A Pig Saved My Life

Tim Flannery flew into a remote airstrip in the mountains of New Guinea, planning to collect animals in a village about a half-day's walk away. But when he tried to hire someone to take him there, no one wanted the job.

Flannery walked to the village alone and arrived after dark.

"The villagers seemed shocked to see me," he recalls. "Normally, people are very hospitable in New Guinea. They will take vistors to an empty house, light a fire, and provide them with food. They gave me a place to stay, but no fire or food."

The villagers had a large fire going outside the house where Flannery stayed, and at about 11 p.m. he heard the men talking heatedly.

"I could not understand the local dialect," he says. "However, as the conversation became more excited, they switched to pidgin, which I understood. They were talking about killing me.

"I couldn't sleep after hearing that, so at about 3 a.m. I decided to walk to the next village."

What Flannery didn't know at the time was that two white men who had previously visited the area had treated the villagers badly.

The first European they had ever met ignored local prohibitions about going to a sacred mountain to trap animals. When he left, he paid the people with a large sack of coins. "The locals thought they had suddenly become incredibly wealthy, and they took the money down to the nearest trade store. Unfortunately, the coins were pence pieces, the equivalent of pennies; all they got were two sacks of rice and a few tins of fish."

Their next white visitor was arrogant and rude. He paid his hunters and trappers low wages and verbally abused them. The locals decided to kill him, but he left before they got the opportunity.

"So who turns up to be the next guy in the village but me," Flannery continues. "All justice in New Guinea goes by the clan system. If you are wronged in any way, you can take revenge on any member of the clan who wronged you. It was nothing personal with me; I just happened to be a member of a clan -- white men -- they didn't particularly like."

When Flannery arrived in the next village just after dawn, he talked to some people and figured out what the problem was. He saw a pig running around and offered to buy it. Then he paid two men to help him carry it back to the first village.

"I presented the people with the pig and told them I wanted to talk with them," Flannery recalled. "We set wages we both thought were fair. I stayed for two-and-a-half weeks, got a lot of work done, and we parted on good terms. The pig saved my life."