As most experienced outdoor enthusiasts know, it’s usually some combination of two elements that put us into the most dangerous situations: 1) underestimating the proposed adventure and 2) overestimating one’s own abilities. Which brings me to this story.

When I left for Indonesian Borneo to join a youth volunteer program, I remember my parents spending hours debating about the various health risks and dangers: Malaria, Dengue fever, piranhas… Men who might try to steal my wallet and passport; women who might offer me dubious massages. They told me about  Indonesia’s straights of Malacca, which has, to this day, the highest and most dangerous concentration of sea pirates in the world.

I had never considered myself someone who feared the world and stayed home. At the time, I was 21 years old and had for the most part considered myself invincible and generally immune to serious injury or illness. In the car on the way to the airport, my father tried one last time to educate me about the dangers of  poisonous snakes.  I dismissed his warnings as sensationalist, and reminded him that, according to national Indonesian statistics, more people are killed every year by falling coconuts than snake bites. He laughed, “Then maybe you should take your bicycle helmet with you for trekking in the jungle.”

January 2004
Lekaq Kidau, Central Borneo Jungle

“He wants to know if you can climb trees” my friend and translator, Firman tells me. He is helping me arrange to join a hunting trip for wild boar in the Borneo jungle with a native hunter named Pak Jalung. Can I climb trees? Images run through my head of climbing oak trees in my front yard as a kid, some real, some surely constructions of a faulty memory. “Sure I can. I’m a tree climbing champion,” I answer. Firman translates. The hunter, a muscular, intimidating man of about 35, looks me up and down. He laughs, showing a gap where his left incisor tooth once was. A moment of hesitation about the whole arrangement enters into my head. “Wait. Why do I need to climb trees?” I ask. “I thought we were going hunting.” Firman answers without asking the hunter, which leads me to believe that he and the hunter have already covered this point, but the information didn’t get passed along to me. “Because the wild pigs will smell you if you are on the ground. You will need to be a little much higher.”

A “little much higher” was in truth a whole lot higher than I had ever seen any human being climb in a tree. But I don’t find that out until later.

The next morning, the hunter and I drive together in his motorboat — a long, canoe shaped boat with a motor tacked on the back — up the Mahakham river from his village and turn up a small tributary. We occasionally stop when Pak Jalung feels the urge to shoot at the proboscis monkeys swinging in the trees on the river banks. He motions to his “spare parts” shotgun (made from a black smithed car axle), then to me, and then to the monkeys. He is asking if I would like to shoot. I politely decline, trying to recall whether proboscis monkeys are on the endangered species list and wondering how dangerous shooting a homemade shotgun would be. Without my translator Firman there to help, we are forced to use body language and my limited Bahasa Indonesia to communicate. I watch curiously as he lines up his shot. The crack of the shotgun and the recoil nearly topple me into the water. The monkeys scatter into the jungle interior, without apparent loss in numbers. We repeat this several times over the trip (unsuccessfully), as a warm up to the wild boar hunt.

Four hours of navigating around larger boats and floating trees, we arrive at the hunting spot. It appears to me indistinguishable by any unique feature from the rest of the river bank, but my hunting guide assures me that this is the place. The hunter tells me to pee here in the water. Pee here? I ask. From my understanding of what he says, it’s so that the animals don’t smell us in the jungle.

We then trudge for about thirty minutes through thick, humid jungle, the hunter using his machete to hack away vines and small trees. As we walk, we pass huge lines of army ants and see foot-tall wasp nests. The hunter points them out and whispers “Hati, hati” (literally “liver, liver”) which means “be careful.” These are the only words we exchange on the hike.

Every once in a while the hunter picks up some broken nutshells on the jungle floor and tells me. “Di sini, bagus” (“Here, good”) he says. Eventually he stops and sets his pack basket on the ground. I notice a lot of little open nutshells on the ground here. This seems like the spot. The hunter walks to a tall tree and points up. I look up and nod, not sure what’s next. Then I watch, in disbelief as the hunter climbs up high in the branchless tree, using only his hands and the bottoms of his feet, until I have to squint to see him. I watch nervously as he ties a tiny hammock from that tree to a nearby tree. He climbs down quickly and smiles at me when he reaches the bottom. He points to me, then to the tiny blue hammock up in the tree tops, then to me again. I stare at him in disbelief. He wants me to climb the tree. Even if I were mentally okay with climbing a tree this high, physically I don’t think I could.

He tries again. You. Climb. Tree. Stay. Hammock.

I shake my head no. “You’re fucking crazy, hunter man.” He gives me a confused frown. I attempt to demonstrate my physical weakness by starting to climb the tree. I manage the first 30 feet by straddling the tree between my legs and pulling myself up. I look down and he gives me the thumbs up (apparently a universal symbol). I am already exhausted and my muscles start shaking. I grip the tree tight and shake my head “No” at the hunter, signaling that I can’t go on. Unfortunately, the hunter takes this signal as a request for help and quickly climbs up the tree below me. Suddenly I am being propelled from below by the hunter’s free hand. He is climbing the tree and pushing me up at the same time. With half the effort, it is relatively easy for me to keep climbing. I think to myself, there is no way that he can push me the whole way up to the hammock, interspersed with, I really do not want to be this high up, all the while continually climbing. Eventually I am at eye-level with the hammock. I hesitate. I know in my mind how high the hammock is and this scares the crap out of me.

The hammock is about a third the size of a normal one, and looks like it’s made from second hand fishing netting. Without saying a word and in one swift move the hunter pushes me up to the hammock. I straddle the hammock with my legs while holding a death grip on the tree. I hear the hunter’s hearty laugh, then hear him climb quickly back down. It takes me a minute to realize just how fucked I am. If the hammock breaks; if the knot comes untied; if I loose grip on the tree and fall… there is no way I could live through it. Not a one in a thousand chance. I’m simply too high up.

It takes me a half hour of strenuous grunting and slowly shifting my weight to move so that I’m resting more of my weight on the hammock and less on the tree. I don’t dare make any sudden moves, so as not to compromise the integrity of the setup.
Eventually, I am able to turn my body enough to see that the hunter is about the same height up in another tree about 50 feet away, balancing himself on a branch thinner than my arm. He is holding the tree with one hand and his shotgun with the other. He notices me looking at him and waves with his shotgun hand. I nod my head back, not willing to let go of my death grip on the tree. Then the waiting game begins. I sit and wait for an hour. Nothing happens. A thick wall of sound – monkeys, birds, and insects – rises to a fever pitch as our presence blends into the jungle. I feel my muscles tighten and tense and start to cramp, but I don’t dare rest.

Hour two marks the start of the wind. With each gust of wind along the tree tops, the two trees on which my hammock is strung, sway back and forth. I feel like I’m about to vomit. Then the trees start to move out of sync, moving toward each other and then away. When the trees move together the hammock starts to slip down. Each time it slides a few inches I feel like I’m about to die. Worse still is when the trees sway apart and the threads of the hammock tense and start to tear. I watch as three diamond shaped threads tear with a “rrriiippp” and the hammock slides down even further. I nervously look to the hunter. He is still looking down, calmly holding his shotgun. He looks as if he might fall asleep in his swaying tree.

After another hour of feeling on the edge of certain death passes with the wind calming down, I slowly and carefully reach for the notepad and pencil in my back pocket. I have the sudden urge to write a note to my family, should I not make it back from this hunting trip. I flip to an open page with one hand. My handwriting is tense, shaky. The note reads something like this:
Dear Mom, Dad and (my sister)

In case something happens to me, I want you guys to know that I love you and I really appreciate having such a wonderful family. I’m genuinely sorry that I’ve put myself in dangerous situations and for all the times I’ve made you worry. Love you guys.
Mike

(I actually still have this note, which I never gave to my parents and am now mildly embarrassed about.)

As I slide the notepad back into my pocket, I’m startled by a loud shot. “Krack!” For a split second I think that it’s all over: that the hammock has broken and I’m about to hurtle to my death on the jungle floor. I look down. My arms are clinging to the tree with all my strength. The hammock is still intact and I’m alive. Then I remember the hunter. I look over and he has his right arm wrapped around the tree and his right hand on the trigger of his shotgun, pointing down. It looks like an awkward posture. He fires again. “Krack!” The shot seems even louder this time. I look down to where his gun is pointing  and I can see tiny animals, the size of ants, running towards my tree. He puts his shotgun to his side and looks down.

A few minutes pass with nothing happening, just listening to the silence and the noises in the jungle recovering from the shot. Finally, the hunter climbs down his tree. He is swift and graceful. I wonder to myself whether I’ll be able to climb down without incident. Should I climb down now? I ask myself. I decide to wait for his signal. Besides, there’s no way I could get back up if I needed to. Twenty minutes pass and no sign of the hunter in the thick foliage below. I begin to wonder what’s happened. Then, the hunter appears, a spec on the jungle floor. He yells at me to come down in Indonesian. I yell back okay. I sit for a minute, wondering if I can do this with my muscles completely worn out from the past few hours. He yells again. I yell back. I can do this, I think to myself. The only tricky part is to get my legs out of the hammock and around the tree. If I can do that without falling, I should be alright. Memory of the next few moments is blurry. I must be running on pure adrenaline, because I don’t remember climbing down — just the feeling of relief when my feet finally touch the ground. I feel weak, as if I might faint. The hunter asks if I’m okay. Yeah, I reply, breaking a smile, feeling thankful to be alive.

Before I can catch my breath, Pak Jalung motions for me to follow him . Between our two trees lays a giant wild boar, bloodied and motionless. We walk over to the huge animal. The hunter grabs the hind legs and stares at me waiting. I pick up the front legs and we slowly, painfully, drag the heavy carcass back to the boat, without speaking.
On the long boat ride back, while watching the sun set over the west bank of the Mahakham river, I contemplate death and dying. I silently conclude that I might not be invincible.

Below, some pictures from the processing of the meat.