On one patrol Barclay and Patrol Officer Colin Young were in pursuit of a group that had killed and eaten a woman accused of witchcraft….

We passed an abandoned long house and heard the sound of a chopping axe in a garden ahead. A shout five minutes later indicated that the patrol had been spotted. We sprinted forward, and a group of armed men darted into the bush to the south. We apprehended the two slowest and moved on to a partially completed long house that was said to belong to Ouli (one of the murderers).

As the patrol was now out of food, we despatched Constables Okomba and Suni and ten carriers to collect food from the gardens directly below the house where we camped. Payment was made to the Sabasigi men who we had taken into custody. An exhausted carrier stumbled into camp soon after to inform us that constable Okomba [pictured at the top of this article] had been speared and killed, and that a carrier had been wounded in the hand with an arrow.

Colin and I immediately left the camp with five police. We charged through the garden and into the jungle. A small house near the jungle’s edge was deserted. We ran further uphill, spotting a boot print of Okomba’s heading into jungle. Loud yodelling was heard from the camp. Colin and I looked at one another and froze. Colin and two police immediately charged back in case the ever-resourceful Ouli had made an opportunistic attack in our absence.

Four police and I followed a track that the warriors had recently used, and discovered the footprints of Okomba. Biami footprints diminished in number, suggesting that they were peeling off individually into the jungle. The tribesmen were adept at leaving the track and heading straight through the virgin jungle, leaping on logs, rocks and tussocks to avoid leaving prints.

We soon arrived at a small house on the edge of a stream, where the last of the tracks petered out. We returned along the same track, carefully examining the verges, but we saw no signs of a large body of men leaving it.

Approaching darkness made it difficult to distinguish features in the dense jungle. That night, apart from the cooking fires we were in darkness, as we were out of torch batteries and lamp kerosene. Our police guards were changed regularly, to enable them to stay alert in the impenetrable blackness of the forest night.

Interpreter Nogoi offered to talk to the spirits and went into a self-induced trance, swaying and then falling to the ground, twitching and rolling. He recovered and announced, “Okomba will return when the first bird chirps.”

The Adumari and Sefalobi sang to the spirits for much of the night, in an attempt to discover Okomba’s whereabouts. We were told that he had not been killed, but was in hiding. Thus “reassured” we went to bed; but not to sleep.

Colin and I spent the rest of the night unsuccessfully searching for telling phrases in the English language to use in the report to Headquarters to soften the blow of having a policeman murdered, dragged off and eaten.

We were overjoyed when Okomba returned to the camp at daybreak. He had thought that the garden house contained only a man and a woman. Instead, it was packed with warriors. He had given his shotgun to a carrier to keep his hands free. Men came boiling out of the house, and Okomba and a carrier secured one each.

The remainder, some eight to ten warriors, seeing only a small arresting force, decided on direct action. An Adumari carrier heard one shout, “There is only a few of them, let’s get our weapons and kill them.” The carrier shouted to Okomba, and then hared off into the bush with the rest of the panic-stricken carriers, clutching the empty shotgun, and leaving Okomba to it.

Okomba, in possession of the now useless shotgun cartridges, and finding the warriors between himself and the camp path, was forced to sprint off in the opposite direction, hotly pursued by the enraged warriors. He was able to shake off all but two shrieking fighters. One was armed with bow and arrow, the other with an axe.

A number of arrows were fired at him during the pursuit, one of which lodged in his shirt, which he instantly discarded. His oversized commando boots (an old pair of mine) slowed him down, but he managed to unlace and discard them at a dead run: no mean feat. Twice he slipped and fell, and twice he hid behind a tree, and each time he was discovered.

Finally eluding his pursuers, he climbed a large tree as darkness fell, and strapped his arm to a branch with his belt. But his troubles were not over. He soon found he was not alone. Soft talking and whispering around the base of the tree seemed to go on interminably. Eventually he felt that the shadowy figures had left, and he judged it safe to begin to relieve himself, as he was in real pain.

Frighteningly, he then sensed more figures were gathering again under the tree, and he froze in fear. They remained silent and motionless for a long time, seeming to seek the source of the smell, and listening for the sound of any movement. A slight rustling much later seemed to suggest that they were moving off. But how far? Had they left a guard hidden by the blackness of the night? He couldn’t chance it, and moved his aching muscles only infinitesimally to relieve the debilitating pain.

Just before dawn, when the first bird chirped, he gingerly climbed down, fully expecting an attack. But there were no warriors to be seen. Relieving himself caused him absolute agony. Hiding in the jungle, stealthily moving beside the tracks, he eventually came across our prints, and finally returned to camp to our rapturous reception.

I was more than a little angry. His instructions had been to supervise the gathering of food for the patrol and return to camp, and not to conduct investigations or attempt any arrests in the dangerous environment the patrol found itself in.

No disciplinary action was necessary beyond a reprimand, as nothing I ordered could duplicate the effect of his traumatic experience. He was an excellent policeman, energetic and normally reliable. His wish to affect what had seemed to be a simple capture was understandable.