Eight months ago Pak Bobbi found himself face to face with an ape-like creature that few people even believe exists. Farmers and guides who work around the forested slopes of Gunung Tujuh on Indonesia’s Sumatra island are in no doubt, however. They are almost unanimous in their certainty that there is a creature here – completely unknown to modern science – that they know as the orang pendek (which, quite literally, means “short person”).
Like most of the country people around here, Pak Bobbi is in no doubt that orang pendek exists. They believe that the animals were already here when the first settlers arrived and, after all, he has looked into the creature’s eyes.
“It’s just an animal like any other,” he shrugs, “not a spirit or a ghost.”
There are those who claim that orang pendek has feet that face backwards – making him notoriously hard to track. Perhaps it is not coincidence that in Madagascar (originally settled by sailors from this region) there is also a myth of a small, hairy pygmy with feet that point backwards. Perhaps it is also no coincidence that – like every Indonesian you will ever meet – this so-called kalanoro has an almost insatiable appetite for rice.
All but a few trained naturalists fervently doubt the possibility that there could be a large primate – bigger than an orang utan and almost as tall as a man – in these forests of Sumatra that has remained utterly unknown to science. Strangest of all is the universally reported fact that the animal always seems to walk, like us, on its hind legs in a completely upright posture.
Tiger conservationist Debbie Martyr has worked in the region for almost three decades and she is in no doubt whatsoever: “It walked straight across the valley in front of me, 30 metres away. This gorgeous, graceful, very strongly built primate, a big ape, walking out of a legend and into broad daylight, lit up by the sun…”
In 1990 Debbie left her job in London to come to Sumatra in search of the orang pendek and spent weeks at a time trekking and camping in the forest, trying to search the creature out. Even so, in the shocked hours after that first sighting, she did her utmost to convince herself that there might have been some sort of illusion, a trick of the forest. And she failed miserably. The sighting was far too close, too brightly lit, for there to be any doubt left in her mind that orang pendek exists.
“If I’d seen it concealed in undergrowth,” she wrote shortly afterwards, “I could have said, ‘Well…I saw something.’ But I didn’t see something. I saw an orang pendek.”
“The most likely scientific explanation as I see it is that orang pendek is an early off-shoot of the orang utan branch of our own primate family tree,” Debbie told me when I interviewed her recently. “Somehow a few of these creatures may have survived the super-eruption that formed Lake Toba and obliterated most of Sumatra’s wildlife about 70,000 years ago.”
In the Kerinci mountains there is no shortage of people who are 100% convinced that sooner or later proof of the existence of orang pendek will be revealed to a disbelieving world.