Itapuni and Awaini

A long time ago a possum named Andeapa gave birth to three children at Waianda rock shelter. It was at Waianda that she named the children. She named the first Eno, the second Mangala and the third was a girl whose name has been forgotten. Eno was dark skinned and Mangala was light skinned. They grew up at Waianda rockshelter.

 

At Waianda they would go out and set traps for birds and bush rats and bring them home and roast them. Even though they went out trapping day after day, Mangala always came home empty handed, and Eno brought back the birds and bush rats he had trapped. Eno became curious as to why Mangala never brought home anything, so one day he secretly followed him when he went out to check his traps. He hid himself and watched to see what Mangala would do. There before his very eyes, he saw Mangala take out his eyeballs and throw them down on a dirt mound. Then in his state of blindness, he picked up the rats he had trapped, and devoured them raw while chanting,

 

“This is how I will eat my father. This is how I will eat my mother. This is how I will eat my brother. This is how I will eat my sister.” As he uttered these words, Eno fled in terror back to the cave and told his mother and sister of what he had seen and repeated the words he had heard.

 

“He is about to devour us. Come, let us pack up our belongings so that we can escape.” While Eno was saying this, he could hear Mangala whistling as he came down the hillside. When he reached Waianda rock shelter, he wiped his blood-smeared hands on the wall of the rock shelter, and his handprints can still be seen there today.

 

He went into the cave where Eno, his mother and sister were preparing to flee, entered and sat down. They took a close look at him. His mouth, hands, and feet were all smeared with blood. Eno, the dark-skinned man, wrinkled up his nose in disgust, and whispered to his mother and sister,

 

“See this is what I was talking about.” When Eno’s mother and sister saw Mangala in this condition, they needed no further convincing. They had no doubt that he had come to devour them. As they started to escape, the entrance to the rock shelter closed. They knew that they were trapped, and that they could not get out of either end of the cave. Now Mangala would certainly get them.

 

Eno’s sister had a black palm spear and instinctively struck the back wall of the rock shelter with it. The wall split open, and Eno, his mother and sister, were just able to squeeze through the passage and escape. Eno ran in one direction, and his mother and sister in another. Eno ran to a large waima tree, gathered some stones from nearby, and embedded them under the bark in the tree trunk. This was to prevent Mangala from chopping down the tree. Then Eno climbed up to the tree’s largest branch, took his axe, and hollowed out the branch, leaving a door of bark. He climbed inside and closed the door just in time to hide from Mangala.

 

Mangala wondered where Eno had gone, so he followed his tracks to the base of the waima tree. When he saw that Eno had climbed the tree like a possum, he tried to chop it down. He chopped and chopped, but his axes soon became blunt from the stones that Eno had embedded in the bark. He tried a new axe, but the same thing happened. After a while, all of his stone axe blades and wooden handles were broken into pieces. He gave up, left them behind, and went to the Lyongo salt pool to make salt. There he made several sacks of salt, and carried them to the east beyond Wapenamanda where the stone cliffs begin. He exchanged them for stone axes and returned home to Waianda.

 

When he reached Waianda, he continued to try to chop down the waima tree in which Eno was hiding. Once again, one by one the axes broke and before long there was only one left. With the remaining axe, he cut a wooden stake from a kapono tree and sharpened it to a point. Mangala took the stake and started digging at the foot of the waima tree, trying to uproot it. He dug for an entire day, pushing the soil and roots aside into heaps. On these heaps, he planted cordyline plants. By evening Mangala had cut every root, except for the last few that still held up the tree. He decided to stop for the night and went to sleep.

 

The next morning, Mangala set out to complete the job. However, during the night the waima tree had fallen over from its own weight. When Mangala saw that the tree was no longer standing, he looked everywhere for it but could not find it. He wondered what could possibly have happened to it. As he looked around, he noticed the path it had made as it had slid down the hillside into Minoko creek. He followed its trail, which was smooth and wide like a road, but when he reached the creek, the tree was not there. Minoko creek had carried it down into the Laialu river, a large tributary of the Lai River. Mangala did not stop there. He followed the Laialu river downstream, searching for the waima log, but found that it had been carried down into the Lai River, and then had been washed away without leaving a trace. Mangala gave up and what became of him after that is unknown.

 

One day during a dry spell, an old woman went to the bank of the Lai River near Lenge to collect driftwood to burn in her fireplace. There she found the branch of a waima tree lying on the riverbank, picked it up and carried it home. She stood it vertically in the pig stall to dry. By that time, night had fallen, so the old woman and her young, unmarried daughter went to sleep. In her sleep, the old Langape woman from the Yakani tribe, heard the sound of a Jew’s harp playing. She woke up and wondered if she had been dreaming; otherwise, where could the sound be coming from? Then her daughter woke up and asked,

 

“Mother, I hear the sound of a Jew’s harp, where is the music coming from?”

 

“Shhhh, I’m listening! Be quiet so that we can find out where the music is coming from!” answered the mother. They lay in bed and listened to the tune of the Jew’s harp. It was so beautiful and soothing that they could not fall back to sleep but just lay there and listened. Then the old woman went outside the house and searched the courtyard to find out where the music might be coming from. She found nobody there, so she sat down and waited quietly. After a while she realized that the tune must be coming from inside the house. Puzzled, she went back inside but could find no one. The Jew’s harp continued to play throughout the night. At dawn it stopped.

 

The mother and daughter waited impatiently throughout the next day for the evening to come to see if the tune would continue. At dusk, they sat there waiting silently and sure enough, the Jew’s harp began to play again, just as it had the previous night. Once again, they went outside to hear where it was coming from and realized that it was indeed coming from inside the house. They went in and searched all the corners of the house but found nothing. Disappointed, they went back to their sleeping quarters and tried to sleep. They just lay there and listened to the beautiful and familiar sound of the Jew’s harp.

 

After a while when they couldn’t fall asleep, they got up and crept quietly around the room searching for the sound. They discovered that the sound was coming from the pig stall in which they had left the driftwood to dry. They decided to search for the source of the music in the morning and went back to sleep. In the morning, the Jew’s harp stopped playing as it had the day before. The mother and daughter waited until noon when everybody had left the neighborhood, and they were alone in the house.

 

The sun was directly overhead when they picked up the driftwood in the pig stall and carried it out into the courtyard. Without wasting a minute, they got their axes and started breaking up the driftwood. They worked delicately, picking up each piece and striking it carefully on the end, so as to split it without hurting anything that might be inside. They examined each piece of driftwood, but in vain. The only remaining piece was the large waima log. They attempted to split this in the same careful way.

 

With one gentle stroke of the axe, the waima log split open and there they saw an incredible sight. A young handsome bachelor lay sleeping inside the log. He was dressed in finely woven aprons with a stone axe in his belt, kina shells around his neck and a fully shaped wig of natural hair. Making sure that nobody was watching, they gathered the pieces of the waima log together and brought them back into the house. They laid a mat of woven pandanus leaves in the corner of their sleeping quarters and laid the waima log on the mat.

 

When they had done this, the mother and daughter went out and killed a domestic pig, roasted it and cut it into pieces. They placed the meat inside the hollowed-out log next to the young man and said,

 

“Here is something to eat. Sleep well.” They laid their possessions around the log to prevent people from finding the log with the sleeping young man in it.

 

The next day the mother and daughter tiptoed quietly over to the log to see how the young man was doing. He was sleeping peacefully and they were satisfied. Once again at noon when nobody was around, they visited the young man. They did this for three days, and on the fourth noticed that the young man had eaten all the meat. Seeing this, the mother and daughter delved into their net bags and laid out all the necessary decorations to fully dress the young man. They chose their best net aprons and put them on top of his. Soon they had him dressed up completely as if he was going to a sing-sing.

 

They finished dressing him in the evening about the time that people returned from their gardens. Just before people arrived, they laid out a mat close to the fire and asked the young man to sit on it. He sat there playing the Jew’s harp and smoking tobacco during the pauses. When the relatives arrived, they flocked around the young man and admired him, wondering where he had come from.

 

The young man, who had not uttered a word since he had fled from his brother, began to talk eloquently. Again and again, they asked him from where he had come, and how, and he repeatedly explained the strange events to them.

 

The young man lived with the mother and daughter for some time. One day the old Langape woman said to him,

 

“You do not belong here. Your home is at Waianda. You should stay another two or three months and then return to your own home.” In her heart though, she was planning to give him her daughter in marriage.

 

After a few months had passed, the young man Eno said to the old Langape woman,

 

“I think that it is time for me to return to my own home; is that all right with you?”

 

The old woman agreed that it was time for him to go and dressed up her daughter for marriage. She gave her new grass skirts, a wedding net bag, and provisions for the journey.

 

“Take her to your place, she will be your wife,” the mother said. Eno agreed to marry her.

 

Eno and the girl traveled along the Lai valley until they came to a part of Wabag that had previously been named Mangi by Eno and Mangala. At Wabag they lived as man and wife. They were not completely content at Wabag though, because they could not stand the heat of the sun and craved possum meat. They remembered the words of the Langape woman, Eno’s mother-in-law:

 

“Up there at Waianda rock-shelter where the possums live and the pandanus grows, that is where your house is and you should return there.” Driven by thirst and hunger for meat, they departed for Waianda cave.

 

On their way, they passed a bent-over tree in which two kepa possums had hollowed out a burrow to sleep. He killed them both and gave them to his wife to carry. Later they arrived at Waianda rock-shelter, went inside and roasted the possums. With their hunger for meat satisfied, they went to sleep.

 

The next day Eno showed his wife the area, the place he used to cut firewood, the pandanus trees, and the areas in which he used to trap possums. Once again, he told her the story of his flight from his brother. In the end he said,

 

“This is the place that your mother told us to come to. Here it is.” They returned to the rock-shelter and lived there. Later they had a son, and Eno’s Langape wife named him Itapuni. They had a second son named Awaini. There in Waianda cave they lived. What happened to Eno’s mother and sister is not known.

(Kaipune Sangaina, Itapuni Kala clan of Amala (Wabag) and Waianda)