The Orgin of Feral Dogs and Pigs

The foregoing myth contrasts the relationship between cross-cousins with that between siblings (their wives) and allows the asymmetry of their relationship to develop against their figurative relationship as "sharers." The following myth proceeds in the opposite manner: against the background of cooperating cross-cousins, complementary animal species develop a figurative brotherhood. The opposition between humans and domestic animals also serves as an idiom for the hostilities and tensions in the cross-sex sibling and brother-in-law relationship.

There once lived a young man and his maiden sister. One day, the man said to his sister, "Stay here with your pig. I am taking my dog [named Dani] with me hunting," and he left for the bush. While he was gone one day, an uga'ana arrived. He learned from the young woman that her brother was away hunting and, after giving her a large gift of pork fat, the two of them conspired to murder the woman's brother and then elope. They slept that night, and the next day the woman's brother and the dog Dani returned. As they did so, the pig grunted heavily in warning and the dog barked shrilly. Noticing this, the brother called out, "Sister, is something wrong in there?" She called out in reply, "No my brother. It is just that I am sick and close to death." The brother went inside and saw his sister lying in the garura , the place in the woman's half of a house reserved for pigs. The sister protested that she had done nothing untoward but was

only very sick. However, her brother was suspicious and refused to approach her. Finally, he went to gather stinging nettles for her and, as he bent over to give it to her, his head brushed the baisesa , the roof beam connecting the two fireplaces in the woman's half. He found that his head was stuck to the beam. With an effort he wrenched free, breaking the beam, and then noticed that the uga'ana had been hiding behind it and had been holding on to his head. The two men fought. The sister aided the uga'ana while the dog and pig sided with the man. Their struggle carried them outside, and finally the brother was overcome. The uga'ana wanted to cook and eat the man, but the sister said, "No, let his body rot here." And the two of them left, leaving the dog Dani and pig behind with the body.

The two animals cut stinging nettles with their teeth and rubbed them on the unconscious man's body. He stirred slightly. They cut firewood and carried the man into the house, making a fire and gathering cucumbers, salt, and ginger for the man to eat when he revived. Then the dog said to the pig, "Brother, you stay here and watch over him" and he left in pursuit of the uga'ana and the sister. Westward he went, arriving at the Kusubia River in northern Fasu territory, west of Lake Kutubu. The river ran swiftly into a waterfall at this point, and the dog was unable to cross. He returned to the house and brought the pig back to help him. At the bank of the Kusubia River, there was a large overhanging tree. The dog chewed at the roots of it while the pig dug them up with his snout. Finally they uprooted the tree and it fell over, forming a bridge across the water. The dog tested it and found that it was safe and they both continued on.

They finally arrived at a garden that the uga'ana and the sister had made. They also saw a wild-pig trap that the uga'ana had made in a fallen sago palm. The pig said to the dog, "Dani, go kill a bandicoot." The dog returned with a large one. "Cover my skin with its blood," the pig then said, and the dog did so. Then the pig went underneath the deadfall log of the pig trap and told the dog to spring the log. Dani let the log fall, and the pig appeared trapped although he was unharmed. Leaving the pig there, the dog went to the garden and there he transformed himself into a tiny, emaciated dog with mange and sores covering its body and hid there.

Presently, the sister arrived at the garden. She saw the miserable little dog there, and it jumped up and wagged its tail happily at her. The sister was pleased at the thought of bringing a dog home to her husband. Before she returned home, she went to inspect the pig trap. She saw a large pig apparently trapped there and cried out in joy. Returning to the house, she showed her husband the dog and told him about the pig in the trap. The uga'ana was very pleased. He cooked and ate a man and a child he had killed that day, and also cooked a cassowary for the woman, telling her to give the choicest bits to the dog. The next day the two of them went to the trap. While they were attempting to lift the heavy pig, the pig sprang up and, running between the woman's legs, split her in half. The dog Dani had meanwhile resumed his normal appearance and cut the woman's neck, severing her head. They then attacked and killed the uga'ana . They then

returned, crossing the Kusubia River by nightfall. They slept in a cave that night. The pig said to the dog, "Brother, there is only room for one of us inside, so you sleep there. I will sleep outside since I am used to getting wet."

In the morning, they awoke and the dog said to the pig, "Brother, last night I had a 'ghost-making-dream.'^[4] I saw our father talking to his cross-cousin and he was saying that he intended to cook and eat you. He was gathering leaves and firewood and heating stones. He is wondering where we are." The two of them continued on until they approached the house. The dog Dani told the pig to wait and he went alone up to the house. There he saw that the man had recovered from his injuries in their absence and was gathering leaves for the earth oven as he had seen in the dream. He returned to where the pig was waiting and revealed what he had seen. "Brother, let us run away," he said to the pig. The pig bent his head in sorrow and said, "My father worked very hard to raise me. If he wishes to cut me up and eat me, then let him. But you must eat two of my legs, brother." The dog returned alone again to the house, and he heard the man remark to his cross-cousin, "The dog is up to something. He has not brought the pig back." They both became impatient as it grew dark. The dog returned once more to the pig and urged that they should both run away, and finally the pig agreed.

The pig said to the dog, "Brother, you climb the mountains; I will follow the base of them." The pig roamed through the valleys of the bush and ate bai^~ -tree fruit shoots, dug for worms, these things. The dog hunted marsupials and slept in caves or near the bases of trees. At times they would meet and they would ask each other how each was faring, and they were both happy in their places. They became the first wild pig and wild dog. That is all.

The myth opens with a man and his sister coresiding along with the domestic animals appropriate to each of them: the man takes the dog Dani hunting and leaves his sister at home with the pig (substitution A : dog for sister; pig for brother). While the brother is gone, a cannibal uga'ana arrives and he and the sister plot the brother's murder and their own marriage (B : husband for brother; sister's husband for sister). They set a trap for the returning brother which underlines the terms of the identification outlined in A : the sister takes the place of the pig in the pig sty (garura ), and the brother becomes the victim of a "hunting trap" (C : sister for pig; brother for prey). The emnity between brother and sister realigns the positional referents of their associated domestic animals—the pig must side with the brother to balance the loss of the sister to the uga'ana . In other words, the pig must replace the sister, dosing triangle ABC . Second, the brother and sister having forfeited the moral content of their sibling loyalty, and hence their humanity, the dog and pig thus assume human moral

roles: it is the pig who nurses the man back to health and the dog who himself goes hunting. And, as the sister and the uga'ana trapped the brother, so do the two animals now trap them (D : animal trap for human trap; sister as cut-in-half "pig" and uga'ana as "prey") obviating A by replacing the opposition between brother and sister with that between animal and human.

Returning to the home of their "father" (hence the figurative siblingship of the dog and pig), the dog dreams of the impending treachery of the man. In effect, having replaced his sister by his cross-cousin, the man must once again oppose himself to the pig (E : cross-cousin for sister; cross-cousin for pig). This obviates B (cross-cousin for sister's husband) and creates the following analogy: as the sister and sister's husband (that is, a husband and wife pair) plotted against the woman's brother, so do the two cross-cousins plot against the domestic animals. The treachery of cross-cousins against animals replaced that of the sister and the uga'ana , closing triangle CDE .

The cumulative effect of these episodes is to replace the oppositional complementarity of certain human relationships with an analogous opposition between animals themselves. Having separated themselves once and for all from humans, the pig and dog oppose each other, one taking to the valleys and the other to the mountains (F : wild for domesticated animals), obviating A : "complementarity of pig and dog for that of brother and sister," and, obviating C , "emnity between wild animals and humans for that between brothers-in-law." Pig and dog, though nominally brothers, become figuratively cross-cousins to each other by inhabiting complementary ecological zones. Henceforth, man will conspire to trap wild pigs; wild dogs will steal men's game. By failing to "domesticate" his sister, the man loses the domestic companionship of his animals. The pig, in turn, becomes the mediator of the hostility between brothers-in-law (as an item of affinal payment). Finally, the ecological complementarity of pig and dog in the bush returns the plot to its original intersexual demarcation, that encompassed by the distinct relationship of men and women to opposed domestic animals.

The Foi in general tend to view any pair of animals that inhabit opposed ecological zones as "cross-cousins" to each other. There is a set of myths, all of them identical in plot, that account for these ecological placements. In chapter 7, I noted that one Foi myth relates that the cassowary and hornbill, who are cross-cousins, originally inhabited the sky and ground respectively and that they agreed to change places.

Nowadays, the hornbill always warns his cassowary cross-cousin of snare traps that men have set in its path. Identically, the fish and kotabera aquatic fern are cross-cousins, and they originally switched places, the kotabera emerging from the water to grow on the banks while the fish took its place underwater. Foi men note that one should not use kotabera ferns in the construction of a fish dam; the fern will move aside and allow its cross-cousin to escape.

Such complementarity of ecological or geographical zones also characterizes the relationship between Foi men and their Highlands trading partners, their somomena . As with one's affines, there are a set of delicate behavioral protocols that exist between somomena . I have already described the nature of such partnerships in chapter 4. The next two myths deal thematically with the kind of reciprocity that defines these relationships.