In a sugar-coffee high we to float around the room supported by a thick pillow of cigarette smoke. I try to focus through the haze on the brown butcher paper on which we are writing village laws. This is quite fun as the Punan language has no written form, so people enjoy trying to sound these words and organize letters in a representative fashion. It’s great, I can never misspell anything. A couple of edible tubers are assigned Gusi lpis and Gusi ptui.
Through the cloud the corner of my eye catches something scurry into the room. I turn my head and the light crosses the threshold and cuts through the haze illuminating the scurrier. I recognize it as some species of civet, but having never seen a civet before the animal does not yet have it’s own portrait in my hall of animal illustrations. Instead it is made to stand under the portraits of other animals to see whom it most resembles, and unfortunately for the civet it most closely resembles a giant rat. A saving grace is that it has some of the more personable otter mixed into its features.
No one else really seems to care that this thing has just sauntered through the room and is now nosing through the pile of flip-flops on the deck. I go out with my camera to check this creature out and it promptly strolls over to me. Suddenly I’m playing the part of some 50’s sitcom housewife. I gather in my gingum skirt, clutch my spatula to my chest, hop up on the bench and stand on my tiptoes hoping this thing will go back to the footwear.
As the next two days evolve this little guy’s role in the village becomes clear. He is in fact a pet, more so in a western sense than the wreathed hornbill that comes to the tree outside our house several times a day. The civet is greeted with petting from the adults and has it’s neck wrung by the children as they drag it around and throw it off of high places watching him contort to always land on his feet. I’ll pet him, but I can’t say it’s particularly soothing or comforting, not like a big ole Bernese Mountain Dog anyway.