to the main village. Another reason may have been this: the deaths represented by the poles were unreciprocated, the poles were still active, still inhabited by Osom, Faratsjam, Akon, Samut, and Ipi, killed by Max Lapre. And if they were, the men of Otsjanep would not have parted with the poles for all the money or tobacco in the world.

12.

March 2012

MEN IN OMADESEP CELEBRATING THE CONSTRUCTION OF THEIR NEW JEU.

FIFTY YEARS AFTER Michael Rockefeller shot photos of the men dancing around the bisj poles in Omadesep, I stood in the same place. The Faretsj River lay five feet down a bank of mud. Perpendicular to the river, the men's house stretched a hundred feet, a ma.s.sive structure of poles and gabagaba-the stems of sago palm-fronted by a long veranda reached by notched logs. Across the river was a wall of lush jungle-nipa palm and coconut palm and tangled green vines. Next to the jeu was a maze of poles sticking out of the muddy ground-the foundation for a new men's house. I was lucky. We'd arrived in Omadesep just as the men were beginning to celebrate its construction, and Amates said the festivities would begin soon.

By now, I had been navigating the rivers and villages with Amates and Wilem for almost a week. It felt dreamlike. We had traveled in the darkness and at dawn and late afternoon-whenever the tides dictated. We had motored through crus.h.i.+ng downpours-the water cold and fresh, the drops hard and big-and in the blazing sun. I hadn't felt hot water on my skin since arriving in Agats over three weeks before. I hadn't seen a chair or a cus.h.i.+on save the sofa in Amates's sister's house in Atsj. We ate three meals a day of rice and ramen, supplemented by very small bits of crab, shrimp, fish, and sago, and there was no oil, no fat, no alcohol, and little sugar except what Filo put in my instant coffee. My weight was dropping fast.

In the village of Betjew we slept on the floor of the school, a school with one teacher for eighty students, only half of whom came to cla.s.s on any given day. "They go fis.h.i.+ng or to the jungle to collect sago," he said, "and I cannot keep them." We paused for a night again in Atsj, where men gathered on the porch as rain cascaded down and drummed and sang and chanted through the night until dawn. "They sang about a man and a woman," Amates said, in his usual frustratingly incomplete explanation. "The man was killed by people from Baiyun. It is a love story."

In Amates's village of Biwar Laut, we spent a day and a night. Years before it had broken off from Omadesep, Amates said, telling the story. "Some women from Omadesep were fis.h.i.+ng when five boats came to the Faretsj and some of the men f.u.c.ked the women," Amates explained as we turned upriver from the Arafura toward the village. "The women's husbands found out and attacked Biwar and killed Biwiripitsj. Biwar attacked Omadesep and killed Escame. My grandfather told me this story." Egrets flew overhead. Some men in a canoe called out Amates's nickname-"Ates!"-when they saw us. At the dock, a crowd materialized and Amates's sister appeared, a gaunt woman in a T-s.h.i.+rt. Seeing Amates, she exploded in screaming and wailing. At an old wooden house, we found his father, small and thin but muscled still, with close-cropped white hair. He, too, sobbed and wailed and rubbed Amates.

As we settled on the porch of his sister's house, Wilem walked up bearing crabs as big as my hands, wrapped in wet palm leaves. He threw them on the fire, and in walked a woman in a stained, ripped sundress, with a pierced septum and strings in her ears. She, too, exploded in wailing and sobbing and clutching, and then slumped to the floor, holding her head in her hands, weeping and rocking. Rising, she stumbled, as if drunk, out the door, the emotion so high she could barely walk, and she stumbled screaming along the boardwalk for fifteen minutes. "My mother's aunt," explained Amates.

Leaving Biwar, we traveled through a cut in the jungle that was barely five feet wide and so shallow we had to pole. I couldn't see the sun or sky at all. The mud banks glistened and teemed with white-bodied crabs with orange legs and mud puppies, primitive tadpolelike creatures with huge heads, long tails, and only a pair of front legs. We ducked beneath overhanging trees and vines and past mangrove roots that looked like the fingers of ancient giants. b.u.t.terflies danced over us, and after an hour we broke into the Suretsj River, which was a mile or more wide.

We spent a night in Owus, Wilem's village on the Bow River, where he introduced me to his wife and their three children and then quickly disappeared. It rained all afternoon and evening, and we sat swatting mosquitoes and flies by candlelight. "You know," Amates said, "Wilem has two families and two wives here." Which was as it had always been in Asmat, even though they now considered themselves Catholic.

After leaving Owus, we'd encountered a sixty-foot-long dugout manned by a Bugis trader, filled with supplies. We flagged him down, loaded up on clove cigarettes and tobacco, and motored on. On another river, we hailed some fishermen and bought a three-foot-long catfish, which Filo later cleaved into chunks and fried in oil. It was the most protein I'd had in days.

Even as we went deeper, there was that wall that I couldn't pa.s.s through, an unsettled feeling that didn't go away and which I'd never felt anywhere else in the world. Slowly it began to sink in. The thing I couldn't quite shake, couldn't quite figure out, couldn't put my finger on, was cannibalism.

Headhunting and cannibalism and the rituals a.s.sociated with them-all of Asmat culture, to put it simply-had only begun changing little more than a generation earlier. Amates's father and the parents of possibly every single person over the age of forty had eaten human flesh. And not eaten it like we eat steak today-purchased in some air-conditioned megastore all wrapped in plastic-but with active partic.i.p.ation in the butchering of bodies, the cutting off of heads, the evisceration of the skulls and chests and bowels of men, women, and children. Think of the blood. The gore. The dismembered limbs and hands. Maybe it was just in my imagination, my own American squeamishness about the human body and death, but what had been ordinary for the Asmat-just a few years before!-was utterly inconceivable to me. Living in huts, hunting and gathering your food, believing in spirits and magic, warfare-these are all just different varieties of what we all do every day. We used to be naked; now we wear clothes. We used to live in palm huts; now we live in wooden houses. We used to believe in exotic magic and spirits; now we believe in Jesus and the Holy Ghost. Big deal. These are all differences of degree, not kind. But what the Asmat had done regularly had crossed a line uncommon in human history, even in traditional hunting-and-gathering cultures. The most horrific, most monstrous thing we could think of had been central to their everyday life. And to me that fact hung over every moment in Asmat. It was the elephant in the room-even now, forty years after the practice had finally been stopped by missionaries and the government.

If I asked anyone about cannibalism, they would acknowledge it. Sure, we used to eat people, but now we don't. They didn't want to talk about it. They are Catholics now, though many still have multiple wives and all believe in an active spirit world and ceremonies that their Catholic G.o.d has no part of. Under the influence of the Church, they have been schooled to believe that what they did in the past was wrong, and they feel shame about it, at least in conversations with Westerners. What they think of it in private among themselves is hard to know. Many of their songs recall it, after all, and their whole ceremonial life has been based on it; it is clearly still part of their consciousness.

The longer I stayed in Asmat, the more I felt that disconnection-between what had been and what appeared to be now, between what they talked about openly and what they thought about in private, and between the Western fascination (my own included) with the idea of cannibalism and the actuality. As Michael Rockefeller wandered through Asmat, the headhunting and the killing and eating were still widely practiced. Every piece of art was rooted in it, and every Asmat he met in the remoter villages had consumed human flesh. And every piece that he collected, even now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, refers to it-the very poles that stand in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Met were created to avenge deaths, and they had the blood of the murdered rubbed into them. Yet he had never seen headhunting or cannibalism. Few Westerners ever had, besides Zegwaard, and it's questionable whether even he actually saw any humans being slaughtered or consumed. I wondered: What would have happened if they had? If I had? What if it had been going on in their sight? Would they have seen the "art" any differently? What would I do, how would I feel, if that butchering and those feasts were going on around me?

In his field notes, journals, and letters, Michael repeatedly makes reference to the connection between headhunting and the art he was collecting. Yet he remains disa.s.sociated from it, never confronting it; it's an academic, historical a.s.sociation. That was the wall I was feeling. I wanted to know what it was like, what it felt like, what they felt and thought about decapitating someone's child or wife and butchering the body with their hands and rough tools. They did it, they knew all about it, everyone in Asmat did-the whole museum in Agats was built on it-and yet no one spoke about it. Tobias Schneebaum romanticized the Amazonian Indians he lived with until the day they raided another village, brutally murdering their victims with clubs. Schneebaum went with them, he watched it all, he pushed a spear into the chest of a man already dead, and it horrified him. And then he partic.i.p.ated in the consumption of one victim's heart, raw, b.l.o.o.d.y. It affected him so deeply that he fled soon after. My guess was that so, too, would Michael have done, and so, too, would I. Somewhere, somehow, there was some fundamental and profound cultural difference between me and the Asmat around me, as there had been between Michael and the men he was photographing, writing about, collecting from. The idea fascinated us because we never had to see the thing itself. But it was what separated me from the Asmat every hour I was with them.

BY THE TIME we got to Omadesep, we were traveling farther from Agats into narrower and more remote rivers. Atsj, Ayam, Becew, all had stores, docks, trash from Western consumer goods, a few generators that roared on in the evening. Omadesep had nothing, not even a store, and what really struck me was its lack of trash. There wasn't any. It was a place with only a few manufactured products-pots and pans, a few machetes, fis.h.i.+ng line-and nothing else that didn't come from the sea or the jungle.

Under a flat white sky, and in humidity you could swim through, I heard screams, wild howls, a rhythmic clacking sound. Amates grabbed me and led me to the end of a rickety dock crowded with barefoot children, some naked, others in the ubiquitous tattered and stained T-s.h.i.+rts and gym shorts. Coming down the river were twelve canoes packed together in a ma.s.s, just a foot apart, ten to twelve men in each canoe. Though all were wearing shorts, they were decorated for battle, draped in dogs' teeth bandoliers and carrying spears embellished with c.o.c.katoo feathers, their bodies smeared with chalk Xs and bands around their legs and arms. They had black grease across their faces, and their eyes were encircled in red, like the enraged King c.o.c.katoo, and they wore cuscus fur hats sprouting c.o.c.katoo feathers. They were born on the water, born standing in their tippy canoes, and they clapped their paddles against the sides of the canoes. "Huh, huh, huh, huh," they grunted, a guttural yell interspersed with high-pitched ululating cut by a single, deep voice singing a few lines of a groaning, melodic dirge, before the grunts and paddle-beating started again. They jumped up and down and horns blew, like the foghorns I'd heard as a kid at my grandparents' in Newport, Rhode Island, and clouds of white smoke engulfed them-lime-as they rowed to the sh.o.r.e. From out of the scrum emerged ten or fifteen men carrying an eight-foot-long cylinder, the top trunk of a sago palm, wrapped in a fancy dress of green sago leaves; sago is female and so wears a skirt, for sago comes out of the inside of the tree as a child comes out of a woman. They hoisted the dressed sago log up into the jeu.

Inside the jeu it was dark, but shafts of sunlight pierced the palm walls and roof. Five men sat cross-legged on the springy floor, their backs to the central fireplace hearth, each with a long, narrow, carved drum across his knees. Here, the center of the jeu, was also the center of the Asmat cosmos. It was where the world of the living and the world of the dead met, where both were present. The men were dressed as animals that eat fruit, headhunters. Tucked into rattan armbands were long, sharp daggers of ca.s.sowary thigh bone-the same daggers used to pin the heads of victims to the floor in the origin tale of Biwiripitsj and Desoipitsj. They drummed in unison, chanting; one man started the song and the others soon joined in, and it ebbed and flowed in between moments of silence with no apparent direction-each man just knowing his part. "Ohhhhhhh," a voice would sing, a long, drawn-out, deep voice, followed by speaking, then more long "ohhhhhhhhhs." "He is singing the name of a man killed by Omadesep in Biwar Laut a long time ago," Amates said. Thousands of flies buzzed. The men smoked. Sang. Drummed. Chanted. On and on it went, for hours, as others filtered in and out, the crowd gathering until there were fifty sitting around the sago log, which was white and glistening and covered with flies.

At some signal that I never understood, a man with an ax began slicing the log lengthwise, pivoting the ax head at each cut, separating an inch-thick layer of sago, which peeled away like the layers of heart of palm. Again and again he sliced, each time the stalk becoming narrower, until it was the diameter of a fis.h.i.+ng pole. The end of the log bulged into a head that was repeatedly shaved into small chunks. Men took their drums to the fire, heating the heads made from the skins of iguana, to tighten them, rubbed their palms over the drum heads, constantly adjusting the small k.n.o.bs of beeswax, stuck to the drum heads like gobs of chewing gum, that tuned them. I lost track of time in the dark and the smoke and the heat and the pulsating drumming and chanting, each chant a story of death and headhunting and battles that stretched back years, generations, according to Amates, and recalled the ancestors and their spirits.

During a smoking break, I asked Amates to ask about the trip to Wagin in 1957. Max Lapre's reports mentioned it as the reason for his actions, but offered few details. Again the long explanation from Amates. We all smoked. The men nodded. Looked at me. They remembered. All of it, as if it were yesterday, and I heard the names Pip, Dombai, Su, Kokai, Wawar, and Pakai. And then one man, Everisus Birojipts, started talking. He was bare-chested and unadorned, and though clearly older, his chest was firm, broad, strongly muscled. He had short hair and a scruffy beard. He had been a boy and had accompanied his father on the journey, and he grew animated as the story unfolded. The quest for dogs' teeth. The rain and the fighting in Baiyun and Basim and Emene. His fear.

Over the past two decades, I'd reported hundreds of stories from all over the world, but this one felt different. Michael's disappearance had been so long shrouded in rumor, and took place in a land so distant, that it had taken on the quality of an impenetrable myth. His own family had so long publicly clung to the notion that he'd drowned; they'd found no way to investigate what happened, and it was easier to give yourself to the mystery, to accept that he'd been swallowed up in this unreachable green and watery fantasy than to untangle it. Here, beyond a certain point, the Rockefellers had been powerless. It didn't matter how many searchers they might employ, how many attorneys they might set to the task, it mattered little what laws or courts might say, or how many powerful people they might know-all the tools of the rich and privileged had been useless here. The Asmat didn't care about any of them, were immune to all of them.

But whatever happened to Michael had been real. Asmat was real-and here, strange as it seems, the spirits had been real too, and I began to think of him as having been lost to this spirit world. Something had happened here that had roots deep in Asmat culture, and I was starting to see that every day I spent in Asmat the story was coalescing into a touchable narrative. The more I understood about Asmat culture, the more I began to think of the mystery of Michael's disappearance in an Asmat way, as if he were one of those spirits who'd never been pushed on to Safan. The Asmat had closed every loop through their rituals-and through violence-but Michael was still floating around out there. Perhaps my journey, both in Asmat itself and through the archives, wouldn't just solve the mystery but lay his spirit to rest once and for all.

In Birojipts's telling, the six men from Otsjanep attacked the men from Omadesep first, though I doubted that, since they were in the minority by far. But at the Ewta there was no doubt: "There were a lot of men from Otsjanep waiting for us, and we were exhausted and resting and sitting and Otsjanep people came and killed us with arrows. My father, all the people behind me, were dead," he said, "and only a few came back to Omadesep. So many were killed."

By late afternoon, the jeu was filled, a hundred men crowding the floor. Other men appeared, bearing ten-foot-long pieces of green, freshly cut sago palm leaves that they hung like curtains around the central section of the jeu, always a sign that spirits were present, since they inhabited the leaves of the sago. When the sago log was gone, the layers were broken into small pieces and distributed. "We must go," Amates said to me. "We can stand by the edge." In an instant, the men divided into two groups, one on each side of the jeu. Wild yelling and screaming erupted, they started pitching the chunks at each other as hard as they could, and around the hearth the old men with their drums. .h.i.t the deck. The throwers yelped. They howled. It sounded like barking dogs and squealing pigs, and the chunks flew, hard, a s...o...b..ll fight of sago. When it was over, the drummers drummed and the singers sang and the men danced as though possessed, the crazy ca.s.sowary dance of moving up and down on the b.a.l.l.s of their feet while frenetically pumping their knees in and out. The jeu shook and the floor moved up and down and clouds of dust enveloped it like fog from the stamping feet and one man pulled his track pants down, lost in ecstasy.

That night, twenty men appeared in the house we were staying in. It was still hot. Stifling. Without power, candles flickered, stuck onto the wooden floor. We pa.s.sed out tobacco, and I listened and watched. Smoke filled the room. Pale white lizards crept along the walls. Outside, the crickets buzzed. In bits and pieces, one man and then another, whose names I didn't know, told me about Lapre coming to arrest the men after the raid, and as always in these villages time s.h.i.+fted and there was no way to separate generations-the village was one, and things that happened to their fathers happened to them. "We were afraid," they said, and in those moments I felt the clash of cultures, their confusion over what was happening and why, who Lapre had been, the guns and the sudden violence they unleashed. I felt their anxiety over the aliens who might be superbeings, who might be their very ancestors, with guns and boats in their midst.

THE NEXT MORNING we left Omadesep for Otsjanep, as Michael Rockefeller had done, though the river was too low and we had to take the sea route. The entrance to the Ewta was so narrow that I never would have noticed it from offsh.o.r.e. It was a tunnel through thick, monotonous green mangroves hanging over the river from the banks, dangling vines. We motored slowly, and I imagined Max Lapre here, his heart beating against his chest, armed and ready for a confrontation, looking for warriors hidden in these very trees and brush, and I imagined the Asmat watching him come, these strange men in their big, loud boats and their guns. A constant stream of canoes slipped past us, heading to the sea, some with women and children, some with men standing, their paddles dipping and stroking in perfect time with each other. Their ragged T-s.h.i.+rts and shorts made them look like street people, and I wished they were naked, though I also wondered if that was just my own hope for an exotic experience with naked savages. The river twisted and turned, and after half an hour the trees cleared and thatch houses appeared on the left bank. The place felt wilder than anywhere I'd been before. There was no dock, just muddy banks lined with canoes, which we climbed over, picking our way across the logs and poles over the mud. Men stared, Amates and Wilem talked, and we were led to a two-room wooden house, its walls black with soot.

This was Pirien, a village adjacent to Otsjanep that resulted from a violent split between the five jeus soon after Michael disappeared. We were barely inside the house when men started appearing. One. Two. Five. Soon I counted forty squeezed into the sweltering, furniture-less room, crowds of young boys peering in through the windows. We sat on the floor, a sea of faces and sweating bodies and flies, staring, waiting. Amates brought out the tobacco, pa.s.sed pouches of it and rolling papers to the elders, who emptied the pouches and divided it up, pa.s.sing mounds of the brown weed around the room. Soon we were enveloped in a cloud of smoke. Amates talked, the men nodded. Some introduced themselves. There was Ber, son of Dombai, former head of the jeu Pirien. Tapep was the son of Pep, who had been chief in the 1960s and who had married Osom's widow, one of the men killed by Lapre. I wasn't sure why they were here, what had brought them. They didn't ask me anything, but they seemed to want to see me, and they wanted the tobacco I'd brought, though I was never quite sure what Amates was saying that I didn't understand.

I asked them how the village had split. There was a lot of discussion, and Amates relayed the story: Dombai was the head of Pirien jeu, and he had three wives. One morning at five a.m., the head of Otsjanep jeu asked Dombai to go into the jungle and collect sago, while Dombai's three wives went in a canoe to fish. Dombai was suspicious, so he asked men to follow his wives. Eventually Dombai's spies saw the women f.u.c.king-that's the word Amates used-three men from the Otsjanep jeu, including the head of the jeu.

When the three women returned to Otsjanep, well, there was trouble. Dombai confronted them. The women threw open their skirts and said, yes, we f.u.c.ked them, and many other men from Otsjanep too. The men made a fire and burned the women's clothes, and that was that.

Not a problem, Dombai said. Not a problem.

But Dombai remembered. One year later, the men from Pirien jeu attacked and killed Bifack, Por, Fin, and Ajim in retribution and moved their women and children half a mile downriver to a new place, and the Pirien jeu became the village of Pirien. What happened to one man in the jeu happened to them all. There was no separation. No individuality. No I. Collective guilt ran deep in a place where men took certain other men as lovers/brothers and also sometimes shared each other's wives, where everyone was related and the bisj pole carvings were a tangle of men standing on and connected to other men.

There was a lot of crying. The children were sad. The men from Otsjanep wanted peace. So they gave a daughter to Pirien, and then the men from the two sides drank each other's urine, an act of submission and bonding.

When I asked about Lapre's raid, they grew quiet, and Amates suggested we take a break and head upriver to Otsjanep itself. The river twisted and wound, and after half a mile the trees cleared and we entered the village. On the left bank, there were no plank houses at all, nothing but thatch huts and mud, smoke, and a few banana trees and coconut palms, crowds of people sitting on porches, watching our arrival. Some of the women had no s.h.i.+rts, their b.r.e.a.s.t.s dangling long and flat against their bellies. We pulled the boat up to the banks, climbed over canoes and over branches and log walkways, Amates talking to the watching crowd. Children gathered, pressing close. The clearing behind the houses stretched for a few hundred yards, and near here, somewhere, had stood the original village that Lapre attacked and that Michael visited.

The vibe here felt strange. Dark. Oppressive, as if there were something hanging over the village. That wall again, though now it was almost visible to the naked eye. No one moved. If I'd been a cat, my fur would have been standing up. I looked at people and they looked back, but there was no recognition, no welcome, nothing that drew me to them. No one shook my hand. No one invited us into their house. I felt like I had no traction here. I asked Amates to ask if anyone knew about Lapre and his raid, or even had been an eyewitness to it. Amates spoke, but it was like he was speaking in a foreign language. Faces were blank, emotionless. A few people said a few words. "They don't remember anything," Amates said. "They don't know anything about this." As always, I couldn't tell if Amates was being straight with me, telling me everything he knew, or if there were things he was filtering, things he was keeping from me.

I'm not sure what I had been thinking, imagining that I could drop into a village and have its people simply open up to me, a complete stranger, a white no less. Had I made the same mistakes as Lapre, or Michael? Showing up with the wrong people, with the wrong motivations? I wanted something, it was true. Not just whatever they were willing to show me, but their deepest secrets, their account of the events that had preceded the possible murder and cannibalization of one of my clan, one of my tribe, my countryman. I had imagined they'd want to tell me, to share it with me, that they'd rush to show me his skull or thigh bone and celebrate the brutality, the violence, that was a part of who they were. I imagined they'd be proud of it. Why did I think they'd be so eager? In America people's egos get the best of them: they like to talk about what they've done, they're open to journalistic flattery and the idea of being affirmed by seeing their names in a magazine story. And we were talking about events that took place fifty years ago, that involved their fathers and grandfathers, not themselves. I imagined those events would be less immediate, less dangerous. But the people of Otsjanep were as blank and silent as stones.

Getting nowhere, feeling unwelcome, we climbed back in the boat and returned to the wooden house downriver in Pirien. It was late afternoon. A huge black pig rooted in the mud under the house, now empty of visitors. Dogs yelped and fought. Children played on the boardwalks, but I couldn't see any adults anywhere. I couldn't keep the flies off my face, my eyes, my nostrils. They were starting to make me feel crazy.

"They are very afraid," Amates said, apropos of nothing.

"Afraid?" I said. "Of what?"

"There was a tourist who died here," he said. "An American tourist named . . ." and the name he said was garbled. I couldn't understand it. This was news to me. In all I'd read, I'd never heard of an American tourist dying in Asmat.

"When?" I said. "What was his name?"

Amates's English was slow, the words hard to comprehend no matter what he said. He said the name again, and then again, more slowly, and it was a hard name for an Asmat to p.r.o.nounce, but this time it was unmistakable: "Michael Rockefeller."

I couldn't believe it. I had never mentioned Michael's name to Amates, not once. All I'd said was that I was a journalist writing about Asmat and that I was interested in its history and the story of the trip to Wagin and Max Lapre's raid.

"Michael Rockefeller?" I said, feigning ignorance.

"Yes, Michael Rockefeller," Amates said. "He was an American. He was here in Otsjanep. They are very, very afraid. They do not want to talk about this."

"How did his name come up?" I asked.

"They told me," he said. "Today, when we were talking, they are afraid you are here to ask about Michael Rockefeller. And they are afraid. Very afraid."

"Why?"

"Otsjanep killed him. Everyone knows it. My grandfather even told me this when I was a little boy."

13.

September 1961