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We sit and give them tobacco, steel axes, fishing line, metal hooks, salt, matches and rice -- the cost of a night's stay. Then Cahill shows one of the qualities that truly distinguish him as an adventurer and as a writer: his ability to invest himself in other people's perspectives.

One of the women, Pya, reached up into a string bag hanging from the roof of the house, fished around a bit, and came up with a white ball of sago pith, which she dropped onto the embers of her fire. After a short time, I was offered a piece the size of a tennis ball. The food had the consistency of doughy bread and was very nearly tasteless. The term half-baked kept clattering through my mind, but I smiled and complimented Pya on her culinary skills. I used one of the few words of Karowai that I knew.

"Manoptroban." Very good.

It was the first word I had uttered in the tree house, and as soon as it tumbled out of my mouth, I wanted to call it back, because it was, of course, a lie. The older of the two men, Samu, stared at me. His expression was that of a man whose intelligence had been insulted. Sago? Good? People eat this soggy crap every day. All the time. They do not sit down for regular meals, but eat only when they have to, because there is no pleasure in the taste of sago. They eat it because there is nothing else. Good? It's not good, you imbecile. It's sago.

I felt chastened and reluctant to say anything else, maybe for the rest of my life.

The men sit or squat, mostly staring into space, content with silence and squatting. Night falls, and they throw up a tarp to separate the inhabitants from the visitors, then all prepare to sleep. In the quiet of the night, Chris the photographer turns to Cahill and says, "I don't want them to change." After a pause, he continues, "Do you think that's paternalistic? Some new politically correct form of imperialism?"

"I don't know," Cahill answers. And then he writes:

But I thought about it. I thought about it all night long. When you suspect that your hosts have eaten human flesh in the very recent past, sleep does not come easily. It seemed to me that I was out of the loop here, not a part of the cycle of war and revenge, which was all just as well. I had expected to meet self-sufficient hunter-gatherers, and the Karowai were all of that, but they wanted more. They wanted steel axes, for instance, and did not equate drudgery with any kind of nobility.

I tried to imagine myself in an analogous situation. What would I want?

What if some alien life force materialized on earth with superior medical technology, for instance? They have the cure for AIDS, for cancer, but they feel it is best we go on as we have. They admire the spiritual values we derive from our suffering; they are inspired by our courage, our primitive dignity. In such a case, I think I'd do everything in my power to obtain that technology -- and to hell with my primitive dignity.

I thought about Asmat art and what is left in the world that is worth dying for. I thought about Agus, who wept over his first bowl of rice and whose first contact with the world set him up in the business of cutting down the forest that had fed him all his life.

I thought about the butterfly I had caught when I was a child. My grandmother told me never to do it again. She said that butterflies have a kind of powder on their wings and that when you touch them, the powder comes off in your hand and the butterfly can't fly anymore. She said that when you touch a butterfly, you kill it.

Butterfly; Karowai.

How this prose soars, leaping from present to future to past, from reality to speculation to memory -- looping and tying and weaving it all together into a whole of maudlin-squashing, soul-plucking poignancy.

And then Cahill ends the piece with this final three-paragraph scene:

Sometime just before dawn, I heard a stirring from the Karowai side of the house. Samu moved out from behind the plastic tarp and blew on the embers of the fire. Gehi joined him.The two naked men squatted on their haunches, silent, warming themselves against the coolest part of the forest day. Presently, the stars faded and the eastern sky brightened with the ghostly light of false dawn.

A mist rose up off the forest floor, a riotous floral scent rising with it, so I had a sense that it was the fragrance itself that tinged this mist with the faint colors of forest flowers. The mist seemed the stuff of time itself, and time smelled of orchids.

As the first hints of yellow and pink touched the sky, I saw Samu and Gehi in silhouette: two men, squatting by their fire, waiting for the dawn.

I read this and my eyes linger on the page. A lump the size of a sago ball sits in my throat; tears mist my sight.

At the travel writers' conference, Cahill had talked about how he ends his stories. A very fine way to end a story, he had said, is to go back to the beginning, to echo some element from the start of the story, to give the piece a kind of fulfilling closure.

But then in some pieces, he had continued with a twinkle in his voice, you can go beyond that kind of closure. You lead the reader to think that's what you're going to do -- and then you leap beyond it, into something else, something further and new.

At the time, I hadn't really understood what he was saying. I thought the perfect ending was that kind of closure, where you wrap everything up in a poignant ball and deliver the reader, enhanced and fuller, back into the world.

But here I am now, with Samu and Gehi, staring at something we've all seen a thousand times and yet have never seen before -- looking into the future.

And I can't even explain all the feelings and thoughts and dreams and desires that rise inside me, don't even want to inspect them now, just want to sit here and let them all jostle within, teaching me -- making me feel -- things I have only half-sensed about the evolutionary curve of the planet.

Tim Cahill is beside me, we're all up in a tree -- and I know this is no dream. We're just squatting here, in silence, waiting for the dawn.
salon.com | Aug. 25, 1999

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