The Awim Caves
by Nancy Sullivan

South of the Sepik River are vast alluvial floodplains laced with narrow waterways and banked by low hills that lead up to the Central Range. These waterways, like clustered veins, comprise three tributary systems: the Karawari, the Blackwater, and the Chambri Lakes. All the floodplain peoples have more in common than not, ecologically and culturally. Indeed, most Middle Sepik peoples are thought to have originated in the hills behind the Blackwaters and Karawari river, where they once lived semi-nomadic lives hunting, foraging, fishing in mountain streams and warding off head-hunting raids from their neighbours. The people in these floodplains now are only the most recent settlers, those who have come down from the refuge of the hills since pacification in the twenties. Their life is probably much like that of the main Sepik peoples' before permanent gardening and population growth allowed for the elaboration of their ritual and material culture (as in the fantastic carving of the Iatmul people).

The Karawari are still the most remote of these floodplains peoples. Many villages along the river and its smaller tributaries are barely a generation old, and the most recent settlement, Awim, dates only from 1996. Although the historic Taylor-Black Hagen-Sepik patrol came through the area in 1939, the region was still largely unknown to outsiders until the 1960's.

Inside the haus tambarans of the Karawari people there are rows of sago bark paintings in bold geometric and rough figurative designs. These panels represent clan stories and are part of the esoterica older men teach young initiates during their confinement. Here, as on the main Sepik River, initiates have their skin cut in a symbolic release of mother's blood. They are then physiologically transformed into their father's clansmen. In the Karawari, as in scattered other places, girls also have their skins cut as a puberty rite.

Some of the spirit houses have been moved down from the hills, while others were built to replace spirit house caves. These caves still exist high in the limestone escarpments near the headwaters of the Karawari, where skulls still litter their dark recesses. Such skulls were head-hunting trophies, scraped clean after their skin and brains were boiled off and eaten in a kind of warrior soup. Today, many of these caves are rests spots for Awim families during their hunting and foraging expeditions. Women, children and pigs are all carted along on these excursions which may last for several weeks.

There is one cave perched high above Awim settlement that still bears evidence to a form of initiatory blood-letting unique to the Awim. Until recently, Awim boys would have cane reeds shoved down their penises during initiation. They would hold their hands before the blood that would spot from this painful act and then press bloody handprints along the walls of the spirit cave as marks of their bravery. Their faint impressions still exist, if barely, in that cave: they are eerie reminders of how quickly customs fall away.

I took a trip to these caves in June of this year. It was a quiet weekend while I was relief managing Trans Niugini Tours' Karawari Lodge. I decided to set out with one of the TNT guides, Ambrose Otto, in a motor canoe with an Awim man named William who now lives in an Arafundi River village and was glad for the opportunity to visit his relatives. We set of at dawn. Two hours later we were at the headwaters of the Arafundi, one of the Karawari tributaries. The dry season had dropped the water levels down to where the actual Awim settlement, further up a narrow baret, was now landlocked, and a few families were settled in a camp at this juncture. We left the canoe and walked an hour through marshy tracks to Awim village. A quiet and charming place filled with more pigs and chickens than most Karawari villages, Awim is nestled beneath a series of limestone ridges. Just behind the village and across a clear mountain stream there is a low hill and empty clearing where the village existed until little more than a year ago. Standing on this clearing, overlooking the Arafundi and the endless plains beyond, with mountains at one's back, we could feel why a high perch was so important to people under periodic threat of enemy attack. From that vantage, the small mountain behind the Yimas Lakes of the Arafundi River looked remarkably like a saddleback haus tambaran, presiding over the river much like the saddleback Karawari Lodge sits over the Karawari River.

It was another two hours' steady climb to the first cave. As always, village kids came along just to demonstrate how easy it is to scramble up twisted vines and muddy slopes at age ten. An Awim man cut the trail for us with his bushknife, and indicated at times where we were climbing the ëtumbuna' road. When people say such things to me, I imagine generations of frightened young boys fitting their feet into the same rock ledges, balancing on the same twisted vines to hoist themselves over boulders, and up into the spirit cave where all the secrets, the histories, the political and supernatural power of their clan resides. On the narrow ledge of that cave one can look out over the Arafundi and see the main Karawari. As we sat to rest, the boys amongst us plaited palm fronds as mats and stripped back wild bamboo rods to make spears. One of them quickly and skilfully rubbed vine around a stick bundled with dry ferns to make fire, blowing the smoke at precisely right time for it to explode into flame. The same boy then felt around behind where he sat on a stone and raised a clean white skull in his hand for me to see. We found two skulls here amidst the rubble. Our Awim guide said the rest had been knocked down the cliff by kids long ago.

We then climbed to the ridgeline above the cave, where we could see a possible trail leading down the far side. This, they told me, was where all the scattered Awim families would congregate in safety when they feared enemy reprisals: they would camp at this high forest intersection where they could guard the only two routes up the mountain. When we sat the rest briefly, three of the boys promptly dashed off to climb for betelnut, and came back with a big unripe cluster. It was only another half hour climb before we broke out into a field of ferns at the highest point of the ridge, to gasp at the 300 degree view. To one side were the Karawari floodplains, their snaking barets, lakes and sago swamps broken by low hills here and there. To the other side were the low foothills that climbed to the faint grey apron of the Central Range toward Mt. Hagen.

At the end of the trek, after slipping and stumbling back down the mountain, all of us jumped into the clear cool mountain stream behind Awim village, more certain than ever that these people live in a beautiful setting.

Trips to Awim can be arranged through Trans Niugini Tours, from the Karawari Lodge. You fly to Mt. Hagen first, where charter flights can take you to the airstrip near the lodge.