Fear Drive My Feet Read Online Free

unstable native police-boy, whose home
is hundreds of miles away and whose ignorance of this part of the country is paralleled
only by my own.’
    I realized that my verbal listing had turned almost imperceptibly into a sort of
double-entry bookkeeping, and that every item so far had fallen on the debit side.
    ‘All right,’ I thought, ‘let’s fill in the credit side of the ledger.’
    There was a pretty long silence.
    ‘Well, I’m damned if I’m going to walk all the way back to Wau just to admit I couldn’t
find Jock,’ I said at last, a little louder than before, and hastily ruled off the
ledger. Even at that stage it seemed as if a lot of entries in those accounts might
be written in red.
    It never occurred to me that I’d been given a pretty slim chance of survival by my
superior, the district officer who had sent me on this errand. Nobody thought it
very strange then, least of all myself, to send someone into that country without
such basic necessities as food, maps, and compass. When you are eighteen the fact
that quite stupid people can play chuck-ha’penny with your life doesn’t seem too
unjust. This is partly because the thrill of the adventure is more dangerously intoxicating
than liquor, and you aren’t too closely in touch with reality. You stride down the
jungle trail full of confidence, a pioneer, a new David Livingstone; you feel exactly
like your favourite hero from the Boy’s Own Paper .
    The hangover from this kind of binge is unpleasant. It arrives not when you understand
clearly the danger you have been in but when you see how useless your whole mission
was, how futile and purposeless your death would have been, and, above all, when
your sober but aching eye discerns that nobody whose business it might have been
took the least trouble to see that you got even a reasonable chance of living.
    But these are afterthoughts, and no such shadows clouded my purpose that hot afternoon
in 1942 as I rested in the shade.
    Five natives squatted in another patch of shadow, a few yards downstream. They were
armed with leafy twigs, which they flicked across their shoulders at the clouds of
mosquitoes that hummed round their shiny brown backs. Four were carriers whom I had
borrowed in Wau to carry my bedroll, my rations, and my few odds and ends of personal
possessions. They wore only lap-laps – strips of ragged and faded red cloth tied
in a knot about their middles. As they sat on their heels patiently suffering the
mosquitoes’ assaults, they talked quietly in pidgin English and passed from hand
to hand a fat twelve-inch-long cigarette which one of them had rolled out of black
twist tobacco and a sheet of newspaper.
    The fifth native was Achenmeri, my so-called police-boy. In peacetime, patrol officers
working in the bush had found the assistance of several well-trained members of the
native constabulary invaluable; now, in time of war, they were indispensable. Yet
here was I sent wandering through the jungles of the largest island on earth with
one partly trained police recruit!
    I studied him carefully as he sat there smoking. His dark-brown face was thin and
parrot-like, almost as if his head had been squashed flat between two boards. His
body was as skinny as a skeleton. No matter how much he ate, he looked half-starved.
His upper arms were adorned by keloid scars in the shape of grotesque formalized
faces with gaping mouths. They were the result of wounds inflicted as part of a ritual
that was a common practice in the Sepik River country, where his home village was.
The fact that he had become a constable of police tickled Achenmeri’s vanity enormously.
He was particularly proud of his uniform – khaki shorts, shining brass-buckled belt,
and khaki peaked cap with a gleaming badge. The cap, which perched precariously on
top of his woolly hair, he was in the habit of removing, to turn self-consciously
round and round in his hands, lost in silent admiration of a piece of property so
magnificent