前回の続き、リーダース・ダイジェストの記事の引用。斜字体にしてあるのは、私が知らない単語および語句。
The next morning Agoos and I wash in a creek at the edge of the clearing. Agoos examines my T-shirt as I dry myself. “We call this laleo khal−’ghost-demon skin,’” he grins. The term is wonderfully apt. The naked Korowai at first contact are unable to imagine the laleo’s garb as anything but strange-looking epidermis that can be magically removed and put back on at will.
The Korowai do not count the years. When I ask Agoos how high he can count, he ticks off the fingers on his left hand, continuing to count as he touches his wrist, forearm, elbow upper arm, shoulder, neck, ear, forehead and then moves down the other arm. The tally comes to 25. Anything greater than that is “many.”
Agoos knows almost nothing about the outside world. When I show him a magazine picture of a horse. He reels back in terror. He’s never seen a mammal bigger than a pig. He refuses to believe we have huts ten times taller than the tallest tree in the rain forest. “Humans cannot climb that high,” he snorts. I waste my breath trying to explain elevators, cars, trains, the wheel.
A wiry man, older than Agoos, greets us. He is the clan’s war chief. Agoos refuses to tell me his name. “If anyone says his name, a spirit will kill that person,” says Agoos.
The war chief points to a large scar spread across his stomach. “A man from another clan stole my daughter and tried to kill me when I went to get her back,” he says, rubbing the scar. “His arrow went into my stomach and came out the back.”
It’s astonishing that he survived. The Korowai have only a rudimentary knowledge of medicine, using plants and bark to bind wounds and ritual to spirit away pain.
This results in a terrible death rate from accidents, disease and war. Life expectancy is short; most die before they reach 35, according to Gerrit Van Enk, a Dutch missionary who spend several years with the tribe and co-authored The Korowai of Irian Jaya. Many children do not last out their first year; almost none receive names until they are about 18 months old.
Another killer is cannibalism. The war chief tells me of men and women the clan killed and ate for stealing pigs or committing adultery. A woman once broke a taboo by shouting evil words at him. “I shot her full of arrows, and we ate her,” he says.
Eating humans is not common−there would be no Korowai left if it were. The most recent cannibal feast Agoos experienced took place a couple of years ago. He arrived as it was ending. “My friends were finishing off a man’s arm,” he says.
After the gruesome tables the war chief offers his tree house to rest. I scale the pole and curl up on the lattice floor, exhausted by the leap across an impossibly wide culture gap.
Next morning the war chief goes to the sago field to collect beetle larvae for a feast. Three months before, he’d chopped down several palms and bore holes along the fallen trunks. Scarab beetles had laid eggs in the holes, and now it was a simple matter of pulling out the grubs and wrapping them in a banana leaves.
As the sun drifts the tree line, the Korowai gather at a hut used for beetle-larvae ceremonies. Uttering special chants, the war chief puts rocks into a roaring fire, then places the first banana-leaf package on top of them.
The prospect of eating beetle larvae, the Korowai's favorite food, seems to banish Fuom’s thoughts of her fate. Eyes shining, she plucks a live grub from one of the banana leaves, watching it wriggle. The creamy grub is about as big and twice as plump, as a finger. She pops it into her mouth.
The warriors race up and down, chanting a wa-wa-wa sound. A mother suckles her sleepy-eyed baby and sings a lullaby: “The grub feast binds us closer, makes us strong. Always remember that you are a Korowai, my son. Never abandon our way of life.”
A gust of steam rises from the banana leaf as the war chief lays it open to reveal a pile of cooked grubs. He pulls one from the pile and gives it to me. I swallow the grub quickly, keeping it in my mouth just long enough to taste its eggy, nutty flavor.
Agoos wakes me at dawn five days into our stay. Fumo’s fierce bridegroom will arrive in the afternoon to collect her. It’s best we be gone by then, he says, because emotions will run high as she departs the clan forever. I hug the little girl, then say good-bye to the war chief.
Agoos and three other warriors guide me through the rain forest. One keeps 200 yards or more ahead, scouting the way, keeping in contact every ten minutes with a yodel.
At the edge of the jungle I clasp each of the warriors in farewell. My eyes meet Agoos’s, and he thrusts his bow and arrows into my hands. “When you see these, you will think of me.” The trees close in around the Korowai as they trek back into the forest.
Should the outsider world let the Korowai keep their way of life, with all its cruelty, or should we shun the temptation to quarantine the tribe from the 21st century, keeping them bottled up as anthropological curiosities?
These are futile questions because the Korowai’s fate has already been decided. Soon, bulldozers will tear down their trees. They will be dragged out of the Stone Age and into the next millennium whether they like it or not.
