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Precarious
future of
By Fergal Keane
BBC News,
Campaigners
on the
Suddenly I lost my footing. My
right foot slid into a deep hole, the mud sucking it down, until I was trapped.
It felt as if the ooze
were alive, wrapping itself around my leg, determined to hold me there.
I reached out to grab a branch
so that I could gain balance. But I recoiled instantly. The branch was stippled
with thorns.
A colleague - who had
made the same mistake - screamed behind me.
After a few anxious
minutes scanning the foliage, I saw a thick and smooth vine which I caught hold
of, pulling myself out of the morass, but leaving my shoe behind.
Ahead of me on the trail
our guide Petrus was chuckling. I doubt he had ever seen before a Westerner so
plump and preposterously unfit, attempting to navigate the jungle.
As he moved ahead, Petrus
would emit an occasional high pitched yell. This, he explained, was a call used
between the Penan hunters to communicate in the dense forest.
I was convinced I heard
murmurs nearby. It was hunters passing like spirits through the shimmering
green of the forest.
Family life
After about 15 minutes we
heard a pounding noise. Petrus stopped and called out. And he was answered immediately.
We had found 
his family.
Coming into the clearing
I saw the patriarch raise a large club and bring it pounding down onto a mush
of sago palm.
The pulp from the sago
palm provides the Penan with a staple of their diet, a sticky
brown goo that is usually served with the meat of wild boar, barking deer,
squirrel or even python.
His hair was still jet
black and hung to his shoulders. It was cut high off the forehead, in a rough
fringe that gave full expression to the warmth and mischievousness of his face.
As well as
They had set up temporary
camp beside a stream where the young women could wash and press the sago
harvested by the men. The little boy was given the task of minding the baby.
The group did not seem to
speak much to one another. That, and the ease with which they moved, all
contributed to a feeling of serenity.
The pounding of the sago
did not interfere with the other noises of the forest, of bees and cicadas and
birds high in the canopy. It did not disturb, perhaps because it has been heard
for as long as humans have hunted and gathered here. The Penan are simply part of this landscape.
Logging threat
It is all too easy to
romanticise indigenous peoples, to invest them with nobility or conjure images
of paradise before the fall. The Penan are not 
angelic or mystical.
What makes them engaging
is their humanity, a gentleness which is not common in our age.
And he spoke like one who
is bereft, for the forest is shrinking.
The loggers who serve the
world's insatiable appetite for timber are cutting swathes through
The Penan have tried to
stop them with blockades and now lawsuits conducted on their behalf by human
rights groups. But in the face of powerful loggers and their political backers,
the Penan seem to be on the wrong side of what is called
"development".
Cultural survival
They are not a
belligerent people. A local told me the Penan were the
only tribe in the region who did not engage in head hunting in the old days.
They disdained physical violence.
I followed them on the journey back
to their camp on the outskirts of the
At the camp several
children appeared along with
Then everybody climbed
onto a rough wooden platform and sat together as the evening food was handed
around. It was the ubiquitous sago and some lumps of fire blackened barking
deer.
I asked
He did not answer the
question directly. "We cannot change our life," he said. "This
is our life."
But for all that, I think
he knew enough of this age to understand that the world he knew was in its last
days.
From Our Own
Correspondent was broadcast on