Fen looked at Nell to explain.
‘We couldn’t stay any longer,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t at any rate. And we had the idea that maybe in Australia we could find a region that has not been claimed.’
The word claimed helped me to understand. I suspect she knew it would. ‘Do not under any circumstances leave the Sepik because of me. I do not own it, nor do I want to. There are eighty anthropologists for every bloody Navajo, yet they give me a seven-hundred-mile river. No one dares come near. They think it’s “mine.” I don’t want it!’ I was aware of the whinge in my voice. I didn’t care. I’d get on my knees if I had to. ‘Please stay. I will find you a tribe tomorrow—there are hundreds of them—far far away from me if you like.’
They agreed so quickly, and without even glancing at each other, that I wondered afterward if they’d been playing me rather handily all along. It didn’t matter. They might have needed me. But I needed them far more.
As I waited for them to collect their things from their upstairs room, I tried to recall every tribe I’d heard of up and down the river. The first that came to mind was the Tam. My informant, Teket, had a cousin who’d married a Tam and he always used the word peaceful when he described his time there. I’d seen a few Tam women trading their fish at market and I’d noted their laconic business savvy, the way they held their ground against the hard-bargaining Kiona where other tribes capitulated. But Lake Tam was too far. I needed to think of a people much closer.
They came down with their bags.
‘That can’t be all you’ve got.’
Fen grinned. ‘No, not quite.’
‘We sent the rest on to Port Moresby,’ Nell said. She had changed into a man’s white shirt and tan trousers, as if she expected to be back at work by morning.
‘I can send word to have it brought back up. That is, if you stay.’ I picked up two of their duffels and headed out before they could change their mind.
My ears rung in the sudden quiet. With the electric light pouring out of the government house and the music tapering to a thin strain and the shorn grass underfoot, we could have been walking out of a dance at Cambridge on a warm night. I turned back and Fen had taken her hand.
I led them across the road, past the docks, through the break in a thicket, and onto the small beach where I’d stashed my canoe. Even in the dark I could see their faces droop. I think they’d imagined a proper boat, with seats and cushions.
‘I won this. It’s a war canoe. I got it for shooting a boar.’ I made up for their disappointment with great energy, tossing their bags in then running back up the beach for the engine, which I had hid behind a fat fig tree.
They brightened up considerably when they saw it. They’d thought I was going to paddle them to my village, which would have taken all night and most of the next morning.
‘Now this is something I haven’t seen,’ Fen said as I bolted the motor into place.
I rearranged the duffels at the front, making a bed of sorts so Nell could sleep. I directed her toward it, put Fen in the middle, and pushed us out a few yards. After I hopped in I pulled the cord and hit the throttle hard. If they had any last doubts I didn’t hear them over the wail of the engine, which slid us quickly across the dark crimped water toward Nengai.
4
I was raised on Science as other people are raised on God, or gods, or the crocodile.
If you took aim at New Guinea and shot an arrow up through the globe, it might come out the other side at the village of Grantchester, on the outskirts of Cambridge, England. The house I grew up in there, Hemsley House, had been in the possession of Bankson scientists for three generations, its every desktop, drawer, and wardrobe stuffed with science’s remnants: spyglasses, test tubes, finger scales, pocket magnifiers, loupes, compasses, and a brass telescope; boxes of glass slides and ento pins, geodes, fossils, bones, teeth, petrified wood, framed beetles and butterflies, and thousands of loose insect carcasses that turned to powder upon contact.