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The never-ending clan warfare is almost always over pigs and women, and is often payback for an earlier killing. This danger, Agoos says, is the main reason the Korowai build their huts in trees. If a rival clan attacks, the women, children and old men can climb to safety while warriors fight it out in the clearing.
Not long ago the tree-house people here were attacked by a nearby clan, over a pig. The fighting was savage. “One of their men was killed, along with one of ours, and several were wounded,” Agoos says. The rival clan carried away their wounded and the dead man. What would have happened if they had left his behind? “We would have eaten him,” Agoos says.
He shows me one of his arrows especially made for killing humans. A yard of weathered bamboo is lashed with vine to a handspan of bone with six sharp barbs carved on each side. This ensures the arrow-head will cause terrible damage when removed from the victim.
I accept Agoos’s invitation to climb into the safety of the khaim, or tree house. But it seems an impossible task for a bulky laleo. Slanted against the ground at an angle of 45 degrees is a jungle ladder, three feet across, made from boughs, the side struts tied to a pair of the poles that support the tree house. About 15 feet long, the ladder meets a long pole called a yafin that runs off at an angle up to the veranda.
Korowai mothers carry their babies up the pole until they are about four years old, when the toddlers begin to scramble up without help. Falls are frequent for young and old, some fatal.
The pole bends perilously as I place my foot on a notch, the upper end rattling against the veranda. A burglar alarm.
After too many moments of terror, I gratefully haul myself onto the veranda. “The women are in the sago fields, but they will return soon because of the threat,” Agoos says.
Standing high above the clearing, I see there are other advantages to these tree houses. Inhabitants escape the malarial mosquitoes; the air up here is cooler, breezier. From the veranda the Korowai can shoot arrows at birds flying by and also see their beloved gardens growing many types of banana and sweet potato. Korowai men call themselves Lords of the Garden, lumping together the gardens in the clearing and the sago fields in the clan’s chunk of rain forest.
The forest silence is shaken by loud yodeling. Is it the war party? Agoos grins. “It’s the women.”
A dozen troop into the clearing, their backs bent under loads of firewood and food carried in vine bags strung around their foreheads. They climb the pole to the tree houses still toting their loads.
Agoos nods his wife, Lali, a round-faced girl I judge to be in her late teens, clad like the other women in a tiny skirt made form strips of dried palm fronds. Circles of scar tissue the size of large coins run the length of her arms, around her stomachs and across her breasts. “They are beauty marks,” she says shyly. The marks are formed by thrusting burning-hot pebbles on the bare skin.
A girl who looks no older than 13 stacks a bundle of wood against a wall and turns to stare at me. The natural beauty of her features is shadowed by some inner agony.
“She is to be married against her will to a powerful man from another clan,” explains Agoos. “He saw Fuom at a beetle grub ceremony and threatened to kill and eat her father unless she became his bride.”
She has no choice in the matter. The man will arrive in five days to claim her, Her bride price will be chains of dog’s teeth and cowry shells and also two adult pigs.
The Korowai staple food is a flour made form the pith of sago palm. Lali had spent her day in the forest hacking down sago palm with a hand ax−a tool which defines an entire epoch of human existence, the Stone Age. It is a chunk of stone sharpened at one end and lashed with vine to a wooden handle, She had pummeled the pith to a pulp, then sluiced it with water to produce a dough molded into bite-size pieces.
After grilling several chunks, Agoos eats them with gusto. Given a piece, I find it tastes like warm raw flour, clogging my throat, until I flush down with river water.
As darkness falls I ask Agoos if the rival clan might use the cover of night to attack. He shakes his head . The spirits in the jungle are especially hostile at night.
Most powerful is a spirit named Ginol who created the present world, his fifth effort, having destroyed the previous four. This will not be the final world, according to Korowai legend. Around the fires for as far as tribal memory reaches back, the old people have told the younger ones that white-skinned ghost demons will invade Korowai land. Once the laleo arrive, the fifth world will be obliterated. The accuracy of the prophecy stuns me.
