Gimme That Old Time Religion

An entry of Steve's brought to mind an old story of mine. Steve was explaining the reasoning behind deleting a troll-comment, and the folks replying to his post began discussing male-female relationships throughout the ages, etc.

Interesting thing about the old-school female-male hierarchy/relationship is the fact that there remain places where one may go to see what life was like thousands of years ago. Africa for one, but I never lived among the tribesman for any length of time and commenting upon it would include far too many secondhanded anecdotes. I did live in Borneo long enough to discover that those who can lift that barge tote that bale remain far more valuable than the herb gatherers. When a jungle cat wants one of the children, or an elder, they don't call for the smaller folks to come help and that's reasonable. Size is very important. So much so that there was this one time when Swinny and I were stranded in a village for several days. A rising tide had covered the only bridge we could use to continue our journey and arrangements were made for us to be housed with a friendly chieftain. We needed his permission to traverse his domain, and also wished to hire some of his more able bodied men so it provided a good opportunity for the old fox to fleece out of of every last nickle we had.

I am not small, and neither was my Australian guide Peter, aka Swinny. Some day I'll find the pictures of this particular village and post them, but suffice to say they were opportunists par excellance. All people that live off the land are. To seal the deal that had been agreed upon, the chief informed us that he would be most pleased were we to...freshen...as many of the village females as was possible during our stay. Swinny speaks many dialects but even he had a hard time translating what the sly old horsethief was asking of us.

"He's saying something about big children, Bobbo. I reckon he wants to trade for some."

Now where in all hells were we going to find big children? Then sell them? Sweet geez. Better to head home with our tail between our legs because slavery isn't in the cards no matter how many men we could hire or how many rivers would be more easily forded.

"Christ, Swinny, tell him no. Be nice about it but tell him no. We can make it back the way we came and..."

"Good on ya Bobbo, but hold a tic..." He answered as his eyes squinted, a sure sign he was doing all he could to understand what the chief was really trying to say.

"No buyin' or sellin, mate. His nibs wants we should make some."

We were far from gods but for out of the way villagers we were the closest thing they were going to get. They promised to rename the biggest trees and boulders and fish in the area after us. Swinny wanted to hold out for at least a small hill or two, but Aussies are like that.