I was a year into my training when the four Nocte boys in Borduria began wielding bows and arrows. Their aim was sharper. They had learned to move silently in the forest and they could shoot unsuspecting animals. The birds had begun responding to their calls, a success they would not forget. The day they first succeeded in this, they sat in silence, concealed behind a tree in the jungle. Binto pursed his lips and made the mating call of a male jungle fowl. Soon, several fat hens left their hiding places and came flapping and waddling, cocking their heads and looking around for the male.
When Wangroh’s arrow sharply pierced a hen, Lokesh and Gonia went rushing to fetch the wounded bird and wrung its head to take its life. Back home, they proudly displayed their catch. And soon they sought recognition as good hunters of Borduria.
At last, the day they had been waiting for arrived; the greatest day in their lives. While people of Borduria were celebrating their Choulow festival, their fathers performed a rite and presented a pig and rice beer to the morung boys to hold a feast and formally accept their boys as members. With their chins up, chests swelling, feeling like adults, the gang of four proudly reached the morung.
In unison, ten men ranged on either side, beating the twenty-foot-long and two-foot-diameter drum, with the notes travelling a great distance, informing their village and the villages far away about their induction to the morung. They had seen the inside of the morung many times earlier. Yet, as its formal members, they keenly looked around the large structure with sleeping platforms along each wall on either side of the ten hearths. They saw scores of skulls of mithuns that were sacrificed and animals that were killed in hunting stacked on the bamboo racks. Proudly, they touched the human skulls, collected through head-hunting in the past. Their chief’s morung had more than a hundred such skulls, displayed on a wooden plank fixed to the wall, which were taken out during annual festivals.
On the first night, the boys sat around the hearth in the morung. Some pamis gossiped as they worked with cane and bamboo. Some relaxed. They began learning their lessons. Firstly, they were told about how their morung was constructed by all the villagers some years ago and how after the construction, rice beer was offered in leaf-cups in the names of their forefathers. One elder spoke about their precious log drums, how they were used to broadcast messages in the past to sound signals of danger like an outbreak of fire, or to announce the killing of some big game like a tiger, bear, et cetera. They used different notes and rhythms to communicate different messages.
They were assigned tasks from the very next day and put on the first formal duty, mounting the guard. They were cautioned that they were responsible for any accident taking place and that the village council would decide on the action to be taken against them if there was any failure on their part. Equipped with their dhaos, bows and arrows, they ambled through Borduria to the outskirts and peeled off to their posts.
Gonia waved to his fellow guards and walked along the outside of the fence, past the thorny bushes abutting it, to a cushion of foliage underneath a hollong tree. From there he could afford a clear view of the surroundings in the bright yellow light of the full moon. Checking his scabbard for his dhao, keeping his spear by his side, he made himself comfortable on the ground. Perking his ears, he listened to the shrilling of crickets, shrieks of night birds and howling of hyenas at a distance. He heard occasional yelps of animals. He was alert all night; even his friends did not have a wink of sleep.
In time, they realised that their morung, besides serving as a young men’s club for recreation and as a sleeping house, was also the venue of the village council or any other gathering of the villagers. It also conducted some village festivals, such as those for the selection of new jhum fields, or for undertaking any development work. Like the other boys, Gonia and his friends also began helping widows and the old in cultivation.
Then, they were told to get ready for a hunt. On their way deep into the Borduria forest, their leader told them to march so silently that even animals should not hear them. He pointed out the place where a tiger had recently crouched in wait to kill its prey, showed them the tracks of a herd of deer and they followed the tracks back and forth to know their movements that day. He showed them the hideouts of jackals and hyenas.
When they walked deeper and farther, Lokesh was nonplussed. Silently, he nudged the leader and showed him a black panther lazily sleeping on a tree. The leader signalled them to move. Quietly, they moved ahead, out of the danger zone. The leader then said that the panther was full-bellied, perhaps it had killed that evening. He said such animals would not attack unless they were hungry and that humans were rarely attacked, unless they provoked the beasts.
On and on they moved, as the leader taught them the nuances of hunting: “A hunter should hear what others cannot and smell the scent that others cannot. He also must be able to see through the darkness.” Their air of being good hunters was deflated with the fund of new information they gathered and they realised that what they knew was only very little. They learned that they should not move abruptly, since the animals were very intelligent and were very swift in their movements and that their instinct for survival was great. Earlier, their skills in imitating the sounds of animals and birds were never perfect. Now, they looked with awe when the leader demonstrated his skills; several animals and birds came into sight in no time. They thought of him as a magician.
It took them months to learn the new tricks of hunting. They were even taught secret prayers to help them be invisible to the animals. They could detect and follow the almost invisible tracks and signs of animals. With growing expertise, they hunted animals with accuracy and proudly ate a great variety of meats of animals, either trapped or shot by them, skinning them quickly and cooking them on the fire built with flint and twigs.
While they continued with their schooling, they mastered their traditional works—salt making and jhum cultivation. And, about girls, too, they learned many new things; interacting with them was a new experience. Young girls and boys sang love songs in morungs, or in the field huts. Through the songs, the lovers expressed their minds. Once the lovers exchanged their minds, it gradually became a permanent bond in a marriage.
Excerpted with permission from Heroes of the Hidden Lands, N Dilip Kumar, Speaking Tiger Books.
