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During a heavy shower a Penyahbong went into the jungle with his sumpitan and returned with a young rusa, quarters of which he presented to Mr. Loing and myself. Bangsul had travelled here before, and he thought we probably would need two weeks for the journey to Djudjang from where, under good weather conditions, three days' poling should bring us to Tamaloe.
We had used seventeen days from Tamaloe, much in excess of the time calculated, but under unfavourable circumstances we might easily have used double. There was reason to be satisfied at arriving here safely without having incurred any losses.
At Tamaloe animals and birds were not plentiful, the call of the wah-wah usually imparting a little life to the mornings; and I once heard a crow. I do not remember to have seen on the whole Busang River the most familiar of all birds on the Bornean rivers, an ordinary sandpiper that flits before you on the beach.
As a rule the days were bright, warm, and beautiful; the few which were cloudy seemed actually chilly and made one desire the return of the sun. Our first task was to make arrangements for the further journey up the Busang River to Tamaloe, a remote kampong recently formed by the Penyahbongs on the upper part of the river.
The sergeant had noticed their prahus departing from a point lower down than convenience would dictate, and, as a matter of fact, nobody else could have done it. But they were gone, we were in seclusion, and there was nobody to send anywhere. In the middle of February we had twenty-nine men here from Tamaloe, twenty of them Penyahbongs and the remainder Malays.
Both before and since their transition to sedentary habits the Penyahbongs have been influenced by the Saputans, their nearest neighbours, four days' journey to the north, on the other side of the water-shed. Their ideas about rice culture and the superstitions and festivals attending it, come from the Saputans, of whom also a few live in Tamaloe.
The lieutenant had been successful, and the men had only used two days in coming down with the current. They were in charge of a Malay called Bangsul, who formerly had been in the service of a Dutch official, and whose fortune had brought him to distant Tamaloe, where he had acquired a dominating position over the Penyahbongs.
On the last day, as the morning mist began to rise, our thirty odd men, eager to get home, poling the prahus with long sticks, made a picturesque sight. In early March, after a successful journey, we arrived at Tamaloe, having consumed only fourteen days from Bahandang because weather conditions had been favourable, with no overflow of the river and little rain.
According to native report the trees which furnish the juice do not grow along the Mahakam and the nearest country where they are found is to the south of Tamaloe. As is the case with the Punans and Bukats, cutting the teeth is optional. Restrictions imposed during pregnancy do not differ from those of other tribes described. At childbirth no man is permitted to be present.
Women are less affected than men, and I often saw men with the disfiguring scaly disease whose wives were evidently perfectly free from it. A party of six fine-looking Penyahbongs were here on a rhinoceros hunting expedition. They came from the western division, and as the rhino had been nearly exterminated in the mountain ranges west and northwest of Tamaloe, the hunters were going farther east.
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