By Sandshoe

I moved with an even attention to not raising the alarm of the many eyes I believed were watching the trespass and tugged at Docherty’s boots as they manipulated frantic purchase on the sill of the entrance into the grass hut. The distinctive difference of the hut on stilts Docherty had run towards and deftly up its ladder was its higher elevation. He had in the same movement pushed athletic bulk in the dense black of the narrow entrance. A crescendo of murmurings suggested to me the compound’s native inhabitants in the likely proximity I had interpreted from eerie silence as Docherty and I approached just ahead of the others the red dirt track leading down to the settlement and grove of cultivation.

I supposed Docherty could not hear the murmuring in his scrabble part-inside and part-out of the construction. His legs and rubber-soled boots seemed to be pushing him inwards. Thick woven walls and his excitement doubtless insulated him from eruption of noise in any exterior world. The sound of the voices cackled in my mind with the danger I had sensed in the surround of tall native grass clumps and straggling palms and trees. These were people who had not seen the full potential of a white invasion I wondered. Their tones sounded referential, consultative rather than rabidly murderous. They might slit our throats with some polite justification if Docherty did not withdraw himself out of the hut I considered.

Only three ancient elders sitting in rock-like silence on a bench in the centre of the compound, about a quarter of the distance from the circular wall of huts where it bowed away neatly from our line of sight where we had entered the arena suggested habitation. The red ground of the compound beneath our feet that I supposed was tramped by generations into a compacted floor was so bare of debris it appeared fresh-swept. The rock-like silence endured of the elders and I wondered as I glanced discretely towards the row of men if they could speak. I supposed the venerables were left behind by the fleeing men, women and children who it was seeming had abandoned their village at the sound of our progress along the track from the landing strip on the edge of that high mountain place. The elders looked fragile, skeletal, but sighted or not seemed observant in their still demeanours and I drew the sense of their strength, their respect into a reservoir of belief I may be saved as I reached to grasp Docherty’s boots again.

We flew to the location in a plane that was chartered as result of a chance conversation in the Port Moresby Club. Docherty, buying up big and ferrying trays of exotic liquers he was insistent those who had never experienced them try got into a confrontation with a patron it transpired was a pilot scheduled to fly to keep an appointment in the Central Highlands the next day (He said it was social; a Saturday afternoon piss-up we surmised later). You will see natives, he assured Natural Ringleader Docherty loudly, Good Fun, Loveable Docherty, waving a dismissive hand at suggestion danger was involved. He would fly a little earlier than he intended, that was all. We could do whatever we wanted on arrival at his destination as long as he was left to his own devices and we meet him at the scheduled time for the return flight. If you don’t, the pilot warned, I’ll leave you on the mountain. On our arrival, he waved us in a direction opposite to his own.

Tugging sharply on Docherty’s right boot, I realised as equally as I did there was little danger for us in the original environment, that a sense they were in danger had begun crowding the natives from their hiding places. Big Docherty was used to being in charge. He needed strong persuasion to reverse his impulsive lunge. I said firmly, “Docherty, get out. You’re trespassing. This is the private property of these people.”

“No, No” I heard the muffled voice declare as if the magnification of the soul of an hypnotic, “There’s something in here. I want to see. I’ve got a match. I’ll light a match.”

I reached further into the dark cool and commanded by a combination of touch and tone that Docherty get out.

“You’re in danger. We all might be.”

I could hear the grasses rustling more loudly and rhythmically.  The rising crescendo of murmuring was louder because it was drawing nearer.  I just knew, although there was no sound of feet on the earth or on twigs or fallen palm branches.

“Everybody’s out,” Docherty had casually commented when we arrived on the edge of the mountain overlooking where its slope fell sharply on one side into a ravine and to a glimpse of the peaks ahead of huts in a circle. I was awed by the silence as we looked down on the splendid array of bright-leaved fronds and tropical bushes interspered with palms. “The people are hiding,” I said, instinctive, young, sensitive, attuned immediately to the meaning of the sound of a silence I had never experienced before and cherished for knowing.  The air was crystal-glare. Despite our elevation and the sun was near enough its height, on exertion the heat was a swelter. It was air stripped nevetheless of the extreme stress of the sweltering heat of Moresby.

The bareness of the red-brown earth of the compound was a striking monochrome of colour in a rich mix of hues of green beyond the circle of this evidence of residential life.

As if a light had come on in Docherty’s head deep in the hut’s interior, Docherty’s head popped out of the black mouth of the hut. Docherty to my surprise looked mildly confused by himself, as if he was even grateful if he was to about to be slaughtered it would be from a standpoint of a renewed consciousness of realism. Having shown not the least consideration of fearful possibilities, possibilities seemed to be occurring to Docherty in a rush like the onset of a sudden tropical downpour of rain that is heralded by an atmosphere of pure swelter. Beads of moisture glistened in the sun that was falling over him like an illuminator of lost dreams, his face changed in the same thought to a sense of hope in contrast to sense of loss. I suppose he suffered hell. I supposed he thought of his one child in the States who he told me on our group chartered flight from Cairns was home in the States. That was my first experience of hearing the word “weed” and what was meant as he told me his despair his son preferred it to law school and described its effects. No Doubt Docherty as he scrabbled off the ledge of the hut now considered his own status, a now common trespasser attested by the extra tinges of pink flaring through the tan of his affluent and untrammelled face. The murmurings of the voices like the presage of a mob moving closer had remained uniform as if the same words and similar were being repeated by different people under the direction of a conductor of an invisible choir of voices reciting an orchestrated sound symphony. I had just finished High School. I was 17 and it was three months before I heard a choir perform an acapella sound poem I heard as a similar musical effect. As instantly as Docherty exited the hut, the music of the voices faded and fell to a low volume before rising to a cacophonic babble. Docherty flared red above his light cotton round neck t-shirt.

“What will we do?” he asked me.

I said lightly and pleasantly, accepting my leadership as survival, turning, looking at Docherty over my shoulder, “We walk back the way we came. Follow me.”

Docherty followed me to where the others waited ashen-Docherty greeted his  wife shame-faced and she gathered him-and I walked with an easy stride indicating “Follow”. Everybody seemed to realise the safety cue I might best be seen with the red sun leaping through my hair as a young heroine leading Docherty away from dangerous mischievousness. We walked towards the narrow gap between two huts the way we had entered the compound. The silence that fell of the invisible people who lived here and had fled I was sure from their homes at the sound of our approach reassured. It meant we were free to leave. The sun etched a mottle on the trail through the vegetation when I glanced back where the huts described their edge around the circle of trodden red soil that was flat and occupied again only by the three old men I now did discern on the bench seat. I would never know them. We walked across to the red-dirt earth of the hill track we had followed down the mountain to the village and the sun blasted its heat on the steep aspect of the hill as we climbed to its top.