Kimusai used to stay at Salomi village all those years back and had just got
married. The hills were very thickly forested back then and he wanted to treat
his new bride with a wild boar feast.
In fading light, Kimusai stood under a tree at the very top of a hill when he
heard a loud wailing sound. He says “I saw a giant bird with fire on its wing
circling close overhead. It was crying out loudly’. As he watched, the circling
plane very narrowly missed hitting one hillock and an instant later came down
in the forest just below the hill where he was standing.
“There were a thousand fires and it made an ear splitting noise as if the moon
has come crashing down on earth!” said Kimusai. He was a brave hunter and a
warrior but he had never ever seen such a massive explosion so close. He
dropped his kill and ran all the way to the village.
Those were the early days of Christianity in Nagaland and many still held on
strongly to their pre-Christianity beliefs. The burning aircraft was seen as a
message from heaven and that the Gods were angry. Prayers were held,
mithuns were sacrificed and nobody was allowed to go to the jungle to hunt.
In a few days’ time, the village started running out of food and livestock. So
Kimusai and a couple of hunters decided to investigate the giant bird from the
sky and made their way to the site.
They had never seen an aircraft before but knew that it was not some bird
from the heavens. The fire had died down but the there was an overpowering
stench of burnt flesh and a very large area of the forest lay scorched.
As they cautiously made their way through the debris, they found human
remains - three dead bodies in different degrees of dismemberment. Two of the
mutilated bodies were near the aircraft while they found a third corpse stuck
on the branches of a tall tree, high above the ground. It was not dismembered
but mutilated and bloodied.
Kimusai and the others buried the three airmen some distance away from the
aircraft. They collected a few things from the site including a gun and didn’t
return there for many years.
“The place was haunted by the spirits of the men who died there” Kimusai said.
He didn’t specify how and I didn’t ask anymore.
It was most probably a C-47 transport plane that had taken off from Chabua
airbase in Assam. Before the United States were officially engaged in World War
II, American pilots flew these supplies planes across the high snow covered
jagged peaks of Himalayas to ferry supply to the armies of Chiang Kai-shek in
Kunming in western China who was fighting against the Imperial Japanese
army.
These sorties were fraught with danger. The planes were up against natural
elements like snow and 200 mph wind and also the Japanese Zero fighter
planes. This infamous route was nicknamed ‘The Hump’ and ‘Skyway To Hell’ by
the brave airmen who flew the planes. More than 700 planes went down in this
region during the war. Some fell in the deep jungles of Arunachal Pradesh,
Nagaland, Manipur and Burma.