GEORGE BRILL

THE MOUSE HUNT

 

I glanced up at the rear-view mirror and locked gaze with the unwavering stare of Empeng; dark eyes amid a face of deeply carven wrinkles. Her brightly coloured t-shirt was emblazoned with the slogan ‘cocaine and caviar’ in large letters—a jarring juxtaposition to her age and demeanour. Of course, she had no idea, nor even if she did would it make any sense to her. Who knew where it came from.

 

Beside her, her sister Chengkling crouched, low and diminutive: the two of them were easily pushing eighty. Surrounding the pair was a haphazard arrangement of six younger women, bundled on top of one another in the back of the open truck. Flowers flowed from their tightly curled hair, held in place with the long teeth of ornately carved bamboo combs, white and yellow petals contrasting sharply with dark olive skin and the deep black of their curls. Eight faces stared ahead emotionless. They crouched as if arranged for a portrait shoot, unperturbed by the rough jostling as we bounce and grind our way along the pitted logging track. These women were Batek: descendants of an ancient tribal heritage: rainforest foragers from deep in the heart of Peninsular Malaysia.  

 

None of them sat in the truck itself; I was alone. I pondered how on earth I had ended up in this bizarre situation.

 

I had met the community a few months earlier, working for a small wildlife conservation group who taught occasional English lessons to the younger children. Over the course of a couple of months I’d grown to know them, and their shyness had given way to an amicable dismissiveness. In the months that followed, I would come to live in the village, to learn the language and fall headfirst into their culture and society. Their tolerance would become an unconditional acceptance and instil a deep sense of belonging I never expected. But that’s getting ahead. Right now, I was still a tolerated outsider, glimpsing my first of the many remarkable events that would follow.

 

Leaving the truck by the side of the track, we headed barefoot into the forest. The old colonial railway cut a stark juxtaposition as the women crossed its bare corridor from green wall to green wall, single-file, machetes hanging at their belts. Solid ground gave way to thick sucking mud, and the line split, now flowing as individuals around tangled roots and vines like ants through grass, or the swift flow of water around rocks. We were here to collect pandanus, a tough, viciously barbed leaf that would later be dried and woven into bags and mats. The women worked at incredible speed, cutting them down as they went, deftly stripping away the spines with the backs of their machetes. Each flowed around the others as if with a common mind, working silently with clinical precision and practised efficiency.

 

We walked some distance, and by the time we paused each had cut vines to bind the growing bundles they carried. A small fire was brought to life and the women milled about, taking their ease and resting. Some produced oversized leaf roll-ups from their sarongs and began to smoke, lighting their creations with glowing brands from the fire. Changkling began drying her pandanus over the flames, while the remainder busied themselves with further adornments to their hair. It was hot. Humidity was high and the sun fell in thick, steaming rays from the canopy above. The mud that encased our feet began to dry and crack; leech bites glistened crimson in the dappled light.

 

I sat alongside Empeng as she smoked, watching the women as they rested. A resilience and strength seemed to radiate from them, embodied in the powerful physiques and fluid movements of the younger women, but no ostensive in the crouched and wizened forms of the elder sisters: an underlying integrity anchoring an outer canvas marked and worn with tales of age and experience. I saw it most in their faces. Deep wrinkles of the elders contrasted with the strong jaw-structure and graceful beauty of the younger, their skin a dark olive, smooth and soft, yet solid, as if shaped from velvet-lined stone. And within the faces of both young and old were set bright, dark eyes with a fire and intensity unlike any I’d seen before. In that moment I saw more than just a group of capable women. They represented a far-reaching corner of human spirit: a subtle strength and proud independence of a dying people—the last of the forest spirits.

 

My thoughts were interrupted. One of the women was fanning the ground with a bundle of folded leaves. She had lit a small fire in the entrance of a mouse hole and was wafting smoke down the burrow. A rhythmic thwack, thwack, thwack beat against the hiss of insects as she pumped air into the hole. Smoke began to rise from the ground before her like dry ice, clinging low and snaking about the roots and stems. Before long, a wispy ethereal line of shifting grey marked the burrow’s subterranean path, growing thicker by the second.

 

Halfway down the line, another of women dug with her machete, finding the burrow and reaching inside. Her hand returning empty, she filled the new hole she’d made with dry leaves, lit them and the fanning began again, driving the line of creeping smoke onwards. And so the process moved along, meandering around trees and root systems for thirty feet or more.

 

Suddenly one of the women, backside in the air with her hand armpit deep inside the burrow, pulled out the limp body of a young mouse. Less than the length of her palm, its tail hung limply through her fingers. She cradled it gently, massaging its belly and inspecting the lifeless form. Elsewhere another had dug out the mother, a monstrous foot-long jungle rat. Treatment was vicious in comparison. It was pulled from the hole, both back legs snapped like toothpicks to prevent escape, before the unfortunate animal was raised and swung above her head like a rag doll. With a speed and enthusiasm far exceeding the aged frame of the old women doing the swinging, the animal’s skull met a tree with a sickening crunch, and fatal consequences. Dinner secured.

 

By now, six or more baby mice had been recovered, lying limp and unresponsive in their state of asphyxiation. Then, to my utter disbelief, one by one, with a surety of past experience, the women raised mice to mouths and sucked on tiny muzzles. Cheeks pulled in with the strength of indrawn breath they repeated the process, spitting occasionally, sucking smoke from tiny lungs. To my even greater surprise, the unconscious mice began to stir, stumbling drearily about as the women resuscitated them, massaging the soft white fur of throat and belly with the gentle caress of a fingertip. When one failed to regain consciousness, it was fed water from a bottle-top, administered in drops with a small leaf.

 

Once all had been revived, the women sat individually cradling their new pets, gradually coaxing them back to full alertness. The extraordinary nature of the event I’d just witnessed had thrown me entirely, and I was sat dumbfounded when a sudden shriek broke the silence. Fleeing the lap of its captor, a mouse had escaped, and all chaos broke loose. Five previously reserved and dignified women ran, crawled and scrambled through undergrowth, encircling the escapee with a flurry of childlike giggles and high-pitched shrieks of excitement. A few minutes later, captive regained, the women returned to their seats to examine their catches more thoroughly. 

 

We continued to sit there on the jungle floor for some time, and I watched them as they cradled and stroked their new pets. They lifted toes and angled noses to better see the details, utterly absorbed in the little balls of fur they held. Further escapes occurred at least four more times, until I began to wonder if perhaps guards were being relaxed rather more so than was strictly accidental, such was the excitement the resultant scramble elicited each time. When finally the women grew bored, the mice were laid in sarongs and imprisoned in a knotted roll from shoulder to hip, allowing pandanus collection to continue unhindered as we retraced our steps to the truck.

 

As we drove home, I couldn’t help but look up at the mirror again, the stern arrangement faces surrounded this time by thorny bundles of pandanus. Expressions were unchanged; they stared ahead as if they couldn’t be more bored at the whole situation. I dropped them off at the village and helped remove their bundles from the back of the truck. Each woman went their separate way, dispersing to various bamboo shelters, vast piles of pandanus on their shoulders and mice tucked away in their sarongs. As they left, I called to Changkling in my broken Batek, ”Mice kaneet. Moh seunt-a goon keughtuck?”—‘The little mice. Will you eat them later?’. She turned to face me, the bundles on each shoulder dwarfing her tiny frame. She smiled, briefly but with warmth, then continued on her way.

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