Death Through collaboration from the Last Grain of Rice

 

Death Through Collaboration

The jungle did not sleep, it never does.  Ernest Masters followed his guide Talan through a tunnel of giant ferns, higher than a man, as insects hummed around them like a thousand whispers of warning.  Every snapped twig made Masters flinch.  Every shadow looked like a rifle barrel.

“Keep low,” Talan murmured without turning.  His voice blended into the night, as if the forest itself were speaking. “They move fast when they smell fear.”

“I’m not afraid,” Masters lied.

Talan didn’t pause to correct him.

The guide moved with the precision of someone who had walked these trails his entire life, feet finding grips in roots.  A pale bruise of moonlight filtered through the canopy, giving just enough light to show the damp sheen on Talan’s back.

Masters wiped his hands on his shirt.  “Are you sure this route is safe?”

“No place is safe,”  Talan said as branches cracked far behind them, too deliberate to be an animal.

Masters swallowed hard. “Must be Tan’s people.”

“Yes,” Talan slowed, head tilted.  “Tan Security force.  Five, maybe six.  Spread wide.”

“I thought we lost them at the river.”

Talan gave a thin, humourless smile.  “They know this place but not as well as I do.”

They reached the mangrove shelf along the river as the tide began to rise.  The air smelled of salt and rot, a thick, choking odour that coated the tongue.

The canoe waited exactly where Talan had promised, wedged between the roots that coiled like fingers of a buried giant.

Masters paused.  “Why are you helping me Talan?  You don’t even know me.”

“The forest knows you,”  Talan said” It knows when a man comes with truth.  And when he leaves in fear.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Talan looked at him fully then, eyes reflecting a sadness deeper than the riverbed.  “My brother worked for Tan.  The same men you are exposing. He died on the job and they left his body in the jungle, is that answer enough?”

“They killed him,” Talan said simply.  “So I help you because the dead do not get justice.  Only the living can take it for them.  You can do that.”

Masters felt a raw ache inside him.  Before he could speak, Talan angled the canoe toward him.

“Go now, be safe.  Your boat and escorts wait past the inlet.”

Masters climbed in.  The current tugged instantly.

“Talan, thank you.”

Talan stepped back into shadows.  “Do not thank me just do what you promised.”

The canoe drifted quickly into darkness as the first droplets of rain pattered on the water’s surface, forming circles that grew, merged and vanished.

*****

Two hours later, Tan Security Force arrived at the water’s edge with the ruthlessness of wolves denied their kill.  Captain Juro scanned the mud, flashlight beam slicing through the heavy air.

“He passed here,”  one soldier said, pointing to disturbed roots.  “And his guide with him.”

Juro crouched, finger tips brushing a foot print. “We missed them by minutes.” His voice carried no anger, only calculation.

“Fan out,” he ordered.  “They won’t have gotten far.”

The forest gave way beneath their boots, and soon enough they ran down Talan, sitting on a log, beside a stagnant pool, shoulders straight, face unreadable.

“You took the foreigner out, tell us where?”

Talan did not move.  “Forest takes many things.”

Juro, stepped close, the barrel of his rifle inches from Talan’s cheek.  “Answer.”

No response.

“You’re a smart man,”  Juro continued. “Smart enough to know what happens to those who protect our enemies.”

Talan turned his head, slowly, deliberately.  “I know.”

Juro’s expression changed, not to anger, but to something colder.  Acceptance.

“Bind him,” he said.

The guards grabbed Talan, forcing his wrists behind his back.  He didn’t resist, only looked up at the canopy with a strange calmness, as if summoning the spirit of his brother.

As they pulled him to his feet, Juro leaned in.  You can still walk out of this.  Just tell me where Masters went.”

Talan met his gaze.  “He is gone.  And so are you.”

Juro frowned in puzzlement, “what does that mean?”

Talan’s mouth curled faintly.  “The forest remembers the harm you do.  And it always gives it back.”

Juro’s face hardened.  “Take him.”

They forced marched him into the mangrove swamp where the tide was rising high and dark, lapping against the gnarled trunks.  No one spoke.  Even the insects had gone silent.

A rope was looped firmly around Talan’s wrists tethering him to a root that jutted upward like a broken bone.  Juro looked at him one last time.  “Last chance my friend.”

Talan closed his eyes.  My brother’s name was Kelan.”

Juro said nothing.

“And now,” Talan whispered, you will remember him too.”

The captain abruptly turned away.  “Leave him.”

The soldiers trudged away through the mud, their footprints vanishing under the soft roar of the rising water.

Talan didn’t struggle.  The tide crept higher, relentlessly and inevitably pulling him down inch by inch until the swamp swallowed him completely.

His body was discovered the next day.

Embedded with the Penan

 Marty Rempel

Excerpt from chapter 13 of The Last Grain of Rice

Embedded with the Penan

Ernest Masters left Basil, Switzerland and his life as medical student to live in the wilds of Kalimantan, in Borneo.  At this point he has been with the nomadic Penan tribe for almost three years. He stays for six, until hostilities with lumbering companies break the tranquility.  During this time he has been adopted into the tribe as one of their own.  He speaks the language, knows their ways and has taken a partner.  This section describes a small part of his life with Lian, his partner, and their close and simple life in the interior of Borneo.

*****

It was during the wet season when the rivers swelled and the cicadas screamed into the dusk that Lian sat beside him one evening, close enough for their knees to touch.  She said nothing, only silently placed her hand, warm, and sure on his.  That was all.  Certain things are universal. From then on they walked the trails together, shared the night fire, and in time, the woven walls of a home they built with their own hands.

Their romance was not the rush of city romance but the slow, steady merging of two lives shaped by the same forest.  She taught him the story songs, those sung to newborns and children, the chants to ward of evil.  In turn he told her stories of far away places where the trees grew in rows and water came in pipes.  She laughed at the absurdity of it all.  They grew together.

Ernest would struggle to explain, never justify, his relationship to outsiders. What was it that bound them together with such power?  Words like love or partnership seem too small, too trivial.  It was more like the joining of two rivers when tributaries come together to make something greater, something stronger.  Different in course, origin and direction, but indistinguishable once joined.

Nights in the forest were never silent. Even when the wind was silent in the canopy there was the rustle of creatures unseen in the leaves, in the undergrowth. The soft lap of water against the shoreline as it gently erodes the bank, the far off whoop of a hornbill.  Yet, when Ernest lay next to Lian, the noise receded to insignificance, to a distant hum, as if the forest itself was respecting the small circle of warmth they made.

Her hair smelled faintly of woodsmoke and the crushed aromatic leaves she used to wash it in the clear cold river. When she spoke in the dark, her voice was low and unhurried, each word resonated with the weight of the world he was still learning to understand.  She was his guide and he the eager follower.  Sometimes she would place his hand over hers while she described the constellations as her people knew them not as mere points of light, but the stories that surrounded them strung out across the sky.

The forest parted into a small clearing, Lian stopped short, her dark eyes widening.  Above the canopy, the sky was a brilliant wash of blue, almost too powerful for the Penan eyes so accustomed to the forest’s darkness.  Across the blue a faint white scar, a contrail drifted in the high air.  She shaded her brow with one hand frowning while at the same time pointing upward for Ernest’s benefit.

“Ernest“ she whispered, “what spirit is that?” The sky burns and there is smoke, there is no fire.  I have seen this before.  In her own language she queried the everyday mysteries of the mundane in Ernest’s.

Ernest followed her gaze and her outstretched arm.  A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, yet he thought at the same time how strange this must look to her.  How would he explain this to Lian?

He had grown accustomed to the forest’s silence being broken by the ever present cicadas, hornbills, the buzz of dragonflies.  Here, this thin white line in the upper atmosphere so far removed from the canopy and yet so near seemed like a blasphemy against stillness and nature itself.

Finally he spoke, “Lian, that is not a spirit.  It is a machine, an airplane.  A very big one.”

With some understanding, while tilting her head, she responded, “Like the little bird-plane used by the missionaries?  The metal long boat with long wings like the Tree Swift or the Hornbill?”

“Yes, something like that,” Ernest replied with a smile. “But this one, It’s different.  It’s much larger.  The missionary plane can carry 4 or five people at one time if you squeeze in close.  This one high in the sky, again Ernest pointed to the contrail visible far above them.  He paused as he thought of a way to explain the impossible to Lian in her jungle based world.  This one carries hundreds.  Men, women and children.  All sitting together inside a shell of metal flying faster than any falcon any bird you can imagine. 

Lena blinked in disbelief, her lips parted as if ready to speak.  She thought for a moment longer then said, “Hundreds? In the sky? More than our village? They could fall?

Ernest crouched, scooping a stick from the ground.  He drew a rough outline of a fish in the dirt.  “Think of a giant fish, sealed tight so no water enters.  People sit inside, dry and safe, even as it swims deep.  An airplane is something like that but instead of moving through the water, it moves through the air.  The long white smoke you see is its tail and marks its passing.  They are sitting in comfortable chairs in rows, eating warm dinners, some are sleeping, some are staring out of little windows watching clouds below them. While they do this they are carried cross the world.  Its like a flying longhouse.  

They stood together as the tiny dot of a plane disappeared into the distance and the contrail shifted its position as it drifted across the sky.  Each lost in their own thoughts of two different worlds, so close and so far apart.

They learned each other’s silences.  When she wanted closeness, she would lean against him as they squatted by the fire.  When he sought her, it was enough to reach out across the woven mat in the night, fingers brushing until she intertwined them, tightly. There was no need for grand declarations or gestures of any kind, only the quiet certainty of presence, of two lives that had chosen to intertwine.

When the rains came heavy and they were forced to sped more time in their shelter, at times for days, they moved around each other in eloquence as if their bodies were in constant conversation and communion.  He working at mending and repairing tools and weapons.  She at weaving rattan, there they would spend their day in contentment and laughter, sharing stories and the kind of closeness that made the damp walls and dripping roof vanish from their thoughts.

In time Ernest realized he no longer thought of Lian as someone he loved in the forest.  She was the forest to him. Wild and gentle, whole, complete and pure, mysterious and sustaining unending in her depth.  He had never in his life felt this way.  Not even close.  In her eyes, he saw his own reflection, not as a visitor or an outsider, but as a simple man who had finally found his place in the world.   

And so as the days and months moved forward and on into years Ernest the hunter, the story teller was embedded into the village life with Lian.  He wore loin cloth.  He carried a rattan pack, a parang at his side with all of the embellishments of a Penan.  He spoke their language. The only thing that stood him apart were his height and his eye glasses.  He was otherwise Penan.

The Master Primate

 

The Master Primate

The canopy thins as if

Stitched together

Like a Mennonite quilt

Sky connecting earth

Orangutans lose their homes

Tree by tree

Palms rise in straight obedient rows

Where wild fruit once grew 

The wilderness is lost to

Bewildering progress

Now endangered, not by hunger

But by profit

Some are taken

Small arms clinging

Eyes still learning 

the language of the leaves

Sold into markets

Where cages replace their branches

Silence replaces birdsong.

Their cathedrals of light and shadow

Now in jeopardy, they live alone

Masters of patience

Long reddish hair

The Bohemians of the jungle

Swinging with majesty

Like fire against the rain

And stars

Babies abandoned 

The poachers kill the mothers

Orphans learn again

How to climb how to trust trees

And life,

How to belong

With hands belonging to humans

Undoing what others have done

Released back to the forest

in future days

To begin a new life

Never quite like the first

A male calls out, the long call

Low and echoing

Claiming territory

Declaring I’m here

Seeking a mate

The sound reverberates

Through forest like a warning

A prayer

An invitation

Penetrating brown eyes

Intelligent, holds questions

A right to survive 

They were here before the roads

Before the plantations

Before fences and fires

The only true threat

To the real master primate

Is man

Who forgets too

He once lived in trees.